Architectural Power and Social Relations

Throughout our society, relationships are what form connections between us keeping up together. Connections find similarities between us matching us with new emotions and experiences. Though, it is also the individuality and differences between us that allow us each to be our version. Without the individuality that diversifies societies, we would all be the same image of each other. Each life experience humans go through allows for differentiation. Although, through community we are then allowed to feel as if we belong to a group of people while having our own spaces to experience our own lives. The contrast between conforming as a society and individuality is a line that oftentimes gets blurred. Where do we find the line, if there is no right or wrong answer? The balance to find the relationship amongst community versus individual stems from many aspects of identity. Finding identity in communities and individuals often is built around power sources in society. Power can be represented in many forms and variations which allows both negative and positive effects. In all forms of power, biopolitical, discipline, punishment, orientalism, ideology, development, spectacle, smartness, resistance, structural, functional, and representational power, society forms new identities. Specifically, looking at architectural examples leads to the answer of how different forms of power in structure and in concept separates us as communities. Forms of power and hierarchy through systems in our lives, such as architecture, allow us as a society to find connections and relationships between one another while simultaneously posing the question of how we define individuality in our own paths of life.

Different aspects of power form our societies to conform to a bigger picture. Biopower, the power over life in many aspects including health, hygiene, and reproduction, the power to control the human body has proven to affect our societies in many different ways. Thinking about how humans connect stems that we share the same biological structure, though each of our genes provides unique separations between us. Biopolitical power roots from biological life linked to race and eugenics. The overall goal is to control the human body through mass society. This goal is in place in order to make our society's more efficient and allow those in control to upload the power. Statistics and census reports from a territorial government system, allows for the rise of urban planning to be a force of regulations upon us, “we can use the term ‘biopolitics’ to embrace all the specific strategies and con- testations over problematizations of collective human vitality, morbidity and mortality; over the forms of knowledge, regimes of authority and practices of intervention that are desirable, legitimate and efficacious.” (Rabino, 197). Through experiences in our society, such as social housing, immigration control, health control, and forms of organized religion, they use strategies for interventions upon collective existence. Humans then have to subject themselves to intervening on specific life in order to conform to the whole. Through many architectural examples, such as immigration processing facilities, most famously Ellis Island, we see an exercise of biopolitics that enabled governance overpopulation in the United States. Immigrant communities, upon arrival, were screened for physical and mental health defects; bodily examinations were required for the approval and admittance of immigrants into the country. The United States used their biopower in order to know who was there, what benefits they had, how much money they made, and other statistics in order to develop this environment based on their standards of normal. The Ellis Island immigration processing facilities not only enabled the exercise of biopolitics through permitting entry to the United States based upon a set of eugenics based criteria established by the government, but also perpetuated the ideology of a “superior” America, as those “unfit” to enter were turned away and set as an example on the global stage. The prime example of biopolitical power between countries divides us as societies, perching on the idea that one should conform and change their individuality to be the fit whole, in order to succeed in life like the upper most elite.

When one doesn't fit in in society and deviates from the common social norms, punishment and discipline gets enforced. Punishment applies a form of public spectacle to it, forming power to those who are above. This reinforces the power of the state in a form of social construct. Discipline forms this control through surveillance and schedule. Therefore leading to a complete loss of individuality, authomany, and freedom. The idea of discipline is deemed okay in our society because it will prove to be transformative. In power and control over who we are, behavioral transformation forces humans to internalize their own behaviors to conform to the rest. Architecturally through division of structures, it provides the difference between the one and the other. The Panopticon, an architectural project, is a disciplinary concept brought to life in the form of a central observation tower placed within a circle of prison cells. From the tower, a guard can see every cell and inmate but the inmates can't see into the tower. Prisoners will never know whether or not they are being watched. This form of architecture provides the power over someone in order to change them to conform to the society's norms. In specific examples, such as the Panopticon, discipline and punishment is served in order to better our communities and make them safer. Once people find comfort within their communities is when individuality creates its return.

