Classroom architecture and the gaze. Beyond the Panopticon

ABSTRACT

This article begins by considering the radical changes that occurred in architecture throughout the twentieth century due to the influence of Le Corbusier and the ensuing movement of modernism. Though the building of schools was embroiled in this architectural movement, the classrooms within them remained broadly the same as they had been in the previous century, something that might pose a limit to the forms of education that take place within. Classrooms are then explored in the article in terms of their design and symbolic functions, both of which pertain to questions concerned with light, seeing, and the gaze. The article then introduces two key concepts that are useful for considering the gaze, Foucault’s Panopticon and Lacan’s psychoanalysis, to engage with the classroom architecture. Finally, the article proposes a rethinking of classroom architecture to encourage new forms of learning to take place.

KEYWORDS:

• Lacan
• Foucault
• architecture
• gaze
• Panopticon
• classroom

Modernist architecture and new ways of living

When the great modernist architect Le Corbusier (1923) proposed his maxim for design in the 1920s, that a house is a machine for living in (p. 151), the landscape of architecture changed irrevocably. In the wake of Walter Gropius of the Bauhaus movement, Corbusier made it clear that architecture should be about function and its dialectical relationship to form, rather than a space that prioritized ornamentation and decoration. Everyday architecture such as that of the home was forced to engage with the simple but radical question: what is this space for? As such, the homes, and indeed libraries, hospitals, and educational institutions that were built following Corbusier’s architectural modernism were radically different from that which had been built before.¹

The emphasis on light and materials also had philosophical and political implications: that ‘living well’ could be for everyone and that architecture should challenge our aesthetic preconceptions, especially those that are bourgeois and aristocratic. Architecture, in this sense, becomes about both phenomenology and design – the experience of being-in a space and the design that predicates it. Many of the schools and universities built in this movement still stand as beacons of this design, such as Lasden’s Institute of Education at UCL, UK, or Dowson’s Muirhead Tower at University of Birmingham, UK. They perhaps echo Corbusier’s famous maxim in an endeavour to create a machine for learning in, rather than living in. They are spaces that house lecture halls, seminar rooms, meeting spaces, libraries, built with durable concrete and utilizing large windows to allow in vast amounts of light.

The modernist architectural movements of the century coincide with the changes in educational philosophy also, particularly in terms of their progressive goals; the radical shift in municipal architecture for example was a key tool in enabling mass schooling (Dudek, 2000). A particular example exists in the inspiration of John Dewey’s educational philosophy concerning sensory experience and the design of small schools (Figure 1) by modernist architect Frank Lloyd Wright (Dudek, 2000, pp. 18–19). In the Hillside Home School, Lloyd Wright made allowances for interaction with nature and included a laboratory, gymnasium, and library in the layout. The classrooms once again prioritized light via windows that viewed their ‘surrounding green spaces’ (Dudek, 2000, p. 20), with a deliberate situation of the building amongst flora and vistas.

Figure 1. Photo by Marykeiran of the south facade of the Hillside Home School in Wisconsin by architect, Frank Lloyd Wright. Creative Commons: CC BY-SA 4.0.

And yet, even in pioneering examples of modernist educational institutions such as UCL or Hillside Home School, the classroom space that existed within the broader architecture of the school remained broadly unchanged. The classroom is, in these examples and countless others, a more or less square room with desks, chairs, and windows, a space for the teacher usually marked by a large desk, some form of teaching tool at the front such as a whiteboard, and perhaps a wall display. Modernists may have allowed more light into these rooms, but on the whole there was little thought to how these spaces could be redesigned from the nineteenth century classrooms that preceded them. The architectural revolution never came to classrooms, at least not in the way that it did for homes or for schools. What the likes of Corbusier make clear, however, is that architecture affects the way that we live. Classroom architecture, I care to venture then, affects the way that we teach (see also Alterator & Deed, 2018; Mulcahy, Cleveland, & Aberton, 2015). I contend that a limit has been reached with the classroom architecture currently employed in most schools.

