Social Proximities – Week 5 Response

Above: The Hearth defines proximal relations, both socially, and in plan, at the Robie House.

There is a level of control implicit in any object of design. This is, of course, more benign than it sounds. Architecture, as the more prominent building block of the urban fabric, tends to have a significant ability to alter and influence human behavior. While the semiotic messages broadcast by the surfaces, voids, circulations, and rhythms of the built environment may be the more obvious forms of regulation, it is very important not to forget that proximity may play the larger role. Proximity, not just in the relation of human to building, but also in the way in which architecture forces a spatial relation to develop between humans on both a three dimensional canvas, as well as a diachronic axis. Consider these phrases; “Women must pray in the rear of the synagogue”, “They sleep in separate beds”, or “The prisoner is behind bars.” Proximity carries connotation. Spatial and temporal relations created by architecture introduce, enforce, or reconfigure social norms.
The fascinating thing about Lynn Spigel’s analysis of the post-war introduction of TV into the North American domicile is that most of her hypothesis’ are lent credence through the use of spatial arguments. The social relations of residents to their living space, and to each other, are solidified via architecture. The television set and its programming introduced both a new geometry and a new temporal vector into the home. This forced a series of physical changes to the domestic interior.  As spatial and diachronic reconfigurations took place between a person and an object, the social (and gender) norms also had to reconfigure.
Yet, it is interesting to note that the spatial shifts that occurred in the home as a result of this new medium were ideas that had floated within the discourse of domestic architectural modernism long before the television set invaded Levittown. Notions of spatial and temporal re-organizations are central to the thinking of Gerrit Rietveld and manifest themselves quite clearly in his design of the Schröder House (Utretch, 1924). The will to merge interior and exterior space manifests itself in the drawings of Mies Van Der Rohe’s Brick Country House (1922) or the Fredrichstrasse (1921) where the massive glass panes intersect at the edge of the structure. Issues of a central totem around which both family and architecture can gather are strikingly apparent in the plans for the Wrights Robie House (Chicago, 1908).
While the architectural establishment lived with these polemics for the coming decades, they were never fully accepted into the public vernacular. That is, until the coming of television. It was, in part, the desire to consume media that gave these notions a ley inroad to the home. Make room for television, indeed.

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