THE BE DROOM WI N DOW A N D T HE C OU RT YA RD
Architecture as Theatre of Social Coexistence
26 As in the two-channel video installation: Jesper Just, THIS NAMELESS SPECTACLE, 2011 <http://www. jesperjust.com/ thisnamelessspectacle. html> See figure. 27 Formulation adopted from Danish postmodernist writer Inger Christensen. Inger Christensen, Susanna Nied and Anne Carson, It (New York: New Directions, 2006), p. 12. 28 Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to ActorNetwork-Theory (Oxford [u.a.: Oxford Univ. Press, 2008).
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The socio-spatial network exceeds the geometrical and mathematical arrangement and is rather an intricate spatio-temporal system, that can be reconfigured by means of its architecture and architectural interventions. Doors, windows, balconies, loggias and courtyards have other functions than their functional use: they are also apertures that mediate the experience of the social entity of the city, through allowing views, shutting out and exposing. In a sense, the architecture is the scenography, theatre or framework that allows this to theatrical play and social negotiation to take place. The collective being of the city is impressive and overwhelming. In fact, we are all part of each others lives, in an indirect way: and we all have the ability to change and alter fraction of this relation. A simple thing like the reflection of the sun in my window that can be diverted into the house of someone else26, on the other side of the courtyard, can perhaps ‘set each other in motion’27, in some way or another. This is a networked interplay between people, things and space – human and non-human actors – similar to Actor-NetworkTheory28. Even the seasons and weather conditions are part of this infraordinary choreography: trees screen the view in the summer and the elements blur or filters it temporally. Even though the window panorama most often works as an unnoticed backdrop of everyday life, from time to time one catches glimpses of it, acknowledging a world beyond our interior. Obviously, architecture needs to maintain the balance between what exposed and what is not, though spatial demarcations of public and private. Nevertheless, to screen everything away (for instance with polyester window film) may provide an unconditional protection of the private, but the result would be an architecture and city that is opaque and does not allow casual social contact, encounters and negotiation between its inhabitants. Bringing this back to the discussions in the former chapter and urban biopsy ‘The Stairway and the Apartment’, one could critically argue, that to critically question the assumed divide between the public and the personal (visually, acoustically and spatially). Perhaps, this understanding need to be obliterated in order to quality the socio-urban condition and thus maintain social coexistence through the infraordinary dimension, such as perceived through a bedroom window.
Three neighbours interacting from Roy Andersson’s ‘ You The Living’.