Abstract

Architecture and Justice
International Conference
EMTEC

University of Lincoln
November 2009
Art, Architecture, and Design, and Business and Law
Paper Title:

The Architecture of Enclosure

Trevor W Elvin
Senior Lecturer
University of Lincoln
telvin@lincoln.ac.uk

Abstract

The Machine city of modernism embodied mechanisms of discipline and the architectural spaces of enclosure, such as the prison, the factory, and the school. Michel Foucault has described these spaces of enclosure as being and instrument of power. Calvin Coolidge seemed to encapsulate the idolatry of the machine age when he stated `the man who builds a factory builds a temple. The man who works there worships there`. The mechanisms of discipline in the machine city used spaces of enclosure as instruments of power. The individual passed from one closed environment to another, each having its own laws. Here the individual was forced to compare himself to the established norm. Within this system architecture put a face on the sovereign, which would allow disciplinary surveillance to operate.

This paper as well as the projects discussed through it is taken from thematic issues surrounding discipline explored in design studios and starts with abstract ideas relating to issues such as, surveillance, enclosure and control.

Projects manifest themselves as instruments of power which deal with notions of social order and varying degrees of imposed discipline. They describe an architecture which is not always a comfortable fit and provides a critique on many of our current systems In particular the nature of the programme and the brief while at the same time preserving central elements of post structuralism as a humanist subject with social relationships and conceptual frameworks.