Andreas Lechner

REVISION - Study for the Renovation of a Panoptical Prison (Arnhem, Netherlands 1979-81)

In S,M,L,XL the ‘Study for the Renovation of a Panopticon Prison’ is a ‘medium’ sized project that starts
with two famous film stills from the 1929 silent surrealist short film ‘Un Chien Andalou’ by Luis Buñuel
and Salvador Dali introducing the project in a nutshell – a cut through the eye. The following architecture
narrative will not rely on a similar ‘shocking’ gesture but will rather stress the inherent contradictions
implied in ‚revisioning‘ a panopticon prison – for once because it had already given up its foundational
optical regime and also because by definition of the perimeter of prison walls there is always an already
identified and demarcated difference to the world ‘outside’ these walls that renders any more ostensibly
architectural contribution to this ‘island’ at least ideologically doubtful.

Fig. 1.: Pages 232 to 239 from S, M, L, XL

Designed by engineer-architect J.F. Metzelaer in 1882 and opened in 1886 the Arnhem Panopticon Prison is
a built diagram that confidently translated an official consensus – solitary confinement with an observation
tower in the centre – into the built form of a cylindric prison with a diameter of 56 metres, four floor layers
of 50 cells each and a dome (koepel) on top that measures 46m at its highest point. Koolhaas laconically
sums up the endless literature on panopticism that will be produced in the following decades without even
mentioning Focault: ‚The Arnhem Koepel Prison was build according to the so-called Panopticon Principle,
invented in 1787 by the philosopher Jeremy Bentham. It is a universal principle of organization for
situations in which a small group of supervisors monitors a much larger group of supervised: factory
workers, hospital patients, lunatics, prisoners. The Arnhem Koepel represents the principle in its purest
form: a single, all-seeing »eye« is placed dead center in a circle of the observed. The aim of the Panopticon
Principle was efficient production - of goods in the factory, health in the hospital, or reformed human beings
in the prison.’1 What the study brief then asked for was the possibility of adapting the koepel prison to
‘present day insights’ [that] had already spontaneously changed - in fact, drastically reversed - the
performance of the building [...] the former centre of power - the „eye“ of the panopticon - had been
converted into a canteen for the guards: the former observers are now themselves observed by the prisoners,
who are no longer kept locked in their cells at all times, but could circulate freely on the rings and have
access to the ground floor. Originally envisioned as empty, the entire interior is now often as busy as the
Milan Galleria.’2

The brief then called for the design of new facilities for work, visits, entertainment, sport, schooling and
shopping, adding an almost public quality to the basic decision to keep the out-dated and uniquely
theoretical koepel building for ‘its undeniable architectural quality, the convenience that it existed,
reinforced by the fact that the prison was surprisingly popular with its inmates, who like the spaciousness of
its vast interior.‘3

A Prospective Archaeology
We understand panopticism as the exemplification of an instrumental transparency that –under various
scientific authorities like medicine, psychology, and criminology and the governmental power of the
sovereign nation-state – was aimed at producing certainties. The panopticon prison is in that respect the
ultimate realization of a modern disciplinary institution. But translated as directly as possible into the built
form of Arnhem’s prison this ideal concept produced a rather irrational side-effect – something worth
preserving: ‚Extravagant, useless, theoretical, exaggerated, monumental: a »waste«, but also a space that
gives pleasure and that, through its essential excess, enables the decentralized surveillance culture that is
now its intangible asset. The renovation should then: 1. dismantle the panopticon‘s former center; 2. accept,
and possibly extend, the surveillance culture that has spontaneously developed; 3. add facilities in a way that
escapes the deterministic configuration of the existing architecture; 4. create spaces for collective use that
end the limitations of solitary confinement; 5. create additional margins for future programs; and 6. identify
and exploit the prison‘s (unforeseen) potentials.‘4

Fig. 2.: Pages 242 to 253 from S, M, L, XL

Perhaps we can regard this programme as a clearly postmodern roster of indeterminacies. Not only because
‚indeterminacy‘ – abhorred by both by capitalism and its anal bureaucracies – is going to be made a poetic
force here. But because a complex narrative – modernism plus its contradictions – is already being
thoroughly examined as the modern condition per se – i.e. the urban condition. And it is the reality to which
this literary form shall be connected to, that yet has to be invented: ‘A »modern« prison architecture would
consist of a prospective archaeology, constantly projecting new layers of »civilization« on old systems of
supervision. The sum of modifications would reflect the never-ending evolution of systems of discipline.’5
Transforming the prison by both reading it as and turning it into an urban system clearly counters the
quintessentially modern desire for controlling a foreseeable tomorrow that the social hygiene movements,
the infiltrations of scientific management and taylorism in home and work places and the many urban
proposals and architectural polemics of the Modern Movement were so anxious about. Like in Delirious
New York, Koolhaas reminds us here again: ‘Changes in regime and ideology are more powerful than the
most radical architecture – a conclusion both alarming and reassuring for the architect.’6

