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0:08
So first thing, I thank you all for coming, for being here with us today because it's really-- we're very aware it's a very tricky, a very busy time in the semester. So thank you so much for choosing to be here. I really think it's a very special occasion and definitely think it's worth the choice of being here. So I know it's-- we always say the same. But it's difficult, it's almost impossible. Rick Sennett doesn't need an introduction. But it would be really almost verging on the ridiculous
0:43
to go through a list of his publications, to go through a list of his academic positions, of his awards and prizes received. But it would be also equally unnecessary to introduce him in the more literal or even phenomenological sense of the word "introduction." So we don't need to bring him in with a introduction, to bring him into the GSD because he's already part of the GSD. So in a sense, I would say that he's already part of many of us through his writings, through his books.
1:15
On the other hand, Richard is an old friend of the GSD and a part of the [inaudible]. Richard, he wrote his PhD here at Harvard in the History of American Civilization. And then he stayed for a while as a fellow of the Joint Center for Urban Studies, at Harvard-MIT for a number of years. And then later on, he came back as-- I don't know exactly the title, but something like the senior researcher, senior visitor, senior fellow, senior something.
1:43
Definitely senior, sorry about that-- of the Loeb Fellowship program, just four years ago, something like that. And then I had also the pleasure and the privilege to teach with him for a couple of years in the Elements of Urban Design Studio here at Harvard, at the GSD. So that's what I need to start with. When we were discussing about how to address these symposium together with the whole committee, this symposium on inside matters that Keil Moe has so intelligently and really
2:19
carefully put together, one of the first names that came to our minds to really open the conversation and definitely frame the possible questions was that of Richard Sennett. Richard Sennett has definitely spent most of his intellectual life addressing issues of inside and outside, inner and the subjective, as well as the outer and the more physical, the self and the city, the belief city and the physical city, living and dwelling, all of those.
2:51
And he's trying to basically analyze, understand, inhabit, and bridge those divides. And I think that's something which is absolutely relevant and very important. On a final, more personal note, I would say that I first encountered Richard Sennett through his writings, through his books, through a very special book for me, which was Flesh and Stone. It was a book that changed the way I saw a lot of things, that really opened lots of doors for me.
3:16
And then I tried to read as much as he had written. And at that time, I never really imagined, it never crossed my mind that I would be meeting the man behind the books. So when I finally met the man behind the books, I was surprised-- really, not surprised at all, actually, because in the end, that's one of the few things that gives you a little bit of faith in mankind, that the great people happen to be great people sometimes. So really, I enjoyed the fact that the mind behind the books
3:46
was even more or at least equally interesting as the books themselves. And that was a real pleasure. So we enjoyed, really, being with him. He was disproportionately generous with our students and with ourselves. And I have to say that. And he always shared so many insights with us. So lastly, I'd like to say that-- I had a few notes, but I really didn't read them, so-- to try to define Richard, it'd be, once again, really difficult. He's a social analyst, a social intellectual, a thinker,
4:19
an educator, definitely. And borrowing from his own definition of craftsmanship as the skill of doing things well, I would say that he's a craftsman of thinking, a craftsman of teaching, and a craftsman of living. And actually, what's really nice is that he continuously reminds us that craftsmanship or being a craftsman is not a professional skill, but a life skills. So definitely, interior matters. Keil will talk about that in the afternoon. And Richard Sennett matters.
4:48
So really, join me in welcoming Richard Sennett back to the GSD. [applause] Thanks Richard. Thank you so much. [laughter] I'll see you later. Wow, well, after that wonderful introduction, I'm really going to disappoint you because I've been thinking about something. And the thoughts I have about this are-- I'm just trying to think out with you now. And the background to this is that I had a big shift in my own life as an urbanist when, three years ago, I became involved in a project
5:42
that the UN puts on every 20 years, called Habitat III. And this is something sponsored by UN-Habitat, which is based in Nairobi, Kenya, which does not have a great airport. And it's an assessment of the state of the built environment. And this year, it's focused on cities. And I and my team are readying a manifesto for it with its director, Joan Cos. Has he ever spoken here? Joan Clos? He's the former mayor of Barcelona. You have to get him here.
6:24
So this was, as you'll see, something unexpected to me about thinking about a theme that I've thought about a lot in my life in other ways.
