Journal of Architectural Education

ISSN: 1046-4883 (Print) 1531-314X (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rjae20

A Multimedia Panopticon: Media, Translation, and

History in OMA's S,M,L,XL and the Arnhem Prison
Whitten Overby
To cite this article: Whitten Overby (2015) A Multimedia Panopticon: Media, Translation, and
History in OMA's S,M,L,XL and the Arnhem Prison, Journal of Architectural Education, 69:2,
167-177, DOI: 10.1080/10464883.2015.1063396
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10464883.2015.1063396

Published online: 23 Sep 2015.

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A Multimedia Panopticon

Media, Translation, and History in OMAs

S,M,L,XL and the Arnhem Prison

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Whitten Overby
Cornell University

This essay argues that S,M,L,XL is a digital

multimedia architectural project that sought to
redefine the relationship between architecture and
various other media on the cusp of architectural
cultures widespread digitization. It uses one
design included within the text, OMAs proposed
renovations for the Panoptic Prison in Arnhem,
the Netherlands, to analyze how Rem Koolhaas
and his firm synthesize a wide range of media
to create and theorize their own conception of
modern architectural history as a fantastical state
of imprisonment.
Introduction

In 1971, Dutch architect Rem

Koolhaas and his collaborator Elia
Zenghelis entered a project entitled
Exodus, or the Voluntary Prisoners
of Architecture into a competition held by Italian design magazine
Casabella. Published by the same
magazine in 1973,1 the two architects
and their wives formed the collective
Dr. Caligari Cabinet of Metropolitan
Architecture, the seeds of what
would become Koolhaass design
firm, the Office for Metropolitan
Architecture (OMA/AMO).2 Their
initial name combined the titles of
two German films, The Cabinet of Dr.

Caligari and Metropolis, with that of

a manifesto by modernist architect
Ludwig Hilberseimer to evoke the
multimedia means by which they

illustrated the essay. Overlaying

photographs and film stills on top
of architectural paintings evocative
of plans, sections, and elevations,
Koolhaass wife at the time, Madelon
Vriesendorp, envisioned Exodus as
an expression of architects ecstatic
in the freedom from conventional
architectural representations (Figure
1).3 Included as one of two prefatory
essays in the Foreplay section of
S,M,L,XL, a 1995 architectural novel
by OMA, Rem Koolhaas, and Bruce
Mau, Exodus frames the trajectory
of OMA, and of Koolhaas. The text is
a manifesto that simultaneously critiques and embraces imprisonment
as the paradigmatic modern spatial
experience and the prison as its corresponding space.
Exodus complicates this
claim by arguing that such force be
used in the service of positive
intentions.4 The authors recuperate
human experiences from the detritus

Figure 1. Rem Koolhaas, Elia Zenghelis, Madelon

Vriesendorp, and Zoe Zenghelis, Exodus, or
the Voluntary Prisoners of Architecture, The
Reception Area (1972), gelatin silver photograph
with color ink ( OMA). This image is reproduced
in black and white in S,M,L,XL (89) with a
label reading Minimal training for new arrivals:
overwhelming previously undernourished senses.

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Figure 2. Rem Koolhaas, Elia Zenghelis, Madelon

Vriesendorp, and Zoe Zenghelis, Exodus, or the
Voluntary Prisoners of Architecture, The Strip,
Aerial Perspective (1972), cut-and-pasted paper
with watercolor, ink, gouache, and color pencil on
gelatin silver photograph ( OMA). This image is
also reproduced in black and white in S,M,L,XL
(1011) with a label reading Division, isolation,
inequality, aggression, destruction: frontline of
architectural warfare.

of modern life and create eight new

modular environments. Exodus
enacts the Surrealist ParanoidCritical Method (PCM) that defines
Koolhaass Delirious New York: A
Retroactive Manifesto (1978) and OMAs
S,M,L,XL by irrationally linking the
unexpected to create an imaginary
but coherent worldview.5 The PCM
recycles the forms and media of
(architectural) culture to refine new
modes of communicating the primal
character of space. The walled enclosure becomes a means of liberation
where architecture unshackles itself
from historic Londons monumentality.6 Exodus creates a strip, or a
prison, within London, a wall behind
which Londoners may relocate after
abandoning the rest of their city in
disgust (Figure 2). The text itself
functions like a film, using visually
evocative language that walks readers
through the successive programmatic
168

spaces. In doing so, the text suggests

that its readers are the described
spaces users.
OMAs concern with prisons
reemerges with a 1979 commission by the Dutch government
to redesign the Koepel (Dutch
for domed) Panoptic Prison in
Arnhem, the Netherlands. With this
project, Koolhaas and his OMA team
tapped into the Panoptic Prisons
historical form to reconceive, and
creatively destruct, conceptions of
this institutional space.7 Koolhaas
also wrote an essay to accompany
the design proposal submitted to
the Dutch government. Entitled
Revision, the essay has an afterlife
of sorts as it is reproduced, along
with select renderings of the project, inside the pages of S,M,L,XL.
In self-consciously engaging the
textual and built histories of the
Panoptic Prison model designed
by late eighteenth-century English
moral reformer Jeremy Bentham and
later taken up by twentieth-century
French philosopher-historian Michel
Foucault, OMAs Arnhem redesigns
propose, like S,M,L,XL, a reconceiving of architectural design as part of
a collective multimedia project. Both
the Arnhem project and the novel

