Gerald S. Bemstein received his Doctorate atthe University of Pennsylvania. He has been afaculty member of Brandeis University since1968 and won the Outstanding Teacher Awardin 1970. He serves as a consultant to both theNewton and Brookline Public School Systemsand on the Visitor's Committee of the BostonMuseum of Fine Arts.In this year of Orwellian hype and futurist fan-tasy, much has been written concerning BigBrother and the Anti-Utopian State. The pessi-mistic image of an omnipotent governmentoppressing the individual and creating a societyof mass conformity pervades every chapter ofOrwell's classic novel.For many the re-reading of 1984 a generationafter it had been an assigned text in some Eng-lish or Political Science course has been anunsettling experience. The obvious drift towardsa dehumanizing expansion of bureaucracies andthe seemingly unquestioning commitment to thecomputer has reinforced some of our worstfears of a totalitarian society. The disillusioningrealization is that 1984 was not a science fictionprophecy but a powerful warning of the dangerto human freedom inherent in the use of tech-nology to achieve and maintain political power.The despair and fear which surround WinstonSmith, the protagonist of Orwell's novel, ismade evident in his loss of individuality. Thissubjugation of the human spirit is manifested byOrwell in his depiction of the frightening tech-niques of mind control: from the ubiquitousposters of Big Brother with eyes that follow you,to the electronic eye of the telescreen whichinvades even the privacy of the bedroom.The negative Utopia described in 1984 is one ofthe repression supported by a complex technol-ogy in the service of the State. But in Orwell'sdehumanized world it is not only the psychicenvironment that oppresses the individual butthe physical environment as well. For the archi-tecture of Orwell's "future" function as a meta-phor of totalitarian repression.But how does Orwell conceive of the architec-ture of the built environment of Fictional Lon-don, chief city of Airstrip One? Interestingly,Orwell is quite specific in his description of thephysical environment through which his charac-ters move.Winter 1985, JAE 38/2The Architecture of Repression:The Built Environment ofGeorge Orwell's 1984mOrwell's description of this blighted area, withits cobbled streets of little two story houseswas just as depressing as Victory Mansions.Yet the experience awakened in Winston "asort of ancestral memory." Seated in an arm-chair beside an open fire, a vague feeling ofnostalgia gripped Winston. In both its humanscale and its assortment of Victorian furniture,Winston felt that this was a ". . . room meantto be lived in."15Another feature of Winston's secret room was apicture in rosewood frame which hung abovethe fireplace. It was a 19th century steel engrav-ing of an oval building with rectangular windowsand a small tower: St. Clement's Dane was thename of the building originally built as one ofWren's parish churches after the Great Fire of1666. Although Winston recognized it as a stillextant ruin not far from the Law Courts he hadno way of knowing the history of the building inthe Orwellian year of 1984.16 For since the Rev-olution, the State had systematically altered any-thing that might throw light upon the past. InOrwell's future "one could not learn historyfrom architecture any more than one could learnfrom books . . . Anything large and impressive... was automatically claimed to have beenbuilt since the Revolution, while anything thatwas obviously of an earlier date was ascribed tosome dim period called the Middle Ages. Thecenturies of capitalism were held to have pro-duced nothing of value."17Winston's discovery that the old engravingdepicted a church led to an even more startlingrevelation that there existed in London many for-mer churches, which had ". . . been put toother uses."18 Among the most dramatic exam-ples was the great St. Martin's in-the-Fieldswhich had been converted by the party into". .. a museum ... of propaganda," displayingsuch objects as "scale models of rocket bombs... and waxwork tableaux illustrating theenemy atrocities . . .".19 Again, Orwell's depic-tion of the recycling of churches into Museumsof the State is not a futuristic fantasy, but aclear reference to a contemporary campaign ofthe late 1940's being carried out by the govern-ment of the Soviet Union for the conversion ofEastern orthodox churches into Statemuseums.20The world of London in 1984 was one in which"the past had ... been abolished. Every recordhas been destroyed or falsified, every book hasbeen rewritten, every picture has beenrepainted, every statue and street and buildingrenamed, every date has been altered. Anythingthat might throw light on the past has beenrepressed. History has stopped. Nothing existsexcept the endless present."21 Atop the enor-mous fluted column in what was once Trafalgarand had become Victory Square, Big Brotherreplaced Lord Nelson and a telescreen filled thepediment of the converted St. Martin's in-the-Field.Late in the novel Winston's visit to the dwellingplace of O'Brien offers a jarring contrastbetween the delapidated condition of VictoryMansion and the smoothly