Though there are many interesting points to be made about all aspects of the school’s architecture, the classroom is the architecture par excellence of education.² It remains the key educational space that is occupied by those that teach and those who are taught. From two alternative perspectives – Foucauldian and Lacanian – this article looks at what goes on in those spaces a little more closely and looks at the looking that occurs within them, but also the potential for reinventing what goes on in those spaces. Both perspectives have a central concept at their core: the gaze, the act of being seen.

Classroom design

As mentioned, though the architecture that contains the classroom has been developing for some time, generally the classroom itself remains unchanged. If you Google ‘classroom’ you get a similar image many times over (Figure 2); every film and television show that wishes to represent a classroom uses the same space composed of the same objects. In 1800s classrooms, arguably the clearest early example of the modern school (Hunter, 1994), we see much the same – rows of desks, aimed towards the central teaching space in a squarish room, with some room for display and a teaching tool at the front.

Figure 2. Standard classrooms. Perkins’ Back of classroom. Chokai Junior High School. Akita, Japan. Creative Commons: CC-BY-3.0.

A clear modern revolution has been the changes in seating, with the introduction of group tables, horseshoes, etc., which might reconfigure the possibilities of the architecture (Gremmen et al., 2016), but have a limit. Desks and their relation to the central figure of the teacher remain in every seating reconfiguration. Researchers have also turned their investigation to internal elements like collaborative spaces, the integration of technology and flexibility of furniture (Finnish Education Group, 2018; Green Modular, 2020), but the space of the classroom itself is often uncontested in mainstream discourse. Even radical pedagogies like that of bell hooks’ (1994) in Teaching to Transgress still make use of the classroom for their strategies, holding onto the seminar rooms of universities as, in her eyes, spaces to enable criticality. Generally, it is only the likes of Forest schools, Waldorf schools, or similar, that challenge the hegemony of the classroom, or in the more radical abandonment of the classroom in the open-plan schooling movement of the 1960s and 1970s (McLeod & Rosén Rasmussen, 2021; Rosén Rasmussen, 2021) – all examples either abandon the classroom entirely or end up falling back upon it.³ Here, however, I focus on the ubiquitous classroom object found in most schools and universities that I have previously mentioned.

As with the emphasis on light in modernist architecture, so too is a key aspect of the design of contemporary classroom architecture the use of light and consequently obfuscation of darkness, something that has far-reaching philosophical implications. Windows and glass (Figure 3) allow vast amounts of light in, intensified by the walls and doors called for in modern classroom design (HMG, 1999). Specified hours of the school day and their concurrence with adult’s Circadian rhythms (Sousa, 2011) ensures classrooms are always well lit throughout the institutional opening hours (Stock, 2021, p. 151). Other than wintery extra-curricular activities on the football pitch or in the debating club, students rarely encounter dark spaces at all in their time in schools: ‘Book cupboards, staff rooms, basements, kitchens and other dark spaces that exist throughout Educational institutions, symbolically, students have nothing to learn here’ (p. 151). Rather, they should spend their time in the glittering classrooms, move hastily through the liminal space of the corridors and use free time outside in the actual daylight.

Figure 3. Contemporary classroom design. Source: TES (2020). Accessed 12 June 2020. https://www.tes.com/lessons/nneBICK-otGHfw/classroom-redesign-challenge.

The manner in which classroom spaces are produced is important here. As Lefebvre (1991) points out, space is not ‘simply that of an empty area’ (p. 1), just ‘out there’ waiting to be made useful; rather, it is a ‘product … a tool of thought and of action; that in addition to being a means of production it is also a means of control, and hence of domination’ (p. 26). Recent research makes use of Lefebvre’s analysis in thinking through schools as producers of, for example, heteronormative, cis-gendered subjects (Brett, 2024), but in addition to this, the production of light spaces is in classrooms is symbolic, rather than purely material. Light spaces imply the seeking of light for enlightenment. The teacher pulls the students out of darkness or encourages them to make ‘good’ choices (playing appropriately, making friends, sharing space, etc.). We are also reminded of the need for light and open space for the students to remain seen (and it is in this sense that we start noticing the importance of the gaze). Echoing this, Lefebvre (1991) notes in his discussion surrounding the production of spaces:

