Handbook of Tyranny maps the routine cruelties of contemporary governance — walls, prison cells, refugee camps, crowd-control infrastructure — through forensic technical illustrations that render bureaucratic violence with the same cold precision used to design it.
About This Book
This updated edition of Theo Deutinger's landmark work turns the visual language of architecture and engineering against itself. Rather than extraordinary acts of violence, the book documents the ordinary: the legal frameworks, spatial designs, and material systems through which states exercise control over human bodies and movement. Each illustration is deliberately dry, technical, and factual — the graphic equivalent of a regulation or compliance document. The result is a sustained argument about the relationship between political power, territoriality, and systemic cruelty. For architects, designers, and spatial practitioners, it is an unsettling mirror: the same drawing conventions used to build housing are here used to document oppression.
Key Features
- 127 pages of detailed nonfictional graphic illustrations documenting contemporary systems of surveillance, detention, and border control
- Author: Theo Deutinger
- Updated edition with additional statistics and eight new pages
- Over 1,000 illustrations
- Published by Lars Muller Publishers
What You'll Discover
- How the technical drawing — architecture's most neutral tool — becomes a vehicle for exposing the spatial logic of authoritarian infrastructure
- The specific material and design systems behind walls and fences, refugee camps, police tactics, and prison environments in use globally today
- Why the stealth design of authoritarian intervention makes it difficult to trace cause and effect — and how direct depiction breaks that concealment
- The tension between society's drive toward regulation and protection and the scale of repressive enforcement that drive demands
About the Author
Theo Deutinger is an architect, writer, and designer of sociocultural maps. He holds regular lecture and teaching engagements at institutions including Harvard University Graduate School of Design, the Strelka Institute Moscow, and the Bauhaus in Dessau.
Specifications
- Format: Hardcover
- Pages: 127
- Dimensions: 210 x 297 mm
- Language: English
- ISBN: 9783037787199
- Publisher: Lars Muller Publishers
- Publication Date: [Details available upon request]
Perfect For: Architects, spatial theorists, urban researchers, and design educators examining the political dimensions of built environments and the ethics of spatial practice.