Jeremy Bentham’s inspection house, as a 3D model you can turn, cut open and step inside. Go through it step by step, or explore it freely, and tap a label to learn what each part does.
A demo of what educators can make with Claude. The panopticon is an example topic, and the content is quick and unchecked.
Step 1 of 11
Turn and zoom
Viewpoint
Show or hide
These use the controls in Explore freely. Choose Explore freely first, or press Set this up to go straight there.
Choose From a cell, then switch Inspector in the tower on and off. Does anything you can see change?
Choose From the tower and look around. How many people can you see, and how clearly?
Choose Cutaway and switch on See inside the tower. What does the design hide from the cells, and how?
This is a simplified diagram, not a copy of Bentham’s drawings. It has 96 cells in four tiers for illustration, and leaves out the galleries, stairs and roof he specified. Bentham used partitions inside the tower so no light showed through; here that is a solid dark core. No panopticon was built exactly as he planned, though later prisons such as Presidio Modelo in Cuba, built from 1926, borrowed the idea. Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish (1975) made it a symbol of power that works through the possibility of being watched.