Totalitarianism - Totalitarianism in Architecture

Totalitarianism in Architecture

Non-political aspects of the culture and motifs of totalitarian countries have themselves often been labeled innately "totalitarian". For example, Theodore Dalrymple, a British author, physician, and political commentator, has written for City Journal that brutalist structures are an expression of totalitarianism given that their grand, concrete-based design involves destroying gentler, more-human places such as gardens. In 1984, author George Orwell described the Ministry of Truth as an "enormous, pyramidal structure of white concrete, soaring up terrace after terrace, three hundred metres into the air"; columnist Ben Macintyre of The Times has stated that that was "a prescient description of the sort of totalitarian architecture that would soon dominate the Communist bloc".

Another example of totalitarianism in architecture is the Panopticon, a type of institutional building designed by English philosopher and social theorist Jeremy Bentham in the late eighteenth century. The concept of the design is to allow a watchman to observe (-opticon) all (pan-) inmates of an institution without their being able to tell whether or not they are being watched. It was invoked by Michel Foucault (in Discipline and Punish) as metaphor for "disciplinary" societies and their pervasive inclination to observe and normalise.