Military landscape, camouflage clothing and architectures of surveillance

This chapter explores how visuality shaped the modern battlefield, and considers how khaki clothing was designed in response to military architectures of surveillance. When soldiers prepare for battle, the uniform transforms the civilian body into a military presence, but dressing rituals took on a special significance with khaki, a colour developed for army clothing in response to the changing use of military space. Rationalising the visual field of perception was an early twentieth century military concern and khaki service dress responded to this growth in military surveillance. By linking First World War representations of the body with military landscape this chapter situates khaki uniform within the architecture of the modern battlefield.

Publisher's text about this book:

Ordnance: War + Architecture & Space investigates how strategies of warfare occupy and alter built and other landscapes. Ranging across the modern period from the eighteenth century to the present day, the book presents a series of case-studies which operate in and between a number of settings and scales, from the infrastructures of the battlefield to the logistics of the domestic realm. The book explores the patterns, forms and systems that articulate militarised spaces, excavates how these become re-circulated and reconfigured within other domains and discusses the often ephemeral legacies and residues of these architectures. The complexities of unpicking the spaces of the 'fog of war' are addressed by an inter-disciplinary approach which deploys graphic and textual analyses and techniques to provide new and unique perspectives on a hitherto underexplored aspect of architectural and spatial discourse: the tactics and programmes through which the built environment has historically been made to respond to the imperatives and threats of conflict and, in the context of the 'war on terror', continues to be so in ever more pervasive ways.