A Multimedia Panopticon

foreground 1995s emergent computational and digital media in addition

to photographs, drawings, text,
moving images, and models.
Koolhaas and OMA used
S,M,L,XL to establish the firm as an
architectural multimedia production
company, engaging with and critiquing the generic formats and contents
of architectural publications, typologies, and identities.8 In Revision,
Koolhaas engages prior Panoptic
texts by Bentham (1791) and Foucault
(1975) to hew his own paper architecture, riffing on rather than slavishly
adhering to extant architectures
practical, theoretical, and historical
discourses.9 Indeed, Revision is the
third manifesto, following those of
Foucault and Bentham, to detail the
Panopticon as an emblem of contemporaneous space at large.10 OMAs
Arnhem renovations posit that the
Panopticon is an architecture of
consumption as much as of discipline, following the redefinition in
Exodus of prisons that create and
recycle private and public fantasies.11
The redesigns for the Arnhem
prison occurred in two phases
that spanned seven years (197981;
198285), while their accompanying textual statement was published
numerous times in the early 1980s.12
Notably, the Koepel Panoptic
Prison was one of two projects OMA
chose to represent itself with at the
Venice Biennales First International
Architecture Exhibition. Entitled
The Presence of the Past and curated by
Paolo Portoghesi, Koolhaas wrote
Our New Sobriety to accompany
the exhibit. In this text, Koolhaas
establishes and parodies the political
stakes of the project: not only was
the commission a consolation prize
for OMAs rejected redesigns for the
Dutch governmental center in The
Hague, but the designs also proposed prison reform, forging a new
language for incarceration that did
not fit contemporary or past prison
ideologies but rather made Arnhems
spaces inhabitable for prisoners
and guards alike. Koolhaas decries
prison designs privileging of trendiness over functionality to be its key

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failing, conforming to ever-changing

attitudes toward imprisonment
that render prisons outdated upon
completion.13 Throughout its
corpus, OMA emphasizes program,
or function, above all architectural categories, and S,M,L,XL,
like Exodus, spends much of its
time walking readers through its
programs.
Through examining the unrealized designs for the Panoptic Prison
in Arnhem, the Netherlands, I show
how OMA uses S,M,L,XL to refine
a historiographical architecture.
Historiographical architecture
comments upon, responds to, and
modifies architectural discourses
conventional representation of
spatial experience by incorporating the architectural reading public
into the design process. Such paper
architecture makes primarily textual interventions into urban and
architectural environments rather
than executing entirely new projects
by encouraging readers to reassemble architectural history through
the practice of reading. S,M,L,XL
allows readers to diagram OMAs
early designs by creating alternate
chronologies constructed according
to scale and media type rather than
chronology.
As one of the most belabored,
troubling architectures of modern
history and theory, the Panopticon
represents a particularly charged
diagram. Through rerouting
Arnhems program, Koolhaas
throws the Panopticon, an image
of the modern scientific handling
of human bodies, into crisis by
disentangling the spatial technology
from power and instead binding it
to a concept of liberation. Spatial
technologies, like the Exodus
prison, are social condensers that
bring hidden motivations, desires,
and impulses to the surface to be
refined for recognition, provocation,
and development.14 They are also
a Technology of the Fantastic,
the spatializing instrument
and extension of the human
imagination.15 Simultaneously,
the Koepel Panoptic Prison relays

an ethics, or general principles of

(architectural) practice, for the
computer age by, like S,M,L,XL
at large, not representing objects
but rather by mediating between
various stages in an architectures
life.16 This essay first examines the
digital character of the novel before
unraveling the meanings of Arnhems
designs as emblematic of the book
at large.
Bitmapping Architectural
Multimedia: Defining Space-Time,
Memory, and Code in S,M,L,XL

The ascendancy of print media as

a tool for architectural publicity
emerged alongside the printing press
and gained traction as the concept of
the public sphere emerged in eighteenth-century France. Specifically,
publications from this latter group
that is, print broadsheets and other
ephemera born of a public thirst
for informationfocused on the
constructive elements of architectural culture and aimed to produce
a shared knowledge base among a
growing architectural readership.17
The nineteenth-century architectural publications of Viollet-le-Duc,
on the other hand, called for the
restoration of destroyed buildings in
order to construct the new, a process
termed his historical imagination.18
S,M,L,XL processes both of these
discursive streams but establishes its
manifesto-like character from early
twentieth-century modernists like
Le Corbusier, who curated his books
to be juxtapositions of text and
images that promoted his practice.19
While S,M,L,XLs montage-like
arrangement of multimedia representations corresponded to the
twentieth centurys predominant
media form, the cinema, it suggests the emergent digital character
of architectural culture.20 Various
mediums were translated, following Friedrich Kittler, into the
book format of the architectural
novel-manifesto, demonstrating
the digitals ability to convert distinct media into one another. The
numerical information stream of
computer programming and design

Overby

software turns each constituent

medium into a single format but
allows each medium to retain its distinct representational characteristics
for readers.21 The intended readers
belong to a popular reading public
interested in contemporary space:
S,M,L,XLs back cover announces
that the book is a novel, the most
popular fictional form of the nineteenth century, and implies that
OMA seeks to make its visions legible for a similarly broad audience.
Koolhaas wrote several
Surrealist film scripts before starting his architecture career and
claims montage is the mutual basis
for architecture, film, and text. This
technique allows different media to
flow into one another in a provocative, successive manner. The margins
of S,M,L,XL feature definitions of
keywords and related quotes by various authors in a strip that juxtaposes
and creates a reflexive relationship
between design and critical theory
like images in a Surrealist film montage. The definition of space-time
is taken from French theorist Paul
Virilio, who asserts that contemporary urban forms derive their
meaning from technological spacetime, or flowing rivers of immaterial
data that may take shape in various
media to articulate particularized,
individual desires.22 This selected
terminology subsumes film and the
book within the larger project of
digitization and suggests that the
computer constructs and defines
space. Furthermore, memory is
defined through a notice on one of
OMAs computers that there is not
enough memory storage to execute
a task on AutoCAD.23 This definition
promotes OMAs use of computer
design and suggests that S,M,L,XL
in part resulted from CAD. Yet code,
the core logic around which computation is based, is defined through
a description of Nigerian dancers.24
Taken together, these definitions
indicate that OMA considers its
histories, or memories, as translated through the space-time of the
computer technology into embodied
human experience. The keywords

