Troubles in Theory VI - From Utopia To Heterotopia - Architectural Review

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Troubles in Theory VI: from Utopia

to Heterotopia
3 OCTOBER 2014 BY ANTHONY VIDLER UTOPIA
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The sixth instalment in the series turns to the October 2014

theory of ‘space’ as it was reinterpreted from its 27 OCTOBER
2014 BY AR EDITORS
https://www.architectural-review.com/essays/utopia/troubles-in-theory-vi-from-utopia-to-heterotopia Page 1 of 18
Modernist origins to serve political analysis and

Court Report: Hospitalhof,
practice, and focuses on the work and influence of Stuttgart, Germany, by Lederer
Michel Foucault Ragnarsdóttir Oei
29 OCTOBER 2014 BY ROB WILSON
The recent occupation movements have revived memories of
decisive moments in the history of spatial politics, among Far from the madding crowd:
which the events of 1968 in Paris still stand out as much for shortcuts in the city
their revolutionary activism as for the spate of theoretical texts 13 MAY 2020 BY MATTHEW TURNER
that preceded and followed the month of May. The
preoccupation with ‘space’ was almost universal, whether as an
architectural force for social change, or as a repressive force
for social order.
For the re-conceptualisation of the idea of space in the late
1960s was informed by two, apparently contradictory,
intellectual references. The Modernist tradition had celebrated
the idea as a liberation from the closed academic world of the
19th century − ‘Space − protagonist of architecture’, noted
Bruno Zevi in 1948, summing up over 50 years of spatial theory
and practice that marked out architecture from the other arts
as a functional and experiential accommodation of the moving
body and the perceiving subject. Loos’s raumplan, Le
Corbusier’s ‘espace indicible’, Schindler’s ‘space-architecture’,
were only three of the varied propositions that were advanced
to justify the erasure of the Beaux-Arts parti and the load-
bearing wall, the opening up of the street, and the unlimited
territory of an expanding modernity.
With the increasing interest in space from the social sciences,

however, this open-ended vision was subject to critical revision.
Opposed to the rationalised space of postwar housing
developments, the Situationists explored alternative modes of
spatial occupation, inventing the dérive, based on a
psychogeography that proposed an aleatory exploration of
existing urban realms, and in a momentary alliance with
Constant, an architectural equivalent to an urbanism of psychic
desire. They were, as demonstrated in the first issue of the
Situationist International, supported by the analyses of more
orthodox geographers, such as Paul-Henry Chombart de
Lauwe, the intrepid pilot and pioneer of aerial photography
who, in his study of Paris, became convinced that space was a
powerful social flux: ‘We speak, not only of a geographic space,

but a social space; of a demographic space, a cultural space, a
juridical space and a religious space … the limits within which
the life of a group of humans unfolds cannot be defined by a
single criterion. It is the same for the divisions of space
comprised within its limits. In reality it is a series of
juxtaposed spaces whose structures sometimes cover each
other and sometimes escape any superposition.’1
The events in Paris in May 1968 stand out in this history of spatial politics
It was inevitable, given these and many other propositions, not

ignoring the close relations between Lefebvre’s academic
courses at Nanterre and the student movement, that the
uprisings of 1968 would be permeated with spatial rhetoric −
couched both in terms of the ‘liberation’ of urban space, but
also in its strategic and ‘military’ potential.
‘Over 50 years of
spatial theory and
practice marked out
architecture
from the other arts
as a functional
and experiential
accommodation of
the moving body and
the perceiving
subject’
Here, however, the dominant voice of caution came from a

former medical historian and philosopher who had in the early
1960s turned his attention to the institutional forms of medical
practice in a series of studies beginning with Histoire de la
folie [Madness and Civilization], 1961, and continuing with
Naissance de la Clinique [The Birth of the Clinic], 1963. Michel
Foucault, expanding his idea of discourse to embrace the
spatial characteristics of these newly re-constituted
institutions, began to consider their architectural distribution
as contributory factors in their establishment of order and
exercise of power.
In retrospect we can trace the emergence of Foucault’s spatial

