The Desire to See: Binary Systems, Architectural Space, and the Ontology of Being-with

Abstract:This essay explores nineteenth-century European architectural designs in relation to vision, surveillance, and spectatorship. It contributes to the material and posthuman turn in humanity studies. Focusing on Ledoux's design of the salt factory Saline de Chaux, Schinkel's panoramic facilities, the ancient Roman theater described by Vitruvius, and Boullée's Cenotaph of Newton, this essay takes these architectures as optical apparatuses with a clear awareness of the light path setting and power regimes. Challenging the divisions between surveillance and spectatorship, the amphitheater and the panoptic machine, this essay argues for a subject-object position that merges these regimes in the act of seeing within the operation of communities. In showcasing how architecture, as established codes of articulation, visualizes the grids within which actions and interpretations are situated, this essay suggests a detailed historical reading that complicates the architectural space as heterotopias—the sites of struggle between reality and virtuality that open to the future.