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Figure 3. A collage of
the text-image pages
of S,M,L,XL ( OMA).

included in the dictionary marginalia

as well as recurrent throughout the
novels various texts create a linguistic code that functions analogously
to the processing language used to
create digital files, actualizing built
environments to be experienced by
readers.
S,M,L,XL represents what
Koolhaas denotes as architecture
in Morse code, what would become
architecture of computer processing,
because it is the result of teamwork and translation rather than a
singular architect.25 Koolhaas references Morse code in describing the
instructions to build the Astor Hotel
in Manhattan, which were translated
from written text to Morse-coded
language in order to be sent. At
another point in his career, Koolhaas
claimed OMA designed in fax language, further suggesting OMAs
design process as one of conversion
between coded languagesthe
visual-textual image becoming
bitmap transferred via telephonic
tones.26 Bitmaps are maps of digital
images consisting of 0s and 1s, creating a unique spatial array of pixels;
Koolhaass provocation suggests
170

that each page of the novel, like each

OMA design, is a digital image of
itself, a translation of the imaginary
into 0s and 1s in order to be rendered
legible for readers. Furthermore, bitmaps pixelation of images occurs in
a serialized fashion, in an electronic
and flat manner evocative of the
montage of images that construct
S,M,L,XL.
S,M,L,XL is a novel in the form
of a series of bitmaps. It provides
a template for other firms seeking
to articulate, and to market, consumer cultures evolution as well as
a template for how the novels readers should navigate digital images.
Koolhaas often highlights shopping
as the key activity of late modern
public life, detailing unfettered consumption. OMAs novel anticipates
the bitmapped pages of Amazon and
eBay by suggesting users read its
contents like products in a magazine
to create their interpretation of their
goods (to review their buildings and
the firm as seller).27 OMAs manifesto
gives hungry shoppers (readers) more
than they can digest, endless options
to choose between, hypersaturating
the spatial marketplace.

A Multimedia Panopticon

Furthermore, S,M,L,XL constructs a digital spatial network of

built environments whose interrelationship is based upon OMAs
processing but whose connective
tissue must be provided by the reading public.28 Following Casey Reas
and Ben Fry, processing is a textual
program that relates computational
design to visual culture, movement,
and interactivity.29 In an anticipatory
mode, S,M,L,XL represents OMAs
attempt to contextualize and elaborate its processes by visualizing in
text and image its free-fall in the
space of the typographic imagination. This promotional description
on the books back cover reveals the
firm attempting to recuperate the
hopelessly analog fantasy realm of
printed typography from its freefall in the face of digitization.
OMAs novel takes the point of view
of its buildings potential users, like
the first-person perspective of someone using software, walking readers
through their spaces like Reas and
Fry walk their readers through processing language.
The novel suggests readers
course through its pages following

Figure 4. The film still from Un Chien Andalou

that prefaces Koolhaass essay Revision
(OMA) (top).
Figure 5. Jeremy Benthams Panoptic Prison
as realized by Willey Reveley, pencil, ink, and
watercolor (Jeremy Bentham, Panopticon, 1791)
(bottom).

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the randomness and incoherence

of Surrealist artistic production. It
organizes itself into four scales but
provides no connective tissue to
cohere its various fragments, suggesting readers embark on a chaotic
adventure like the architectural
design process to make sense of
the book.30 Such a free associative
reading experience is like clicking
through successive blue hyperlinked
texts on Wikipedia, roving between
definitions, facts, and theories,
fostering active rather than passive reading. To find the sources of
the books dictionary entries, for
example, readers must flip between
a given page and a bibliographic
index at novels end, inevitably getting lost in other definitions and
representations.31
In positioning their texts adjacent to representations of their
designs, OMA uses S,M,L,XL to
demonstrate the compatibility of
architectural media formats spatial
interpretations. This practice builds
on Le Corbusiers Vers une architecture (1923), uvre complte (192969),
and Latelier de la recherche patiente
(1960), which define photographs as
representative of his spatial interpretations rather than as facts and
as defined only in relation rather
than in themselves.32 In the first,
Le Corbusier employs a paranoidcritical method by comparing the
Parthenon with a car,33 while in the
third Le Corbusier curated only his
lifes work according to a flowing
formal montage of poetic photographs and sketches rather than
following their chronology (compare
this method to Figure 3). While 1960
Le Corbusier moves in scalar fashion
between Ronchamps door handle,
the garage of Cook House, and
Parisian penthouses, 1995 Koolhaas
weaves his own scalar preoccupations
into a work of fiction.
Overby

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As a novel, S,M,L,XL refutes

Victor Hugos 1831 Notre-Dame de
Pariss claim that the book will kill
the building.34 OMAs 1995 novel
asserts that the novel is an architecture with the potential to articulate
spatial diachrony to a popular consumer audience. OMA suggests
adapting rather than retiring older
media formats through bitmapping
them. More importantly, the novel
insists upon its multimedia rather
than singularly textual status: its
introduction asserts that writings
are embedded between projects
not as cement but as autonomous
episodes, establishing architecture
and text as two distinct media and
suggesting that representations are
distinct architectures in constant
dialogue with literal architecture.35
A Medium Panopticon: OMAs
Translations at the Arnhem Prison

