Big Brother is a building

Art historian researches “built-in’ surveillance

Observing from an upper-story gallery of the old post office in Georgetown, Del., a postal inspector would be able to take in practically every detail of the workspace below: how current sorting procedures might be made faster and more efficient, who was staffing slow customer service lines, how many times So-and-So checked the time. The view from the observation gallery made it an easy call.

Nearly 70 years after the construction of that post office (in the 1930s), Anna Andrzejewski would peer over the same banister overlooking the now-empty floor below. It was at that moment that she began to recognize what a significant role the perceived need for surveillance has played in the physical design of the American workplace.

Parallels to contemporary open office cubicles, academic lecture halls and the electronic monitors some companies use to keep tabs on employees’ access of certain Web sites were obvious to Andrzejewski, who is into her second semester on the art history faculty. Further scholarly investigation revealed that points of observation also have been built — literally — into American homes, churches, factories and more, as well as into offices.

“From the early 19th century to the present,” she says, “many American buildings and landscapes were designed with surveillance in mind.”

Andrzejewski became so fascinated with literal “built-in” surveillance that it was the subject of her doctoral dissertation, which she finished at the University of Delaware in 2001. Her doctoral research is now becoming a book, “Architecture and the Ideology of Surveillance in Modern America: 1850-1950,” which she expects to complete this summer.

The dynamics of surveillance are the dynamics of power, of course. However, Andrzejewski says, the flow of that power is rarely simple or unilateral. Architects and builders — not to mention those who commission them — might take comfort in assuming that a structure’s physical design will reinforce and enhance status quo power patterns. However, Andrzejewski has discovered that resourceful watchees usually are able to manipulate their environments to achieve more equitable playing fields with the watchers, often without the knowledge of their “superiors.”

For example, in most middle- and upper-class Victorian homes, “mistresses relied upon their gaze as a means of overseeing actions of their domestic servants. Buffer spaces, such as butlers’ pantries, divided service zones from the rest of the household. Mistresses believed they could exercise their gaze, confirm their authority and regulate their servants’ behavior, since they were confined to easily monitored areas of the house,” says Andrzejewski.

However, hired help under observation often proved cleverly adept in circumventing the usual hierarchy. Recognizing that their work areas and living quarters occupied distinct parts of the house, they could carve out moments of freedom to read, socialize or simply shirk assigned duties.

The protocol of various spaces took a toll on masters and servants. Indeed, Andrzejewski’s courses drive home to students how the arrangement of space in general seeps into our psyches and shapes our behavior.

“In my American architecture survey course, I point out how the structure of lecture halls the students occupy influences their interactions with their instructors,” she says. “Lecture halls, of course, stress the authority of the speaker at the front of the room. On the other hand, rooms used for discussion sections or seminars tend to be smaller, with a central table, which allows participants to sit in a circular pattern. These rooms seem structured to facilitate more equal exchanges than large lecture halls.”

Andrzejewski plans to teach regularly a class on the American workplace, a course she has taught once before. The central theme, she says, is the relationship between patterns of design and issues of power. Evidence of that relationship is everywhere, it seems. In addition to her studies of post offices and Victorian homes, Andrzejewski has turned her scholarly gaze to power dynamics as played out in the structural design of religious camp meetings, the housing of agricultural laborers, civil buildings and more.

“Building possibilities for surveillance was a concern in nearly all the workspaces we considered in that first class on workplace design,” she says. “It’s important to teach students about the relationship between buildings and people. My book on surveillance has showed me that the spaces we occupy, and the arrangement of furniture, ceramics and other items we use in those spaces, not only reflect our preferences and inclinations, but also structure the way we live our lives.”