A further necessity is that space – natural and social, practical and symbolic – should come into being inhabited by a (signifying and signified) higher ‘reality’. By Light, for instance – the light of sun, moon or stars as opposed to the shadows, the night, and hence death; light identified with the True, with life, and hence with thought and knowledge and, ultimately, by virtue of mediations not immediately apparent, with established authority. (p. 34)

Lefebvre raises the calculated and deliberate cleansing of the social space by the lighting of specific areas. The principle is seen in town planning, ensuring that spaces are created to allow people to act in a ‘light’ way. The deliberate attempt to throw pupils into light spaces and out of dark ones may well be cleansing of their selves on appearance; inspectors can readily walk up and down a corridor and see the pupils bathed in light, thus symbolically implying they are doing good. The gaze becomes an omnipresent aspect of the classroom of light, a space that encourages one to feel as if they are being seen by external presences and can be seen easily by the teacher in the classroom (or the reverse – the teacher is all too well seen by the student or the inspector who saunters down the corridor).

Classrooms of course contribute to the broader design of the whole school in terms of how they are spaced and organized on a large scale. We see in the blueprints (Figure 4) for traditional school design, the buildings of which are mostly still in use, that classrooms were to be replicated throughout the building, ‘in which the classrooms were set out along single-loaded corridors in order to provide improved ventilation, cross-lighting’ (Steadman & Mitchell, 2010, p. 214). Of course, what is made here is a concourse of visibility, a space that is easily viewed by an Other that might walk down the single-loaded corridor (and that Other need not physically exist). The uniformity of the spaces to be viewed along the concourse makes for easy identification of behaviours deemed unacceptable for the space that is predicated on light.

Figure 4. English elementary and junior school plans from early twentieth century. Source: Steadman and Mitchell (2010, p. 214).

This same design agenda is still implemented: the DfE currently provides guidelines for school architecture, ensuring that they mimic one another, and further, that mimicry should exist within each building: they say that school architecture should prioritize ‘design replication (for example, elements of layouts can be replicated across more than one site …); design repetition (for example, limiting the range of window sizes/types)’ (DfE, 2014). Though in part these design priorities serve to cut costs, there is something interesting about the desire for architectural repetition and uniformity.

The psychoanalytic theorist of architecture Lorens Holm makes an interesting point about such repetition, as found in the shopping mall or the modern housing estate. Holm (2022) claims that repetition in design is about objects of desire, that it is to ‘short-circuit to objects rather than delay it’ (p. 99). What Holm means is that the object of desire that is caused within those spaces is not enjoyed via delay (the way enjoyment is usually found in psychoanalytic thinking), but rather quickly obtained and thus quickly results in disappointment. What this says about the classroom and the supposedly desired knowledge, skills, learning, and grades, perhaps makes a lot of sense in light of this theory. Enjoyment is quickly drained in the shortcut to them, rather than the delay that would likely occur in far less repetitive spaces. On a similar note, Saari (2022) makes a claim about the use of flexible learning spaces in Finnish schools, once again a place where the broader architecture remains the same, but the internal architecture of the furniture is used to ‘bend and twist according to the fantasy of immediate pleasure’ (p. 890). Already, the implications of architecture on teaching are starting to become clear. That classrooms might be designed to encourage the pursuit of some sort of moral good or quick pleasure, and that their repetitive design is a shortcut.

The Panopticon

Repetitive design often invokes the metaphor of the prison, and often we hear that the school and the classroom are examples of Foucault’s Panopticon (Peim, 2022; Youdell, 2011). Foucault’s (1991) position regarding space, its implicated gaze, and architecture, is that it is one of the essential structures of the matrices of power. To paraphrase Foucault – discipline requires enclosure (1991, p. 143) and thus spaces must be produced to allow this enclosure to occur. Here he mirrors Lefebvre’s claim, that space is a ‘product … a tool of thought and of action … also a means of control’ (1991, p. 26). The school is part of the nomos of modernity for Foucault, the blueprint of the prison is the same blueprint for all aspects of modern life such as the barracks, the factory, and of course the school. Often this theory is naively misinterpreted as meaning society is a prison. What might be more accurate is that prison is like all of society. Yet, enclosure, or spatial distribution or partitioning as he also calls it, is not a space of complete oppression with no room to think, act, or breathe. Rather, it is where ‘Each individual has his own place, and each place its own individual’ (p. 143). In this sense, there is a freedom of the subject, a space to be the individual self, within any space of enclosure, and it is in this individuality that Foucauldian power capitalizes.