functioning struc-tures of the Inner Party. Located in their ownquarter of the city, the elite of the Party lived inhuge blocks of spacious flats. The softly car-peted passageways with their cream paperedwalls and white wainscoating were exquisitelyclean. The symbolic contrast between the faultyelevators of Winston's building and the". . . silent and incredibly rapid lifts sliding upand down,"22 in the towers of the Inner Partysuggest that it was more than the color of one'soveralls that distinguished one's position in thehierarchical society of 1984.In Winston Smith's desperate grasp for free-dom, he was betrayed by the very man hethought shared his hatred for Big Brother. For itwas the Inner Party member O'Brien who hadgiven him Goldstein's subversive book. Orwell'sdevice of a book within a book allowed theauthor to create an historical context for 1984. Itis Goldstein's words that describe the chaoticpre-Revolutionary period before the establish-ment of the State. It is also through Goldsteinthat we learn "that the imaginary future to whichpeople . . . (of) the early 20th century aspir dwas a vision of a society unbelievably rich, lei-sured, orderly and efficient. Set in an architec-tural ambience of ... glittering antiseptic(structures) ... of glass and steel and snowwhite concrete and predicated on the continuingdevelopment of science and technology."23 The". .. dwarf, the surrounding architecture" justas Big Brother towers above the Party and thepeople.9Victory Mansion, the apartment house complexwhere Winston lived, seems remarkably similarto the worker housing projects built between thetwo World Wars. From the elevator which". .. even in the best of times was seldomworking," to the "heating system which wasusually running at half steam,"10 the utopiandream associated with Bauhaus designedWorker Housing has been transformed into anightmare. Winston's lament of flaking plasterand burst pipes and the need to have even thesimplest of repairs sanctioned by committee is arecurring echo of the failures associated withpublic housing projects.1If there is one constant in the life of WinstonSmith it is that of surveillance. From morninguntil night the "eyes" of Big Brother watchedhim. The instrument for this procedure was thetelescreen, which Orwell described as "anoblong metal plaque like a dull mirror whichformed part of the surface of the ... wall.""2The telescreen received and transmitted simulta-neously, giving out Party information as well asobserving every move of the individual. Thisfearsome invasion of personal privacy was not ascience fiction fantasy that Orwell invented, forby the late 1940's the technology for such aninstrument was already more than a decade old.One of the most startling exhibits at the NewYork World's Fair of 1939, "World of Tomor-row," was a video telephone which allowed fortwo-way visual communication.13 The Orwelliantwist was that technology in the service of theState created an instrument that could not beturned off.Winston's desire to escape the spying eyes ofBig Brother led him to take a dangerous risk.And once again Orwell uses an architectural set-ting to symbolize an aspect of the oppressiveState. When Winston enters the London districtinhabited by the Prols, a subculture of Oceaniansociety, we find ourselves catapulted into thesqualid condition of Victorian London tene-ments. It is here that Winston finds some relieffrom the constant surveillance of Big Brother. Ina rented room ". . . in the vague, brown col-ored slum to the north and east of what hadonce been St. Pancras Station . . ."14 Winstonfound a refuge from the automaton existence ofthe Party.Winter 1985, JAE 38/2ElNotes1 Orwell, George 1984 New American Library (New York) 1981.2 Ibid, p. 21 Orwell's description of Victory Mansions as amulti-level housing complex built in the thirties strongly sug-gests "the 'water-down' version of modern architecture"which was constructed in England before the outbreak ofWorld War II. Lubetkin and Tecton's High Point I flats, High-gate (1933-35), an eight story concrete apartment buildingderived "from both LeCorbusier and Soviet collective housingof the twenties," may have been Orwell's model. See Curtis,William J. R. Modem Architecture Since 1980 Prentice-HallInc. (Englewood Cliffs) 1983, p. 225.3 Orwell, op.cit., p. 7. The pyramid-like buildings that housedthe Ministries are reminiscent of the projects of the so-calledVisionary Architects of the late 18th century. Drr: Vogt. A,M"Orweil's Nineteen Eighty-Four and Etienne Louis Boullee'sDafts of 1784" Journal of the Society of Architectural Histori-ans, Vol. XLIII, No. 1, (March) 1984, pp. 60-64.4 Ibid, p. 26.5 Orwell, op.cit. p. 7.6 Ibid, p. 38.7 Orwell, op.cit., p. 7.8 Ibid, p. 7. The shanty town squatter settlements of Brazil arecalled favelas. Rapid growth of the favelas occurred in thethirties with a sudden influx of low income people into urbancenters. The dwellings of the favelas are often primitive one-room hovels and are often shared by pigs, goats and chick-ens. See Evenson, Norma Two Brazilian Capitols Yale Univer-sity (New Haven and London) 1973, p. 20-23.9 Ibid, p. 8. The massive fortress-like appearance of the Minis-tries seem