turn in a series of investigations into the history of
psychoanalytical and phenomenological thought, and by way of
Husserl, and specifically in his Introduction to the French
translation of Ludwig Binswanger’s 1930 essay ‘Traum und
Existenz’ (‘Dream and Existence’), where, taking modest issue
with Binswanger, he claimed that the spatial interpretation of
dreams was as significant as their temporal understanding;
their ‘forms of spatiality’, he wrote, were intimately connected
to and a key to the ‘meaning and direction of existence’.2 This
spatial phenomenology was supported by Eugène Minkowski’s
1933 study: Le Temps Vécu − the last chapter of which
was entitled ‘Vers une Psychopathologie de l’Espace Vécu’
(‘Towards a psychopathology of lived space’). This treated the
‘space-of-the-environment’ that, in Minkowski’s terms, localised
and contained the regions of the interior, the exterior, and
their separation. In a metaphor that was to prove seminal for
Foucault, Minkowski here distinguished between two
interrelated and potentially opposed, kinds of space − ‘dark’
space and ‘clear’ space.
Constant’s New Babylon Paris, 1963
In 1964 Foucault transferred these insights to the analysis of

literary texts, and particularly those that themselves utilised
spatial metaphors. In a book review entitled ‘The Language of
Space’, he wrote, ‘If space is the most obsessive of metaphors
in the language of today’, it was because it offered a
fundamental structuring device that ‘determines its choices,
draws its figures and its translations’, constructing ‘digression,
distance, the intermediary, dispersion, fracture, and difference’.
As an example Foucault took the recent publication of Michel
Butor’s Description de San Marco.3 In this work, which is by
no means a ‘description’ in the normal, tourist or art-historical
sense, Foucault discerns an attempt to construe systematically
all the spaces ‘that are connected to a building of stone’ that
language might conjure: ‘[those] interior spaces that it
reconstitutes (sacred texts illustrated by frescoes), spaces
immediately and materially superimposed on painted surfaces
(inscriptions and legends), prior spaces that analyze and
describe the elements of the church (commentaries in books
and guides), neighboring and related spaces that come together
by chance, evoked by words (the reflections of tourists who
regard), closed spaces of those whose gazes are turned one to

the other (fragments of dialogs). These spaces are their proper
place of inscription: scrolls of manuscripts, surfaces of walls,
books, tapes of tape recorders that one cuts up with scissors.’
In Butor’s book, these spaces of the basilica, the verbal spaces,

the place of writing, are composed to provide what Foucault
detects as a double system: first, ‘the sense of the visit (itself
the resultant condition of the space of the church, the path of
the stroller and the movement of his gaze)’ described by the
large blank page, laid out in the manner of Mallarmé’s Un coup
de dés, with horizontal bands of words cut by the margins,
others dispersed in fragments of verse, others in columns. And,
second, one that seems closer to photography than writing, a
space that evokes an: ‘immense architecture of the orders of
the church, but absolutely different from its space of stones
and paintings’.4
These insights into textual spatiality were developed two years

later in Foucault’s 1966 study, Les mots et les choses, with its
much commented upon analysis of Velásquez’s painting Las
Meninas. Reflecting on the surprising juxtaposition of
apparently dissimilar terms in a ‘Chinese’ encyclopaedia cited
by Borges, Foucault finds in the heteroclite, the incongruous
nature of these inappropriate ‘mis-placings’, a key to the
difference between the consoling order of Utopia, and the
disturbing nature of Heterotopia.
Aerial photograph by the pilot Paul-Henry Chombart de Lauwe
‘Utopias afford consolation: although they have no real locality

there is nevertheless a fantastic, untroubled region in which
they are able to unfold; they open up cities with vast avenues,
superbly planted gardens, countries where life is easy, even
though the road to them is chimerical.
‘Heterotopias are disturbing, probably because they secretly

undermine language, because they make it impossible to name
this and that, because they shatter or tangle common names,
because they destroy syntax in advance, and not only the
syntax with which we construct sentences but also that less
apparent syntax which causes words and things (next to and
also opposite one another) to ‘hold together’. This is why
utopias permit fable and discourse: they run with the very
grain of language and are part of the fundamental dimension of
the fabula; heterotopias … dessicate speech, stop words in
their tracks, contest the very possibility of grammar at its
source; they dissolve our myths and sterilize the lyricism of our
sentences.’5
In the same year, in a radio talk for children, Foucault