To look more closely at these spaces of enclosure, those embodied by the prison, barracks, factory, and school, we might see a key set of architectural features. These features are commonplace in the classroom and indeed contribute to their ease of discipline. These spaces must be ‘cellular’, divided into separate spaces like that of a prison cell or a workbench or classroom (which is then divided again by the tables within it). These cells must be easily observed, supervised, and patrolled – the gaze of the supervisor is always at play in this sense. Prisons and school corridors alike, just as in the early modern school blueprints (Figure 4), have a simple layout to enable the view through windows in the doors for each space. The supervisor internal to the classroom is also thus ‘perpetually supervised’ (p. 177), so to uphold the network of discipline that the whole institution enacts. The windows that classrooms so commonly have on at least one wall, though for many teachers serve as a distraction (and they constantly pull the blinds down to arrest the gaze of the student in the classroom), perhaps serve as an addition to the ease of supervision as opposed to the necessity for a connection to the sensory world of nature in Dewey and Frank Lloyd Wright’s vision.⁴

Returning to Foucauldian architecture, the spaces produced for discipline must also act as ‘functional sites’ (Foucault, 1991, p. 144), that is with some clearly defined purpose such as the production of goods, the rehabilitation of the criminal, or learning (even if this clearly defined purpose is contrary to the ‘Real’ undertakings of the space, as Lacan might say). We might see how the tables, displays, and whiteboard/screens contribute to the functionality of the classroom. They are objects that we commonly associate with what we call pedagogy, or teaching and learning – objects that supposedly enable this process to occur. These functions are not arbitrary additions to the disciplining of the space: they contribute to it as another aspect of the matrices of power. Alongside the inherent timetabling, registration, seating-planning, rewarding, demeriting, and ranking, the classroom becomes a tableaux-vivants (p. 148) – an ordering of masses of subjects into a manageable body, a gaze of normalization. In part, this disciplinary organization of classroom spaces is all about how easy it is for the teacher to see. Their gaze is better received by the students in this Foucauldian arrangement, just as it was for the Fordist worker on the production line.

The Benthamite prison design for the Panopticon (Figure 5) was presented by Foucault as the model of enclosure or spatial distribution par excellence.

[A]t the periphery, an annular building; at the centre, a tower … with wide windows that open onto the inner side of the ring; the peripheric building is divided into cells … they have two windows, one on the inside, corresponding to the windows of the tower; the other, on the outside, allows the light to cross the cell from one end to the other … a supervisor in a central tower and to shut up in each cell a madman, a patient, a condemned man, a worker or a schoolboy. By the effect of backlighting, one can observe from the tower, standing out precisely against the light, the small captive shadows in the cells of the periphery. They are like so many cages, so many small theatres, in which each actor is alone, perfectly individualized and constantly visible. The panoptic mechanism arranges spatial unities that make it possible to see constantly and to recognize immediately. In short, it reverses the principle of the dungeon … Full lighting and the eye of a supervisor capture better than darkness, which ultimately protected. Visibility is a trap. (p. 200)

Figure 5. Bentham’s 1843 Panopticon blueprint, reprinted in Foucault’s Discipline and Punish (1991).

To reiterate in a more concise manner, as Foucault says, ‘Power has its principle not so much in a person as in a certain concerted distribution of bodies, surfaces, lights, gazes … ’ (p. 202). In this sense, the classroom becomes the ideal Panoptic space, one that too uses the tables and chairs, the light from the windows and door, the gaze from the teacher and the supervisor in the corridor, and the surface of the white board, for means of discipline (and learning, which is but another means of discipline in Foucauldian terms). It has become almost cliched now, in fact, to discuss the classroom as a Panoptic space, and if we look at some early nineteenth classroom designs there is a clear implementation of the Panoptic blueprint. The Plymouth Marjon school for example, or the corrective schools of David Stow’s (Hunter, 1994; Peim, 2001, 2022), made use of a gallery-like space that would arrest the gaze and movements of the student with a central space for the teacher. But there are things that do not quite suffice in this explanation, especially in regard to the standardized modern classroom design, as other researchers have noted in their discussion of panopticism in classrooms (Landahl, 2013).

