Architectural historians have long thought about the relationship between space and power, even before Michel Foucault made the concept popular within humanities scholarship. The study of perpetrators who through the infrastructure of oppression such as prisons and asylums projected the domination of their world is familiar territory. Prisons like John Haviland’s Eastern State Penitentiary and H. H. Richardson’s Alleghany County Jail are known points of reference in architectural history, just as the participation of British and French architects in the construction of environments of enslavement in the Caribbean and the Americas is increasingly a subject of scholarly concern. In this regard, the violent nature of human society forms crucial context for analyzing the spatial expression of imperialism, slavery, and colonialism as well as the spatial hierarchies of class, race, and gender. The history of physical violence against people and places clarifies and contextualizes the art historical subject.
But is the...
University of California Press