On Public and Private Space

From ‘an Interview with Cedric Price,’ Issue 1, Polytechnic of Central London Architecture Society:

The assumption that hobbling over the cobbles round the backside of a Barbara Hepworth sculpture is going to cause rich, random, social intercourse amongst the populace is foolish. I think a traffic jam in a square in Rome is probably more humane, even if its on the nasty side; at least the emotions are roused.

The University of Westminster used to be called The Polytechnic of Central London and in those days its architecture school occasionally produced a publication, it was called Issue. The first volume of Issue was published in February 1979, its theme was ‘Public Life - Public Place’. Not surprisingly, it is a theme which continues to fuel architectural discourse to this very day. However, what has changed since those days is the rise of the personal computer, or to be more precise of digital technologies more generally, as an active ingredient in the way life is lived in the modern city. Since, as we shall see, the notions of ‘public’ and ‘private’ already were hopelessly inadequate as a means of articulating the organisational patterns of the modern city, the value of using them today seems doubly doubtful. One item featured in Issue 1 was an article by Richard Goodwin, consisting in an interview with Cedric Price. In answer to the question ‘what is public life’ Price offered the following, important, observation:

I do think that public life, as a general term, is difficult to define. I don’t think, necessarily, that the congregation of a crowd has anything to do with public life: you can have very lonely people in a bus queue. The only common factor is that they all want a bus, and there’s a certain amount of unspoken manners being operated, that they make a queue. But it isn't a very public activity. 

Here Price was making the point, there are numerous places in the modern city, necessary to the functioning of the city, that have been designed to support activities that are essentially private and personal. Price gives the example of the bus stop to make his point, but other contributors gave other examples.

In an article by Stuart Knight the problem of the use of the terms ‘public’ and ‘private’ is confronted head-on: 

Problems seem to emerge when definitions of activities related to public and private life are articulated. Problematic because what are now seen as attributable to public life are in fact aspects of private life. Consumer goods, and the variety of buildings housing them, are related to the necessities of life and, therefore, part of the private domain, as are the consumption of food and drink, the purchase of clothing etc. Indeed, the buildings which house these ‘activities‘ display the ‘intimate’ qualities of domestic life, boutiques are redolent of dressing rooms, restaurants of family dining rooms, and department stores construct domestic interiors in anonymous volumes. ‘Advanced factories’ are designed with ‘T’ groups in mind in order that workers can ‘relate’ to small production groups - modelled on the family - working at their own pace, in ‘personalised’ zones. Similarly, London Board schools of the 19th Century - one of the many ‘public’ monuments of the Victorian suburbs - are demolished to make way for schools arranged and articulated as a series of home based units, complete with pitched roofs and domestic interiors. A domestic ‘image’ which has been destroyed in order to build ‘rationalised’ ‘social housing’ at whose base the school hovers as a bathetic irony. The categories have become reversed the ‘private’ housing has become ‘public’ and the school has become private. Just as the hospital, associated with sickness - a private concern - and from the 15th Century located in a domestic building, even in the 19th Century the cottage hospital was the rule, is now located in a public building complete with airport lounge foyer and attendant ennui, escalators and shops. A third category has interceded here - the social...

The ‘social realm’ gathers together all those characteristics of the ‘private realm’ which are capable of rationalisation - a continuous and ever expanding project - into a society of collective, and assumed, unified interests. The model utilised is that of the family, the purveyor of norms and standards, and is projected as the paradigm for all organisations from the school and commerce to local, national and international institutions and governments. This begins with monarchical rule which posits the ‘royal household’ as the principle and ultimate family of the state who sanction - in the constitutional variety - the apparatus of government; and culminates in the modern bureaucratic state in which no one rules but many manage. In Sweden for example, one third of the working population manages the remaining two thirds, who engage in productive work (About the same proportion as the Polytechnic of Central London). In the democratic state no theoretical debate takes place in public or private since there is no theory only the pragmatic elucidation of norms, standards, procedures and conventions applied mainly to the issues that are the preserve of the private realm...

Instead of ‘private’ and ‘public’, Knight was suggesting the concepts of ‘social’ and ‘intimate’ as more appropriate if we want to theorise the kinds of places and their functioning that arise in the modern city: 

The rise of the ‘intimate’ takes its place in opposition to the rise of the ‘social’, particularly in the last hundred years, where ‘modern individualism’ asserts itself as an incapacity to be at ‘home’ with the conventions and conformism of society or the nihilism implied in existing outside it....This unhappy dialectic accounts for the rise of poetry, music, certain forms of ‘modernist’ art, and that uniquely social form of writing - the novel; and the subsequent decline of the most public of arts - architecture, dependent as it is on characteristics derived from the public, rather than private domains.

Fortunately for architecture, the unhappy dialectic, to which Knight refers here, is based upon a misunderstanding, on the ideal of a perfect state of being, in which human life elegantly unfolds into activities and places that are uniquely and absolutely ‘private’ and ‘public’. However, just because it is based on a misunderstanding, does not mean that architecture is immune from it; the ideal of public & private is a problem for architecture and needs to be addressed, in theory, before it can become effective in practice. Unfortunately - and this is where Knight is correct to draw attention to the domain of the ‘social’ as a specifically modern phenomenon - since theory is not an issue for ‘social’ space, so has it tended to disappear from architectural education. But, without theory, architecture has no place in which to work away at its concepts, testing their validity and asking if they are true or false. The lack of theory in architecture schools makes architecture vulnerable, leaving it incapable of accounting for its productive value, either in the past, the present or the future.

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Doctor Watson teaches Architecture at the University of Westminster and she is the inventor of Air Grid, a colourful but mute lattice structure that has recently evolved into an animated population of flying computers, known as beetles. The record of the change is the subject of her new book: UTOPIAN ADVENTURE: The Corviale Void.