The frontispiece of Revision,

contained within the M section of
S,M,L,XL, reveals OMAs multimedia
conceptualization of architecture. A
still from Luis Buuel and Salvador
Dalis 1929 Surrealist film Un Chien
Andalou in which a human eye is cut
through by a razor prefaces the text,
alluding to the linear incision OMA
proposed making into the circular
form of the Panoptic Prison (Figure
4). Jeremy Benthams Panopticon is a
spatial technology intended to surveil
bodies within disciplinary structures
(Figure 5).36 Bentham also intended
for the Panopticon to be a translative, multivalent, and multimedia
spatial object: he wanted a broad
international audience to re-create
his textual essays and designs, drawn
by architect Willey Reveley, into
three dimensions, but he also desired
the spaces contents to be reformulated back into paper knowledge
testifying to his designs success.37
Like OMA and Le Corbusier,
Bentham sought to perpetuate and
promote his intellectual achievement
in a constant fluctuation between
text, design, and built form.
In the hands of OMA, the
Panopticon is an architecture of
digital multimedia consumption that
172

catalyzes scopophilia. The guards

within the Panopticons centralized, circular viewing device look
out upon and into the diurnal lives
of isolated prisoners with ease and
pleasure. Although the purpose of
this gaze was to create disciplinary power, what was observed more
closely approximated the mundane
daily activities of a television show
about prisons whose ideologies
shifted as rapidly as an accelerated
movie.38 The Panopticons windows,
cut at side angles into its faade to
prevent prisoners from knowing
they were being watched, function
like television or computer screens.
These windows are technologies
that provide views into the lives of a
throng of people and forge a viewing
public among guards whose visual
omniscience brings them close to
prisoners.39
But viewers within and of
Panopticons are brought into intimate proximity through either
framing or being enframed by its
windows. Following Koolhaass
descriptions, Arnhems prisoners
look at its Panopticon and imagine
themselves drinking coffee within it
among their guards far more easily
than they may circulate with the
guards. Similarly, as a spatial technology, S,M,L,XL brings readers far
closer to OMAs practice than touring its headquarters or its buildings.
The novel centralizes their gazes
upon its curated forms and provides
them with a shared, coded visual
vocabulary to imaginatively decipher
OMAs language of imprisonment,
like their antagonist fall[ing]
through the relentless spiral of
introspection inspired by the wellproduced exhibition of their [OMAs]
delusions.40
Iconic and everyday twentiethcentury consumer architectures
ranging from Cinderellas castle in
the Magic Kingdom to Victor Gruens
mall atriums have invoked the centralized Panoptic logic to create a
sense of order and reassurance.41
Indeed, every Disney theme park
places a Disney princess castle at its
center as the identifiable company

A Multimedia Panopticon

logo that stands for an overseeing

disciplinary corporate power but primarily provides a mutual, iconic basis
for consumption. S,M,L,XL cites the
greats of twentieth-century design
history but calls only Walt Disney a
20th-century genius.42 Two decades
after Disneyland, OMAs Panoptic
prison takes on the programmatic
distribution of a Disney theme park,
dispersing individual activities along
streams shooting out from a centralized, monumental media icon. As
an object of collective inquiry, the
Panopticon creates a far larger viewing public between the disparate,
isolated bodies within its cells than
among guards, binding prisoners to a
shared visual narrative like suburban
television viewers each in their own
ranch home but watching the same
programs.
Arnhems pure geometric
formsa circular dome intercut
with linear pathwaysecho OMAs
earlier and later and more explicitly commercial architectures like
the Globe Tower description from
Delirious New York and the 1989
Belgian Sea Terminal.43 Both buildings, like Arnhem, make linear
incisions into the ground as circulatory pathways underneath spherical
or domed structures. Following the
essay Bigness also in S,M,L,XL,
OMA juxtaposes geometry to create
a force that draws users away from
global diurnal rotation and toward a
circles periphery. Arnhems socles
are centrifugal and intended to
undercut the centripetal dome:
whereas Foucault describes Panoptic
space as essentially centripetal and
that functions to the extent that
it isolates a space, OMAs prisons
are a centrifugal Technology of the
Fantastic.44 S,M,L,XL represents
the formal play between these two
models. Its rounded binding meets
its linear pages, and its internal
arrangements suggest unpredictable
movement between ideas generated
by OMA.
Furthermore, Koolhaass
description of the Panopticon as
a kind of coffeehouse is an ironic
recasting of the private disciplinary

Figure 6. OMA, an aerial plan of the Koepel Prison

highlighting the socles, 1980 ( OMA) (top).
Figure 7. OMA, an interior view from within the
socles intersections, 1980 ( OMA) (bottom).

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apparatus using one of the first

commercial spatial typologies of
the eighteenth centurys emergent
public sphere. The OMA Panopticon
becomes a public visual commodity
whose historic monumentality and
functions suggest to prisoners forms
of self-governance. OMAs Koepel
proposals prefaced S,M,L,XLs redefinition of architecture as a digital
consumer good, but the novel, like a
television show, is a visual entertainment that accretes and synthesizes
many mundane details to create a
window onto a world whose primary
function is to, as the manifesto
Exodus claims, provide luxury
and well-being.45 S,M,L,XL is a novel
that is a Panopticon, but the books
purpose is not to control viewers
interpretations of its visual culture.
Rather, the novel centralizes the
intimate relationship between OMA
and readers to create a shared way of
seeing contemporary space.
One of few built actualizations
of Benthams Panoptic prison model,
OMAs Arnhem prison proposal
rereads the Panopticon neither as a
reformative social salve (Bentham)
nor as the best articulation of
modern Western epistemologies of
power (Foucault),46 instead testifying to the flexibility of traditional47
architecture to adapt to contemporary programmatic needs. Koolhaas
reads against Foucaults ideologywhich through the Panopticon
engaged in writing a history of the
present48 to find in the past contemporary political concerns. Instead,
Koolhaas interprets the Panopticon
as a historical iconographic form
liberating the new from having
either to ignore or to express the
idea of incarceration.49 On the other
hand, S,M,L,XLs marginal definitions cite Foucault and his explicit
interlocutors Manuel de Landa,
Henri Bergson, Flix Guattari, Gilles
Deleuze, and Umberto Eco twentyfive times. Foucaults Panopticon, in
Overby