6:39
And I guess you have to tell me what's wrong with the account I'm going to give you. I'll talk for about 50 minutes. It may seem that what I'm talking about has nothing to do with urban design. But at the end, I want to make clear that it has everything to do with it. I'm interested in the relationship between the interior and interiority, that is, between the enclosure of physical space and the notion of subjectivity. Oh, and I should say, I'm not going to show a single slide, not one.
7:23
I'm interested in this relationship. And there is an account which says that the two are deeply linked, that the articulation of interior space was part of what enabled the development of a certain kind of bourgeois-- initially, bourgeois-- European sense of the subjective life, something sheltered and enclosed. And what I wanted to do is give you an alternative account of that, where interiority is actually linked to the exterior rather than the interior. OK? That's the theme I want to pursue,
8:13
that this standard account leaves out a different way of thinking about interiority as subjective experience and behavior in exterior spaces. And as I say, what has jogged my own thinking about this is experiences that I'm going to describe to you, particularly in Cairo. Let me first give you a brief account or a summary of this standard account of the relation between the interior and interiority. The standard account begins with the fact that in the past-- it's so wonderful.
9:06
I think that means the 15th and 16th centuries-- that interior space was not differentiated. People slept in the same rooms they ate in. Bedding was brought into the room. They slept there. It was taken away in the morning. They ate. They did their business there, and so on. The interior was a space in which there was no concept of privacy. And this is a standard account that historians give, including things that, for instance, what we think of as very private acts like sex
9:52
were things that happened in the presence of other people. This is Lawrence Stone, who was a great historian of sexuality, argued this, that basically, sex was not a private experience, that people-- well, they didn't tell other people where to sleep, or they drew the curtains around the bed if they could afford curtains, and so on. But the people-- there was not a private room in which people had that kind of intimate life. And Stone argues from that, as have many others,
10:28
that the notion of privacy and the interior, there was no real correlation between them. The next stage in this standard account is that a new ideal of domesticity that appears in the middle of the 18th century among the European bourgeoisie dictates a kind of new interior space, one in which separate rooms perform separate functions, particularly sleeping, which is segregated from other activities, and that the space of domesticity is not the space in which the public is received
11:16
inside, that is, visitors. And you can see this in the development of housing in the 18th century in London, for instance, in the 1740's, where you have differentiated rooms for different functions.
11:36
And the idea about this was-- and it's initially an idea of Rousseau's, which is that in the shelter of private domestic space, that subjectivity is set free. He argues this in Julie, the famous novel and also la nouvelle Eloise, that a different kind of subjectivity, one which guards the self, is something to be protected against the outside, is enabled by the development of the division of labor in interior space. I should say that this is not merely the interior.
12:31
This story about the interior is not merely architecture. It's also something about the clothing that people wore because it's certainly true that in the 1830's and 1840's, the idea for ordinary people is that they would dress differently when they were in the family than when they were in the realm of strangers. Amazing to us that it should ever be thought otherwise. But a lot of the iconography of people's clothing shows that it's something that before the 18th century,
13:14
that clothing is clothing. You wear it wherever. And that this differentiation begins. It's further articulated as houses got warmer in the 18th century by the adoption of women, of negligee clothing, the wearing of muslin dresses, for instance, very thin. Women even sometimes wetted them down to show off their breasts and things like that. This became intimate behavior, so that when we talk about the interior, we're also talking about a kind of bodily comportment
13:58
and bodily dress, as well as an architectural space.
14:06
What's deduced from this is that this private realm, according to this story, creates a kind of zone of openness and frankness and sharing that constitutes what we think about as interiority, that it's a space in which people feel free to show themselves as they really are, either physically or in terms of their behavior. It's a story told by people like Stone or by, in a different way, Phillippe Aries. Have any of you read this book? Is it still-- I don't know if it's still
14:48
read, Centuries of Childhood, fabulous book which tries to detail all of this from the worlds of children, what it meant to be in an increasingly interiorized, privatized space, that the nursery, for instance, becomes an aspiration for middle class people to segregate children in the nursery.
15:16
It is something you can read, this subjective aspect of it, in 19th century novels like Balzac's Le Pere Goriot, where the interior becomes a space of revelation, a revelation that doesn't occur in the street. And in my domain, in social theory, it is behind ideas like Gaston Bachelard's notions of shelter in The Poetics of Space. Another book people read? It's a great book. And the idea is this mythical hut that he has-- the interior space, is a space of opening up.
