THE COLLECTIVE QUALITY OF PRIVACY IN SEJIMA WING-KITAGATA HOUSING: NEUTRALIZING PERSPECTIVES

Abstract

Amid social and environmental conditions of sharpness and hostility, theory has coped with contemporary needs and desires through schemes far from beliefs of certainty, clarity and autonomy. In such context, collective housing is introduced as an answer to overcrowded and degraded urban environments by suggesting new modes of living and new forms of connection between the private and the public, as well as respective socio-political perspectives. In this paper, we focus on Sejima’s wing Kitagata housing in Gifu and investigate the ways in which privacy is constituted as a spatial quality and the meanings provided by. In this sense, we seek an interpretation of collective housing as a field of possible reconsiderations of traditional concepts and also an attempt to theorize their further connotations as regards the relationship between space and the subject. In specific, Sejima’s wing Kitagata apartment building consists a field where the western and eastern traditions about a contradicting or harmonizing theorization of the opposites, respectively, converge to each other. Related to such character is a kind of ambiguity which accompanies this architectural project regarding its exposing or protecting function in relation to privacy. Through analysing the three spatial elements which we believe are central to the maintenance of privacy in this project, that is the open access corridor on the north facade, the closed glazed corridor on the south facade, and the room-like terraces, we find that privacy is constituted as an effect of a designed system of intermediate spaces which instil in it a collective quality. However, the certain character of the relationship between the private and the collective in the project is based on a neutralizing quality which excludes conflict as a transforming condition in relation to spatial dynamics. Such condition is accompanied by respective implications on the political aspect of coexistence in space and housing

Keywords

• collective housing,private space,public space,neutrality,intermediate spaces

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