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turn, provides the books definition

of power, championing Foucaults
conception of contemporary society and Deleuzes theory of the
diagram, which was defined using
Foucaults Panopticon. Koolhaass
Arnhem designs and S,M,L,XL riff
on but deviate from both theoretical
precedents.50 With Koepel and other
early designs, Koolhaas and OMA
cultivated historical sensitivity as an
ethical practice, but one that unlike
Foucault read forward rather than
backward in its engagement of historical time.
The proposed reformulation
of the Arnhem Panoptic Prison
hinged upon literal yet metaphorical spatial elements that referenced
the archaeological recuperation of
history. OMA formally and functionally explicates how extant built
environments may function like
textual media in their possession of
accreted, palimpsestual information. Arnhem responds to historical
discursive precedents while opening
up, in this case, the Panoptic model
to multifarious user interactivities
that allude to multimedia and digital
experiences. The designs cut two
intersecting socles into the space
underneath and surrounding the
historic, centralized Panoptic dome
structure (Figures 6 and 7). A socle
is both architectural and archaeological: it serves as a plinth that
supports ornamental elements like
sculptures, situating these forms as
spatially distinct from or above their
surroundings, while also describing
the lower layer of a two-layer wall
structure unearthed in the process of
digging into the past.51 OMAs socles
act as street-like corridors that house
new collective facilities for prisoners, dissolving the isolation-style
disciplining central to the Panoptic
model. The socles create new space
from the hyper-monumental,
space-wasting historic prison,
yet these qualities are empowered,
unlike modern architecture, with a
flexibility of excess capacity that
enables different and even opposing
interpretations of uses.52 The socles
render the 1882 prisons historical
174

form decorativethey literally raise

up the Panoptic guard post as a historical relicand modernize the
building by altering its circulatory
patterns.53
In creating pathways that bind
new and old athletic facilities, shops,
recreational rooms, and more,
Arnhems socles invoke many aspects
of OMAs earlier, foundational prison
manifesto, Exodus. The socles
create pathways between new public
spaces for prisoners, executing the
hedonistic science of designing
collective facilities that accommodate individual desires, while also
functioning as social condensers.54
The architecture of the novel thus
acts according to OMAs earlier
architectural manifestos and design
proposals. Readers of S,M,L,XL are
supposed to diagram their linear
movements through the booka
collective, public objectin order
to maximize their individual, private
pleasure within the novels prescribed pages.
The Arnhem proposal considers
the Panopticon a historical rather
than active spatial technology, one
replaced by the theme park, shopping mall, and screen. In visual and
textual descriptions across media
platforms, OMA emphasizes the
speed and motion they sought to
inject into the Panopticon. For
Koolhaas, the Panopticon meets
life-simulation video games.55 OMAs
designs anticipated contemporary
spatial technologies by inserting
numerous corridors for circulation
like those found in shopping malls
and video games while employing reflective glass panes evocative
of empty television and computer
screens or storefronts.
Koolhaas further conflates
shopping spaces and Arnhem by
describing programmatically altering the extant prison to solve the
problem of unused space: originally
envisioned as empty, the entire
interior is now as busy as the Milan
Galleria.56 The Galleria Vittorio
Emmanuele II is one of the oldest
extant shopping malls, designed
and built between 1861 and 1877,

A Multimedia Panopticon

and articulates nineteenth-century

European bourgeois modernity.
The Panopticon is the Gallerias
literal and symbolic other, the space
in which the comfortable classes
relegated working-class criminals
and guards to cleanse society and
reformulate these individuals bodies
in alignment with their moral and
ethical standards. Moreover, the
Galleria bears the same spatial distribution of OMAs Arnhem proposals,
connecting two intersecting streets
underneath a centralized dome
structure. Since 1877, the shopping
mall has become a more egalitarian
architectural typology as the consumer classes and their desires have
grown. The global impulse to produce satisfying, joyful experiences
associated with consuming multiple
multimedia altered the subjectivity and ideology of consumers, who
OMA reminds us are also prisoners.
By conflating the Galleria and the
Panopticon, Koolhaas proposes that
the architectural types of late modernitythe institutional space of the
prison and the commercial space of
the mallare coextensive and mutually reinforcing. Both spaces hinge
upon and are defined by the collective circulation, consumption, and
interpretation of architectural media.
Koolhaas, in his comparison
of Arnhem to the Galleria, was
responding to contextual critiques
expressed by users rather than by the
commissioners. By 1981, the guards
circulated through the cellblocks
while the prisoners left their doors
open and moved throughout the cavernous space underneath the dome.
The two socle-streets facilitate the
movement disabled by the Panoptic
model to create a network that
allowed for the mediation between
different experiential states of its
users. OMA increases flows among
guards and prisoners to encourage
prisoners to alternate between the
functional states Koolhaas proposed
for the prisoners. These varied
potential experiences parallel those
proffered by consumer cultures
more than by the programmatic
determination of historic prisons.

