Dispositif
Dispositif is a term used by the French intellectual Michel Foucault, generally to refer to the various institutional, physical, and administrative mechanisms and knowledge structures which enhance and maintain the exercise of power within the social body. Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon is one of the strongest architectural representations of such a mechanism, so much so that it transcends the human ideals it was based upon. The building can no more be perceived as a neutral object of function, rather it is an alien body of control imposed by us on ourselves. In Foucault’s words the Panopticon is “mechanism of power reduced to its ideal form”. The failure of the Biosphere II1 can also be associated to such phenomenon. In an attempt to create an idealized environment of self sustained equilibrium and growth the system ate into the minds of the occupants as an oppressive cage of isolation from the rest of the world. This created social unrest and a deterioration of physical and mental well being, symptoms one would commonly associate to the term “Sick building syndrome”2. However, What such a term lacks in its most common usage is the perspective to look beyond the scientific and mechanical implications of such building effects and delve deeper into the social outlooks that bred such environments.