Journal of Architectural Education

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A Multimedia Panopticon: Media, Translation, and

History in OMA's S,M,L,XL and the Arnhem Prison

Whitten Overby

To cite this article: Whitten Overby (2015) A Multimedia Panopticon: Media, Translation, and
History in OMA's S,M,L,XL and the Arnhem Prison, Journal of Architectural Education, 69:2,
167-177, DOI: 10.1080/10464883.2015.1063396

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10464883.2015.1063396

Published online: 23 Sep 2015.

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 A Multimedia Panopticon
Media, Translation, and History in OMA’s
S,M,L,XL and the Arnhem Prison
Whitten Overby
Cornell University

illustrated the essay. Overlaying

This essay argues that S,M,L,XL is a digital
multimedia architectural project that sought to
redefine the relationship between architecture and
various other media on the cusp of architectural
culture’s widespread digitization. It uses one
design included within the text, OMA’s proposed
renovations for the Panoptic Prison in Arnhem,
the Netherlands, to analyze how Rem Koolhaas
and his firm synthesize a wide range of media
to create and theorize their own conception of
modern architectural history as a fantastical state
of imprisonment.
Introduction
In 1971, Dutch architect Rem
Koolhaas and his collaborator Elia
Zenghelis entered a project entitled
“Exodus, or the Voluntary Prisoners
of Architecture” into a competi-
tion held by Italian design magazine
Casabella. Published by the same
magazine in 1973,1 the two architects
and their wives formed the collective
“Dr. Caligari Cabinet of Metropolitan
Architecture,” the seeds of what
would become Koolhaas’s design
firm, the Office for Metropolitan
Architecture (OMA/AMO).2 Their
initial name combined the titles of
two German films, The Cabinet of Dr.
Caligari and Metropolis, with that of
a manifesto by modernist architect
Ludwig Hilberseimer to evoke the
multimedia means by which they
photographs and film stills on top
of architectural paintings evocative
of plans, sections, and elevations,
Koolhaas’s wife at the time, Madelon
Vriesendorp, envisioned “Exodus” as
an expression of architects “ecstatic
in the freedom” from conventional
architectural representations (Figure
1).3 Included as one of two prefatory
essays in the “Foreplay” section of
S,M,L,XL, a 1995 architectural novel
by OMA, Rem Koolhaas, and Bruce
Mau, “Exodus” frames the trajectory
of OMA, and of Koolhaas. The text is
a manifesto that simultaneously cri-
tiques and embraces imprisonment
as the paradigmatic modern spatial
experience and the prison as its cor-
responding space.
“Exodus” complicates this
claim by arguing that such force be
“used … in the service of positive
intentions.”4 The authors recuperate
human experiences from the detritus

Figure 1. Rem Koolhaas, Elia Zenghelis, Madelon

Vriesendorp, and Zoe Zenghelis, “Exodus, or
the Voluntary Prisoners of Architecture, The
Reception Area” (1972), gelatin silver photograph
with color ink (© OMA). This image is reproduced
in black and white in S,M,L,XL (8–9) with a
label reading “Minimal training for new arrivals:
overwhelming previously undernourished senses.”