The mode of power and control in late capitalism has changed and OMA’s prison project perhaps marks that
beginning of the corporate capitalist governance superseding the former governmental power of the
sovereign nation-state. Koolhaas’ ‘sum of modifications’ might very well take a glimpse into what Gilles
Deleuze will ten years later describe in a footnote to the work of Michel Foucault: ‘We are in a generalized
crisis in relation to all the environments of enclosure – prison, hospital, factory, school, family… The
administrations in charge never cease announcing supposedly necessary reforms: to reform schools, to
reform industries, hospitals, the armed forces, prisons. But everyone knows that these institutions are
finished, whatever the length of their expiration periods. It‘s only a matter of administering their last rites
and of keeping people employed until the installation of the new forces knocking at the door. These are the
societies of control, which are in the process of replacing disciplinary societies.’7

The Malling of the Koepel Prison

The design follows a clear logic of linear circulation and addition, giving ‚the architecture of revision‘8 the
character of a montage maintaining evidences of past ideologies. The programme can be roughly divided
into three parts. The largest structure is now formed as an underground socle with outdoor activities on its
top. This socle is organized along two streets that intersect right in the centre and proverbially cut through
the Panopticon ‚eye‘. ‚All new facilities are „built“ along these streets as autonomous elements - some
inside, but most outside. The same relative freedom that now exists in the dome is extended across the two
streets. In this way, essential contrasts that define life outside - such as indoors / outdoors, home / work,
house / street - are re-established inside the prison…The existing decentralized surveillance culture in the
koepel is extended by the two streets that form… South Street leads to the visitors centre; its facade is
exposed by a sloping garden. From a waiting room, prisoners see visitors arriving from the main gate. North
Street leads to a patio with kitchen, medical departments, and a separate pavilion for difficult prisoners.
West Street leads to the most urban conditions: four workshops, a sports centre, and a hall for film, drama,
religion. Each workshop has a roof garden and a patio with a »park«. The final section of the street is sunken
further; filled with water, it becomes a swimming pool. A running track surrounds the socle… All of the
facilities required for the Koepel to function as »home« – living quarters, dining rooms, bathrooms – are
concentrated in two external satellites attached to the ring. The Koepel‘s interior is left intact while the
extensions communicate the changes to the outside world… A third Koepel satellite is planned at the site of
the present entrance building…creating a sector of an implied second ring… in this case offices.’9
Fig. 3.: Redrawn axonometric view from 3D CAD drawing by Melanie Pils

A Truely Postmodern Prison?

In the slightly abbreviated and altered project description on OMA’s website the last paragraphs read: ‚What
was most rewarding about the project was the extent to which programmatic, metaphoric and formal
intentions could be made to coincide…the metaphor of a new beginning - culture as a system of paradigms
continuously revised, the crossing out of the centre, all worked both on the most utilitarian and the most
conceptual level, and established a bonding between them. What was surprising, finally, was the almost
eager way in which an „architectural“ solution was embraced by the authorities as resolving the dilemma of
other disciplines. The discredited claim for architecture as being able to directly intervene in the formation
of culture - and to achieve through its crystallisation, the resolution of hopelessly contradictory demands -
freedom and discipline - was for once vindicated on the edge of dystopia.‘10

After considerable renovations from 1994 to 2005 the shut down of the ‚Koepel Prison’ is announced for
2015. It seems feasible that building OMA’s discontinued project from the early Eighties had been a more
successful move. Not only did the project meticulously dissect the mechanisms that tie ideology and from
together. It would have recorded this process as it’s actual ‘modernization’ and thereby approximate it to the
conditions of the ‘outside’ world. Prison, Museum and/or Shopping Mall – long before sustainability has
become the new opium the project could have had demonstrated that the principle of social order has long
moved from Panopticism to seduction.11
1
Rem Koolhaas, ‘Revision – Study for the renovation of a Panopticon Prison’, in: OMA; Rem Koolhaas,
and Bruce Mau, S, M, L, XL, 2nd edn. (New York: Monacelli Press, 1998), 235-253.
2
op. cit.,
3
op. cit.,
4
op. cit.,
5
op. cit.
6
op. cit.
7
Gilles Deleuze, ‘Postscript on the Societies of Control’, October 59 (1992), 3-7.
8
see Joost Meuwissen, ‘Delirious Rotterdam’, Plan onafhankelijk maandblad voor ontwerp en omgeving 13
(2/1982), 8-9, also online www.joostmeuwissen.nl/blog/arnhem (accessed 01.08.2014).
9
Koolhaas, op. cit.
10
www.oma.eu/projects/1980/koepel-panopticon-prison/ (accessed 08.05.2014).
11
See Zygmunt Bauman: ‘On postmodern uses of sex’, in: Mike Featherstone (ed.), Love and Eroticism
(London: Sage, 1999) 19-33.