Building the Empire of the Gaze: The Modern Movement and the Surveillance Society

The paper draws on Michel Foucault's notion of the surveillance society to develop criticism of the Modern Movement. The contention is that Modern architecture was not only symptomatic of the shift to the surveillance society, but that it was also complicit in its development through the discursive imperative of total visibility at the heart of Western metaphysics, modernity and Modernism. It is argued that salient features of the Modernist discourse—glass, the interior, the house and factory—represent architectonic mechanisms of disciplinary power.