16:01
In his famous statement, [speaking german]. That is, being is something rounded. It's enclosed.
16:12
So that's a standard account. The contrary account-- a contrary account is given by Georg Simmel. And that's in an essay called Metropolis and Mental Life. And it starts in a totally different place. It starts actually in Potsdamer Platz in Berlin. And Simmel was the first theorist to think, what is the theory of the street as embodied by Potsdamer Platz, which was a huge shopping street filled with a diversity of people. Most people in Berlin tried to get as far away from the lower
16:54
classes as possible. We're talking about people. But for shopping, they were brought together. And it was a very dynamic street. And Simmel said, what can we make theoretically of it? Very, very sympathetic to my way of thinking. And his answer was this, that in a street, what you get is a kind of overstimulation physically, and that the response to that is what he calls blase behavior, on the one hand, that is, wearing a mask so that you show nothing to people. You're not really there.
17:31
You're blase. And on the other hand, behind that mask, there is the feelings that you're having by being in the street. And these feelings, these sensations, are your subjectivity. That is what urban subjectivity is about. It's a reaction to being exposed to difference and complexity, which divides perception so that on the one hand, there is very much indifference or seeming indifference. Simmel takes this a further step in saying it articulates rational behavior, which is very instrumental.
18:13
And on the other, behind the mask, you're still feeling all of this.
18:21
In other words, you are divided. You know what he's talking about in terms of eye contact, how important it is on the street to manage it so that it's not challenging. Right? You can feel dissed if you stare too much at somebody else or complimented. But we won't go there. That's the experience of old age. But the notion is that you're managing your comportment so that you're very neutral on the outside. But you're still stimulated by that. You're aware of this other person coming towards you.
19:04
Is he of another race or something like that?
19:09
The importance about this is that this is an urban account of interiority, that is, of subjective feeling, linked to an exterior condition, that is, of exposure to others. You try to show that you're cool, but you aren't cool inside. There's an inside-outside divide, Simmel says. But it's one that's made by the street rather than removed from the street. And furthermore, he says that your subjective feelings are actually heightened by the exterior stimuli of the street.
19:54
Rather than trying to neutralize them, as in the standard account, to get away from them in order to open up and shelter, the notion is you're feeling more the more you're on the street, on that exterior. So these are two contrary accounts, one which links the interior with interiority and the other which links interiority in the sense of subjective feeling to living exteriorly in the street. Now, this is a huge long prologue to what I want to talk to you about.
20:33
I have been a part of this UN work. I have been spending a lot of time in Islamic cities. And particularly, I've spending time in Cairo. And through a variety of circumstances, I, as a man, have been able to talk to various women in Cairo about wearing the burka, this full covering. And 'm interested in clothing and appearance on the street. And somehow, there were many male minders in the room the times that I have done this. But so I was interested in women and the street.
21:25
And someone said to me, in full burka said to me, you know, what this going into the street allows me to do as long as I'm dressed is become free of my mother and my children.
21:46
And if I could put words in her mouth, that there is a kind of relief from the tyranny of intimacy in a more anonymous realm. And we began hearing a lot about that because we we're interested for this UN project in the relation between gender, interior and exterior. The bourgeois construction of that is that gendered space is interior space, right? That's part of the standard account. But we were finding something else made complicated by the fact that, in this religious culture, being exposed
22:28
didn't actually mean being protected. You could imagine the burka as a kind of mask in a way. But it's not really accurate because wearing of it made people feel free to go into public with this tinge, as our researchers are now finding, that it's a relief from the domestic realm in which they become the prisoner of children, even more than men on the inside.
23:04
I and the researchers working for me were hearing this story in a variety of contexts. And we decided-- and this is not an Islamic story-- that freedom from Gemeinschaft, from something warm, opening up to other people, is something that is inflected by young people making voluntary moves from country to city. The idea of being free from the intimate knowledge of others is something-- now, this is a restricted thing-- of people who could move that was added onto the economic imperatives
23:48
for wanting to move. So this was an account which was not Simmel's account. And it wasn't Eurocentric. It seemed to us that this relationship of the exterior to something, to the self, was something that had much more modern overtones to it.
24:11
But what is a kind of interiority, of subjectivity, that people gain by getting away from interior spaces?