JAE 69 : 2   167

Figure 2. Rem Koolhaas, Elia Zenghelis, Madelon
Vriesendorp, and Zoe Zenghelis, “Exodus, or the
Voluntary Prisoners of Architecture, The Strip,
Aerial Perspective” (1972), cut-and-pasted paper
with watercolor, ink, gouache, and color pencil on
gelatin silver photograph (© OMA). This image is
also reproduced in black and white in S,M,L,XL
(10–11) with a label reading “Division, isolation,
inequality, aggression, destruction: frontline of
architectural warfare.”
of modern life and create eight new
modular environments. “Exodus”
enacts the Surrealist “Paranoid-
Critical Method” (PCM) that defines
Koolhaas’s Delirious New York: A
Retroactive Manifesto (1978) and OMA’s
S,M,L,XL by irrationally linking the
unexpected to create an imaginary
but coherent worldview.5 The PCM
recycles the forms and media of
(architectural) culture to refine new
modes of communicating the primal
character of space. The walled enclo-
sure becomes a means of liberation
where architecture unshackles itself
from historic London’s monumental-
ity.6 “Exodus” creates a strip, or a
prison, within London, a wall behind
which Londoners may relocate after
abandoning the rest of their city in
disgust (Figure 2). The text itself
functions like a film, using visually
evocative language that walks readers
through the successive programmatic
168 A Multimedia Panopticon
spaces. In doing so, the text suggests
that its readers are the described
space’s users.
OMA’s concern with prisons
reemerges with a 1979 commis-
sion by the Dutch government
to redesign the Koepel (Dutch
for “domed”) Panoptic Prison in
Arnhem, the Netherlands. With this
project, Koolhaas and his OMA team
tapped into the Panoptic Prison’s
historical form to reconceive, and
creatively destruct, conceptions of
this institutional space.7 Koolhaas
also wrote an essay to accompany
the design proposal submitted to
the Dutch government. Entitled
“Revision,” the essay has an afterlife
of sorts as it is reproduced, along
with select renderings of the proj-
ect, inside the pages of S,M,L,XL.
In self-consciously engaging the
textual and built histories of the
Panoptic Prison model designed
by late eighteenth-century English
moral reformer Jeremy Bentham and
later taken up by twentieth-century
French philosopher-historian Michel
Foucault, OMA’s Arnhem redesigns
propose, like S,M,L,XL, a reconceiv-
ing of architectural design as part of
a collective multimedia project. Both
the Arnhem project and the novel
foreground 1995’s emergent compu-
tational and digital media in addition
to photographs, drawings, text,
moving images, and models.
Koolhaas and OMA used
S,M,L,XL to establish the firm as “an
architectural multimedia production
company,” engaging with and critiqu-
ing the generic formats and contents
of architectural publications, typolo-
gies, and identities.8 In “Revision,”
Koolhaas engages prior Panoptic
texts by Bentham (1791) and Foucault
(1975) to hew his own paper architec-
ture, riffing on rather than slavishly
adhering to extant architecture’s
practical, theoretical, and historical
discourses.9 Indeed, “Revision” is the
third manifesto, following those of
Foucault and Bentham, to detail the
Panopticon as an emblem of contem-
poraneous space at large.10 OMA’s
Arnhem renovations posit that the
Panopticon is an architecture of
consumption as much as of disci-
pline, following the redefinition in
“Exodus” of prisons that “create and
recycle private and public fantasies.”11
The redesigns for the Arnhem
prison occurred in two phases
that spanned seven years (1979–81;
1982–85), while their accompany-
ing textual statement was published
numerous times in the early 1980s.12
Notably, the Koepel Panoptic
Prison was one of two projects OMA
chose to represent itself with at the
Venice Biennale’s First International
Architecture Exhibition. Entitled
The Presence of the Past and curated by
Paolo Portoghesi, Koolhaas wrote
“Our New Sobriety” to accompany
the exhibit. In this text, Koolhaas
establishes and parodies the political
stakes of the project: not only was
the commission a consolation prize
for OMA’s rejected redesigns for the
Dutch governmental center in The
Hague, but the designs also pro-
posed prison reform, forging a new
language for incarceration that did
not fit contemporary or past prison
ideologies but rather made Arnhem’s
spaces inhabitable for prisoners
and guards alike. Koolhaas decries
prison design’s privileging of trendi-
ness over functionality to be its key
failing, conforming to ever-changing
attitudes toward imprisonment
that render prisons outdated upon
completion.13 Throughout its
corpus, OMA emphasizes program,
or function, above all architec-
tural categories, and S,M,L,XL,
like “Exodus,” spends much of its
time walking readers through its
programs.
Through examining the unreal-
ized designs for the Panoptic Prison
in Arnhem, the Netherlands, I show
how OMA uses S,M,L,XL to refine
a historiographical architecture.
Historiographical architecture
comments upon, responds to, and
modifies architectural discourse’s
conventional representation of
spatial experience by incorporat-
ing the architectural reading public
into the design process. Such paper
architecture makes primarily tex-
tual interventions into urban and
architectural environments rather
than executing entirely new projects
by encouraging readers to reas-
semble architectural history through
the practice of reading. S,M,L,XL
allows readers to diagram OMA’s
early designs by creating alternate
chronologies constructed according
to scale and media type rather than
chronology.
As one of the most belabored,
troubling architectures of modern
history and theory, the Panopticon
represents a particularly charged
diagram. Through rerouting
Arnhem’s program, Koolhaas
throws the Panopticon, an image
of the modern scientific handling
of human bodies, into crisis by
disentangling the spatial technology
from power and instead binding it
to a concept of liberation. Spatial
technologies, like the “Exodus”
prison, are “social condensers” that
bring “hidden motivations, desires,
and impulses to the surface to be
refined for recognition, provocation,
and development.”14 They are also
a “Technology of the Fantastic,”
the spatializing “instrument
and extension of the human
imagination.”15 Simultaneously,
the Koepel Panoptic Prison relays
Overby
an ethics, or general principles of
(architectural) practice, for the
computer age by, like S,M,L,XL
at large, not representing objects
but rather by mediating between
various stages in an architecture’s
life.16 This essay first examines the
digital character of the novel before
unraveling the meanings of Arnhem’s
designs as emblematic of the book
at large.
Bitmapping Architectural
Multimedia: Defining Space-Time,
Memory, and Code in S,M,L,XL
The ascendancy of print media as
