The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

Architecture is dead. I have read its obituaries. One cultural analyst writes,
“After the age of architecture-sculpture we are now in the time of cinematographic
factitiousness[;] . . . from now on architecture is only a movie.” 1
Others call architecture the “subelectronic visual marker of the spectacle,”
too place-bound and inert to survive the ethereal, ubiquitous lightning
flashes of the telematic storm. 2
And architecture deserved to die. It had committed technolatry:
the worship of means at the expense of divine or human ends—ethical miosis.
Always complicit with establishment and capital, they say, its aim was
domination. To control internal climate it sought power over nature; to control
behavior, architecture’s other purpose, it sought power over people.
ARCHITECTURE AND THE EVIL EYE
For power over people, architecture had wielded the evil technologies of the
eye: spectacle and surveillance. From the cathedral and palace to the housing
development and shopping mall—to start with spectacle—architecture
has been characterized by grandiloquent display and forceful geometry. Its
symmetries, hierarchies, and taxonomies fabricated the intoxicating dreamworlds
of authority, commodity, and consumption. As for contemporary
surveillance, architecture was at first blamed for not providing it. Legcocking
underdogs in the early 1970s claimed city territory with threatening
Day-Glo squirts; their spray cans seemed almost as threatening as their
guns. An influential book blamed modern architecture for not providing, in
the words of its title, “defensible space.” 3 By this was meant the premodern
surveillance of the twitching curtain and the bobby on the beat. Instead
came the videocam and armed response.
Architects were blamed for that too, at least partly, because to their
misfortune the 1960s and 1970s (first in America, later more famously in
France 4 ) saw a building type displace Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four as the
dominant metaphor for Western society seen as a surveillance-driven
dystopia. The building type was, of course, Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon
prison. (The first “real-time” transmission of a photographic image, incidentally,
was by telegraph, in 1927. The image, as it happens, was of a federal
penitentiary.) 5
The word surveillance derives from the Latin vigilia, meaning
“wakefulness” or “sleeplessness.” So in the thousand eyes of surveillancenight
we see reflected the light never switched off in the prison cell, the
dazzling antidungeon of the Panopticon, the insomniac horror of Poe’s
“Tell-Tale Heart.” The political Right wishes to shield the private sphere
from social intrusion; the Left fears an oligarchy immovably embedded in