24:25
Come back to Europe. Is it Degas who painted "The Absinthe"? [inaudible] d'Absinthe? Antoine. Was it Degas or was it-- was it Toulouse-Lautrec? Anyhow, but you know the image. I should have shown this image. This is one image I should have shown. It's a woman sitting alone at a table with a glass of absinthe.
24:56
And we can think of that scene of being alone in public, even more by the table itself-- because one of the things that happened in the 19th century was long common tables the people sat at in bars-- well, they didn't have bars, but pubs, cafes, were replaced by ever smaller tables so that the space, the exterior space became more of a space that was hospitable to single people alone, whereas in the 18th century, there were only long tables. And if you sat at them, anybody could talk to you.
25:36
And you could intervene in anybody else's affairs. So there is something about privacy forming in public which is counter to, I think, the standard story. But it asks a question. What's happening here? Or consider again the fact that 30% to 35% of adults who live in big cities now are single. This is a phenomenon researched by my friend, Eric Klinenberg. It's incredibly important for us.
26:19
And they're single in the proper sense. The number of people who co-habit or are married to other people is constantly shrinking in big cities.
26:32
All of these conditions, is this a sign of urban loneliness? Are they looking for [? baslov's ?] design? Are they deprived of the opportunity of having a rich emotional life because they are alone? I would say not necessarily. And here's my own argument. I believe that being alone in impersonal conditions enables a certain kind of interior work, a certain kind of subjective activity. First of all, it's reflexive, that the opportunity of being alone is a chance to ask, what's it all about,
27:24
without the intrusion of others. That is, you don't have a stimulation from-- this is something I think against Simmel. That kind of just being alone, detached from other people, is not a state of being blase or being defensive against them. It's a state in which reflection is possible because you are released from Gemeinschaft, and from the physical stimulation of other people.
28:06
The second aspect of this interiority could be called observational cruising. And not just gay people do it.
28:19
Most psychogeographies are not about people engaging the outside, but observing it. A great example of this is in Sinclair, the British-- do you know him? Yeah, this is probably the greatest psychogeographer at work today. And it's always something in which the eye is engaged visually. But it doesn't become imprecated with actual engagements with other people. That's quite an interesting thing to me. The model for this in one way is Christopher Isherwood's Berlin
29:06
Stories, whose first line is, "I am a camera." It's a brilliant piece of writing. But I would say more than that we develop an interior insight, not through interaction, but through the freedom of being able to observe without interacting. And when I say this, this is something-- you can find traces of what I'm arguing, too, in Walter Benjamin's travel writings, for instance, his travel writings in Russia, in which he says, "I'm free here because I can't speak the language.
29:58
And I'm seeing more than people who actually speak Russian." And just little traces of that in Benjamin.
30:10
See you later. He's a dean. He has to work. I mean, you know? [laughter] Let's not get lost on that. So the importance of this is that interiority is something that is more complicated than simple withdrawal.
30:37
Do you understand what I'm saying? What's wrong with the standard account is that interiority is not a detachment from the world. It's a particular kind of relationship with the world, one which is reflexive, which is what I think of as an observational cruising. And finally, and I think this is the most important, that this condition that I'm describing is one which allows the work of memory to go on. And the reason it does is because under these conditions in public, the work of memory can
31:26
be floating and intermittent. Think about the difference between-- I'm sure it's Degas-- between The Absinthe, the [inaudible] d'Absinthe, that woman sitting at the table and somebody lying on a shrink's couch. Expensive. You have 45 minutes. You have to put things together. Of course, you have free association. But what you're paying for is something that ultimately makes an interpretation, a story. I think the work of memory in the suspended space of the experience is more floating.
32:12
You're not yanked to the notion of making explanations. You are in a different kind of time when you're in that exterior space. And Bachelard, not in The Poetics of Space, but it is more-- before he wrote these books, he was a historian and theorist of science. And he is the author of basically the theory of epistemic break. And basically, what being in this kind of floating space, I think, enables in the exterior is the experience of epistemic breaks,
33:01
of things coming and broken down and then going. When we talk about daydreaming, in the Freudian sense, there's always the revelation of some inner gravamen, of some inner logic. But in an epistemic break, you're not linked to that. You're into something that is more open.