a tool for architectural publicity
emerged alongside the printing press
and gained traction as the concept of
the public sphere emerged in eigh-
teenth-century France. Specifically,
publications from this latter group—
that is, print broadsheets and other
ephemera born of a public thirst
for information—focused on the
constructive elements of architec-
tural culture and aimed to produce
a shared knowledge base among a
growing architectural readership.17
The nineteenth-century architec-
tural publications of Viollet-le-Duc,
on the other hand, called for the
restoration of destroyed buildings in
order to construct the new, a process
termed his “historical imagination.”18
S,M,L,XL processes both of these
discursive streams but establishes its
manifesto-like character from early
twentieth-century modernists like
Le Corbusier, who curated his books
to be juxtapositions of text and
images that promoted his practice.19
While S,M,L,XL’s montage-like
arrangement of multimedia rep-
resentations corresponded to the
twentieth century’s predominant
media form, the cinema, it sug-
gests the emergent digital character
of architectural culture.20 Various
mediums were translated, fol-
lowing Friedrich Kittler, into the
book format of the architectural
novel-manifesto, demonstrating
the digital’s ability to convert dis-
tinct media into one another. The
numerical information stream of
computer programming and design
JAE 69 : 2
software turns each constituent
medium into a single format but
allows each medium to retain its dis-
tinct representational characteristics
for readers.21 The intended readers
belong to a popular reading public
interested in contemporary space:
S,M,L,XL’s back cover announces
that the book is a novel, the most
popular fictional form of the nine-
teenth century, and implies that
OMA seeks to make its visions leg-
ible for a similarly broad audience.
Koolhaas wrote several
Surrealist film scripts before start-
ing his architecture career and
claims montage is the mutual basis
for architecture, film, and text. This
technique allows different media to
flow into one another in a provoca-
tive, successive manner. The margins
of S,M,L,XL feature definitions of
keywords and related quotes by vari-
ous authors in a strip that juxtaposes
and creates a reflexive relationship
between design and critical theory
like images in a Surrealist film mon-
tage. The definition of space-time
is taken from French theorist Paul
Virilio, who asserts that contem-
porary urban forms derive their
meaning from “technological space-
time,” or flowing rivers of immaterial
data that may take shape in various
media to articulate particularized,
individual desires.22 This selected
terminology subsumes film and the
book within the larger project of
digitization and suggests that the
computer constructs and defines
space. Furthermore, “memory” is
defined through a notice on one of
OMA’s computers that there is not
enough memory storage to execute
a task on AutoCAD.23 This definition
promotes OMA’s use of computer
design and suggests that S,M,L,XL
in part resulted from CAD. Yet code,
the core logic around which compu-
tation is based, is defined through
a description of Nigerian dancers.24
Taken together, these definitions
indicate that OMA considers its
histories, or memories, as trans-
lated through the space-time of the
computer technology into embodied
human experience. The keywords
  169
Figure 3. A collage of
the text-image pages
of S,M,L,XL (© OMA).
included in the dictionary marginalia
as well as recurrent throughout the
novel’s various texts create a linguis-
tic code that functions analogously
to the processing language used to
create digital files, actualizing built
environments to be experienced by
readers.
S,M,L,XL represents what
Koolhaas denotes as “architecture
in Morse code,” what would become
architecture of computer processing,
because it is the result of team-
work and translation rather than a
singular architect.25 Koolhaas refer-
ences Morse code in describing the
instructions to build the Astor Hotel
in Manhattan, which were translated
from written text to Morse-coded
language in order to be sent. At
another point in his career, Koolhaas
claimed OMA designed “in fax lan-
guage,” further suggesting OMA’s
design process as one of conversion
between coded languages—the
visual-textual image becoming
bitmap transferred via telephonic
tones.26 Bitmaps are maps of digital
images consisting of 0s and 1s, creat-
ing a unique spatial array of pixels;
Koolhaas’s provocation suggests
170 A Multimedia Panopticon
that each page of the novel, like each
OMA design, is a digital image of
itself, a translation of the imaginary
into 0s and 1s in order to be rendered
legible for readers. Furthermore, bit-
map’s pixelation of images occurs in
a serialized fashion, in an electronic
and flat manner evocative of the
montage of images that construct
S,M,L,XL.
S,M,L,XL is a novel in the form
of a series of bitmaps. It provides
a template for other firms seeking
to articulate, and to market, con-
sumer culture’s evolution as well as
a template for how the novel’s read-
ers should navigate digital images.
Koolhaas often highlights shopping
as the key activity of late modern
public life, detailing unfettered con-
sumption. OMA’s novel anticipates
the bitmapped pages of Amazon and
eBay by suggesting users read its
contents like products in a magazine
to create their interpretation of their
goods (to review their buildings and
the firm as seller).27 OMA’s manifesto
gives hungry shoppers (readers) more
than they can digest, endless options
to choose between, hypersaturating
the spatial marketplace.
Furthermore, S,M,L,XL con-
structs a digital spatial network of
built environments whose inter-
relationship is based upon OMA’s
processing but whose connective
tissue must be provided by the read-
ing public.28 Following Casey Reas
and Ben Fry, processing is a textual
program that relates computational
design to visual culture, movement,
and interactivity.29 In an anticipatory
mode, S,M,L,XL represents OMA’s
attempt to contextualize and elabo-
rate its processes by visualizing in
text and image its “free-fall in the
space of the typographic imagina-
tion.” This promotional description
on the book’s back cover reveals the
firm attempting to recuperate the
hopelessly analog fantasy realm of
printed typography from its “free-
fall” in the face of digitization.
OMA’s novel takes the point of view
of its building’s potential users, like
the first-person perspective of some-
one using software, walking readers
through their spaces like Reas and
Fry walk their readers through pro-
cessing language.
The novel suggests readers
course through its pages following
 Figure 4. The film still from Un Chien Andalou
that prefaces Koolhaas’s essay “Revision”
(©OMA) (top).

