The term ‘Panopticon’ has been used more or less loosely, since Jeremy Bentham first
coined the word, to refer to any prison – or indeed any other kind of institutional
building – which has a centralised plan and some sort of observation post at the
middle.2 But if we take the word to apply more narrowly to cylindrical prisons along
the lines that Bentham himself imagined, then very few have ever been built. There
were three panopticons erected in Holland in the late nineteenth century, all of which
survive. Figure 1 shows the Koepelgevangenis [cupola prison] at Arnhem, designed
by J F Metzelaar.3
Perhaps the best-known true panopticons ever constructed were at
the Stateville Penitentiary near Joliet in Illinois (Figure 2), where there were five
rotundas within the one prison, built between 1916 and 1924. The architect was W.
Carbys Zimmerman. All but one have since been demolished. Stateville was the
model in turn for a prison on the Isle of Pines in Cuba, opened in 1931. And that is
about it.4 Meanwhile hundreds of prisons were built across the world throughout the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth, on the general layout of Pentonville,whose plan has a series of straight cellblocks radiating from a central hall.
Figure 1: Koepelgevangenis [cupola prison] at Arnhem, the Netherlands, 1886, architect J.F. Metzelaar. Photo from www.archivolt-bna.nl/
Figure 2: Stateville Penitentiary, near Joliet, Illinois, 1916-24, architect W. Carbys Zimmerman.
From a 1930s postcard reproduced
All this is odd, since architectural historians and social scientists, most
prominent among them Michel Foucault, have attributed enormous influence to
Bentham’s Panopticon.
They have seen it as the original model for a new kind of
supervisory power relation across a whole range of nineteenth century types of
institution: not just prisons, but schools, hospitals, barracks and factories.
In Foucault’s own words:
In the 1830s, the Panopticon became the architectural programme of
most prison projects.
The fact that it should have given rise, even in our own time, to so many
variations, projected or realized, is evidence of the imaginative intensity
that it has possessed for almost two hundred years [...] Whenever one is
dealing with a multiplicity of individuals on whom a task or a particular form of behaviour must be imposed, the panoptic scheme may be used.
Figure 4: Sketch for the frontispiece of Bentham’s planned book Panopticon: or Inspection house.
Figure 5: 1787 design for the Panopticon. Plate 1 in J. Bentham, Management of the Poor, Dublin
1796
Figure 6: 1791 design for the Panopticon by Jeremy Bentham, Samuel Bentham and the architect
Willey Reveley. Plate II in ‘Postscript – Part II’ Works of Jeremy Bentham.
Figure 7: Axonometric (bird’s eye) view of the 1791 Panopticon to show the six floors of cells, the roof-light and oculus, the ‘dead part’ and the corridor to the airing yards. Author’s drawing.
Figure 8: Axonometric view of the 1791 Panopticon with the roof
Figure 9: Axonometric view of the 1791 Panopticon with the roof, the cell floors and the ‘dead
part’ removed, to show the inspector’s lodge, the three annular galleries, and the central raked
seating for divine service. Author’s drawing.
Figure 11: Cross-section of the 1791 Panopticon by Willey Reveley (with some differences from
the published design of Figure 6). In addition to the features visible in Figure 10, this drawing
shows the stairs and bridges crossing the ‘annular well’, the cast iron columns supporting the
galleries and roof, the water tank in the attic, and the chaplain in his pulpit.
Figure 12: Plan of a Panopticon penitentiary with three rotundas, showing the access roads,
airing yards and perimeter wall. Plate III in ‘Postscript – Part II’, Works of Jeremy Bentham.
Figure 13: Plan of one floor of the 1791 Panopticon showing the isovist or extent of view of the
cells available to a warder from a given position on an annular gallery. Author’s drawing.
Figure 14: Interior of a rotunda at Stateville Penitentiary, Joliet, Illinois. Photo from Illinois
Department of Corrections.
Figure 15: The old south hall at Auburn Prison, Auburn, New York
Figure 16: Isometrical perspective of Pentonville Prison, 1840-42, engineer Joshua Jebb. Report
of the Surveyor-General of Prisons, London 1844
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