In his article “The Modern Movement and the Surveillance Society,” Peter Jones looks into the connection between modernist architecture and the rise of surveillance. He discusses how Modernist architectural principles began to prioritize efficiency, transparency, and logic. These principles were used to design buildings and urban spaces that allowed for control through surveillance. Jones claims the origins of this surveillance society to the early twentieth century when modernist architects rejected traditional forms in favor of designs that preferred functionality and practicality. According to Jones, the desire for visibility was a key component of both the surveillance society and the Modern Movement in architecture. The desire for visibility appears in areas of Modernist discourse such as glass, the interior, the house, and the factory. Glass, an important component of the Modern Movement, was seen as a symbol of a new collective life, whether under reformed capitalism or a socialist state. The shift from opacity to transparency, on the other hand, is symptomatic of the larger shift toward a surveillance society and has facilitated its development. In the name of sunlight, architects such as Le Corbusier prioritized open floor plans and long ribbon windows. As a result, surveillance-optimized buildings such as homes, schools, and government buildings were built.

Jones also mentions the role of technology in the evolution of the surveillance society, referencing innovations such as CCTV and computer networks made it easier to monitor and control people in public spaces. Overall, Jones believes that modernist architecture and its fetishization of materials, particularly glass, played an important role in the development of a built environment that facilitated individual control and monitoring, thus contributing to the development of a “surveillance society”. I agree with Jones in his assertion that modernist architects were fetishizing materials and I would push that idea further and claim that there was a fetishizing of the building as a static object to be viewed. Homes like the Farnsworth house appear to me like they were prioritizing how the building appeared in a photograph or as an architectural drawing rather than the user experience. If I remember correctly from my visit to the home, the privacy curtains had to be installed at the request of the client. An additional closet storage space was also built roughly a mile up the river because Mies did not include it in his design.

I couldn’t help but choose Camp 13 Cafe at the Jaqua Center when I was looking through the class map for a building to study this week. The structure is essentially a giant square glass cube, and given this week’s reading topic of surveillance and the modernist architecture movement, I had to investigate further. Programmatically, the building serves as a study space exclusively for the University of Oregon student-athletes. It appears to be one of the nicest, most opulent buildings on campus to me, and anyone who attends the University understands that the student-athletes here are in a completely different societal class. There is a reason why I took my photo from the outside of the Cafe, I didn’t feel comfortable walking up to the door of the building. Now this feeling is counter to the thesis of the reading, a facade made entirely of glass should result in a lack of privacy for its inhabitants. However, an elegant, obscuring screen hangs between the glass and the interior space, allowing light to enter the space, but not the public eye. This screen acts as a physical barrier, but I would argue that the sense of exclusivity associated with the space does far more to protect against public surveillance, suggesting that the concept of surveillance is nuanced and extends beyond materiality.

The exterior of the John E. Jaqua Center with a reflection of a cloudy sky.