Monika Jovanovi1

MORPHOLOGY AND IDEOLOGICAL PATTERNS

TYPOLOGICAL PATTERNS OF HOUSING AND PUBLIC STRUCTURES
DERIVING FROM IDEOLOGY

Abstract | In this paper my focus will be on the relation between biopolitics and architecture as
well as on the role of architecture in forming national, racial, class, political, behavioural, moral,
and family identities and codes.
Architecture as an interdisciplinary political social science and practice is determined by
relations and synthesis between humanities, technical sciences, designing, building and
planning. By developing and acquiring complexity of its own language within historical and
geographical societies in which it emerges, architecture is not just an indicator of a certain
societys situation, but one of the primary constituents of its relations and regulations
(Pojmovnik teorije umetnosti, uvakovi, 2011.). Therefore, based on the architectural language
of a historical moment, regarding existing or non-existing typological patterns by which it is
made, it is possible to do an analysis of the overall structure of society of that moment.
Leaning on the theoretical platform of Michel Foucault (1978.), Hannah Arendt (1958.) and
Tamara orevi (2010.) I will analyse the typological patterns of the middle class family
housing in western Europe throughout the 20th century, towards emerging typological patterns
of today with the aim of acknowledging the transformation of the structure of the middle class
family and its eventual disappearance.
By identifying the present language of architecture of capitalist society in housing typologies I
will identify architectures biopolitical function in forming contemporary private life and
everyday reality.
Keywords | biopolitics, architecture, housing typology, private life, family identities and codes

1.
1.1.

THE NOTION OF BIOPOLITICS IN ARCHITECTURE

The term biopolitics

The terms biopower and biopolitics were first used and made popular by a French
theoretician, philosopher and sociologist Michel Foucault. Biopolitics (fr. biopolitique), as a
form of distributing power, implies an application of various techniques for achieving the
subjugations of bodies and the control of population, and overall life-specific characteristics,
like birth, death, production, illness, etc. In other words it takes control over everyday life, and
appears as a technique of distributing power that is realized through social institutions such as
family, school, police, army and medical institutions. According to Foucault the transformation
of distributing power ways was set in Western Europe, at the end of 17th century and the
beginning of 18th. New techniques of government were focused on the life and living issues and
problematized them. They were focused on the body, the body that was now individualized,
aligned with other bodies and placed under surveillance. Those were disciplinary techniques of
rationalization and strict economy of power that were realized through monitoring, hierarchy
1

PhD student of Theory of Arts and Media, Interdisciplinary studies, University of Arts in
Belgrade, monika.z.jovanovic@gmail.com

and inspection in order to increase health, birth rate and therefore productivity and functionality
of the population body. This transformation was triggered by a change of political right [2], but
didnt occur only on the level of political thought, but on the level of mechanisms, techniques
and technologies of power and governing as well. The transformation consisted of additions,
more than a change of the previous form of social contract where a sovereign had such power
over life like having the right to kill or let someone live. In contrast, new form of power has
right to give life and to let someone die. Later, in the middle of the 18 th century, emerged a nondisciplinary form of power, biopower that did not exclude the disciplinary form; Foucault
suggests that those two forms of power still coexist in contemporary society. This new form of
distributing power, biopolitics, does not observe a man as an individual body that needs to be
disciplined, but men as a species [2]. Biopower, in contrast to distributing power over an
individual body, is distributed over a population, in other words its global processes
characteristic for life such as birth, death, production, control of illness and sexuality.
1.2.

