Thesis Positioning Statement #3
There exists in the world, countless instances of behavioural manipulations subtly conveyed through form, patterning, architecture and media. The motivations for these interventions are multiple, but are usually associated with some kind of power structure whose goals are to inflect behaviour patterns to their advantage. In each case, the proponents of the control, are seeking some kind of strategic advantage. This could mean anything from political alignment, consumer spending and military advantage to patriotic pride and defending the interests of the populous. What follows is a brief outline of some of these strategies.
Dazzle Pattern Camouflage
Type of control - Self preservation – strategic advantage
Developed in Britain by Norman Wilkinson and in the US by Everett Warner and Frederic Waugh, the dazzle techniques were intended to make “a single thing appear to be a hodgepodge of unrelated components,” as Behrens puts it in this fascinating article. The aim was that such visual disruption would cause confusion and make it difficult for the enemy to identify what kind of ship – and what size – it was from a distance, with the use of ‘reversed perspective’ in the patterning a part of this. The ship’s course – and angle to the viewer – would also be problematic to identify, with colouring including bright whites, blues and sea-green alongside black, darker blue and grey selectively helping parts of the ship to blend into the seascape, and other parts very much stand out.
Breaking the enemy’s ability to distinguish elements of the ship properly, and generally to cause distraction and make it difficult to concentrate on observation for protracted periods, were all part of this plan; painting ships with different dazzle patterning on each side made identification even harder.
Casino Control
Type of control: Capital gain
The manic environment of a casino is an overwhelming place of extreme stimuli and loaded cultural meaning. This sensory intensity would normally be countered by your eyes searching out a calmer thing to look at – most usually the floor. Casinos strategically install bright, garish and ugly looking carpets so that your eyes see more chaos and immediately return to the slot or table or whatever you are playing.
The beauty of this strategy is that they do not attempt to alter how you may or may not perceive casinos. They are uninterested in leaving you with a positive impression or even disproving the common truth that ‘the house always wins’. Their only goal is to relieve their customers of their money as relentlessly and quickly as possible. Their strategy is to harness the manic surroundings and localize and exacerbate that tension to focus the player back to where the house makes money.
Pink lighting to discourage loitering
Type of Control: Preserving the civil order (failed)
In order to counter loitering teenagers in Nottingham, Preston and Scunthorpe in the UK, residents associations are installing pink lighting that highlights skin blemishes in people who stand underneath it. Although many youths do have acned skin, so may many of the residents. This scatter bomb approach discriminates against everybody, not just the loitering youths. But it primarily fails because it does nothing to address the problem at hand, which is youth boredom/opportunities/engagement. It merely shifts the problem to the next housing estate.
Disciplinary Architecture
Type of Control: Preemptive for the assumed good to the populous.
Central handrails on public benches, radiused curbs on ledges, perches in bus-stops, deliberately uncomfortable seating in cafes to encourage a fast turnover of traffic. These all ‘defend’ the general public against undesirable behaviour by other members of society.
“This type of architectural strategy is one step away from Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon. Also Michel Foucault argues (in Discipline and Punishment) that by embedding punishment systems into architecture and institutions (e.g. prisons) rather than meeting out direct retributions publicly, (e.g. public hangings) the likelihood of adverse public reactions to the punishment is greatly reduced.”[1]
It can be argued that the broader social benefit, although very much a top down scenario, is worth the slightly sinister subterfuge enacted by the party seeking to control. When looking at these imbalances in power and unfolding the scenario, “knowing who has the power is a question of know who power serves”.
Leonid & Alexandr Vesnin– Soviet Era Russia.
Type of Control: Political alignment/propoganda
Proposal for a branch office of the Leningradskaya Pradva newspaper in Moscow. 1924.
At a time when the soviet message was in full force and was looking to many different vehicles to convey that message, the Vesnin Brothers proposal for a newspaper office becomes just that. A tiny site (6m X 6m) forced the architects to make the building a long, thin advertisement for the new soviet ideal. At this point it ceases to be a building in pragmatic terms, and moves into the realm of the idea. It is a billboard of information, both implicit (the new modern style for the new era in Russia) and explicit (the digital clock, neon signage, soviet flag and spotlight). In this instance, the building becomes a vehicle for the message of the state. It is not explicitly controlling society, but is nonetheless implicit in the state message.
Because there were almost no private landowners in USSR, the role of architecture throughout the soviet project was to act as a vehicle for the ideals of the socialist enterprise.
The home as a vehicle for isolation
Type of Control: repressive
Guy Debord says in Society of the Spectacle (1968) that Urbanism safeguards class power by atomizing the workers. This has occurred to such an extent as to have culminated in the suppression of the street as a community driver. Lewis Mumford also notes that the efficiencies of long distance communication serves to isolate the individuals even further and has become ‘an even more effective method of keeping the a population under control.’ Top down community designing (factories, offices, tourist reosorts, housing facilities) is intentionally directed towards creating pseudocommunities. “The same collective isolation prevails even within the family cell, where the omnipresent receivers of spectacular images fill the isolation with the ruling images – images that derive their isolation precisely from that isolation.”