Like Youdell (2011) and Peim (2001, 2022), I don’t dispute the function of the classroom as a disciplinary apparatus, something foregrounded by teachers’ reports of open-plan teaching spaces being more difficult to discipline due to the lack of cellular distribution of bodies (Rosén Rasmussen, 2021). However, there are other aspects at play that might be important to develop the theory. Though the Panopticon certainly provides some insight into classroom architecture, the lack of veiling on the watchman (even if the gaze is partially internalized by the student and indeed the teacher) opens up a different sort of model. The Panopticon mirrors the school architecture – the corridors with their rows of cell-like spaces, the Victorian design of either hall or playground as a central space surrounded by classrooms. Schools are becoming ever more efficient at such acts of discipline, as Barker, Alldred, Watts, and Dodman (2010) say:

schools have become increasingly sophisticated sites for surveillance. Recent advances in building design and materials, and contemporary building practices, have embraced and enhanced the potential for the panoptical disciplinary gaze. (p. 380)

Other methods of discipline include isolation units or staggered lunchbreaks in dining rooms (Pike, 2008) and playgrounds (Peim, 2022). But the classroom itself poses some challenges to the Panopticon as the perfect model for understanding its architecture and inherent gaze.

Beyond the Panopticon. The Lacanian gaze

If we put the Panopticon to one side for a moment and look closely at the layout, shape and design of the classroom (Figures 2 and 3) we can see that the ‘cells’ of the tables are pointing towards a central spot at the front of the room, but rarely surround it. On the whole, the cellular desks are actually seen by the watcher rather than just an implied gaze (and vice versa with the students being able to see the watcher). Horseshoe seating plans and group tables ensure that students look at each other more (implicating a second gaze at play), but still they are encouraged to orient their heads towards the front of the classroom where the teacher stands. While I am talking look at me. Foucault certainly makes this point through the watchmen, but the use of light in the room implicates the essentiality of being seen by a visible seer. Lacan (2014) echoes this – ‘gaze is always a play of light and opacity’ (p. 96) – the light in the room and the walls surrounding it allows one to see the Other.

In this arrangement, the way the classroom is organized is perhaps more akin to a group viewing of a screen like a cinema than it is a circular prison around a watchtower. There is of course the actual screen at play of a projector or digital whiteboard, something that the students regularly watch and perhaps something that gazes at them. But the frame of the whiteboard also creates a screen like image. Even more so does the teacher, framed by the four corners of the wall they teach from (Herbert, 2012). Lecture halls often have a stage, once again with a backdrop of a massive screen or whiteboard. In turn, this opens up the possibility of a different sort of gaze from Foucault’s – the Lacanian gaze.

Foucault’s Panopticon implies a totalizing gaze, completely internalized by the Other, and one that is always-already disciplinary. Many discussions surrounding the Lacanian gaze conflate it with the Panoptic one or with the male gaze from Mulvey’s (1975) famous theory of cinema. Though of course the male gaze is something that occurs in the classroom (Calogero, 2004; Skelton, 2002), the Lacanian gaze is neither totalizing nor that of the misogynistic camera in a film. It is akin to the gaze we find in mirrors and screens – one that looks back at us.