Biopolitical status of architecture

As the main field of interest of this paper is the influence of biopolitics through architecture on
everyday life, it is primary to identify the functions of biopolitical art and architecture. Serbian
theoretician, art critic, and author Tamara orevi introduced the idea of biopolotitical status
of art [3]. According to orevi, from the standpoint of social reality that we live, every praxis
is biopolitical, since it occurs in biopolitical social circumstances [4]. Therefore, biopolitical art
can have biopolitical consequences and contextual biopolitical aspect. When artists consciously
and intentionally use theoretical knowledge or biopolitical discursive sets from everyday life, art
can even have characteristics of biopolitical genre. Biopolitical art can have a biopolitical status
when its marked as biopolitical trough interpretative theoretical models, in regard to the effects
and functions that it realizes in the society. Following orevis conclusion, it can be said that
architecture as art can be biopolitical, and have a biopolitical function in society, especially
since architecture is an interdisciplinary political social science and practice that is determined
by relations and synthesis between humanities, technical sciences, designing, building and
planning, which are all controlled by economy, therefore state ideology and finally the way of
distributing power in a society in case of modern society, biopolitics. If architecture,
contemporary as well as historical is biopolitical, it means that it realizes its biopolitical
functions such as forming knowledge about national, family, behavioural and ideological codes,
stimulation and production of labour, control of free time, as well as encouraging increase in
birth rate as the key category of political according to Hannah Arendt [5].
Ideology is clearly and intentionally visible in architecture of public buildings, for example,
architecture of national banks, a national bank is usually conservative, almost traditional, and
overwhelmingly massive structure made of traditional and robust materials such as stone in
order to show the strength, power and security of the state that people are entrusting money to.
In the field of housing the presence of ideology can easily be read as non-existent, however,
which other kind of architecture could regulate everyday life better than architecture of a house?
A home, as a machine for living with specific and precise instruction guide inscribed in its
typology. A house is a private space, yet it is built by strict rules that were made according to
ideology of the state. One example of how regulations and rules of building are influenced by
ideology is easily seen in the results of research done by The Centre for Housing during the 80,
which were later used for forming Yugoslav National Building Code. In its study on the space
functionality, The Centre for Housing suggested two models of family, in respect of which it
conducted its research. Functionality of living space was empirically tested and later made for a
married couple where the mother is employed or a married couple where the mother is
unemployed (fig.1). In other words in Yugoslavia of the time, only one form of family was
acceptable, a heterosexual bond between two people, where a woman is referred to as a mother,
and therefore a woman is not even possible to exist in the family union unless she is a mother.

Proposed structure of the family clearly alienated a possibility of existence of a family that has
only one member, a family that consists of a heterosexual couple of equals, where a woman is
not necessarily a mother, or a homosexual couple, a homosexual couple with children, single
parent families and so on. Viewed from the perspective of biopolitics, architecture that is a
result of this research is not just limiting, but it shapes everyday life of a family, it builds
gender, sexual and family identity of every individual that will use it, and it does it in a way that
the user will never be conscious of the restraint. In the very output of this research and the way
it was conducted, a very strict and precise user guide is encoded, a user guide that carries all
aspects of national ideology in which it was made. That national ideology, or state ideology in
this way serves a set of rules, all the rules that are necessary to follow in order to produce a
healthy family and individual.

Fig. 1 Research results conducted by The Centre for Housing, with titles that suggest the type of family
that lives in Yugoslavia of the time (heterosexual married couple in which the mother is employed, and
heterosexual married couple in which the mother is unemployed)

Speaking of American neoliberalism Foucault mentions a text by a Scottish economist and

philosopher Adam Smith, in which Smith explains the phenomenon of the invisible hand [6].
While Smith refers to the invisible hand as something that guides a common salesman towards
fulfillment of a goal in which his intentions take no part, Foucault deems that we should not
insist on the existence of a hand which connects all the strings and guides people without
them knowing how or why, and in doing so, following its own interest brings gain to all, but
that we should pay attention to the invisible aspect of the mentioned hand. Later he infers to this
as the basic characteristic of biopolitics and the way it manages to penetrate into habit and
everyday life of an individual. Earlier Foucault mentions J. Benthams panoptical system [7], in
other words, surveillance house that is not simply a model used for penitentiary institutions but
an idea for a new construction principle which could be applied to all kinds of institutions that
practice surveillance ranging from industrial halls, offices, schools, hospitals, sanatoriums,

quarantines, and among which he mentions homes of the poor. The fact that Bentham mentions
the homes of the poor in this list of institutions indicates that the poor should be controlled and
regulated. A highly applicable and adaptable building principle is given for that purpose, which
could be with its structure, even without direct supervision from above function, a restrictive
system. Owing to its structure, in other words typology, the house limits and enables precisely
those functions that are planned. Bentham does not present the implementation of the
surveillance house simply as a mandatory procedure that would enable behavioral monitoring of
individuals, thus enhancing profitability and productivity of their activity, but he states that it is
a mandatory formulae of liberal government [] because, what in fact does a government
have to do? It definitely has to give way to anything that could represent natural behavioral
mechanics and production. It has to give way to these mechanisms and it is necessary not to
have any other form of intervention, at least in first instance, besides surveillance.[7] He
concludes that the government may intervene only when it sees, limited to monitoring. In that
sense residential architecture certainly performs the surveillance role over the user, meaning that
it imposes typology that imposes function of every space and therewith moulds rules of conduct
in it by shape, size, function and furniture layout of the room. Speaking about monitoring
Foucault explains what defines a 19th century workers settlement. He explains that it is plainly
obvious that in some way it linearly connects disciplinary mechanisms of control over body
with its webbed structure, with settlement division, division of families and individuals.
Division, exposition, norms of conduct and a sort of spontaneous control established through
urban planning are just some of the obvious means of control in such settlements [8].
This may be explained by Umberto Ecos thesis about architecture as communication. Eco
addresses the issue that architectural forms do not seem to impart, or do not seem to be made to
impart anything but simply work. [9] Eco speaks of the fact that no one doubts that the principal
purpose of a roof is to protect the house from weather, nor that the glass is used for drinking,
and in that he poses the issue in the field of semiology that the function itself could be
interpreted through a form of communication. Eco claims that phenomenological observation of
human relation to architectural form implies that architecture is most commonly understood as a
communicational act, although its functionality is not excluded. He suggests stairs as an
example of stimulation and communication. Stairs stimulate the user towards climbing. To
surmount a flight of stairs one has to repeatedly raise each leg. Eco claims that a staircase
stimulates climbing even if one has tripped over the first step in the dark. Elements that he
considers for deliberation are the fact that a man to climb a flight of stairs has to learn what
stairs are as well as what climbing them signifies and that a man learns that the stairs are a
stimulus for climbing since they enable transport from one horizontal level to another. If we
accept that a man recognizes in stairs a certain stimulation and offered application for certain
functions, then Ecos logic about stairs could be applied to any piece of furniture found in
everyday space and on any form of space itself.