Part of forming our communities is the idea of similarity and the comfort in living with those we feel alike to. In the idea of smartness and technology, communities' territorial zones create divisions between us. Economic zones, for example, exempt certain trade and tax regulations of countries, leading to differentiation in labor and environmental politics. Smartness is then used for urban form and addressing city problems rather than solving the issue from global relationships. In The Smartness Mandate Halpern critiques the idea of smartness and how it has enabled the development of our world in the wrong ways, “This new vision of smartness is inextricably tied to the lan- guage of crisis, whether a financial, ecological, or security event. But where others might see the growing precariousness of human populations as best countered by conscious planning and regulation, advocates of smartness instead see opportunities to decentralize agency and intelligence by distributing it among objects, networks, and life forms.” (Halpern 108). We believe as a society that smartness is used in a positive way and that it allows us to find the best solution with the use of technologies, datas, and algorithms. Smartness turns away from a society's natural growth and change because it focuses more on the algorithmic determinant of relationships within data, which leads to maintenance of this “smart” society rather than in our natural ways of evolution. Smartness becomes an “organizing concept” whose goal is not utopia, its goal is technology in order to manage societies for new results through data consumption. The critique that we want to manage societies, looks for a total result or “finished product” which is intangible to happen. It leads to the thought that optimization should be controlled through algorithms. These algorithms determine our social lives, relationships, and our relationships to our environment. Optimization and smartness is negatively calculating our lives and using these algorithms to determine how we can be different and connections between smartness, rather than our life as a whole.

Ideas and concepts that are pushed in differing populations negatively affects how our society identifies connections between each other. If we conform to the same ideals, then those in power succeed towards a simple form of hierarchy. This idea is known as ideologies, which produce relations of reproduction and how we are reproduced. Social order and how that relates to economic order, is what is stopping that divide to be an individual. Society forms habits and routines because of compliance to the power from above them. Ideology can exert power over people because of the way in which this imaginary representation has been created to influence how our government and class system truly exist. Louis Althusser’s Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses discusses that “the reproduction of labor power requires not only a reproduction of its skills, but also, at the same time, a reproduction of its submission to the rules of the established order, i.e. a reproduction of submission to the ruling ideology for the workers, and a reproduction of the ability to manipulate the ruling ideology correctly for the agents of exploitation and repression, so that they, too, will provide for the domination of the ruling class ‘in words’.”(Althusser 6). Examples in history such as the Soviet and US radio wars from 1947-1989, prove an example of ideology through effective propaganda. Radio could penetrate over enemy lines because one side has the truth, the other doesn't. Those who do not have the truth then form into a new social order because they are not in enough power to effectively differentiate the wrong from the right. The US began to realize that the most effective propaganda was through popular culture because of the way it easily influenced societies. Ideologies then can be argued to be valued, but then if societies all conform to the same ideologies where is the differentiation between communities and individuality.

Governmental and high class power systems want to influence communities to create a national identity. This then benefits them for political power and control over people. Power systems use the concept of spectacle to produce a fake unity. Therefore trying to appear as unifying and creating a national identity. In Ong’s Hyperbuilding: Spectacle, Speculation, and the Hyperspace of Sovereignty power especially through the western world produces this new insanity, “Such a perspective is based on the assumption that corporate power and Western technologies are creating a global space that is effacing national identity and under- mining the capacity for a nation to control how it wants to be and how it wants to act in the world. Capital here thwarts national sovereign self-determination by subjecting “local” spaces to the overarching logic of a capitalist system with translocal or placeless determinations.” (Ong 206). Ong exemplifies how the state and capitalism are intertwined. The cities are being formed and reshaped by capitalism, but in different ways that the state is impacting. These hyperbuilding and technologies are being promoted as spectacle for political ends, not for the forming of relationships between societies. We see this through the study architecturally of the duck versus the decorated shed. In Denise Scott Brown, Robert Venturi, and Steven Izenour, Learning from Las Vegas, A series of studies of the city of Las Vegas as a system, including analyses of sizes and frequency of signage. They claimed consumer culture pointed to what people truly wanted, and therefore should inspire effective architecture. Creating the concept of the “duck” and the “decorated shed”, the authors argued for straightforward form, communicating intent through symbols and signage. Decorated sheds brought people in, and so should be glorified. The authors argued for the existence of a commercial vernacular, meaning capitalism and consumer culture shaped architecture of our time. Modernism would therefore be defying this “true” vernacular, and trying to replace it. Proving the idea that the spectacle that creates these false community lines, is better off to exhibit originality, similarly producing the individuality of who each human exemplifies.

