There is an abundance of cases – architectural and philosophical, and especially post-modern; by academics, practitioners, and critics – in which a relation between architecture and philosophy is at work, with one engaging the other directly, or simply in a marginal or implicit manner. Philosophy has avidly been sought by architecture to discover, question, understand, and express the deeper dimensions of its works, the world upon which they intervene, and the discipline itself. Architecture, in turn, has grown from a footnote, example, or metaphor in some greater discussion, into a topic in its own right within philosophy. Despite the mutually influential relation between the two, one scarcely finds reflections about the relation itself and its implications. Why does architecture resort to philosophy? Why does philosophy refer to architecture? How? What comes about? What does this say about architecture? What can it say about philosophy? What are the recurring problems, what are the appealing promises, what are the unexplored potentials? The following presentation poses these questions to a case-study of the relation, one in which an architect efficiently resorts to a philosopher’s work in order to produce an architectural design. The philosopher is Michel Foucault, popularly invoked in a variety of discussions within architectural theory and practice – though he himself never dedicated a single piece of literature exclusively nor even primarily to architecture. Foucault’s conception of architecture and his contribution to it appear playfully suggested in Of Other Spaces (1967) and explicitly discussed in Space, Knowledge, and Power (1982), but best exemplified by Discipline and Punish (1975). In the chapter Panopticism, he speaks of architecture as a potential institutional mechanism of power, used and defined not by the architect but by others. As principal metaphor and study object of this notion, he chose the panopticon. The architect is Rem Koolhaas, not only amongst the most illustrious practitioners of today – know to the general public for projects such as the Kunstal (Rotterdam, 1993), the Seattle Central Library (Seattle, 2004), the CCTV Headquarters (Beijing, 2012), and the Museo di Fondazione Prada (Milan, 2015) – but also renowned for his writings about architecture and contemporary culture, which in fact first brought him fame – particularly Delirious New York (1978) and S,M,L,XL (1995). Early in Koolhaas’ career, in 1979, his architectural office OMA was commissioned to assess the possibility of transforming and thus extending the lifetime of the Koepelgevangenis, a panoptical prison in Arnhem. The proposal and its explicative text especially – Revision (1981), later published in S,M,L,XL – subtly reveal that the interpretation of the panopticon upon which OMA worked and reacted to in their design was that described in Discipline and Punish by Foucault – the philosopher whom Koolhaas had curiously met just a few years before. The