Figure 5. Jeremy Bentham’s Panoptic Prison

as realized by Willey Reveley, pencil, ink, and
watercolor (Jeremy Bentham, Panopticon, 1791)
(bottom).

the “randomness” and “incoherence”

of Surrealist artistic production. It
organizes itself into four scales but
provides “no connective tissue” to
cohere its various fragments, sug-
gesting readers embark on a “chaotic
adventure” like the architectural
design process to make sense of
the book.30 Such a free associative
reading experience is like clicking
through successive blue hyperlinked
texts on Wikipedia, roving between
definitions, facts, and theories,
fostering active rather than pas-
sive reading. To find the sources of
the book’s dictionary entries, for
example, readers must flip between
a given page and a bibliographic
index at novel’s end, inevitably get-
ting lost in other definitions and
representations.31
In positioning their texts adja-
cent to representations of their
designs, OMA uses S,M,L,XL to
demonstrate the compatibility of
architectural media formats’ spatial
interpretations. This practice builds
on Le Corbusier’s Vers une architec-
ture (1923), Œuvre complète (1929–69),
and L’atelier de la recherche patiente
(1960), which define photographs as
representative of his spatial inter-
pretations rather than as facts and
as defined only in relation rather
than in themselves.32 In the first,
Le Corbusier employs a paranoid-
critical method by comparing the
Parthenon with a car,33 while in the
third Le Corbusier curated only his
life’s work according to a flowing
formal montage of poetic photo-
graphs and sketches rather than
following their chronology (compare
this method to Figure 3). While 1960
Le Corbusier moves in scalar fashion
between Ronchamp’s door handle,
the garage of Cook House, and
Parisian penthouses, 1995 Koolhaas
weaves his own scalar preoccupations
into a work of fiction.