The Lacanian (1994, 2004, 2014) gaze is embroiled in mirrors, as it is founded in the more famous of Lacan’s theories, the ‘Mirror Stage’ (2004, pp. 81–93). The mirror stage is a developmental event of the ego, both metaphorical and literal, that a child goes through when they see themselves in a mirror as an autonomous being. I lift my arm, and the being in the mirror lifts its arm. I frown, and the being in the mirror frowns. Cause and effect, but also control of the body. As such, it is the appearance of a moment of subjectification for the child where they believe they have reached a fully formed self – a ‘jubilatory’ moment where they engage with their ‘specular image’ (2014, p. 32). They believe they see their ego (or Ich [I] in the original German) in the mirror, but really what they see is an ego-ideal, a version of themselves from the perspective of a total view where the ‘fragmented body’ (2004, p. 97) appears as a completed entity. In actuality, for Lacan, what this stage presents is a myth of totality and wholeness. What is missing from the image seen in the mirror is the Other that put them there and on which they depend (2014, p. 32), and so indeed is the unconscious aspects of their subjectivity. They imagine themselves to be whole when they engage with this mirror image, a promise of a future of perfection and control over themselves (Herbert, 2012, p. 23) but really they are lacking. An example is found in Berger’s (1972) BBC series Ways of Seeing when he shows a discussion between a group of women about what they see when they look at themselves naked in the mirror. One of the women reports that they see a nude, not a naked woman. Though we might argue this is the construction of what they believe males want to see akin to Mulvey’s (1975) ‘male gaze’, it serves as a good allegory for the Lacanian gaze as it raises the idea of seeing oneself as a painting. The nude, an archetype of fine art, implies that she saw a fully completed image captured in a moment of perfection, framed like a painting in a gallery. There is a gap, therefore, between the image that the subject has of themselves and the subject – a mediated image which importantly is framed by the screen-like object of the mirror. Our sense of completion is only to be achieved virtually.

The mirror is not just a simple reflection then. The image seen in the mirror is that of oneself as a character, an individual that one believes an Other sees: the ‘mirror is conceived of as a screen’ (Copjec, 2015, p. 16) and the subject sees themselves being seen. The implication is that the image of the self that looks back at the subject, the thing that sees me, the gaze, creates a fantasy akin to that of a film – a complete subject as part of a fixed narrative. The imaginary wholeness granted to the subject by the gaze echoes the claims of developmental logic in schooling. Undoubtedly, the dominant view of the subject in education is inflected with the ‘overwhelming influence of Jean Piaget’ (Johnson, 2014, p. 2) and his theory of cognitive development. It is regularly taught on teacher training courses, remains a firm favourite of educational psychologists, and generally forms the unconscious view of the student as a subject that teachers hold. This view maintains that the subject as a child is in a process of becoming that will ‘unfold naturally if the student has enough empty space into which to grow’ (p. 3). They will grow, if the educational environment is appropriate, into a rational and autonomous agent – a fully formed subject. The classroom and accompanying educational spaces have been almost universally, or unconsciously, agreed upon as the space in which this can occur. The image the student sees on the screen is that the teacher has become complete – they have completed the educational narrative that will fill the gap that the student perceives themself to have. They have learnt what there is to be learned. The mirror stage and its inherent gaze troubles Piaget’s narrative of progress in this sense by positing the image of the teacher is only a fantasy, and it is interesting to note that Piaget’s theories of child development had an influence on even radical forms of school architecture like the open-plan school (Rosén Rasmussen, 2021, p. 227). Perhaps a rethinking of the gaze in the classroom is to rethink the constant desire, even demand, for progress at play in pedagogy, and progress is not to be found anywhere in Lacan’s work (Webster, 2022).

The Lacanian gaze is ultimately important in thinking about classroom architecture as though it accounts for the student as the Panopticon does, it takes greater account of the teacher as seen by the students rather than just by an external body. In her account of the gaze and pedagogy, Anna Herbert (2012) gives an anecdote of visiting a friend’s house and their daughter, whenever looked at, started doing pirouettes. If she was not looked at, she would attempt to catch someone’s attention and begin to twirl again (p. 22), she would be, as Herbert says, ‘a pretty twirling doll for you’ (p. 22), the Other and what she believes she wants it to see. Once again, we find that the gaze is invested in the fantasy image that the subject wishes to be seen as – the image in the mirror that they see in the screen. Herbert goes on to question, does she ‘solicit the gaze of [her] students in much the same way as this little girl’ (p. 22)? It turns teaching into the performance of an actor in a film, or of a child’s reflection in the mirror, but not one that is entirely under the conscious efforts of the teacher themselves. The teacher performs on the screen to solicit the gaze of the Other – the gaze of the children is invited by the arrangement of the classroom space. We might understand this better in its inversion: some will recall the idiomatic phrase banded around over lockdown of ‘teaching into the void’ during Zoom lessons. The teacher may have been on a screen, but without the apparent gaze of the Other, the process was regularly noted as difficult or artificial. Teachers become something in the architecture of the classroom due to its formation – it subjectivates as a space, forming a sort of subject who it believes the Other wishes to see in it. It demands to be seen, unlike the Foucauldian gaze who demands to be absent, and is in fact only disciplinary due to its absence.

