Tennessee revisits its Vernacular Architecture series with a powerhouse Victorian Studies book

Anna Vemer Andrzejewski is an assistant professor of art history at University of Wisconsin at Madison and she had written an unusual and innovative book about how surveillance played a key role in the building of prisons in 19th century America, and how this dynamic spilled over into the construction of post offices, factories, offices, and even houses. Building Power: Architecture and Surveillance in Victorian America shows how surveillance influenced a diverse array of the built environment in this country from roughly 1865 to 1918. She goes so far to say that surveillance not only motivated a range of common buildings but also was and is a defining practice of modernism.

French philosopher Michel Foucault is the author of Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison, and the classic Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977, and his ideas are what informs Andrzejewski’s arguments. Foucault wrote extensively about the idea of ever-present gaze and control, and the kind of insidious power that “reaches into the very grain of individuals, touches their bodies and inserts itself into their actions and attitudes, their discourses, learning processes and everyday lives.” The argument is complex and way too multilayered to paraphrase here, to say nothing of the fact that it’s been translated from the French, but Foucault also goes back to English political philosopher Jeremy Bentham’s central idea of the Panopticon, that is, a building, as a prison, hospital, library, or the like, so arranged that all parts of the interior are visible from a single point.

Andrzejewski’s title and the very concept of Building Power is an interesting play on words, a reference to Foucault’s panoptic theory. Even so, she builds and expands on Foucault’s creative arguments and illustrates how diverse American spaces were built with close scrutiny in mind in Victorian America, and how this complicated landscape influenced all aspects of everyday life and the principles of modernism. The book is illustrated with 80 photographs, and, according to architectural historian Ken Breisch from the University of Southern California, Andrzejewski’s “comparative method is original and yields new insight into the widespread role of surveillance in American life.”