Overby JAE 69 : 2   171

 As a novel, S,M,L,XL refutes
Victor Hugo’s 1831 Notre-Dame de
Paris’s claim that the book will kill
the building.34 OMA’s 1995 novel
asserts that the novel is an architec-
ture with the potential to articulate
spatial diachrony to a popular con-
sumer audience. OMA suggests
adapting rather than retiring older
media formats through bitmapping
them. More importantly, the novel
insists upon its multimedia rather
than singularly textual status: its
introduction asserts that “writings
are embedded between projects
not as cement but as autonomous
episodes,” establishing architecture
and text as two distinct media and
suggesting that representations are
distinct architectures in constant
dialogue with literal architecture.35
A “Medium” Panopticon: OMA’s
Translations at the Arnhem Prison
The frontispiece of “Revision,”
contained within the “M” section of
S,M,L,XL, reveals OMA’s multimedia
conceptualization of architecture. A
still from Luis Buñuel and Salvador
Dali’s 1929 Surrealist film Un Chien
Andalou in which a human eye is cut
through by a razor prefaces the text,
alluding to the linear incision OMA
proposed making into the circular
form of the Panoptic Prison (Figure
4). Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon is a
spatial technology intended to surveil
bodies within disciplinary structures
(Figure 5).36 Bentham also intended
for the Panopticon to be a transla-
tive, multivalent, and multimedia
spatial object: he wanted a broad
international audience to re-create
his textual essays and designs, drawn
by architect Willey Reveley, into
three dimensions, but he also desired
the space’s contents to be reformu-
lated back into “paper knowledge”
testifying to his design’s success.37
Like OMA and Le Corbusier,
Bentham sought to perpetuate and
promote his intellectual achievement
in a constant fluctuation between
text, design, and built form.
In the hands of OMA, the
Panopticon is an architecture of
digital multimedia consumption that
172 A Multimedia Panopticon
catalyzes scopophilia. The guards
within the Panopticon’s central-
ized, circular viewing device look
out upon and into the diurnal lives
of isolated prisoners with ease and
pleasure. Although the purpose of
this gaze was to create disciplin-
ary power, what was observed more
closely approximated the mundane
daily activities of a television show
about prisons whose ideologies
shifted as rapidly as “an accelerated
movie.”38 The Panopticon’s windows,
cut at side angles into its façade to
prevent prisoners from knowing
they were being watched, function
like television or computer screens.
These windows are technologies
that provide views into the lives of a
throng of people and forge a viewing
public among guards whose visual
omniscience brings them close to
prisoners.39
But viewers within and of
Panopticons are brought into inti-
mate proximity through either
framing or being enframed by its
windows. Following Koolhaas’s
descriptions, Arnhem’s prisoners
look at its Panopticon and imagine
themselves drinking coffee within it
among their guards far more easily
than they may circulate with the
guards. Similarly, as a spatial tech-
nology, S,M,L,XL brings readers far
closer to OMA’s practice than tour-
ing its headquarters or its buildings.
The novel centralizes their gazes
upon its curated forms and provides
them with a shared, coded visual
vocabulary to imaginatively decipher
OMA’s language of imprisonment,
like “their antagonist fall[ing]
through the relentless spiral of
introspection” inspired by the “well-
produced exhibition of their [OMA’s]
delusions.”40
Iconic and everyday twentieth-
century consumer architectures
ranging from Cinderella’s castle in
the Magic Kingdom to Victor Gruen’s
mall atriums have invoked the cen-
tralized Panoptic logic to create a
sense of order and reassurance.41
Indeed, every Disney theme park
places a Disney princess castle at its
center as the identifiable company
logo that stands for an overseeing
disciplinary corporate power but pri-
marily provides a mutual, iconic basis
for consumption. S,M,L,XL cites the
greats of twentieth-century design
history but calls only Walt Disney a
“20th-century genius.”42 Two decades
after Disneyland, OMA’s Panoptic
prison takes on the programmatic
distribution of a Disney theme park,
dispersing individual activities along
streams shooting out from a central-
ized, monumental media icon. As
an object of collective inquiry, the
Panopticon creates a far larger view-
ing public between the disparate,
isolated bodies within its cells than
among guards, binding prisoners to a
shared visual narrative like suburban
television viewers each in their own
ranch home but watching the same
programs.
Arnhem’s pure geometric
forms—a circular dome intercut
with linear pathways—echo OMA’s
earlier and later and more explic-
itly commercial architectures like
the Globe Tower description from
Delirious New York and the 1989
Belgian Sea Terminal.43 Both build-
ings, like Arnhem, make linear
incisions into the ground as circula-
tory pathways underneath spherical
or domed structures. Following the
essay “Bigness” also in S,M,L,XL,
OMA juxtaposes geometry to create
a force that draws users away from
global diurnal rotation and toward a
circle’s periphery. Arnhem’s socles
are centrifugal and intended to
undercut the centripetal dome:
whereas Foucault describes Panoptic
space as “essentially centripetal” and
that “functions to the extent that
it isolates a space,” OMA’s prisons
are a centrifugal “Technology of the
Fantastic.”44 S,M,L,XL represents
the formal play between these two
models. Its rounded binding meets
its linear pages, and its internal
arrangements suggest unpredictable
movement between ideas generated
by OMA.
Furthermore, Koolhaas’s
description of the Panopticon as
a kind of coffeehouse is an ironic
recasting of the private disciplinary
 Figure 6. OMA, an aerial plan of the Koepel Prison
highlighting the socles, 1980 (© OMA) (top).
Figure 7. OMA, an interior view from within the
socles’ intersections, 1980 (© OMA) (bottom).

apparatus using one of the first

commercial spatial typologies of
the eighteenth century’s emergent
public sphere. The OMA Panopticon
becomes a public visual commodity
whose historic monumentality and
functions suggest to prisoners forms
of self-governance. OMA’s Koepel
proposals prefaced S,M,L,XL’s redef-
inition of architecture as a digital
consumer good, but the novel, like a
television show, is a visual entertain-
ment that accretes and synthesizes
many mundane details to create a
window onto a world whose primary
function is to, as the manifesto
“Exodus” claims, provide “luxury
and well-being.”45 S,M,L,XL is a novel
that is a Panopticon, but the book’s
purpose is not to control viewers’
interpretations of its visual culture.
Rather, the novel centralizes the
intimate relationship between OMA
and readers to create a shared way of
seeing contemporary space.
One of few built actualizations
of Bentham’s Panoptic prison model,
OMA’s Arnhem prison proposal
rereads the Panopticon neither as a
reformative social salve (Bentham)
nor as the best articulation of
modern Western epistemologies of
power (Foucault),46 instead testify-
ing to the flexibility of “traditional”47
architecture to adapt to contempo-
rary programmatic needs. Koolhaas
reads against Foucault’s ideol-
ogy—which through the Panopticon
engaged in “writing a history of the
present”48 to find in the past contem-
porary political concerns. Instead,
Koolhaas interprets the Panopticon
as a historical “iconographic” form
“liberating the new from having
either to ignore or to express the
idea of incarceration.”49 On the other
hand, S,M,L,XL’s marginal defini-
tions cite Foucault and his explicit
interlocutors Manuel de Landa,
Henri Bergson, Félix Guattari, Gilles
Deleuze, and Umberto Eco twenty-
five times. Foucault’s Panopticon, in

