"[1] The origins of the concept may be traced in Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon and in the Enlightenment bienfaisance as expressed in the institutional reform of prisons and hospitals.
However the notion only gained generally currency and universal applicability with the rise of behaviourism, functionalism and the utopian social programme of the Modernist architectural movement.
The term was first coined by Maurice Broady in his 1966 paper Social theory in Architectural Design [2] which also roundly criticised the authoritarian nature of this belief.
"[3] The determinist belief was a contributory factor in the numerous slum clearances of the post-War industrialised world (see Herbert J. Gans).
Despite being a widely held, if not always articulated, theory the premise was not sustained by social research, for example the "Hawthorne experiments" by Mayo at Harvard found no direct correlation between work environment and output.