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At Arnhem, OMA revises history

to suggest that architecture could
become a Corbusian machine able
to work through an issue to create
change. The essay and the novel
employ the spatial code of scale to
solve a problem rather than to merely
describe and reference the worlds
it enclosed.57 Its proposals allow
readers to imagineto fictionally
inhabitthe prison in as many ways
as S,M,L,XL may be read.
Conceiving of interventions
on the scalar level allowed OMA to
remove itself from the manic evolution of prison form and to focus
on circulation through mass. This
emphasis reveals OMAs prioritization of programmatic flexibility as
a means of ensuring its designs
sustainability. What has been characterized as the event architecture
of OMA and Koolhaas, especially as
articulated in their novel, hinged
upon exactly this sort of programmatic bent, which was harnessed as
a cinematic device that anticipated
multiple events happening in time as
well as in space deliberately choreographed by juxtaposing overtly
disparate events and heterogeneous
user groups [and presented as]
an opportunity for self-directed
action.58
While Koolhaas and secondary literature concerning him both
employ cinematic analogies, the
architects emphasis on programmatic variability stems from the
rise of coding language in the late
twentieth century. It is through the
freedom to connect to technical
images rather than slavish adherence to or preoccupation with
origins or sources that S,M,L,XL
and Revision engage architectural
imagery. Both the book and the
essay forge an open technical image
field of architectural imagery that is
digitally connective, programmatic,
and scalar rather than historically overdetermined.59 But neither
eschew architectural tradition
entirely. Instead, they use prose to
stress how descriptions in books like
Foucaults and Benthams diverge
from the practical everyday concerns

of users inhabiting discursive spaces.

Revision proposes that each prisoner and guard authors their own
experiential text concerning Koepel
and that these collective texts supersede the authority of established
scholarly voices.
The Panopticon is a largely ideational architecture because it was
not, as intended, commonly adopted
and because it is primarily associated
with two treatises on prison politics,
Foucaults Discipline and Punish and
Benthams Panopticon Writings. As
textual documents, the ideas of the
Panopticon anticipated the digital
translation of media as diverse as
architecture, film, photography,
drawings, and text because these two
foundational articulations were conceptually translated between many
different media in order to represent
and argue how the Panopticon suggests modern conceptions of power
and control. Revision is the third
treatise in this genealogy, and it takes
on the characteristics of its predecessors, describing the ideological
debates that led to its actualization
and recounting how a new Panoptic
formal interventionone of disempowerment and disenablingwould
bring about a paradigm shift.
Yet Koolhaass text deviates
from its predecessors by foregrounding constitutive, productive relations
that would yield happiness among
the incarcerated and their guards. He
highlights a form of power associated
with local, immediate, and actual
collectives of individuals rather than
one dominated by an ever-mediated,
transcendental command. Bentham
thinks that his Panopticon is the
former when it is in fact the latter,
and Foucault becomes so enamored
with the Panopticons articulation
of his history-philosophy that he
cannot see beyond negative thought.
S,M,L,XL uses the same transcendental, mediating power of old
media, the text, to subvert the power
relations of Koolhaass predecessors.
Revision ironically undermines
the elitism of architectural and more
specifically Panoptic discourse with
approachable language accompanied

Overby

by extensive narrativenot purely

illustrativeimagistic representations of OMAs propoals. At the same
time as S,M,L,XL literally takes its
definition of power from Discipline
and Punish, the design for the Arnhem
prison suggests a counter or redefinition of the term to empower users.
Koolhaas and his team destabilized
the hypostasis, or visibility, of topdown, hierarchical social control
articulated by the Panoptic guard
tower as well as the unverifiable
position of the guards. OMA places
guards and prisoners on the same
horizontal plane and made both populations visible to one another just as
their novel gives its readers a similar
degree of interpretive agency.
A Fragment on Ontology,
Benthams clearest and earliest statement on the fictions undergirding
our realities, describes different
states of being, existence, or becoming that individuals may experience.60
Included in the Panopticon volume,
it implies the spatial mechanisms
attempt not only to produce power
and surveillance but also to control or sway human emotions and
incorporeal perceptions of space
and time. The Panopticon sought
to exert spatial power in order to
induce spiritual cleansing. Foucault
extended Benthams theory by substituting tropic, incorporeal concepts
of power and discipline for the more
numerous ontologies posited by his
predecessor. Disciplinary society,
whose fullest articulation Foucault
sources in the Panopticon, selects
and distributes individual objects
and bodies into their own discrete
spatial units.61 In such a society
which Foucault argues characterized
Western modernity from the late
eighteenth century into his present daysizablemonumentally
scalargovernmental institutions
functioned as observatories of
human multiplicity that produced
individuals.62 Benthams variegated
states of existence were subsumed
under and superseded by predetermined disciplinary functions; or,
more closely following Foucault,
Benthams experiential diversity

JAE69 : 2

175

testifies to the degree to which

discipline may act singularly to produce copies of itself. Thus, neither
Foucault nor Benthams Panopticons
allow for a myriad of experiences
as both made a disciplined, isolated spectacle of each prisoner
rather than eliciting their engaged
responses. The gigantic domed
structures centralized guard post
serves a depersonalizing function,
surveilling each prisoner in their
identical cells and offering each the
same form of redemption.