As Lacan (1994) says, ‘The gaze I encounter … is not a seen gaze, but the imagined by me in the field of the Other’ (p. 84); or put more coherently by Anna Herbert (2012), ‘I see you seeing me, I interpret your desire yet all this happens unconsciously’ (p. 22). Now both the development of the child and the position of the teacher are complicated by the Lacanian account of the architecture of the classroom. As, though the gaze the student feels of the teacher is disciplinary, it also enacts the fantasy of what the Other believes is desired to be seen. The gaze felt by the student is not just one of discipline, but one of love, of hate, of fear, ultimately whatever fantasy they have unconsciously constructed the teacher to be and that the teacher constructs for themselves in light of the gaze they feel. The visibility of the watcher is essential in the classroom. They are not an absence like that of the veiled watchtower of the Panopticon. It is an (at least) partial presence of a very certain type of subject – a watcher who teaches, even if that watcher is lacking, divided, and constituted of fantasies and unconscious desires.

This of course works in reverse too, as the gaze sustains the internalized punishment, or masochism, of the teacher. As Lacan (1994) says, the ‘ascetic who flagellates himself does it for a third party’ (p. 183), that is, the gaze of the Other present in the space and ‘Things’ (p. 109) of the classroom. Such an irony that the students believe it is the teacher who is the holder of this gaze and, some, studiously flagellate themselves for better grades (or not), whilst really it is the teacher who is the one tortured by the gaze. The gaze always asks ‘what do you want?’ of the subject – we are made by what we think the Other wants, though of course this is something we cannot know. And so what occurs in the classroom space is a question of a teacher’s desire, and an unfolding of that desire in the space that has been dedicated to its gaze of unfolding.

So where does this leave us with architecture? My key concern here was to outline some different thoughts surrounding the gaze in light of the dominant design of classrooms that we see across the world, but there are of course some pressing steps to be taken. There are other spaces that I alluded to at the start that might work differently. Though it goes beyond the scope of this paper to be explore them in any great depth, what these spaces pose is an alternative architecture and consequently a different sort of learning that might occur within. An outdoor space, for example, shatters the screen. So too does a classroom that has no space for an educator, such as that of a meeting circle or a library. Early Years spaces, in particular Montessori ones, function differently and so too does their design: often the classrooms are laid out with individual zones, some not directly in the gaze of the teacher, and make use of levels too (Hertzberger’s Montessori school in Delft (Hertzberger, 2008, pp. 38–42) is a particularly good example). Some of the open-plan schools, particularly the Hellerup School in Denmark (Leiringer & Cardellino, 2011) and the Collingwood Education Centre in Australia (McLeod & Rosén Rasmussen, 2021) exercise flexible layouts that tend to abandon the fixed nature of the classroom though still occasionally fall back on them or even bemoan their absence (Rosén Rasmussen, 2021, p. 232). We must admit, however, that such spaces have failed to penetrate the design of mainstream schooling and its spaces, and so too do they uphold the importance of light above all as the educational-spatial-architectural ideal. Ultimately, in the wake of Corbusier’s maxims, the act of being seen seems to keep its stranglehold on educational spaces and so too on what occurs within them. Spaces that utilize darkness and shadow might trouble the gaze, as they interrupt the specular image. Use of shadow opens the ‘uncanny silence of dark spaces’, to quote Tanizaki (1933, p. 20) and, perhaps, begin to penetrate the darkness at the heart of the subjects in education.⁵

These spaces would thus generate a different architectural phenomenology. There might be other spaces that we can imagine too that would create a different sort of gaze. If the teacher as we know it is constituted by how they believe they are seen – they must ‘belong in the picture’ (Holm, 2022, p. 53) and thus appear as they think a teacher should be seen, we must wonder if a different way of seeing, one enabled by a different sort of architecture, would inherently form a different subject. Perhaps, thus, a different sort of teacher altogether. This is what is at stake in architecture: the very beings that unfold within it, and though Foucault accounts for the discipline of these beings, the theory falls short of anything more. That is why the Lacanian gaze is essential, and one that hopefully opens discussions about the building of educational spaces.