2.

TRANSFORMATION OF THE FAMILY AND ITS ARCHITECTURE

Until the 18th century family was in its essence a community consistent of relations between
parents, children, cousins and distant cousins, and many different generations, that type of
family is defined as the extended family. Foucault claims that the diminishing influence of
religion over governance and articulation of individual family life demanded a new power that
would take over the care for life. Care for life is taken over by medicine. By the mid-18th
century, medicine takes the protective role over childrens sexuality, in the sense that it is
considered hazardous for the childs mental and physical health to the point that it could
endanger its life. Medicine of that time imperatively requires parents to protect their children
from unwanted and dangerous behavior masturbation, that was being done by limiting the
large, polymorphous and dangerous space of the home, as the first step, and then establishing a

special bond with their children. Since houses that used to support extended families were not fit
anymore, a new way of living was suggested. Parents and their offspring now had a unified
body which was presented as a nuclear family, unified with its care for the childs sexuality and
autoeroticism. Masturbation is not presented to parents as a sin or immorality but as an illness,
a dangerous, inhuman, monstrous illness that leads to many others. Suddenly a new form of
family is born, a condensed, firm, basic, bodily, sensitive family core. The space in which the
new family, the nuclear family resides is a closed, dense space in which rationality is invested in
the name of illness; rationality that binds this family to outer influences of medicine that has the
power of knowledge and protection from illness thereby gaining access to innermost circle of
private, everyday life. The child is never left alone. In short, medicine governs the means of
ethical, physical and sexual control within morality of a family, based on the supposed medical
need and in doing so it shapes the family to function as a source of normalization. Political
and economic interest for insisting on the survival of children was becoming obvious and that
was one of the main reasons for striving to replace the old loose polymorphous and complex
apparatus of a large family with a limited strong and enduring apparatus of parental control. In
other words forming of a new modern family enabled absolute control over offspring and
prevention of immoral behavior and implantation of real values to ensure.

3.

CONCLUSION

In postmodern time typology seems to have disappeared in its plurality, but perceiving this from
the perspective of transformation of the family structure that was just illustrated, a question
would emerge, just what this change is supposed to imply. If the range of family types has
increased by a certain number, then we should question ourselves how many times would the
range of typologies increase as its consequence. On the other hand, the same phenomenon, and
the emerging typologies could be observed from the standpoint of world estrangement and the
problem of family dissolution. In either case architecture, as an interdisciplinary political and
social praxis has its biopolitical function in forming everyday life and national, social, gender
and family identities. Therefore, based on the architectural language of a historical moment,
regarding the existing or non-existing typological patterns by which it is made, it is possible to
do an analysis of the overall structure of society of that moment.

REFERENCES
[1] Fuko M. (1998) Treba braniti drutvo: Predavanja na Kole de Fransu. godina 19741975.
Novi Sad: Svetovi, p. 292 293
[2] Ibid, p. 294
[3] orevi T. (2010) Biopolitika teorija umetnosti: Analiza funkcija umetnosti i umetnikog
dela u savremenom drutvu. Beograd: Doctorate, p. 264
[4] Ibid, p. 212
[5] Arent H. (1991) Vita Activa. Zagreb: Biblioteka August Cesarec.
[6]Fuko M. (2005) Raanje biopolitike: Predavanja na Kole de Fransu. godina 19781979.
Novi Sad: Svetovi, p.379
[7] Ibid, p. 100
[8] Fuko M. (1998) Treba braniti drutvo: Predavanja na Kole de Fransu. godina 19741975.
Novi Sad: Svetovi, p. 304
[9] Eko U. (1973) Kultura, Informacija, Komunikacija. Beograd: Nolit, p. 207 - 210