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Conclusion

Disciplinary societys totalized

collective swaying of bodies and
constitutions continues to characterize 1995s computational era
of coding as well as late modern
consumer culture as typified at
Disneyland. Technological optimists
have argued that codeemployed
by OMA to design its buildings and
their 1995 novelcreates a collective
democratic populace. A myriad of
individuals constitutes this political group and places their fate in
the hands of a figurehead in order
to construct a shared will and a
common good.63 The multiplicity
of voices that constitute OMA are
a group of individuals placing their
wills in the hands of Rem Koolhaas.
His acerbic design statements and
essays articulate a supposedly shared
consciousness. Yet Koolhaas does not
truly relay the totality of the diverse
opinions that form the meshwork of
OMA, the very codes used to refine
its legally determined programmatic
forms. Instead, Koolhaas partially
acknowledges these voices to create a
false illusion by which the logic of the
marketplacethe marketability of
Rem as architect-genius-creator
comes to dominate, supersede, and
eventually obliterate the voices that
undergirded his ascent to power.64
The multifaceted code that gives
rise to each OMA building, and to
S,M,L,XL, represents the decimation
of collective sovereignty in the face
of making architecture a marketable,
packageable commodity.
Yet this cynical reading is a
176

phantasmagoria belying the joys

that OMA finds in late modernitys
characteristic imprisonment, in
the Panopticon of Disneyland.
Within Revision and throughout
S,M,L,XL, Koolhaas and OMA invoke
Benthams argument that fiction
undergirds reality. They elaborate a
method of systematic idealization, or
a systematic overestimation of what
exists, a bombardment of speculation that invests even the most
mediocre aspects with retroactive
conceptual and ideological charge,
an ethics arguing that to each bastard, [there is] a genealogical tree.65
Telling a history, rendering the past
melodramatic fodder for the present, becomes part of a contemporary
design ethics, but Koolhaas and
OMA hyperbolize historymonumentalize it by removing it from
everyday usein order to render it
a programmatic toolkit rather than
a precedent generator. Ironically,
history, which is what S,M,L,XL
represents by recounting OMAs
accomplishments, comes to function
much like a computer. The novel is
a machine of fantasy that mediates
between states and media rather than
functions as an object like a history
book or the creator of such objects
like a historian.66
Author Biography

Whitten Overby is a PhD candidate

in Cornell Universitys Department
of Architecture. His dissertation,
entitled The Seekers, concerns the
architecture and urbanism of five
American Christian mediascapes.
Notes

1 Rem Koolhaas and Elia Zenghelis, Exodus, or

the Voluntary Prisoner s of Architecture, Casabella
378 (1973): 4245. Citations in this article will be
taken from OMA, Rem Koolhaas, and Bruce Mau,
S,M,L,XL (New York: Monacelli, 1995) (hereafter
cited as S,M,L,XL).
2 Roberto Gargiani, Rem Koolhaas/OMA (New York:
Routledge, 2008), 6. AMO is the research division
of OMA, established in 1998.
3 Koolhaas and Zenghelis, Exodus (note 1), 7.
4 Ibid., 5.
5 See Rem Koolhaas, Delirious New York: A Retroactive
Manifesto (1978; New York: Monacelli, 1994),
23582.
6 Rem Koolhaas, AMO, Harvard Graduate School,

A Multimedia Panopticon

and Irma Bloom, Wall, volume 2 in Elements

(Venice: Marsilio, 2014), 14. In their 2014 venture,
OMAs research division characterized defensive
walls as the primal kind of wall.
7 See Max Page, The Creative Destruction of
Manhattan, 19001940 (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 2000). Page applies Joseph
Schumpters term to Koolhaass Manhattan to
describe how the islands architecture constantly
destroyed and rebuilt itself to reflect mutating
economic structures. See Schumpter, Capitalism,
Socialism, and Democracy (1942; London: Routledge,
1994), 8283.
8 Beatriz Preciado, Pornotopia: An Essay on Playboys
Architecture and Biopolitics (Brooklyn: Zone Books,
2014), 18.
9 See Jeremy Bentham, The Panopticon Papers, ed.
Miran Boovi (New York: Verso, 1995); and
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of
the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage
Books, 1995).
10 See Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population:
Lectures at the Collge de France, 19771978, trans.
Graham Burchell (London: St. Martins, 2009),
4449. Foucault softens and qualifies his subsuming statements about discipline from his 1975
history manifesto.
11 Koolhaas and Zenghelis, Exodus (note 1), 13.
12 Rem Koolhaas, Project for the Renovation of
a Panoptic Prison, Artforum (September 1981):
4143.
13 Sandra L. Resodihardjo, Analyzing the
Supermax Prisons in the Netherlands: The Dutch
Supermax, in The Globalization of Supermax Prisons,
ed. Jeffrey Ian Ross (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers
University Press, 2013), 6779. Resodihardjo
details the history of Dutch prisons from before
OMAs proposals through the present day.
14 Koolhaas and Zenghelis, Exodus (note 1), 13.
15 Koolhaas, Delirious New York (note 5), 56. Koolhaas
uses this term to describe Coney Island.
16 Alexander Galloway, The Interface Effect (New York:
Polity, 2012), 2223.
17 See Richard Wittman, Architecture, Print Culture,
and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century France
(London: Routledge, 2007).
18 See Martin Bressani, Architecture and the Historical
Imagination: Eugene-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc, 1814
1879 (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2014).
19 See Beatriz Colomina, Privacy and Publicity:
Modern Architecture as Mass Media (Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 1994), 77140; see also Colomina,
Manifesto Architecture: The Ghost of Mies (Berlin:
Sternberg, 2014). Further, see Catherine de Smet,
Le Corbusier, Architect of Books (Baden: Lars Mller,
2005).
20 See Sergei Eisenstein, Film Form, ed. and trans.
Jay Leyda (London: Harcourt, 1949), 2883.
Eisenstein defines montage, among other things,
as the structural basis of cinematography.
21 Friedrich Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter,
trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael
Wutz (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press,
1999), 12. Kittler discusses how the digital eradicates the concept of medium because it enables
seamless conversion between mediums.
22 Space-time, in S,M,L,XL, 1162. Cf. Paul Virilio,
The Overexposed City, in Zone 1/2: The City,
ed. J. Crary, S. Kwinter, and M. Ferer (New York:
Urzone, 1987).

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23 Memory, in S,M,L,XL (note 1), 926.