33:31
And I think in sum what I'm trying to say was said by Seneca a very long time ago when he wrote that "Never was he less lonely than when he was alone in the midst of the crowd," that solitude in public is a way to know oneself. Now, I do have a practical side. I'm trying to do some research about this into two domains, how this kind of subjectivity, this freedom from Gemeinschaft, works among groups of African immigrants to London and among groups
34:20
of countryside Chinese who have come to Shanghai. I got spurred on to this by these discussions we had with women in Cairo. How is this constructed outside? I know how it's constructed in Western context. But what does that feel like? What is "Stadluft macht frei" as a freedom from the local, the known, look like to people outside that Western context?
34:56
Now, as I said, this may seem very far from urban design. But it isn't. And this is the last thing I'd like to say to you. And then maybe we can have some talk. Almost all the design ideologies that I think animate us are about making communities stronger, about bringing people together, about creating convivial spaces, about a street which has got that warm James Jacobs, feel good about your neighbor. Right? I mean, I would say it's the great unspoken thing that urban designers have.
35:47
We should make more community.
35:52
And if you take on board what I have described to you, we are neglecting spaces in which people can dwell alone in safety, in public. We're neglecting to think about what kinds of spaces would enable the young mothers that I was talking to in Cairo to get away from their children and their families. We're not freeing them. And I think for us as designers, we need to begin to try and translate-- this is my own view-- that notion of "Stadluft macht
36:39
frei," of being freed from the constraints of domesticity safely into something, our practices, you know. And It could be something as seemingly trivial as what kind of park benches are you creating. Do you have spaces in parks which are nothing like the spaces that Olmstead wanted, which were all spaces of conviviality, but spaces where you can actually be alone?
37:21
This has also been an issue for me in thinking about-- I think I'm not going to talk about that-- in thinking about the use of social media in public, which I think is a very, very narrow and constricted thing. Somebody told me-- and I was in Bangkok. And I was having another one of these discussions. And somebody told me-- it was a young teenage girl who said, well, whenever I go out, I shut off my phone because my parents can't know where I am. I thought so, so wonderful. [laughter]
38:08
But that's a whole other issue about this, about what's the relationship between social media, interiority and exteriority. As I read this, you could make money off of the standard paradigm if you're Mark Zuckerberg by destroying as much-- by interiorizing the space of social media, bringing people closer and closer together. But I don't want to talk about that. What I want to talk about, or what I want to impress on you, is that the emphasis on sociable space
38:52
is something that we've got to rethink because for lots of people, that's not why they want to be in public. They want something. They want an interior life, if you follow what I'm saying, a life where they can practice cruising, reflexivity, observational cruising, or cruising, reflexivity, in which the work of memory can work because they're alone. And that's not something that we, as designers, that's not in our heads.
39:35
I mean, I think the issue is what kinds of spaces can we make so that somebody can sit at a table in a cafe, drink a glass of absinthe, smoke a cigarette, and reflect. You know? That's really the relationship between interiority and the exterior. So that's what I wanted to say to you about this. I am not sure I have-- I am just beginning to think about this. And as I say, it's the reflections that I've had, which have really been changed by seeing outside Western context, the liberation
40:22
that impersonal public space which allows people to be alone, how valuable that is to many people. And how the freedom from Gemeinschaft is something that is freedom for lots of the people elsewhere in the world. So I'd love to get your comments on this. I don't know how we do this. Shall I take them? Yeah. Maybe we have the lights up since you're all in GSD darkness. Is that possible? Yeah, but you have to shout. Yeah. Shout. I'll try. Within your account of liberation
41:14
that happens in a public space, do you have any thoughts or could you reflect a little bit about-- OK, I'll restart. Within your account of the liberation that occurs in public space and the kind of individual freedoms, do you have any thoughts or can you reflect a little bit about the indoor public space, the infrastructure of shops, cafes, what Stan Anderson's called the occupiable public space as a enabling infrastructure for this sort of behavior. Or where does it fit in your story?
41:52
Right, that's a wonderful question. And that's maybe a beginning point for you in this as a designer because going back to the 19th century, that's what an arcade was. It was an indoor public space protected from the elements. And we're building lots of versions on that. I think that there are a couple of issues about it, which is that the logic of a lot of shopping malls, for instance, interior public space, is for people to keep going, circulating as much as possible.
