Rethinking Architecture| A reader in cultural theory

ideally the exercise of disciplinary power. In order to make rights and laws function according to pure theory, the jurists plac ...

Figure 2 Bentham’s Panopticon (1791) Source: J.Bentham, Panopticon; Postscript, London, 1791 effect of backlighting, one can obs ...

To begin with, this made it possible—as a negative effect—to avoid those compact, swarming, howling masses that were to be found ...

that assures dissymmetry, disequilibrium, difference. Consequently, it does not matter who exercises power. Any individual, take ...

So much for the question of observation. But the Panopticon was also a laboratory; it could be used as a machine to carry out ex ...

cruel, ingenious cage. The fact that it should have given rise, even in our own time, to so many variations, projected or realiz ...

Panopticon opens with a list of the benefits to be obtained from his ‘inspection-house’: ‘Morals reformed—health preserved—indus ...

instruments that render visible, record, differentiate and compare: a physics of a relational and multiple power, which has its ...

9 Ibid., p. 40. 10 Ibid., p. 66. 11 Ibid., p. 39. 12 Imagining this continuous flow of visitors entering the central tower by an ...

on collective facilities, on hygiene, and on private architecture. Such chapters are not found in the discussions of the art of ...

This idea has since been abandoned. The question has been turned around. No longer do we ask: What is the form of governmental r ...

rendered war far easier to wage. The third development, which came later, was electricity. So there were problems in the links b ...

guarantee them. This is why almost all of these laws and institutions are quite capable of being turned around. Not because they ...

MF Nothing is fundamental. That is what is interesting in the analysis of society. That is why nothing irritates me as much as t ...

What is this Reason that we use? What are its historical effects? What are its limits, and what are its dangers? How can we exis ...

with its thatched roof. History protects us from historicism—from a historicism that calls on the past to resolve the questions ...

MF You mean religious architecture? I think that it has been studied. There is the whole problem of a monastery as xenophobic. T ...

PR In your book The Order of Things you constructed certain vivid spatial metaphors to describe structures of thought. Why do yo ...

exact science. On the other hand, if architecture, like the practice of government and the practice of other forms of social org ...

Paul Virilio French theorist and self-styled urbanist Paul Virilio (b. 1932) has pursued a long involvement with architecture. A ...