The literary critic Walter Benjamin came to see the nineteenth-century private house as not only separate from the public world but, more significantly, as a retreat from it. Perhaps for a similar reason, Swedish artist Carl Larsson was moved to devote a series of watercolors (A Home, 1899) to his family home, which he described as the place he "experienced that unspeakably sweet feeling of seclusion from the noise of the world."
At the end of the twentieth century, a new relationship between public and private is emerging-one where the private is engaged with the public through media and technology. In both theory and practice, the ascendency of these digital technologies has become a catalyst for contemporary architectural innovation and experimentation. In Frank Lupo's and Daniel Rowen's Lipschutz/Jones Apartment in New York City, digital screens displaying financial information are visible throughout the loft, alerting the owners to fluctuations in international currency markets. In Jacques Herzog's and Pierre de Meuron's Kramlich Residence and Media Collection, to be built in Napa Valley, California, the interior partitions of the house are screens onto which the owners' collection of video art is projected. Earlier in this century, the philosopher Martin Heidegger expressed concerns about the effects of the media in our lives, warning against what he called "distancelessness" (in "The Thing"; 1954). His unease about this condition, however, has been replaced today by a common awareness of the distinction between the real and the virtual and an acceptance of both states.
Privacy
Privacy has always been related to political considerations and
individual rights, but of late these issues involve not only physical
privacy, but the increased presence of electronic media in people's
homes and daily lives as well. Writing recently, with considerable
alarm, on the proliferation of electronic media, the New York Times
columnist William Sa?re said: "Your right to privacy has been stripped
away. You cannot walk into your bank, or apply for a job, or access
your personal computer, without undergoing the scrutiny of
strangers. . . . Isn't it time to reverse that terrible trend toward
national nakedness before it replaces privacy as an American value?"
In contrast, Bernard Tschumi displays a nonchalance about the
literal and virtual permeability of his unbuilt Hague Villa. Referring
to its most transparent parts' orientation toward a public boundary of
the site, the architect remarked: "The house is to be seen as an
extension of city events and a momentary pause in the digital transfer
of information. The borders of the living room and work space, devoid
of the camouflage of ornament, expand beyond the property lines just
as they [the property lines] are undermined by the electronic devices
of everyday use." Another example of a transparent house within a
dense urban landscape is Shigeru Ban's Curtain Wall House in Tokyo,
which erodes the border between public and private in a notable and
even startling way. The outer skin of the house is comprised of two
elements: transparent glass panels and fabric curtains the size of
boating sails. Both glass and fabric can be drawn back to open up the
interior to the surrounding neighborhood. The result is a "nakedness"
that even those who live in glass houses might find surprising.
The Family
Radical changes in the concept of privacy are paralleled both in
terms of scope and pace by the transformation of the family and family
life since World War II. Today people who live alone or with one other
person are the general public in many parts of the industrialized
world. For example, around a quarter of American households now
consist of one person. Half of the families in America consist of
couples without any children living under the same roof.
There are very different spatial requirements for a couple
with children compared to those of a couple (or a single person)
without children. Without the need for acoustic and visual privacy, as
one would have with children in the house, the traditional
upstairs/downstairs separation of the private and public spaces is
less compelling. Instead, the loft model has been deemed to be
appropriate; its flexibility and openness are in marked contrast to
the structured spaces that typify the traditional family house and
reflect domestic rituals revolving around the presence of
children. While none of them are literally lofts, Winka Dubbeldam's
Millbrook Residence and Frank Lupo's and Daniel Rowen's
Lipschutz/Jones Apartment, both designed for young couples without
children; Michael Maltzan's Hergott Shepard Residence in Beverly
Hills, built for a gay couple without any children, and Francois de
Menil's Shorthand House in Houston, built for a divorced woman whose
children are now adults, are all good demonstrations of that spatial
option.
Domesticity
Of typical representations from the first half of the nineteenth
century of German private houses, the historian Alexandra Richie (in
Faust's Metropolis: A History of Berlin; 1998) describes how the "the
rooms were cosy and homely, with wooden floors and striped silk
wallpaper, filled with dainty furniture of lavender and
cherrywood. The centre of this world was the family." The comfort of
the houses suggested by Richie's words, and the orderliness and
functionality that would have maintained them, were not spontaneous
inventions of an architect. Rather, they represent highly refined
attitudes that could scarcely have developed if it were not for the
fact that for over two centuries the intellectual and physical
capabilities of bourgeois European women and their later middle-class
American counterparts had been channeled toward the near-exclusive
responsibility of tending their houses and caring for their families.
Clorindo Testa's Ghirardo-Kohen House, a complete
reconfiguration of a grand suburban residence north of Buenos Aires,
might equally be interpreted as a critique of the cult of
domesticity. Built in the 1920s, the original house was designed in a
Tudor style, the very image of the house as an institution devoted to
tradition and comfort. But Testa's design deconstructs this image,
with slashing interventions that slice through the house and open it
up and expansions that add to it strange new forms that are as
disquieting and inexplicable as the original house's imagery was
soothing and familiar. Similarly, Rem Koolhaas's Maison à Bordeaux
strikes an unsentimental pose in opposition to traditional expressions
of domesticity-"a shelter from shelter," as one architecture critic
has called it. This aloofness is, in a sense, a kind of
antidomesticity, a highly stylized, constitutional unfamiliarity that
is both challenging and liberating.
Work
Reversing a process begun nearly four hundred years ago, the
reintroduction of work into the private house now under way is
extensive, with some twenty million Americans now using their homes as
principal workplaces. How working at home affects house design can be
seen on a variety of scales. In one instance, a home office might be a
fairly contained space that acts as an appendage or an extension of a
remote place of work, such as in the Thomas Hanrahan's and Victoria
Meyers's Holley Loft in New York City. In other cases, the home office
might be a principal place of work, in which one or more of the
occupants spends all of his or her working time, as in Clorindo
Testa's Ghirardo-Kohen House in Buenos Aires and Kazuyo Sejima's and
Ryue Nishizawa's M House in Tokyo.
In other designs, the presence of work is not limited to a
single space, instead merging with the living areas to create a new
kind of space, as might be seen in Frank Lupo's and Daniel Rowen's
Lipschutz/Jones Apartment. The owners of this loft are both traders on
Wall Street, and, in light of the globalization of international
markets, their working hours are no longer fixed. Rather, work occurs
when market activity occurs. Hence, the home office is in effect a
panopticonlike trading room, its flickering digital screens visible
from other areas of the loft. Six screens in addition to those in the
office display information at close range in various locations: next
to the bathroom mirror (so as to be visible when shaving), next to the
bed (to be visible upon waking), and so on.
