The spatial arrangement of the Panopticon as developed by Jeremy Bentham in 1775 was made up of an observation tower placed in the center of a ring made up of cells that occupied its whole width. The cells were punctured on both sides so that the figures of the confined would be backlit and hence easily discernible from the center. It is at this time in history that the primacy of vision over the other senses was declared, and architecture was turned into an extension of the eye. The disposition of space was now being used to accommodate the political and economic changes which occurred in the 18th century and which necessitated the development of architecture as a machine that would facilitate the exercise of power by the state and/or the ruling class over the underprivileged masses.

The model of the Panopticon depends largely on the presence of light, which is not surprising given the fact that it was developed during the period of the Enlightenment. During the period preceding the enlightenment it was believed that truth possessed its own luminosity, that it was absolute and self-evident. With the Enlightenment however came the belief that truth needed to be illuminated, because only through visibility could truth and knowledge be revealed and registered. Thus, in the Panopticon the prisoners, the workers, the pupils - and in general all those that needed to be under surveillance in order to be kept away from indecent or unlawful acts - are pulled out of the dark dungeons and put into transparent cells. Hence light replaces the lock and the chain.

The promoters of the Enlightenment had a fear of darkened spaces which were the loci of conspiracies and epidemics, and which symbolized the so-called "dark ages", a period when the clergy or the monarchy reigned against reason. Darkness was in addition considered threatening because it promoted an equality amongst things or people and therefore a disorder that was akin to that produced by the festival which, according to Foucault, was a condition of "suspended laws, lifted prohibitions, a frenzy of passing time, bodies mingling together without respect, individuals unmasked, abandoning their statutory identity and the figure under which they had been recognized, allowing a quite different truth to appear." (Discipline and Punish, p.197)

The reformers-intellectuals that were instrumental in implementing the ideals of the enlightenment, Bentham of course included, supported the presence of order and regularity. Implicit within this order was a system of social hierarchy that would draw clear distinctions between the overseer and the overseen, or the bourgeois and the proletariat. Bentham was an entrepreneurial contractor and therefore part of the bourgeois class that emerged out of the new market economy.

In the Panopticon power was exercised by the real or implied gaze of the overseer - situated in the central observation tower - which penetrated the cells where the silhouettes of the overseen were exposed. Order was insured in this system through the lateral division between the cells, which eliminated communication between the confined and therefore rendered the possibility of an uprising impossible. The overseen lived in isolated togetherness marking therefore the shift from the classical civilization where a small number of objects were accessible to a multitude of men making the presence of a public life possible, to the condition of modernity where the individual has an instantaneous view of the multitude.

In the model of the Panopticon there is no seeing-being seen dyad; the periphery is clearly the observed and the center the observer. This is proved not only by the size of the openings which permitted an unobstructed view of the cells while maintaining the central tower virtually opaque, but also by the fact that the "tin speaking tubes that were devised by Bentham as the acoustical analogues to the visual arrangement were soon discarded because their effect was reversible and therefore not in tune with the mono-directionality of the spatial arrangement.

Thus, space becomes segmented, frozen, dead, and each individual is fixed in his place. Despite the presence of positions of supremacy in society, both the overseer and the overseen are trapped within the machine of the Panopticon. Even if we are to accept the fact that the overseer does not need to be present in the observation tower because his implied presence is enough to guarantee order, the symbol of his power is still trapped, doomed to immobility. As Foucault asserts, the Panopticon is a machine in which everyone is caught, those who exercise power as much as those over whom power is exercised. (The Eye of Power in Power/Knowledge, p.159)

In the frozen space of the Panopticon - which is a microcosm of 19th century society - the bourgeois-overseer has a fundamentally different perception of the space which he occupies than the proletariat-overseen. The overseer placed in the central tower can only see the multitude of cells surrounding him and the flat outlines of the confined figures. The overseer's perception of his surroundings is merely contemplative. His position prevents him from comprehending the totality of the space that he occupies. His experience is abstract, his gaze comparable to that fostered by the institution of the museum, and therefore a split occurs between the subjective and the objective world.