The formation of our cities commonly is the defining characteristic of how communities form. The way our cities are formed from certain qualities immediately correlates to structural power. Therborn’s Cities and Power, uses three concepts of power, structural, functional, and representational, and how these all project organization, meaning, and power of architecture. We can see aspects of Therborn's message in many works of John Portman and Associates. The Westin Bonaventure Hotel in Los Angeles represents a form of new protocols and relationships among humans and our environments. The hotel fits everything into one, the shops and restaurants are on the ground floor, above the hotel with all the rooms. This was a new type of postmodernism. The hotel deems it as a hub fitting everything one needs under one roof, without interaction with the outside world. The “fearful” outside world one can stay clear from and safely aim all control under one building. The hotel creates a mini world, ejected from the existing environment. Through the hotel we can see new relationships among people and the world. Instead of existing through connecting with the outside, through roads, sidewalks, downtowns, etc, we now see the concept of structural and functional power of buildings. Another project by John Portman and Associates, the AmericasMart in Atlanta, as well provides a challenge of existing protocols and relations. The project consisted of three postmodern buildings used for trade. Each of these buildings was a complex capsule closed from the outside world and city surroundings. The large structure had no windows, with a reflective outside which prevented someone from seeing into the structure. Again, we see the new formed relationship of ignoring the outside context and aiming the control from the inside. In both of these projects we can show through spatial and material organization in relationship to humans and the outside world has been challenged. Instead of aiming to connect cities and people to each other, we see here the connection through the inside and neglect to the outside world and our environment. New forms of living and relationships through designing buildings with materiality and strategic aim to push the boundaries of the outside versus the inside.

In all these examples of power and how power represents and divides us as communities, there has also been forms of resistance that architectural push against the norm. If communities are supposed to bring us together, but at the same time they can divide us because of upper power pushing new ideas and identities into us making us different people. The Women’s School of Planning and Architecture (WSPA) provides an urban example of resistance to hegemonic power, specifically in regards to gender and education. WSPA was founded in 1974 through a program at Smith College. A group of women started the program because of the lack of a new realm of education for women and learning. The aim was to produce a new curriculum and mode of learning to the traditional ways of the past. The women felt that current architecture did not aim to serve everyone, it only served 10% of the population. This small percentage it covered were the rich and affluent people. To change this the women wanted to serve clients who were going to benefit the most. The project resisted against the power of the rich male in order to serve all. Out of the basis of feminist ideals, women projected change in many ways. In relation to the means of urban architectural resistance, we can discuss these aspects in Baird’s Criticality and Its Discontents. The main discussion of the text is critique how architecture has been developed in the past and posing a new position in regards to resistance. In the text we develop an understanding of Peter Eisenman and the design process. Eiseman proves the aim of resistance embodying the importance of the design process, over the product. In order to produce new forms of architecture, embodying the process will bring new fundamental designs. If we do not accept architectural theory of process over product, then architecture will simply be platonic. In Bairds text we see the relationship between the resistance of how architecture was seen in the past. Architecture will stay stagnant without developing the new implementation of change through design. Similarly, to the WSPA, using a group to emphasize the change, that if we stick to the past there will be no way to develop architecture. Whether through focusing on the process, or making architecture more accessible, we must embody the change to provide a shift in power.

