13.5.11

Architectures of Surveillance

It's been a while since my last post, but was caught up in different things last week.
I cannot leave Beatriz Colomina's visit to Beirut uncommented, notably her work on the relationship between architecture and media, medical metaphors in architecture, and surveillance . 
Her lecture at LAUBlurred Vision: Architectures of Surveillance from Mies to SANAA follows the evolution of windows and glass since Mies and Corbu and their usage as tools of control. The lecture also draws a comparison between the glass house of a very charismatic Philip Johnson and Sanaa's glass pavilion, deconstructing the role of glass in each.
Of course, one cannot think surveillance and control without thinking of Jeremy Bentam's Panopticon as curated by Foucault.
An upcoming post will be exclusively dedicated to a historical apercu of notions of control and surveillance in architecture and urbanism.



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