associated with the monumental architectureemployed by totalitarian regimes between the two WorldWars. In Italy, Germany and Russia the architecture of theState was meant to be a reinforcement of nationalist senti-ment. Both in its overwhelming scale and disciplined repeti-tion of motifs government architecture became a symbol ofthe power of the State. See Curtis op.cit., p. 211.10 Ibid, p. 21.11 Blake, Peter Form Follows Fiasco Little Brown and Company(Boston/Toronto) 1977, p. 121-132. In Blake's polemicalchapter entitled "The Fantasy of Housing" he links the con-cept of worker housing to the company towns of the Indus-trial Revolution which he contends were designed to keep theresidents under company control. He goes on to suggest thatthe mass worker housing settlements (Siedlungen) designedin the twenties and thirties had a similar controlling effect andbecame most popular in the Soviet Union, Germany and Italy.12 Orwell, op.cit., p. 6.13 The communication section of the 1939 New York World'sFair "dealt with effects of modern communication ... as asocializing force." One of the exhibits was an experimental"television-telephone" which had been developed in the1930's. The perfection of the cathod ray tube which madepossible electronic visual transmission was first utilized by theBritish Broadcasting Corporation in November of 1936. Thepicture was viewed by reflection in a mirror placed above themechanical console. See Harrison, Helen Dawn of a New DayThe New York World's Fair, 1939-1940 New York UniversityPress (New York, London) 1980, p. 82-83.failure of this Utopian dream and the substitu-tion of the nightmare of the repressive State wassaid to be partly due to the impoverishmentcaused by wars and revolutions. But an evenmore significant factor was the inability of. . . scientific and technological progress,(which) depended on the empirical habit ofthought . .. (to) survive in a strictly regimentedsociety."24The control of the State depended on the falsifi-cation of the past and the subjugation of thehuman spirit. In a world in which "nothing wasyour own except the few centimeters inside yourskull "... individuality had to be abolished.25The architecture of such a world, whether thesurviving relics of the 1930's or the pristinetowers of the Inner Party, shared the commoncharacteristics of sterile banality. They rejected adistinctive expression of style in favor of a rigidright angle conformity. It would seem thatOrwell's model for the built environment of 1984was not a flight of science-fiction, but a percep-tive recognition of the anti-historical characteris-tics of the contemporary International Style. Foras Philip Johnson has said "a glass box may beof our time but it has no history."26At the end of the novel, Winston, and his loverJulia are arrested in their secret hiding place bythe Thought Police who have been observingthem from a hidden telescreen, ironically placedbehind the rosewood framed engraving of theWrenian church. Brought to the ominous for-tress of the Ministry of Love, Winston begins along period of personal humiliation. Imprisonedwithin the windowless labyrinth Winston isunable to tell if he was high up near the roof ormany meters underground.27 It is within thishermetically sealed interior, as repressive anddegrading as any of the techniques of brain-washing, that Winston finally breaks down.However, even at the moment of the Party'striumph over the individual we are aware of afatal flaw in the State's attempt to destroy thepast. For Winston had already realized that onlyin "a solid object with no words attached"28could history survive. For there exists in archi-tecture a linkage to the past. To Winston the. . . "pale-colored pleasure of identifying St.Martin's church"29. . . meant that history wasnot stopped and although the church had beenrecycled for the use of the repressive State thecontinuity of architectural style as a document ofhistory continued to exist. -14 Orwell, op.cit., p. 70.15 Ibid, p. 82.16 Ibid, p. 83.17 Ibid, p. 83.18 Ibid, p. 84.19 Ibid, p. 84.20 The campaign against religion had been resumed in Russia asearly as 1944. The propoganda attacked religious superstitionand focused on the achievements of science and technology.Not only were many churches closed and sometimes demol-ished but converted to other uses. See Conquest, RobertReligion in the U.S.S.R. Frederick A. Praeger (New York andWashington) 1968, p. 21.21 Orwell, op.cit, p. 128.The calculated rejection of the past and of all historical asso-ciation in architecture is strongly reminiscent of the writing ofthe Italian Futurist Antonio Sant'Elia. In his Messaggio of1914 Sant'Elia asserted that the architecture of the futuremust abolish ". .. the discipline of historical styles" andsubstitute designs created for a ". . . scientific and techno-logical culture. See Curtis, op.cit., p. 73.22 Ibid, p. 138.23 Ibid, pp. 155-156.24 Ibid, p. 156.25 Orwell, op.cit., p. 2626 Eisenman, Peter Philip Johnson Writings Oxford UniversityPress (New York) 1979, p. 23. Statement concerning the1962 project for the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial.27 Orwell, op.cit., p. 188.28 Orwell, op.cit., p. 128.29 Orwell, op.cit., p. 95.