transferred the concept of heterotopia into spatial terms. In
this talk, he evoked the idea of ‘other spaces’, those ‘countries
without place, histories without chronology, cities, planets,
universes, untraceable on any map or heaven, simply because
they do not belong to any space’. These were the traditional
utopias that formed the dream worlds of societies.
There were, however, Foucault went on, certain kinds of utopic

spaces that could be situated in real space and real time: ‘one
does not live in a neutral and white space; one does not live,
die, or love, within the rectangle of a sheet of paper’. Rather,
‘one lives, loves, and dies in a space that is gridded, cut up,
variegated, with light and dark zones, differences in level,
stairs, holes, bumps, hard and fragile regions, penetrable,
porous. There are regions of passage, streets, train, subways;
there are regions open to momentary pause − cafés, cinemas,
beaches, hotels, and then there are the closed regions of rest
and being at home. Yet, among these places that are
distinguished from each other, there are those that are
absolutely different: places that are opposed to all the others,
that are destined in some way to efface them, neutralize them
and purify them. These are in some way counter-spaces.
These counter-spaces, these localized utopias.’6
For the child, these spaces reside in secret places − under the
covers, in the attic, on the ‘ocean’ of the parents’ bed. For the
adult, ‘there are gardens, cemeteries, there are asylums,

brothels, prisons, Club Med villages, and many others’. These
‘counter-spaces’ are not utopias because they can be situated in
real space, but, as Foucault now introduces the word, hetero-
topias, the scientific study of which would be named
heterotopology.
Having isolated and defined the theory that might characterise
his previous studies of institutions, Foucault then defined the
varied ways in which societies, historical and present, invented
their specific heterotopias: the forbidden spaces of ‘biological
crisis’ in so-called ‘primitive’ societies − spaces set aside for
the attainment of puberty or giving birth; and spaces in
modern societies, more concerned with deviation: ‘the places
that society establishes in its margins, in the empty beaches
that surround it (…) reserved for individuals whose behavior is
deviant in relation to the mean, or the required norm’. Besides
hospitals, that retain something of the space of biological
crisis, these might take the form of psychiatric clinics, prisons
− even retirement homes for the ‘lazy’ deviants who no longer
work in a busy society. And there is an almost natural order of
establishment and disappearance, as old heterotopias are
suppressed (brothels), and some continued in use (cemeteries).
The guiding principle, Foucault concluded, is the juxtaposition
in real space of many spaces together that would normally be
incompatible. In these terms, even the theatre, with its
combination of stage, rectangular scene, and auditorium, or the
cinema, a ‘great rectangular scene at the end of which on a
two-dimensional space is projected a new space in three
dimensions’, would qualify.
The experimental textual spatiality of Stéphane Mallarmé’s Un coup de dés
Between 1966 and 1969, the critical influence of Lefebvre’s and

Foucault’s spatial ideas was evident in both theory and
practice. Lefebvre joined forces with his assistant, Hubert
Tonka, together with Jean Aubert, Jean-Paul Jungmann,
Antoine Stinco, Isabelle Auricoste, Catherine Cot, Jean
Baudrillard, and René Lourau, to produce a series of
pamphlets to be distributed at assemblies and events − La
Logique de l’urbanisme, L’argent de l’urbanisme, L’Utopie
n’écrit pas au futur, Des raisons de l’architecture, Urbaniser la
lute de classe − together with the short-lived journal UTOPIE:
Sociologie de l’urbain, described by Craig Buckley as
developing ‘new promises of liberation to new forms of
repression’. Here, in July 1968, Hubert Tonka published his
Critique of Urban Ideology, and Henri Lefebvre ‘From Urban
Science to Urban Strategy’.
Foucault’s work, as we know, was very soon to play a

fundamental role in widening the scope of architectural history,
through the extension of his studies on institutions with Bruno
Fortier’s team of researchers encompassing the architecture of
18th-century hospitals, Les machines à guérir (aux origines de
l’hôpital moderne) and the design of arsenals and ports (Les
vaisseaux et les villes); and Robin Evans’ magisterial work on
the history of the English prison, The Fabrication of Virtue.
Foucault’s own research into the nature of the ‘prison’ led him
to visit Attica in 1971, where he made a distinctly architectural
observation: ‘#at struck me first of all was the entrance, that
kind of phony fortress à la Disneyland, those observation posts
disguised as medieval towers with their machiolis; and behind
this rather ridiculous scenery, which dwarfs everything, you
discover it’s an immense machine.’7
And of course it was the machine itself that interested him,

