Coercion

Educational architecture is indeed mostly of modernist influence. Regular schools all over the Western world display geometric assemblages, large spaces where students can be observed, and rooms & corridors which shape their movements. Architecture is the first element of bodily standardisation – and thus the first step towards coercion.

This clip shows a dramatic moment in Gus Van Sant’s poetic investigation into Columbine, shot as a video game and thus trying to embody the experience of the students rather than explain it. It is the perfect metaphor of the coercive relationship between space and body – and of the fine line between utopia and dystopia.