inverse PANOPTICON
critic: John Perry, Ed Eubanks

The notion of the architecturally therapeutic is a product of the secular revolution of rationalism, the first great human potential movement. The favored model image here is Jeremy Bentham's 18th-century Panopticon. This all-seeing supervisory construction was only the most synoptic representative of a time when Western culture was suddenly alive to the possibility that its deviant citizens, its criminals, its mentally disturbed, its poor, might not simply be disciplined, punished, maintained, or concealed, but actually reformed via the ministrations of science. Architecture, mother art, had a special place in this scheme. The idea that a certain spatial order would translate itself into a comparable order of mind and imagination became an early and sweepingly believed item of faith that, if implicit in earlier times, was now provided with a sound ideological basis.