with its long corridors, defining ‘specific trajectories’
‘calculated to be the most efficient possible and at the same
time the easiest to oversee’.
Foucault was later to apply the same reasoning to another

semi-panoptical plan, that of Ledoux’s saltworks at Arc-et-
Senans, which he visited in the autumn of 1973. Here he found,
as he wrote in Surveiller et punir, published two years later,
what he thought to be ‘the perfect disciplinary apparatus that
would make it possible for a single gaze to see everything
constantly [from] a central point that would be both the source
of light illuminating everything, and a locus of convergence for
everything that must be known: a perfect eye that nothing
would escape and a center towards which all gazes would be
turned’. And while this vision of a total Benthamite
panopticism was dubious when applied to a Ledoux whose
symbolic preoccupations were as strong as his proto-functional
rhetoric, for architects intent on radicalising the discipline the
message was clear: either submit to a reformist ‘architecture or
revolution’, or attempt to subvert the established power
structures embedded in institutional space by inventing ‘other
spaces’, alternative heterotopic forms to contest those already
existing.
Foucault made a much commented upon analysis of Velasquez’s famous painting Las Meninas in his
1966 study, Les mots et les choses
Yet Foucault had already demonstrated the complexities of

‘revolutionary space’, in a 1972 conversation with the Maoist
group led by Benny Lévy concerning the formation of popular
tribunals. For Lévy, these tribunals, of Chinese inspiration,
were the best way to ensure justice according to proletarian
correctness. Foucault, however, disagreed, pointing out that
historically, in the French Revolution, the Revolutionary
tribunals had served more as the agents of repression than the
arbiters of justice. To demonstrate his point, Foucault went on
to analyse the spatial distribution of the contemporary French
tribunal, and arrangement of the actors behind and in front of

the table: ‘#at is this disposition? A table; behind this table,
which separates them the two suitors, the thirds who are the
judges; their position indicates firstly that they are neutral in
relation to the one and the other and secondly, it implies that
their judgment is not determined in advance, that it is going to
be established after an enquiry through the hearing of both
parties, in function of a certain norm of truth and a certain
number of ideas on the just and the unjust, and thirdly, that
their decision will have the force of authority.’ This order, was,
Foucault concluded, very far from the idea of ‘popular justice’
enacted by the ‘masses’ against their ‘enemies’.8
‘For architects intent

on radicalising the
discipline the
message was clear:
either submit to a
reformist
“architecture or
revolution”, or
attempt to subvert
the established
power structures
embedded in
institutional space by
inventing ”other
spaces” to contest
those already
existing’
For his part, Lefebvre was sceptical: Foucault, he complained,
unquestioningly applies the spatial metaphor to knowledge and
discourse, but ‘never explains what space it is that he is
referring to, nor how it bridges the gap between the theoretical
(epistemological) realm and the practical one, between mental
and social, between the space of the philosophers and the
space of the people who deal with material things.’9
Foucault found the semi-panoptical plan of Ledoux’s saltworks at Arc-et-Senans to be ‘the perfect
disciplinary apparatus that would make it possible for a single gaze to see everything constantly
[from] a central point that would be both the source of light illuminating everything, and a locus of
convergence for everything that must be known’
In the end the space-as-power thesis was to be quickly

absorbed in political critique on both the left and the right,
functionalised in behaviourist studies, and translated into
images by counter-architectural dystopians. It was a supreme
irony that much intended ‘subversive’ architecture, dedicated
to undermining panopticism, was to be couched in terms that
were more reminiscent of the Attica entrance than any
disruption of spatial orders themselves − the symbolic masking
of the machine continued under other guises.
If there was to be a single master-trope for architecture

retained from Foucault, it was the concept of heterotopia. In
the postscript to the newly translated text of the radio talk,
Daniel Defert provides a useful timeline of the successive
phases of Foucault’s elaboration of this idea that has proved so
influential in architectural theory.10 Beginning in 1966 with the
radio broadcast, Foucault then developed the concept in an

