The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

Part 1: Filters
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Philip Tabor
Notes
A version of this paper was given at the first
“Spaced Out” conference of the Institute of Contemporary
Arts, London, 8 April 1995.
1 Paul Virilio, The Aesthetics of Disappearance,
trans. Philip Beitchman (New York: Autonomedia,
Semiotext(e), 1991), p. 65; emphasis his.
2 Critical Art Ensemble, The Electronic Disturbance
(Brooklyn, N.Y.: Autonomedia, 1994), p.
69. Telematics is the study of the combination of
telecommunications and computational power,
whose recent increase has brought about the socalled
information revolution.
3 Oscar Newman, Defensible Space: People and
Design in the Violent City (London: Architectural
Press, 1973), pp. 126–128, 182–185, recommends
that to counter vandalism and crime,
public housing should be designed to encourage
“territoriality” on the part of tenants and their
“natural surveillance” over public and semipublic
space. He makes only passing (approving) reference
to electronic surveillance: closed circuit
TV cameras linked to home sets or monitored by
“tenant patrols.”
4 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The
Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (1977;
reprint, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991), influentially
adopted the Panopticon to illustrate
symbolically the mechanisms of a surveillancedriven
“carceral society.” Martin Jay, Downcast
Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century
French Thought (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1994), p. 381 n. 9, notes that Gertrude
Himmelfarb in 1965 and Jacques-Alain Miller
in 1973 had previously drawn similar lessons
from the Panopticon.
5 Judith Barry, “Mappings: A Chronology of
Remote Sensing,” in Incorporations, ed. Jonathan
Crary and Sanford Kwinter, Zone 6 (New York:
Zone; Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1992), p.
570. The prison was Fort Leavenworth.
6 Joel Garreau, Edge City: Life on the New Frontier
(New York: Doubleday, Anchor, 1991), p.
470, claims this half-humorously as one of the
“Laws” of commercial development.
7 Robert Graves, The Greek Myths 2 vols.
(1955; reprint, Harmondsworth: Penguin,
1960), secs. 3b, 7e, 170b.
8 Jay, Downcast Eyes, p. 37. See also Richard
Sennett, The Conscience of the Eye: The Design and
Social Life of Cities (London: Faber and Faber,
1991), p. 10.
9 Robin Evans, The Fabrication of Virtue: English
Prison Architecture, 1750–1840 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1982), p. 206.
10 Sigmund Freud, “Civilization and Its Discontents,”
in Penguin Freud Library, trans. under
the editorship of James Strachey, vol. 12, Civilization,
Society, and Religion: Group Psychology,
Civilization and Its Discontents, and Other Works,
ed. Albert Dickson (Harmondsworth: Penguin,
1991), pp. 316–20.
11 Lázló Moholy-Nagy, Painting, Photography,
Film, trans. Janet Seligman (London: Lund
Humphries, 1969), p. 38; emphasis his.
12 Nancy Knight, “‘The New Light’: X Rays
and Medical Futurism,” in Imagining Tomorrow:
History, Technology and the American Future, ed.
Joseph J. Corn (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press,
1986), pp. 11, 17.
13 Large-sheet glass-making, which began in
the late eighteenth century, was not generally affordable
until the last two decades of the nineteenth.
Jeffrey L. Meikle, “Plastic, Material of a
Thousand Uses,” in Corn Imagining Tomorrow, p.
85, notes that Dupont’s cellophane was introduced
onto the consumer market in 1927, and
their nylon in 1939.
14 Brian Horrigan, “The Home of Tomorrow,
1927–1945,” in Corn, Imagining Tomorrow, pp.
141–142.
15 Lenin is quoted in David Lyon, The Electronic
Eye: The Rise of the Surveillance Society (Cambridge:
Polity Press, 1994), pp. 185–186.
16 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections
on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (1981;
reprint, London: Vintage, 1993), p. 11.
17 Jay, Downcast Eyes, p. 143.
18 Ibid., p. 288, quotes François George, Deux
études sur Sartre (Paris: Bourgeois, 1976), p. 321:
“L’autre me voit, donc je suis.”
19 John Whalen, “You’re Not Paranoid: They
Really Are Watching You,” Wired, March 1995