As well, the media is used as a form of power in our societies to hold our attention to make us believe that something is as it appears. Though, when society sees behind the falseness of the media projection is thus when we can have a new emotional response about who we are. We then are surrounded by media such that the idea of a single image cannot fully hold our attention. In the Charles and Ray Eames exhibition at the Moscow World Fair, the intro film provoked a new sense of the user. The users were overloaded with information, with all the information coming in it was overwhelming but provides a change of emotions from when you enter the space. In Colomina’s Enclosed by Images, he described “We are surrounded today, everywhere, all the time, by arrays of multiple, simultaneous images. In the streets, airports, shopping centers, and gyms, but also on our computers and television sets. The idea of a single image commanding our attention has faded away. It seems as if we need to be distracted in order to concentrate,” (Colomina 7). The film installation not only gave people a new perception of emotions, but as well reinforcing emotions of the political country in which we live. The design of the film installation created these overwhelming emotions because of the surplus of data coming at the viewer from all directions because of the abundance of screens in the room. I feel that in the Circus Room as well there is a high emotional response because of the different nature in the message of the room. Someone could see the scene as pleasure, thinking a circus correlates your emotions to happy thoughts. Though, when you read into the room it can seem different. How are these acts, like being shot from the cannon, everyone's forms of pleasure? I think for each person they can read into it differently. The installation therefore can be seen as a communication tool between “people and things''. The circus as well used sound to bring to the audience a new feeling and expression of what they were viewing. This definitely affected the visitors emotions and senses on how they were viewing it. The new form of media, both in this example and in modern times then leads us as a society to feel this disconnection between how we form indeidites with each other and how we form identities on our own.

Through our society the formation of relationships results from similarities and differences between us. Formation of power structures in our society creates divides and connections between groups of people through a hierarchical structure. In relation to architecture, through formation of cities, structural impact, and structural meaning in different projects exemplifies how our societies and relationships are created. Forms of power force our societies into groups, dividing us and our communities. Through different modes of resistance groups try to resist the urge to conform, to create a more inclusive space for social identity and relationships. Expression and identity through architecture immediately relate humans together. Power, both negatively and positively, creates both divides and connections serving as a larger identity of our social identities. Proven in the conclusions that power and development has caused more issues than solved any, for it created a set of relations. These relations among institutions, states, and certain favored practices, to form a new whole in which the first world is the only one who benefits, and those who are different are meant to struggle.

Works Cited

Althusser, L. (1971). Ideology and ideological state apparatuses. In L. Althusser (Ed.), Lenin and philosophy and other essays. New York: Monthly Review Press.

Baird, George. "Criticality and its Discontents." Harvard Design Magazine 21.2004 (2004): 1-5.

Colomina, Beatriz. “Enclosed by Images: The Eameses’ Multimedia Architecture.” Gray Room, vol. 2, no. 2, MIT Press, 2001, pp. 6–29. https://doi.org/10.1162/152638101750172975.

Halpern, Orit, et al. “The Smartness Mandate: Notes Toward a Critique.” Gray Room, vol. 68, no. 68, MIT Press, 2017, pp. 106–29, https://doi.org/10.1162/GREY_a_00221.

Paul Rabinow, and Nikolas Rose. “BIOPOWER TODAY; PAUL RABINOW AND NIKOLAS ROSE; BIOPOWER TODAY.” BioSocieties, vol. 1, no. 2, Palgrave Macmillan, 2006, p. 195–.

Roy, Ananya, and Aihwa Ong. Worlding Cities: Asian Experiments and the Art of Being Global. 1. Aufl., Wiley-Blackwell, 2011, https://doi.org/10.1002/9781444346800.

Therborn, Göran. “Cities and Power.” International Journal of Urban Sciences, vol. 19, no. 1, Routledge, 2015, pp. 1–6, https://doi.org/10.1080/12265934.2015.969416.

Venturi, Robert, et al. Learning from Las Vegas. Facsimile edition., The MIT Press, 2017.