Overby JAE 69 : 2   173

turn, provides the book’s definition
of “power,” championing Foucault’s
conception of contemporary soci-
ety and Deleuze’s theory of the
diagram, which was defined using
Foucault’s Panopticon. Koolhaas’s
Arnhem designs and S,M,L,XL riff
on but deviate from both theoretical
precedents.50 With Koepel and other
early designs, Koolhaas and OMA
cultivated historical sensitivity as an
ethical practice, but one that unlike
Foucault read forward rather than
backward in its engagement of his-
torical time.
The proposed reformulation
of the Arnhem Panoptic Prison
hinged upon literal yet metaphori-
cal spatial elements that referenced
the archaeological recuperation of
history. OMA formally and func-
tionally explicates how extant built
environments may function like
textual media in their possession of
accreted, palimpsestual informa-
tion. Arnhem responds to historical
discursive precedents while opening
up, in this case, the Panoptic model
to multifarious user interactivities
that allude to multimedia and digital
experiences. The designs cut two
intersecting socles into the space
underneath and surrounding the
historic, centralized Panoptic dome
structure (Figures 6 and 7). A socle
is both architectural and archaeo-
logical: it serves as a plinth that
supports ornamental elements like
sculptures, situating these forms as
spatially distinct from or above their
surroundings, while also describing
the lower layer of a two-layer wall
structure unearthed in the process of
digging into the past.51 OMA’s socles
act as street-like corridors that house
new collective facilities for prison-
ers, dissolving the isolation-style
disciplining central to the Panoptic
model. The socles create new space
from the “hyper-monumental,
space-wasting” historic prison,
yet these qualities are empowered,
unlike modern architecture, with a
flexibility of “excess capacity that
enables different and even opposing
interpretations of uses.”52 The socles
render the 1882 prison’s historical
174 A Multimedia Panopticon
form decorative—they literally raise
up the Panoptic guard post as a “his-
torical relic”—and modernize the
building by altering its circulatory
patterns.53
In creating pathways that bind
new and old athletic facilities, shops,
recreational rooms, and more,
Arnhem’s socles invoke many aspects
of OMA’s earlier, foundational prison
manifesto, “Exodus.” The socles
create pathways between new public
spaces for prisoners, executing “the
hedonistic science of designing
collective facilities that accommo-
date individual desires,” while also
functioning as social condensers.54
The architecture of the novel thus
acts according to OMA’s earlier
architectural manifestos and design
proposals. Readers of S,M,L,XL are
supposed to diagram their linear
movements through the book—a
collective, public object—in order
to maximize their individual, private
pleasure within the novel’s pre-
scribed pages.
The Arnhem proposal considers
the Panopticon a historical rather
than active spatial technology, one
replaced by the theme park, shop-
ping mall, and screen. In visual and
textual descriptions across media
platforms, OMA emphasizes the
speed and motion they sought to
inject into the Panopticon. For
Koolhaas, “the Panopticon meets
life-simulation video games.”55 OMA’s
designs anticipated contemporary
spatial technologies by inserting
numerous corridors for circulation
like those found in shopping malls
and video games while employ-
ing reflective glass panes evocative
of empty television and computer
screens or storefronts.
Koolhaas further conflates
shopping spaces and Arnhem by
describing programmatically alter-
ing the extant prison to solve the
problem of unused space: “originally
envisioned as empty, the entire
interior is now as busy as the Milan
Galleria.”56 The Galleria Vittorio
Emmanuele II is one of the oldest
extant shopping malls, designed
and built between 1861 and 1877,
and articulates nineteenth-century
European bourgeois modernity.
The Panopticon is the Galleria’s
literal and symbolic other, the space
in which the comfortable classes
relegated working-class criminals
and guards to cleanse society and
reformulate these individuals’ bodies
in alignment with their moral and
ethical standards. Moreover, the
Galleria bears the same spatial distri-
bution of OMA’s Arnhem proposals,
connecting two intersecting streets
underneath a centralized dome
structure. Since 1877, the shopping
mall has become a more egalitarian
architectural typology as the con-
sumer classes and their desires have
grown. The global impulse to pro-
duce satisfying, joyful experiences
associated with consuming multiple
multimedia altered the subjectiv-
ity and ideology of consumers, who
OMA reminds us are also prisoners.
By conflating the Galleria and the
Panopticon, Koolhaas proposes that
the architectural types of late moder-
nity—the institutional space of the
prison and the commercial space of
the mall—are coextensive and mutu-
ally reinforcing. Both spaces hinge
upon and are defined by the collec-
tive circulation, consumption, and
interpretation of architectural media.
Koolhaas, in his comparison
of Arnhem to the Galleria, was
responding to contextual critiques
expressed by users rather than by the
commissioners. By 1981, the guards
circulated through the cellblocks
while the prisoners’ left their doors
open and moved throughout the cav-
ernous space underneath the dome.
The two socle-streets facilitate the
movement disabled by the Panoptic
model to create a network that
allowed for the mediation between
different experiential states of its
users. OMA increases flows among
guards and prisoners to encourage
prisoners to alternate between the
functional states Koolhaas proposed
for the prisoners. These varied
potential experiences parallel those
proffered by consumer cultures
more than by the programmatic
determination of historic prisons.
At Arnhem, OMA revises history
to suggest that architecture could
become a Corbusian machine able
to work through an issue to create
change. The essay and the novel
employ the spatial code of scale to
solve a problem rather than to merely
describe and reference the worlds
it enclosed.57 Its proposals allow
readers to imagine—to fictionally
inhabit—the prison in as many ways
as S,M,L,XL may be read.
Conceiving of interventions
on the scalar level allowed OMA to
remove itself from the manic evo-
lution of prison form and to focus
on circulation through mass. This
emphasis reveals OMA’s prioritiza-
tion of programmatic flexibility as
a means of ensuring its designs’
sustainability. What has been char-
acterized as the “event architecture”
of OMA and Koolhaas, especially as
articulated in their novel, hinged
upon exactly this sort of program-
matic bent, which was harnessed as
“a cinematic device that anticipated
multiple events happening in time as
well as in space … deliberately cho-
reographed by juxtaposing overtly
disparate events and heterogeneous
user groups … [and presented as]
an opportunity for self-directed
action.”58
While Koolhaas and second-
ary literature concerning him both
employ cinematic analogies, the
architect’s emphasis on program-
matic variability stems from the
rise of coding language in the late
twentieth century. It is through the
“freedom to connect to technical
images” rather than slavish adher-
ence to or preoccupation with
origins or sources that S,M,L,XL
and “Revision” engage architectural
imagery. Both the book and the
essay forge an open technical image
field of architectural imagery that is
digitally connective, programmatic,
and scalar rather than histori-
cally overdetermined.59 But neither
eschew architectural tradition
entirely. Instead, they use prose to
stress how descriptions in books like
Foucault’s and Bentham’s diverge
from the practical everyday concerns
Overby
of users inhabiting discursive spaces.
“Revision” proposes that each pris-
oner and guard authors their own
experiential text concerning Koepel
and that these collective texts super-
sede the authority of established
scholarly voices.
The Panopticon is a largely ide-
ational architecture because it was
not, as intended, commonly adopted
and because it is primarily associated
with two treatises on prison politics,
Foucault’s Discipline and Punish and
Bentham’s Panopticon Writings. As
textual documents, the ideas of the
Panopticon anticipated the digital
translation of media as diverse as
architecture, film, photography,
drawings, and text because these two
foundational articulations were con-
ceptually translated between many
different media in order to represent
and argue how the Panopticon sug-
gests modern conceptions of power
and control. “Revision” is the third
treatise in this genealogy, and it takes
on the characteristics of its prede-
cessors, describing the ideological
debates that led to its actualization
and recounting how a new Panoptic
formal intervention—one of disem-
powerment and disenabling—would
bring about a paradigm shift.
Yet Koolhaas’s text deviates
from its predecessors by foreground-
ing constitutive, productive relations
that would yield happiness among
the incarcerated and their guards. He
highlights a form of power associated
with local, immediate, and actual
collectives of individuals rather than
one dominated by an ever-mediated,
transcendental command. Bentham
thinks that his Panopticon is the
former when it is in fact the latter,
and Foucault becomes so enamored
with the Panopticon’s articulation
of his history-philosophy that he
cannot see beyond negative thought.
S,M,L,XL uses the same transcen-
dental, mediating power of old
media, the text, to subvert the power
relations of Koolhaas’s predecessors.
“Revision” ironically undermines
the elitism of architectural and more
specifically Panoptic discourse with
approachable language accompanied
JAE 69 : 2
by extensive narrative—not purely
illustrative—imagistic representa-
tions of OMA’s propoals. At the same
time as S,M,L,XL literally takes its
definition of power from Discipline
and Punish, the design for the Arnhem
prison suggests a counter or redefini-
tion of the term to empower users.
Koolhaas and his team destabilized
the hypostasis, or visibility, of top-
down, hierarchical social control
articulated by the Panoptic guard
tower as well as the unverifiable
position of the guards. OMA places
guards and prisoners on the same
horizontal plane and made both pop-
ulations visible to one another just as
their novel gives its readers a similar
degree of interpretive agency.
“A Fragment on Ontology,”
Bentham’s clearest and earliest state-
ment on the fictions undergirding
our realities, describes different
states of being, existence, or becom-
ing that individuals may experience.60
Included in the Panopticon volume,
it implies the spatial mechanism’s
attempt not only to produce power
and surveillance but also to con-
trol or sway human emotions and
incorporeal perceptions of space
and time. The Panopticon sought
to exert spatial power in order to
induce spiritual cleansing. Foucault
extended Bentham’s theory by sub-
stituting tropic, incorporeal concepts
of power and discipline for the more
numerous ontologies posited by his
predecessor. Disciplinary society,
whose fullest articulation Foucault
sources in the Panopticon, selects
and distributes individual objects
and bodies into their own discrete
spatial units.61 In such a society—
which Foucault argues characterized
Western modernity from the late
eighteenth century into his pres-
ent day—sizable—monumentally
scalar—governmental institutions
functioned as “observatories of
human multiplicity” that produced
individuals.62 Bentham’s variegated
states of existence were subsumed
under and superseded by predeter-
mined disciplinary functions; or,
more closely following Foucault,
Bentham’s experiential diversity
  175

