Control Room Architecture: Towards a Theory

This paper initiates a theorizing for architecture of what the author terms the control room, interior spaces that might be as thin as a screen or far, far thicker, from which our contemporary networked existence can be productively read and engaged. It establishes control rooms as those entities that share three criteria: they are junctures within a determinate network; they are public; and they display multiple surfaces with multiple images upon them. Moving from images of control rooms on to theoretical images and concluding with a provisional dip into image processing, the investigation relates multi-screen environments by the Eames Office to other depicted spaces and architectural representations, suggesting that Philip Agre’s distinction between surveillance and capture, tied to Michel Foucault’s panopticism and Gilles Deleuze’s society of control, is at the heart of the control room’s logic. Incorporating concepts and interpretations of images, both as representations and as screen captures, from Hélène Lipstadt, Guy Dubord, Jacques Guillerme, and Catherine Ingraham, as well as design ideas from Abbe Laugier, Jeremy Bentham, Gottfried Semper and IKEA, the trip from depiction to surveillance to capture suggests an excursion architecture might yet want to undertake, and perhaps even learn to control.