On the other hand, the prisoner, the worker, the pupil, or the lunatic, can not only see the tower in the center, but he can also see the surface of the cells opposite his own and the scape on the outside. By combining these different views in his mind he can construct the totality of the scheme and comprehend his own active position in the spatial arrangement. Just as the worker that Georg Lukacs talks about in "The Phenomenon of Reification" is able because of his position within economic production to experience his surroundings concretely, so is the person placed in the cell able to conceive the totality of the space which he inhabits.

This difference between the experience of the bourgeois and that of the proletariat, which is the difference between optical and haptic space respectively, is made clear by two pre-photographic devices: the camera obscura and the camera lucida.

The experience of the overseen is like that of the user of the camera lucida. This device permitted drawing an object through a prism, one eye fixed on the model and the other on the paper. Thus, the camera lucida permitted the artist to maintain a concrete experience of his surroundings by allowing him to occupy a space that could be tactily appropriated. Both the user of the camera lucida and the inhabitant of the cell in the Panopticon scheme understand their environment as a construct of which they themselves are a part, so that there is no division between the object and the subject. The individual co-exists with the social. On the other hand, the experience of the overseer is like that of the user of the camera obscura. Once inside the box with the pinhole, haptic space is displaced by a conception of space as a surface divorced from the self.

Therefore, the camera lucida as a paradigm of the experience of the proletariat-overseen offers a perception of space that is haptic and therefore concrete, while the camera obscura as a paradigm of the experience of the bourgeois-overseer limits the experience of space to a surface that is solely optic.

The development of the pre-photographic devices mentioned above was driven by the same bourgeois obsession with illumination as the way to arrive at truth that gave birth to Bentham's Panopticon. The ultimate "victory" of the bourgeoisie was the invention of photography, which made possible the production of an abundance of images, which would come to govern social relations and hence transform concrete perception to mere contemplation. Photo-graphy as we know it today is a development of the camera obscura and not of the camera lucida, the latter being genealogically closer to cinema.

During the same period that the first experiments with photography were taking place, panoramas started to appear in the urban centers of Europe. The panoramas were cylindrical structures the interior surface of which was covered with an uninterrupted landscape or city vistas which could be viewed from a platform placed in the center. In order to access the panoramas one followed a sequence from the street entrance through a dark passage in order to emerge in the center of the interior space that was of course artificially illuminated.

Not only is the spatial configuration of the Panorama strikingly similar to the Panopticon but the experience of space that these devices foster is virtually identical. In both cases the middle ground is eliminated so that there is a clear division between the center and the periphery and as a consequence a separation between object and subject. But as the classical unity between the subject and the object is lost, both become so abstract that they are subsequently reunited on the basis of their mutual abstraction. As Henri Lefevbre writes, modern space is "shattered into images, into signs, into connected-yet-disconnected data directed at a 'subject' itself doomed to abstraction." (The Production of Space, p.313) The "abstract subject" uses only the eye to read the codes of his surroundings and to move through its visual field. Thus, the reality that was previously concrete is now a surface that contains everything and is contained by everything and it is onto this surface that the object and the subject are collapsed.

The Panopticon and the Panorama were the birthplaces of the space of modernity on which guy Debord elaborated in his Situationist manifesto "The Society of the Spectacle". Debord asserts that modern space is governed by the spectacle as a social relationship; all that used to be directly lived now becomes mere representation. Images merge into a "common stream" impairing irrevocably the unity of life and the tactility of experience. According to Debord, reality is apprehended in a "partial way, and it unfolds in a new generality as a pseudo-world apart solely as an object of contemplation. ...spectacle is the very heart of reality's real unreality." (The Society of the Spectacle, p.12)

Debord could have well been speaking of the Panopticon when he stated that spectators in the society of the spectacle are linked by a one-way relationship to the very center that contains their isolation from one another. Despite the phenomenal centrality of the Panopticon's observation tower it not only fails to construct a unitary perception, but on the contrary it reflects the compartmentalization of the cells exacerbating thus the alienation of the modern subject. Just as the spectacle, according to Debord, imposes a unity that is "merely the official language of a generalized separation", so is the centralized scheme of the Panopticon/Panorama shattered into fragments in and from its very center.

It is this shattering of space into optical fragments that Mies van de Rohe expresses through his 1929 design of the Barcelona Pavilion. Van der Rohe does not negate the current condition, but rather uses its logic to create a space that is simultaneously a mimesis and a critique of the modernity.