42:40
The whole notion is that they're movement systems, that they're footfalls. That's economically how they work, so that a more complicated, multipurpose public space, multipurpose indoor space like this, flies against a certain kind of logic, of economic logic. The other thing we've been finding, because we've been doing a study as part of this thing of shopping centers in Latin America, is that basically, the interiors, they're guarded and that there's a lot of social selection going on,
43:23
economics selection at the gates to these interior public spaces. If you don't look like you have money, you're not going to get in. And what happens is that therefore, the parking lots of shopping malls become the true public spaces. They're usually not planted.
43:47
That's where kids hang out. That's where a lot of music gets made and so on. But it's all restricted. With those two caveats in mind, I think what I'm talking about could be built inside if you created a space that was multi-functional and in which economic motion was not the dominant program for the space itself. It's really interesting to me. I'm sure all of you have seen the Arcades Project that Susan Buck-Morss put together with Benjamin, with all those photos.
44:27
There's nowhere to sit in those arcades. And you're standing all the time. And the reason for that is simply that the notion about the arcade was that you are never in a space of reflection. Right? You're in a space of consumption. So in principle, I think you could do it. Francine Houben is trying to build something just like a more multi-functional space like this. Is it in Okinawa? No, it's in Taipei.
45:09
But it requires something other than capitalist logic, consumer logic, to make it work.
45:21
I guess the last thing I'd say about this is that the idea of exterior there is exterior to something which is [french] which is protected, something which is controllable. The exterior is something-- it's not a [inaudible] space, which is the ultimate of this. And the one thought I had-- I should just say this also. Your question has really wound me up. People have said, well, isn't that what Jane Jacobs thinks when she talks about people being in the street and so on. And it is and it isn't.
46:01
I mean, you remember she has this notion of eyes on the street as a means of protection? It's a question of the no crime if you can see out your window. It's a question of whose eyes they are. If it's your mother's, she's not just looking to see whether somebody is going to rob you. If she's an Islamic mother, she's looking to see that you don't talk to any man. So it's the whole issue of the panoptic element is I think it's imprecated in our ideas of privacy. It's about surveillance.
46:48
And to make interior or exterior spaces, we'd also have to maybe shut off the CCTV cameras. But it could be done. And Francine is trying to do it in Okinawa. No, in Taipei.
47:08
Ask me another question. This was such a good question. Yeah. [chatting in background]
47:25
It's not actually. I'm curious to know if you've been thinking about spaces of the elderly. It strikes me that with a growing awareness of dementia and Alzheimer's, in terms of triggering a kind of interior space of the imagination and the idea of opening, creating a way in which one might activate memory, it seems to me like the aged or the typology of these kinds of facilities, which also need to create physical interiors-- hard boundary physical interiors really need some rethinking.
48:22
And I think that this particular constituency of the elderly, it seems to me to strike a chord with many of the things that you've been describing. Right. Other than the fact that I am very elderly, I hadn't thought much about this. And I think that's a defamation of-- you know, this is a big divide for us. Most of the cities that UN-Habitat is dealing with are cities predominantly of the young.
48:56
Most European cities, and to some extent the Japanese and Chinese, are much older. But just thinking about what you say, yeah, it resonates to me. I mean, in my own case, I would commit suicide before going into an old age home. I want to be on the street. I want to die on the street.
49:27
But what I don't want is a kind of happy, clappy community stuff that's always provided for the elderly, which is kind of infantilization.
49:42
But I really haven't thought very much about this because our whole focus on this project is what to do about this mass of young people, many of whom are fleeing from community. That's why they're going-- when their parents say, you don't know anybody in Shanghai, they go, right! [laughter] You know? That's a completely different configuration. But would it mean-- well, I have to think about this. It would be very painful for me. Then I have to think about it.
50:22
I mean, this elderly issue, I understand, is a big one here. But it's quite something-- the whole meaning of exteriority is quite different in most of the places we've been.
50:37
Ask me a final question. And then we'll have-- do it. Or final two questions. I just have a question concerning the existing conditions of domestic interiors because this is still a reality in some ways. And there is also the concept of family, something that is persisting. So what about these spaces? I think that there are many architects that are trying to think of it. But what is your position on that? Well, I'm not sure I have a position.
51:11
I've lived all my life in lofts, in basically one room. So that's a personal thing about this. But do you think-- I ask you this as architects-- that by creating more fluid interiors while separating the interior from the exterior, having less porosity between inside and outside, but more purely internal porosity, exacerbates a problem of oppressive Gemeinschaft or solves it? I would think it exacerbates it. I don't know. I really don't know. But I mean, the notion, it doesn't just
52:01
come with a notion of freeing up interior space. It's also a kind of divorce from being outside.