address to the Cercle d’études architecturales de Paris, hosted
by Ionel Schein, excerpts from which were translated into
Italian in L’Architettura the following year. The edited version
was only to be published in full 16 years later, significantly
enough, in Berlin, accompanying the exhibition of the
Internationale Bauausstellung (IBA). Here, ‘of Other Spaces’
was adopted as the leitmotif of the general approach of JP
Kleihues and OM Ungers who saw the notion of ‘heterotopia’ as
informing and supporting their own version of rebuilding the
city as a series of ‘archipelagoes’.
References
1. Paul-Henry Chombart de Lauwe, ‘L’Etude de l’Espace
social’, Paris, essais de sociologie 1952-64, Paris: Editions
Sociales, 1964, p22 ff.
2. Michel Foucault, Introduction to Ludwig Binswanger,
Le cas Suzanne Urban. Étude sur la schizophrénie (1952),
French translation J Verdeaux, R Kuhn et M Foucault
(Bruges: Desclée de Brouwer, 1957), p60.
3. Michel Butor, Description de San Marco (Paris:
Gallimard, 1963).
4. Michel Foucault, Dits et écrits (1954-1988), Vol I: 1954-
1975 (Paris: Gallimard, 2001), pp439-40.
5. Michel Foucault, Les mots et les choses. Une archéologie
des sciences humaines (Paris: Gallimard, 1966; translated
The Order of Things. An Archeology of the Human
Sciences (London: Pantheon Books, 1970), ppxvii-xix.
6. Michel Foucault, Le corps utopique − les hétérotopies,
presentation by Deniel Defert (Paris: Éditions Lignes,
2009).
7. John Simon, ‘Michel Foucault on Attica: An Interview’,
Social Justice, vol 18, no 3 (Fall 1981), p26.
8. Foucault, Dits et écrits, vol II, p1214.
9. Henri Lefebvre, La Production de l’espace (Paris:
Editions Anthropos, 1974); translation Donald Nicholson-
Smith (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991), pp3-4.
10. Foucault, Le corps utopique − les hétérotopies.
Previous Troubles in Theory

I The State of the Art 1945-2000
II Picturesque to Postmodernism
III The Great Divide: Technology vs Tradition
IV The Social Side
V The Brutalist Moment(s)
OCTOBER 2014
Since 1896, The Architectural Review has

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are chosen as prisms through which arguments
and broader narratives are constructed. In
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Troubles in Theory VI: from Utopia

‘London’s waterways could

If Form didn’t follow Finance:

The sixth instalment in the series turns to the October 2014

Modernist origins to serve political analysis and

With the increasing interest in space from the social sciences,

powerful social flux: ‘We speak, not only of a geographic space,

It was inevitable, given these and many other propositions, not

Here, however, the dominant voice of caution came from a

In retrospect we can trace the emergence of Foucault’s spatial

Constant’s New Babylon Paris, 1963

In 1964 Foucault transferred these insights to the analysis of

regard), closed spaces of those whose gazes are turned one to

In Butor’s book, these spaces of the basilica, the verbal spaces,

These insights into textual spatiality were developed two years

Aerial photograph by the pilot Paul-Henry Chombart de Lauwe

‘Utopias aﬀord consolation: although they have no real locality

‘Heterotopias are disturbing, probably because they secretly

In the same year, in a radio talk for children, Foucault

There were, however, Foucault went on, certain kinds of utopic

adult, ‘there are gardens, cemeteries, there are asylums,

The experimental textual spatiality of Stéphane Mallarmé’s Un coup de dés

Between 1966 and 1969, the critical influence of Lefebvre’s and

Foucault’s work, as we know, was very soon to play a

the history of the English prison, The Fabrication of Virtue.

And of course it was the machine itself that interested him,

Foucault was later to apply the same reasoning to another

Yet Foucault had already demonstrated the complexities of

tribunal, and arrangement of the actors behind and in front of

‘For architects intent

In the end the space-as-power thesis was to be quickly

If there was to be a single master-trope for architecture

radio broadcast, Foucault then developed the concept in an

Previous Troubles in Theory

Since 1896, The Architectural Review has

Join the conversation online

Terms and conditions FAQ Contact us

COPYRIGHT © 2020 EMAP PUBLISHING LTD

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