The pavilion's vertical planes of glass and marble - sandwiched between the horizontal planes of the floor and the wall - form an asymmetrical composition, which is devoid of spatial hierarchy. The only feature of the pavilion which alludes to the central spaces traditionally found in public buildings is a small space dislocated from the geometrical center of the plan which is completely enclosed and illuminated artificially from within. Mies has evacuated the center turning it into an empty sign that testifies to the impossible existence of a unifying spatial element.

The simultaneous reflective and refractive quality of the glass walls make it difficult to distinguish between the real and the virtual. When approaching the building, the visitor sees himself reflected in the dark glass with the sky, clouds, and buildings reflected behind him. As Jose Quetglas writes, "the image is a double one: he sees himself in the interior of the building and yet he is in an exterior. Could it be that the pavilion has no interior, or that its exterior is an interior?" (Fear of Glass in Architectureproduction, p.131)

Van der Rohe«s space creates profound ambiguities. The pavilion is neither interior or exterior but simultaneously both and none. The glass walls which create a continuum between the interior and the exterior are at the same time transformed into opaque planes which resist the context, transforming it into an image that denies its existence as a material reality. This trans-mutation of the exterior into a representation of itself glued onto the previously transparent surface closes off the space of the pavilion "towards an interior dependent on that which is not itself. The more the mirror becomes saturated with rich, impenetrable landscapes, the more is the room in front of it emptied". (Fear of Glass in Architectureproduction, p.135)

Due to the lack of a spatial hierarchy "inside" the pavilion the visitor, according to Quetglas, wonders through the sequence of segmented spaces, at times re-entering the same room but from a different side; "and so he thinks he recognizes it, although perhaps he saw it through a glass and it was not the same one, or was only one very similar. Is he pursuing his own footsteps running after his own shadow? He departs from the house - he loses the house upon entering." (Fear of Glass in Architectureproduction, p.144)

Modern man becomes part of a mis-en-scene in a spectacle that bounces his own image back to him in the form of the other and dispossesses him of a place of his own. As Debord aptly states, " the spectator feels at home nowhere, for the spectacle is everywhere." (The Society of the Spectacle, p.23)

The ambiguity between place and image (non-place), between site and sight, combined with the simultaneous presence and effacement of the visitor, attests to the fact that Van der Rohe’s space acknowledges the collapse of object and subject onto a surface that is consumed as it is being produced.

Massimo Cacciari explains that modern spaces, spaces enclosed in glass, are empty not only because they oppose the existence of traces but also because they resist the existence of a place where "the thing (the collected) might be for the individual an inalienable experience. ...transparence in Mies is absolute because it is born out of the precise and truly desperate awareness that there is nothing left to collect, and hence, to make transparent. In this sense the glass no longer violates the interior, but appears henceforth as the meaning of the thing that it has helped to destroy." (Architecture and Nihilism, p.213)

Modern man is without property, without qualities, a passive subject whose pure emptiness can accommodate a new kind of richness. His experience is thoroughly impoverished in order to be filled again with a new perception. Like the new "global space" that Lefebvre talks about - a space which establishes itself as a void waiting to be filled, to be colonized by images, signs, and objects – Van der Rohe’s space empties itself in order to accept a new perception of space produced through the richness of the surface. As Meister Eckhart wrote, "if the eye, when it sees, contained any color, it would not perceive either the color it contained, or another which it did not contain. However since the eye lacks all colors, it recognizes all colors." (Fear of Glass in Architectureproduction, p.143)

Bibliography
Cacciari, Massimo. Architecture and Nihilism: On The Philosophy of Modern Architecture, 1993.
Debord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle, 1994.
Evans, Robin. Bentham's Panopticon in Architectural Association Quarterly, 1971.
Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, 1977.
--------. The Eye of Power in Power/Knowledge, 1972.
Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space, 1991.
Mashek, Joseph. Bentham's Panopticon: An Architectural Perpetuation in Building Art: Modern Architecture Under Cultural Construction, 1993.
Quetglas, Jose. Fear of Glass: The Barcelona Pavilion in Architectureproduction, 1988.