52:15
In that regard, I wanted to just say one other thing. One of the things we're documenting is the trouble that planners in both Beijing and Shanghai are having finding a sociable alternative for-- both cities had these vast fabric of courtyard buildings, the Lilong and Hutong had these courtyards in both Shanghai-- all destroyed very quickly. And what's happened in both places have been replaced by much more hygienic, better structures, physical structures.
53:09
So our Chinese colleagues tell us, it's a sociological crisis because there's no outside anymore. In upmarket parts of Shanghai, for instance, there are beautiful exterior gardens that are planted. And there's nobody in them. They are surround. So I think part of this issue for very rapidly urbanizing places like that is when you destroy one kind of fabric which has an outside-- the courtyards in Shanghai were Shikumen. They were based-- well, I don't go into it.
53:55
But basically, people lived outside. They cooked there. When it was hot, they slept out there.
54:06
They had a sociable life in the courtyard. And the destruction of that kind of housing has provoked-- in the case of Shanghai, it's now having rates of juvenile delinquency which are going through the roof. There is a social breakdown that's occurring. One reference for this, if you want to get a local one here-- there's an old article by somebody name Mark Freid, F-R-E-I-D, called Grieving for a Lost Home, which is about what happened when the West End in Boston was destroyed.
54:48
And it's the same thing we're seeing today, although this is on a giant scale. I mean, mile after mile of this. So what is the answer to that? Is simply making the interior more intense but sealing it off from the exterior? Is that an answer? I guess the architectural issue about this would be porosity.
55:17
Does it make sense?
55:21
But then you'd really-- maybe we should do studio on this. Maybe it's a question of how to work it out so that the porous exterior is one that's also with freedom from the interior rather than bring it in. I see what we'll do the year after next. You'll have to endure my musings for that. But that's to me what this is about. It's not a simple thing about just taking down walls. There's a much more complicated phenomena. Let's have a last question. And then I'll sit. How about you?
56:01
You've defined interiority as a psychological subjectivity. But I think we use the word "interiority" in other ways, too, such as the inherent qualities of interior things that can be defined, the kinds of things that mark interior space inherently. And I was wondering if you could address one of the breakdowns between the interior and the exterior by talking about formal interiority in exterior spaces. So for example, those courtyard houses in China
56:36
have a great deal of interiority in their exterior spaces, where the streets of Cairo where people are playing dominoes, et cetera, bringing the domestic world into the exterior spaces. So the idea of interiority in exterior spaces as a formal idea. Right.
56:58
This is a really good not only comment, but criticism. And what you make me think is that what-- I wouldn't say it's just a psychological definition of interiority. I mean, I would think of it as cognitive, certainly, and emotional. But it also supposes a certain kind of social relationship to other people. But I think you're absolutely spot on about the idea that there are formal elements to finding interiority. Windows that open or don't open. I really have to think more about that.
57:45
I just don't know how you would get there. And it's the kind of thing that I think we should do in urbanism, which is try to move from a vision of the social whole to actually being specific about what role the built environment plays or doesn't play in this. You could imagine that the conditions, actual architectural conditions of a house, don't matter to the explanation I've given. The only architectural element that would matter would be the wall, the barrier between inside and outside.
58:31
And I can understand my argument could be reduced to that primitive level. I don't want to do that. But you're going to have to tell me how not because it's a question about-- I mean, it's a designed question. How much and what kinds of things in design would mitigate against that? You know? And I just don't know yet. I think we're going to do this as our next studio. Well, thank you very much for this. I'm sorry this is very disorganized. I'm just starting to think about this.
59:09
I am hoping, by the way, that somehow we'll be able to bring the work of Habitat III here in 2017 for a conference or something like that so you can see what we're doing.
59:33
And I'll see you, I guess, in a year or so. Thank you very much. [applause]
59:49
And don't forget your watch, yes. Richard, thank you so much for all of those thoughts. I think I understand even more now why we gave you your own hour-long slot to speak to us individually in public about these notions of interiority and subjectivity. We were going to pick back up at 3:30 with a series of three conversations. So please join us then. There's also most, if not all, of an exhibit up about some projects within the school related to interior matters.
1:00:24
So please feel free to circulate through there. But we'll start back up at 3:30. Thank you very much, Richard. [applause]
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