ABSTRACT
The architectural innovation produced a new sensorial dimension with profound effects. It produced a new form of visuality wherein a single watchtower in the center produced an omniscient, “Godlike,” all-seeing eye peering into each individual cell. Residents trade “a sense of community for increased security” and other amenities such as maintenance. Residents, Setha Low describes, are not overly “concerned about making friends in these new communities.” The materiality of built form has long held the power to heal, such as the “hygienic” gleaming, reflective, transparent, and brilliant white surfaces of modernism that ward off illness and heal. Fredric Jameson’s “diagnosis” is confirmed by the materiality of the building’s surfaces, the reflective glass that rejects the city outside and makes the Bonaventure “placeless.” Fredric Jameson famously refers to the Bonaventure Hotel, designed by the architect John Portman, as “a mutation in object, unaccompanied as yet by any equivalent mutation in the subject”.