24 Code, in S,M,L,XL (note 1), 182.
25 Koolhaas, Delirious New York (note 5), 134.
26 Quoted in Gargiani, Rem Koolhaas (note 2), 68.
27 See Rem Koolhaas, Chuihua Judy Chung, and
Jeffrey Inaba, eds., Harvard Design School Guide to
Shopping (Kln: Taschen, 2001 and Harvard Design
School).
28 Anna Klingmann, Brandscapes: Architecture in the
Experience Economy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
2010), 13134.
29 Casey Reas and Ben Fry, Processing: A Programming
Handbook for Visual Designers and Artists (Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 2007), 1.
30 OMA, Introduction, in S,M,L,XL (note 1), xix.
31 Geoff Cox and Alex McLean, Speaking Code: Coding
as Aesthetic and Political Expression (Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 2013), 8 and 14.
32 See Colomina, Privacy (note 19), 80, 93, and 100.
33 See Koolhaas, Delirious New York (note 5), 23582
for a detailed discussion of how Le Corbusier
employed the PCM.
34 For an extended discussion of this analogy,
see Neil Levine, The Book and the Building:
Hugos Theory of Architecture and Labroustes
Bibliothque Ste-Genvive, in The Beaux-Arts and
Nineteenth-Century France, ed. Robin Middleton
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1982), 13873.
35 OMA, Introduction (note 30), xix.
36 See Foucault, Discipline (note 9), 200202, for a
more extensive description of the Panopticon.
Also see Robin Evans, The Fabrication of Virtue:
English Prison Architecture, 17501840 (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1982), 195235. Evans
presents a rigorous architectural history of the
Panopticons historical genealogy from before its
articulation through the 1980s.
37 Lisa Gitelman, Paper Knowledge: Toward a
Media History of Documents (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2014). Gitelman argues that
the paper textual document is a type of medium
with a particular modern history. See also Lorna
Rhodes, Total Confinement: Madness and Reason in
the Maximum Security Prison (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 2004). Rhodes implicitly
argues that prisons are a multimedia complex
whose functioning hinges upon the circulation
and dissemination of media as various as computers, chairs, trays, trade journals, and televisual
and filmic imagery between prisoners and prison
workers.
38 Koolhaas, Revision, in S,M,L,XL (note 1), 241.
39 Misha Kavka, Reality Television, Affect and Intimacy:
Reality Matters (London: Palgrave Macmillan,
2008), 57 and also the preface and the first chapter. See also Lauren Berlant, The Female Complaint:
The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American
Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2008), especially the preface and introduction.
These two texts talk about the intimacy generated
by consumer goods and entertainment. Further,
see Reinhold Martin, The Organizational Complex:
Architecture, Media, and Corporate Space (Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 2003), 67. Seagrams translucent
windows, like those OMA proposed inserting
underneath the Panopticon, were like network

television a medium to be watched in passing

rather than looked at like an artwork it channels flows, patterns of patterns, a visual language
that creates a logic of organization.
40 Koolhaas and Zenghelis, Exodus (note 1), 17.
41 Karal Ann Marling, Design Disneys Theme Parks: The
Architecture of Reassurance (Paris: Flammarion, 1998),
7985. Marling argues there is always an architectural icon visually cohering this public-private
consumptive sphere to provide the reassurance
necessary to facilitate spending: at Disneyland,
this is Sleeping Beautys Castle, at Koepel the
Panopticon, and for OMA the book form of
S,M,L,XL.
42 Rem Koolhaas, Field Trip, in S,M,L,XL (note 1),
232.
43 See Koolhaas, Delirious New York (note 5),
7176 for a discussion of the Globe Tower, and
Koolhaas, Working Babel, in S,M,L,XL (note 1),
579601 for a discussion of the Sea Terminal.
44 Koolhaas, Revision (note 38), 242. See Foucault,
Security (note 10), 4445, where he claims discipline is essentially centripetal.
45 Koolhaas and Zenghelis, Exodus (note 1), 9.
46 Foucault, Security (note 10), 3031.
47 Koolhaas, Revision (note 38), 239.
48 Foucault, Security (note 10), 31.
49 Koolhaas, Revision (note 38), 247.
50 Power, in S,M,L,XL (note 1), 1052. See also Gilles
Deleuze, Foucault, trans. Sean Hand (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 3344.
51 Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge,
trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Vintage,
2010). Likely not unintentional was OMAs use
of archaeology as a theoretical and formal trope:
Foucaults early historical-philosophical method
was typified as an archaeology.
52 Koolhaas, Revision (note 38), 239 and 240.
53 Ibid., 242.
54 Koolhaas and Zenghelis, Exodus (note 1), 7
and 13. The term social condenser is, notably,
taken from early twentieth-century Russian
Constructivist architecture.
55 Preciado, Pornotopia (note 8), 209.
56 Koolhaas, Revision (note 38), 237.
57 Galloway, Interface Effect (note 16), 22. Revision
and S,M,L,XL more generally follow the category
of calculus as compared with that of language
elaborated by Galloway as paradigmatic of
computers.
58 Klingmann, Brandscapes (note 28), 113.
59 Galloway, Interface Effect (note 16), 9.
60 Bentham, Panopticon Papers (note 9), 11758.
61 Foucault, Discipline (note 9), 170.
62 Ibid., 171.
63 Cox and McLean, Speaking Code (note 31), 8297.
See Reas and Fry, Processing (note 29), whose
optimism for the creative potential of processing
overlooks its more insidious potentials.
64 Cox and McLean, Speaking Code (note 31), 9395.
65 Rem Koolhaas, The Terrifying Beauty of the
Twentieth Century, in S,M,L,XL (note 1), 208.
66 Galloway, Interface Effect (note 16), 22.

Overby

JAE69 : 2

177