testifies to the degree to which
discipline may act singularly to pro-
duce copies of itself. Thus, neither
Foucault nor Bentham’s Panopticons
allow for a myriad of experiences
as both made a disciplined, iso-
lated spectacle of each prisoner
rather than eliciting their engaged
responses. The gigantic domed
structure’s centralized guard post
serves a depersonalizing function,
surveilling each prisoner in their
identical cells and offering each the
same form of redemption.
Conclusion
Disciplinary society’s totalized
collective swaying of bodies and
constitutions continues to char-
acterize 1995’s computational era
of coding as well as late modern
consumer culture as typified at
Disneyland. Technological optimists
have argued that code—employed
by OMA to design its buildings and
their 1995 novel—creates a collective
democratic populace. A myriad of
individuals constitutes this politi-
cal group and places their fate in
the hands of a figurehead in order
to construct a shared will and a
common good.63 The multiplicity
of voices that constitute OMA are
a group of individuals placing their
wills in the hands of Rem Koolhaas.
His acerbic design statements and
essays articulate a supposedly shared
consciousness. Yet Koolhaas does not
truly relay “the totality of the diverse
opinions” that form the meshwork of
OMA, the very codes used to refine
its legally determined programmatic
forms. Instead, Koolhaas partially
acknowledges these voices to create a
false illusion by which the logic of the
marketplace—the marketability of
Rem as architect-genius-creator—
comes to dominate, supersede, and
eventually obliterate the voices that
undergirded his ascent to power.64
The multifaceted code that gives
rise to each OMA building, and to
S,M,L,XL, represents the decimation
of collective sovereignty in the face
of making architecture a marketable,
packageable commodity.
Yet this cynical reading is a
176 A Multimedia Panopticon
phantasmagoria belying the joys
that OMA finds in late modernity’s
characteristic imprisonment, in
the Panopticon of Disneyland.
Within “Revision” and throughout
S,M,L,XL, Koolhaas and OMA invoke
Bentham’s argument that fiction
undergirds reality. They elaborate “a
method of systematic idealization,” or
“a systematic overestimation of what
exists, a bombardment of specula-
tion that invests even the most
mediocre aspects with retroactive
conceptual and ideological charge,”
an ethics arguing that “to each bas-
tard, [there is] a genealogical tree.”65
Telling a history, rendering the past
melodramatic fodder for the pres-
ent, becomes part of a contemporary
design ethics, but Koolhaas and
OMA hyperbolize history—monu-
mentalize it by removing it from
everyday use—in order to render it
a programmatic toolkit rather than
a precedent generator. Ironically,
history, which is what S,M,L,XL
represents by recounting OMA’s
accomplishments, comes to function
much like a computer. The novel is
a machine of fantasy that mediates
between states and media rather than
functions as an object like a history
book or the creator of such objects
like a historian.66
Author Biography
Whitten Overby is a PhD candidate
in Cornell University’s Department
of Architecture. His dissertation,
entitled “The Seekers,” concerns the
architecture and urbanism of five
American Christian mediascapes.
Notes
1 Rem Koolhaas and Elia Zenghelis, “Exodus, or
the Voluntary Prisoner s of Architecture,” Casabella
378 (1973): 42–45. Citations in this article will be
taken from OMA, Rem Koolhaas, and Bruce Mau,
S,M,L,XL (New York: Monacelli, 1995) (hereafter
cited as S,M,L,XL).
2 Roberto Gargiani, Rem Koolhaas/OMA (New York:
Routledge, 2008), 6. AMO is the research division
of OMA, established in 1998.
3 Koolhaas and Zenghelis, “Exodus” (note 1), 7.
4 Ibid., 5.
5 See Rem Koolhaas, Delirious New York: A Retroactive
Manifesto (1978; New York: Monacelli, 1994),
235–82.
6 Rem Koolhaas, AMO, Harvard Graduate School,
and Irma Bloom, Wall, volume 2 in Elements
(Venice: Marsilio, 2014), 14. In their 2014 venture,
OMA’s research division characterized defensive
walls as the primal kind of wall.
7 See Max Page, The Creative Destruction of
Manhattan, 1900–1940 (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 2000). Page applies Joseph
Schumpter’s term to Koolhaas’s Manhattan to
describe how the island’s architecture constantly
destroyed and rebuilt itself to reflect mutating
economic structures. See Schumpter, Capitalism,
Socialism, and Democracy (1942; London: Routledge,
1994), 82–83.
8 Beatriz Preciado, Pornotopia: An Essay on Playboy’s
Architecture and Biopolitics (Brooklyn: Zone Books,
2014), 18.
9 See Jeremy Bentham, The Panopticon Papers, ed.
Miran Božovič (New York: Verso, 1995); and
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of
the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage
Books, 1995).
10 See Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population:
Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977–1978, trans.
Graham Burchell (London: St. Martin’s, 2009),
44–49. Foucault softens and qualifies his subsum-
ing statements about discipline from his 1975
history manifesto.
11 Koolhaas and Zenghelis, “Exodus” (note 1), 13.
12 Rem Koolhaas, “Project for the Renovation of
a Panoptic Prison,” Artforum (September 1981):
41–43.
13 Sandra L. Resodihardjo, “Analyzing the
Supermax Prisons in the Netherlands: The Dutch
Supermax,” in The Globalization of Supermax Prisons,
ed. Jeffrey Ian Ross (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers
University Press, 2013), 67–79. Resodihardjo
details the history of Dutch prisons from before
OMA’s proposals through the present day.
14 Koolhaas and Zenghelis, “Exodus” (note 1), 13.
15 Koolhaas, Delirious New York (note 5), 56. Koolhaas
uses this term to describe Coney Island.
16 Alexander Galloway, The Interface Effect (New York:
Polity, 2012), 22–23.
17 See Richard Wittman, Architecture, Print Culture,
and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century France
(London: Routledge, 2007).
18 See Martin Bressani, Architecture and the Historical
Imagination: Eugene-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc, 1814–
1879 (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2014).
19 See Beatriz Colomina, Privacy and Publicity:
Modern Architecture as Mass Media (Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 1994), 77–140; see also Colomina,
Manifesto Architecture: The Ghost of Mies (Berlin:
Sternberg, 2014). Further, see Catherine de Smet,
Le Corbusier, Architect of Books (Baden: Lars Müller,
2005).
20 See Sergei Eisenstein, Film Form, ed. and trans.
