VIRTUAL: Prague Heritages
Abstract
This paper focuses on threshold as cultural spatio-architectural concretizations of the intimate in domestic architecture. In a time where public and private are blurring, where information technologies are omnipresent in every home and where professional and personal spaces are superimposed, the expressions of domestic intimacy tend to diminish at the risk of being erased in favor of an architecture indifferent to the socialization’s nuances . We argue that thresholds – as border between socialty territories (H.Hertzberger) – and the spatio-architectural systems they establish constitute spatial dispositive (M.Foucault, J.Estebanez) of social mediation in the dwelling created by material inscriptions of values and social traditions. E. Levinas’s intimate spatialized in the home initiated the theoretical framing, which has been specified by G.H.Mead’s notions of “self” and “other”. The polarization of the anthropological space by O.F.Bollnow was then introduced, followed by H.Arendt’s relation between private and public. Then came the common and the particular of J.Habermas, as well as the anterior and posterior regions of E.Goffman. The cases studies focus on articulation of spatial and social registers. Cases from the corpus of premodern and modern domestic architecture illustrate a typology of thresholds synthesizing the spatio-architectural manifestations of culturally embedded practices of inhabitation valuing intimate: Glass House by P.Chareau, B.Bjvoet and L.Dalbet (1928-1932), Maison Müller by A.Loos (1930), Tempe a Pailla by E.Gray (1934), Villa Mairea by A.Aalto and A.Alto (1938-1939), Fallingwater by F.L.Wright (1935-1939). These sites, already recognized for their heritage values, should be distinguished and valued as cultural testimonies of intimate dispositive.
Virginie LaSalle holds a Ph.D. in Environmental Design (2018) from the University of Montreal. Her thesis is about the meaning of home in domestic architecture and specialized housing space for vulnerable people. She is an assistant professor at the School of Design (UMontreal) in the interior design programs and a member of the Laboratoire d’étude de l’architecture potentielle (LEAP). Her teaching and research focus on the meaning of the built environment from a historical and cultural perspective, as well as on user theories applied to the design of environments for people with special needs