Biopolitics and the Emergence of Modern Architecture
Sven-Olov Wallenstein

Biopolitics and the Emergence of Modern Architecture concerns the dissolution of the classical paradigm of architecture as imitative form in the context of the French Enlightenment, and analyzes the emergence of a new logic of architecture based on a biopolitical process of subject formation. Wallenstein draws especially on the late work of Michel Foucault for his argument and distinguishes Foucault's theory of biopolitics from that of Giorgio Agamben.

Published shortly after the release of the first English translation of Foucault's The Birth of Biopolitics, this is the first volume that specifically relates the biopolitical concept to architecture. The book concludes with a pictorial essay on the development over the last two centuries of the modern hospital, a building type that epitomizes the unfolding of this new architectural logic.


Sven-Olov Wallenstein teaches philosophy at the University College of Södertörn and architectural theory at the Royal Institute of Technology, both in Stockholm. He is the editor-in-chief of SITE (www.sitemagazine.net), the author of several books and essays on contemporary art, philosophy, and aesthetics, and the translator of works by Kant, Frege, Husserl, Heidegger, Levinas, Derrida, and Deleuze. A brilliant and eloquent younger intellectual whose recent books include Bildstrider: Förelasningar om estetisk teori (Image Wars: Lectures on Aesthetic Theory, 2001), Den sista bilden: det moderna måleriets kriser och förvandlingar (The Last Image: Crises and Transformations of Modern Painting, 2002), and Den moderna arkitekturens filosofier (The Philosophies of Modern Architecture, 2004), as well as Swedish translations of Immanuel Kant's, Critique of Judgment (2003) and Gilles Deleuze's, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque (2004), Wallenstein deserves to be known by an American architectural readership.
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