Jay Leyda (London: Harcourt, 1949), 28–83.
Eisenstein defines montage, among other things,
as the structural basis of cinematography.
21 Friedrich Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter,
trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael
Wutz (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press,
1999), 1–2. Kittler discusses how the digital eradi-
cates the concept of medium because it enables
seamless conversion between mediums.
22 “Space-time,” in S,M,L,XL, 1162. Cf. Paul Virilio,
“The Overexposed City,” in Zone 1/2: The City,
ed. J. Crary, S. Kwinter, and M. Ferer (New York:
Urzone, 1987).
23 “Memory,” in S,M,L,XL (note 1), 926.
24 “Code,” in S,M,L,XL (note 1), 182.
25 Koolhaas, Delirious New York (note 5), 134.
26 Quoted in Gargiani, Rem Koolhaas (note 2), 68.
27 See Rem Koolhaas, Chuihua Judy Chung, and
Jeffrey Inaba, eds., Harvard Design School Guide to
Shopping (Köln: Taschen, 2001 and Harvard Design
School).
28 Anna Klingmann, Brandscapes: Architecture in the
Experience Economy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
2010), 131–34.
29 Casey Reas and Ben Fry, Processing: A Programming
Handbook for Visual Designers and Artists (Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 2007), 1.
30 OMA, “Introduction,” in S,M,L,XL (note 1), xix.
31 Geoff Cox and Alex McLean, Speaking Code: Coding
as Aesthetic and Political Expression (Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 2013), 8 and 14.
32 See Colomina, Privacy (note 19), 80, 93, and 100.
33 See Koolhaas, Delirious New York (note 5), 235–82
for a detailed discussion of how Le Corbusier
employed the PCM.
34 For an extended discussion of this analogy,
see Neil Levine, “The Book and the Building:
Hugo’s Theory of Architecture and Labrouste’s
Bibliothèque Ste-Genviève,” in The Beaux-Arts and
Nineteenth-Century France, ed. Robin Middleton
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1982), 138–73.
35 OMA, “Introduction” (note 30), xix.
36 See Foucault, Discipline (note 9), 200–202, for a
more extensive description of the Panopticon.
Also see Robin Evans, The Fabrication of Virtue:
English Prison Architecture, 1750–1840 (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1982), 195–235. Evans
presents a rigorous architectural history of the
Panopticon’s historical genealogy from before its
articulation through the 1980s.
37 Lisa Gitelman, Paper Knowledge: Toward a
Media History of Documents (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2014). Gitelman argues that
the paper textual document is a type of medium
with a particular modern history. See also Lorna
Rhodes, Total Confinement: Madness and Reason in
the Maximum Security Prison (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 2004). Rhodes implicitly
argues that prisons are a multimedia complex
whose functioning hinges upon the circulation
and dissemination of media as various as comput-
ers, chairs, trays, trade journals, and televisual
and filmic imagery between prisoners and prison
workers.
38 Koolhaas, “Revision,” in S,M,L,XL (note 1), 241.
39 Misha Kavka, Reality Television, Affect and Intimacy:
Reality Matters (London: Palgrave Macmillan,
2008), 5–7 and also the preface and the first chap-
ter. See also Lauren Berlant, The Female Complaint:
The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American
Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2008), especially the preface and introduction.
These two texts talk about the intimacy generated
by consumer goods and entertainment. Further,
see Reinhold Martin, The Organizational Complex:
Architecture, Media, and Corporate Space (Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 2003), 6–7. Seagram’s translucent
windows, like those OMA proposed inserting
underneath the Panopticon, were “like network
Overby
television … a medium to be watched in passing
rather than looked at like an artwork … it chan-
nels flows, patterns of patterns,” a visual language
that creates a “logic of organization.”
40 Koolhaas and Zenghelis, “Exodus” (note 1), 17.
41 Karal Ann Marling, Design Disney’s Theme Parks: The
Architecture of Reassurance (Paris: Flammarion, 1998),
79–85. Marling argues there is always an archi-
tectural icon visually cohering this public-private
consumptive sphere to provide the reassurance
necessary to facilitate spending: at Disneyland,
this is Sleeping Beauty’s Castle, at Koepel the
Panopticon, and for OMA the book form of
S,M,L,XL.
42 Rem Koolhaas, “Field Trip,” in S,M,L,XL (note 1),
232.
43 See Koolhaas, Delirious New York (note 5),
71–76 for a discussion of the Globe Tower, and
Koolhaas, “Working Babel,” in S,M,L,XL (note 1),
579–601 for a discussion of the Sea Terminal.
44 Koolhaas, “Revision” (note 38), 242. See Foucault,
Security (note 10), 44–45, where he claims “disci-
pline is essentially centripetal.”
45 Koolhaas and Zenghelis, “Exodus” (note 1), 9.
46 Foucault, Security (note 10), 30–31.
47 Koolhaas, “Revision” (note 38), 239.
48 Foucault, Security (note 10), 31.
49 Koolhaas, “Revision” (note 38), 247.
50 “Power,” in S,M,L,XL (note 1), 1052. See also Gilles
Deleuze, Foucault, trans. Sean Hand (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 33–44.
51 Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge,
trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Vintage,
2010). Likely not unintentional was OMA’s use
of archaeology as a theoretical and formal trope:
Foucault’s early historical-philosophical method
was typified as an archaeology.
52 Koolhaas, “Revision” (note 38), 239 and 240.
53 Ibid., 242.
54 Koolhaas and Zenghelis, “Exodus” (note 1), 7
and 13. The term “social condenser” is, notably,
taken from early twentieth-century Russian
Constructivist architecture.
55 Preciado, Pornotopia (note 8), 209.
56 Koolhaas, “Revision” (note 38), 237.
57 Galloway, Interface Effect (note 16), 22. “Revision”
and S,M,L,XL more generally follow the category
of calculus as compared with that of language
elaborated by Galloway as paradigmatic of
computers.
58 Klingmann, Brandscapes (note 28), 113.
59 Galloway, Interface Effect (note 16), 9.
60 Bentham, Panopticon Papers (note 9), 117–58.
61 Foucault, Discipline (note 9), 170.
62 Ibid., 171.
63 Cox and McLean, Speaking Code (note 31), 82–97.
See Reas and Fry, Processing (note 29), whose
optimism for the creative potential of processing
overlooks its more insidious potentials.
64 Cox and McLean, Speaking Code (note 31), 93–95.
65 Rem Koolhaas, “The Terrifying Beauty of the
Twentieth Century,” in S,M,L,XL (note 1), 208.
66 Galloway, Interface Effect (note 16), 22.
JAE 69 : 2   177