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Abstract
For over half a century, the works of Michel Foucault have famously exerted tremendous influence upon practicing architects and theoreticians alike. But what of the role architecture played for the French philosopher, who rarely addressed architecture exclusively or primarily as a topic in itself? The following pages assemble a coherent outline of Foucault’s understanding and utilization of architecture, based on his fragmented dealings with and remarks on the subject in what may be considered his three most well-known writings among architectural audiences: a lecture to architects, “Of Other Spaces” (1967); an interview for an architecture magazine, “Space, Knowledge, and Power” (1982); and a book that rendered an old architectural typology famous, Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison (1975).
Notes
1. Sigurd F. Lax, “Heterotopia: From a Biological and Medical Point of View,” in Other Spaces: the Affair of the Heterotopia / die Affäre der Heterotopie, ed. Roland Ritter and Bernd Knaller-Vlay, HdA Dokumente zur Architektur, 10 (Graz, Austria: Haus der Architektur: Prachner [distributor], 1998), 115–116.
2. Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” [1967] in Heterotopia and the City: Public Space in a Postcivil Society, trans. Michiel Dehaene and Lieven De Cauter (London: Routledge, 2009), 17.
3. Ibid., 16–17.
4. The preferred translation here is a third one, by De Cauter and Dehaene, Heterotopia and the City: Public Space in a Postcivil Society. This choice is due to some issues with the aforementioned translations. For example, Jay Miskowiec’s, published by Diacritics in 1986, presents confusing and apparently mismatching translations for Foucault’s use of the words emplacement and extension, while the Lotus translation (by an unspecified author) does what De Cauter and Dehaene might call “[…] to make the French read as if it were English […]” (De Cauter and Dehaene, Heterotopia and the City: Public Space in a Postcivil Society, 14) which sometimes gives the impression of many passages wandering too far from the original text. De Cauter and Dehaene in a way mix the merits of the two aforementioned translations plus Robert Hurley’s 1998 translation in Aesthetics, Method and Epistemology: Essential Writing of Foucault 1954–1984, Volume II. As the translators themselves describe referring to Walter Benjamin, this version tries instead “[…] to give English a French flavour – in order to reveal both of them as fragments of the complete language.” (Dehaene and Cauter, Heterotopia and the City: Public Space in a Postcivil Society, 14).
5. Heynen, Hilde, “Heterotopia Unfolded?,” in Heterotopia and the City: Public Space in a Postcivil Society (London: Routledge, 2009), 311–312, 314–315, 317.
6. Dehaene and Cauter, Dehaene and Cauter, Heterotopia and the City: Public Space in a Postcivil Society, 28.
7. Heynen, “Heterotopia Unfolded?,” 311, 312.
8. Peter Johnson, “Unravelling Foucault’s 'Different Spaces’,” History of the Human Sciences, 19, no. 4 (2006), 81.
9. Ibid., 81.
10. Edward Soja, Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places, (Oxford, UK and Cambridge, MA: Blackwells, 1996), 162.
11. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences [1966], Vintage books edition (New York, NY: Vintage Books, 1994), xv–xx.
12. Ibid., xviii.
13. Kelvin T. Knight, “Placeless Places: Resolving the Paradox of Foucault’s Heterotopia”, Textual Practice, 31, no. 1 (2017), 142–143.
14. Foucault, The Order of Things, xvii.
15. Daniel Defert, “Foucault, Space, and the Architects,” Politics/Poetics: Documenta X - The Book, ed. Catherine David and Jean-François Chevrier (Cantz Verlag: Ostfildern-Ruit, 1997), 274.
16. Ibid., 274.
17. Michel Foucault, “Space, Knowledge, Power,” [1982] The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow, 1st ed (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), 244.
18. Ibid., 247.
19. Le Corbusier, Towards a New Architecture [1931] (New York: Dover Publications, 1986), 8.
20. Foucault, “Space, Knowledge, Power,” 245–46.
21. Ibid., 253.
22. Curiously resonating, to some extent, with Ancient Greek conceptions of architecture and the concept of “architectonics,” as explained in Lisa Landrum's “Before Architecture: Archai, Architects and Architectonics in Plato and Aristotle,” in Montreal Architectural Review, 2 (2015) 5–25.
23. Bentham, “Panopticon; or, the Inspection-House,” in The Works of Jeremy Bentham (Edinburgh: William Tait, 1791), 60–63.
24. Ibid., 39.
25. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison [1975] (New York: Vintage Books, 1995), 205.
26. Ibid., 195–197, 200–204.
27. Ibid., 197.
28. Ibid., 200.
29. Alan Sheridan’s English translation uses the imposing expression “must”, to say that the panopticon “[…] must be represented as a pure architectural and optical system”. However, Foucault’s original French version uses the expression “it may very well be” – “[…] peut bien être comme un pur système architectural et optique […]” Michel Foucault, Surveiller et Punir: Naissance de la Prison, Collection TEL (Paris: Gallimard, 1975), 207. The difference between both reinforces the current argument: the architectural form of the panoptical principle is incidental, rather than contingent or central, to Foucault’s point.
30. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 205.
31. Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977, ed. Colin Gordon, 1st American ed (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980), 65.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
André Patrão
André Patrão (PhD) is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Yale School of Architecture, funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation. He previously studied architecture at the University of Lisbon (BA), urban design at Lund University (MA), philosophy at KU Leuven (BA, MA), and completed his PhD thesis Architecture / Philosophy: how, why, and what the questions seek in three case-studies from the late 20th century (2020) under the supervision of Professor Christophe van Gerrewey at the EPFL's Lab of Architecture, Criticism, History, and Theory (ACHT), where he would then continue working as a Postdoctoral Researcher. His research explores major interactions between architecture and philosophy since their heyday in the mid and late-20th century to today, seeking to understand the reasons that motived them, the methodological processes that brought them about, and their lingering effects upon both disciplines. The historical project of mapping these pivotal precedents from the recent past informs potential productive dialogues between architects and philosophy to address contemporary issues in each of their domains. He was co-organizer of the 5th Biennial Conference of the International Society for the Philosophy of Architecture (2021), in collaboration with Dr. Hans Teerds and Dr. Christoph Baumberger (ETH Zürich).