The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

7.6
I Am a Videocam
Architects have long known that the window in the tower, the balcony
in a facade, and the throne on its dais are to part of our mind occupied
even when they are not—and continue to survey us, even when we know
there is no one there. And it is not simply that our imagination is conjuring
up for these things notional human occupants. By a kind of metonymy the
window, balcony, and throne, though inanimate, continue to look at us. The
videocam, too, puts us “in an impersonal field of pure monstrance.”
THE MOON
The videocam is the moon. Daedalus, which means literally both “the
bright” and “the cunningly wrought,” is by his very name associated with
sight and technology. Daedalus made the first automata. He also engineered
the first erotic encounter between flesh and machine, devising for Pasiphaë
a wheeled and upholstered wooden cow in whose rear she could hide to seduce
Poseidon’s bull. The product of this coupling was the Minotaur, halfanimal,
half-human: nature and culture fused. 25
Daedalus constructed the Minotaur’s labyrinth and the wings with
which he escaped it. Soaring with him was his son Icarus—whose name
associates him with the moon-goddess, who looks down coldly from
above. 26 The Icarian scene was replicated as, in birdlike planes, aviators
gazed panoptically down on their colleagues, myopic and mud-bound in the
labyrinthine trenches of Flanders. When peace came, architects like Le Corbusier
and Hugh Ferriss sought an urbanism of the lunar, Icarian view—