To emphasize a point made earlier as a final warning, however, that in the Lacanian thinking of architecture, one must let go of desire for utopia. The utopian imagination, that of faith in progress, reaching of potential, betterment of society, personal growth, and so on, an imagination that is clear for some other radical approaches to classrooms (McLeod & Rosén Rasmussen, 2021) and other modernist architecture, is not to be found in Lacan (Webster, 2022, p. 42). The approach to the subject in Lacanian psychoanalysis is a question of desire, not of progress as it so commonly is in educational thinking. In rethinking the gaze of the classroom, a vital task this article contends, one must also allow for radically different desires to enter, ones that we may not even deem to be educational. If we change the classroom beyond the disciplinary and screen like gaze that occurs within it, what forms of desire will unfold?

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by British Academy.

Notes

1 One need only compare the Georgian townhouse (a staple of traditional English architecture), and the Barbican or Isokon buildings (staples of modernism) to understand this difference. Simplicity of materials and style, functionality, cleanness of forms and lines, light – these features dominate the modernist design plans. Barbican and Isokon homes are not large like a townhouse, but they do, for example, prioritise living space over sleeping space and ensure light is available in every room.

2 Other spaces in the school such as playgrounds and assembly halls are explored by Hunter (1994) and Peim (2001) as mirrors of, for example, spaces of self-discipline, a garden of temptation, a space for the sermon.

3 Still, their use of, as Steiner (1996) says, ‘forest or heath, town or country’ (p. 205) as their educational spaces, carry the trace of the classroom in their presence of a teacher and students engaging with objects of learning and making use of the educational tools around. The removal of the walls certainly makes a difference, but it is not uncommon to see, for example, a circle of logs for the students to sit on as the teacher stands at the front with the outdoor environment as their backdrop. Arguably, the removal of the walls of the classroom in fact intensifies the very elements that make a classroom what it is: a space dedicated to the educating of students by a teacher in a formation that draws the gaze of the student. It is interesting that in some open-plan schools, the abandonment of a classroom still impelled the teachers into siloed teaching spaces that would act as classrooms but without doors and sometimes walls (Rosén Rasmussen, 2021).

4 A dark space in a classroom would be entirely unwelcome as the gaze of the teacher cannot reach it, though I have in the past (Stock, 2021) posed the essential nature of darkness in education just as shadows and darkness are essential to architecture. As Tanizaki (1933) says in In Praise of Shadows, ‘I have often thought that hospitals … need not be so sparkling white’ (p. 12), and we might imagine this should extend to schools – especially considering Foucault’s arrangement of societal institutions as mirroring each other in their logic and architectural formation. This use of shadow of course comes with some caveats: obviously it opens an ethical discussion about the safety of students, and more pivotally, it comes with the acceptance that it troubles the teacher’s total gaze.

5 In letting go of the arresting of the gaze, we are left with the sticky question of discipline. It is interesting that in reports of teachers implementing more radical forms of pedagogy in an open-plan school in Copenhagen in the 1970s, they would return to typical forms of discipline when things became noisy and chaotic (Rosén Rasmussen, 2021, p. 232). It seems in the reimagining of a classroom, the educational logic that predicates it remains unthought – here the impetus on the completion of curriculum, reinforces the disciplinary apparatus (or is innately tied to it). This not an invite to chaos; the Lacanian-inspired psychoanalyst and radical theorist of pedagogy Elvio Fachinelli (2010, pp. 150–183) designed a kindergarten in which the teachers would pull back from the students (remove their gaze). He hoped this would remove hierarchical difference in the subjects, but instead found that the children ‘when left to their own devices without interaction from adults’ pursued ‘nearly ‘fascist’, ‘hierarchical’ domination of the stronger over the more vulnerable’ (ffytche & Herzog, 2019, p. 256), thus the complete removal of the gaze is insufficient. What the Lacanian perspective therefore calls for is not simply letting go of the architecture, but also the symbolic expectation of education that occurs within it.