If architecture is a way of knowing the world—not just a profession or a discipline—then how do we know what we know of the world of architecture? Answering “through experience” is trivial, getting us no closer to architecture specifically. This essay will propose that it is neither experience, tectonics nor even form that grants access to architectural knowledge, but instead control. Ever since Deleuze christened our current condition a society of control, ominous inklings of cybernetics, feedback loops and the biopolitical have arisen like so many ghost sightings within architectural history and theory. By describing the implications of our present-day, Deleuzian logic as an architecture of the control room, new folds in architecture theory are discernible. Yet control rooms need neither be rooms (enclosed), nor be dominated by dials, screens or surveillance. They are not so much a space, or a place, but instead the potential of both—in all their metaphoric complexity and dialogical potentials—to be networked, and for that network to be displayed, through architecture. Dispensing with formal prototypes (Laugier’s primitive hut or de Quincy’s tent and cave) and functional ones (the dwelling, the temple or, to be Kantian, the folly), the control room instead trumps them all, by encompassing them all together. For what a control room actually controls is precisely the means by which architecture displays—and architecture displays culture, while all the while displaying architecture displaying culture. Historically, the word display has had three meanings: to arrange (organize, like an exhibition); to show or reveal (render no longer hidden, like a symptom); and to stage (simulate, like an enactment). The formal and functional prototypes just mentioned clearly do many of these things, yet they do not always do them all at once. The control room does, by making visible a tacit organization that simultaneously both is and isn’t just actual, and also is and isn’t just ideal. Just as Semper proposed that the essence of architecture was the knot (joint) yet textiles were architecture’s primordial material condition, because they encapsulated architecture as mask, the control room fuses formal and spatial qualities of architecture with socio-cultural values, within the realm of knowledge and how its reflections and shadows appear in the world around us, as the camera obscura once did. Deleuze’s theory of a control society points to the recent dematerialization and atomization of disciplinary institutions—the home, the school, the prison, the factory, etc. In a similar manner, the control room links its inside to a world beyond, a network of connections simultaneously social and virtual (both moral and digital). As both sacred and secular spaces originally had dual functions, providing both usable locales for rituals and giving their enactment a proper (meaningful) setting, they hence acted as control rooms. Nowadays, our culture of screens reinterprets lush interior spaces replete with multiple patterned textiles; yet unlike the NASA Mercury Control Room at Cape Canaveral, today’s everyday spaces, and places, containing multiple screens, at multiple sizes, displaying constantly changing images, control us.
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