Ch. 5, pp. 187–195

We’re up to Chapter 5 now. I don’t think the book is going to suddenly turn steamy but the first subtitle is 5.1 Housing for “Sexual Phenomena” – or at least that’s the first translation that came to mind. Looking back, we started with a review of how the houses of Ancient Greece had a public (threshold) part to them as well as a private. We then moved on to Yamamoto’s findings from a survey of 170 vernacular villages over 40 years and how thresholds were common to them all. After that came some insights into the provision of public housing by the Tokyo Municipal Housing Authority and how, not only were any kind of thresholds absent, but a system of bureaucratic provision contrived to stifle change. The previous installments talked the meaning of cooperation and the role of the architect. The first sub-sub heading mentions the term local community sphere and I expect this will lead in to Yamamoto’s ongoing theme of communities within a community. We know how the story ends because we’ve already seen images of Yamamoto’s projects and how this aspect of a private dwelling (or even a not private one) having a life partially visible to the public. Some of these projects are from well before 2015 when this book was published. When Yamamoto was made 2024 Pritzker Laureate, much mention was made of his interest in community but I didn’t see much clarification of what the term meant to him. I’m sure this left many people understanding the term community in their own way and dismissing Yamamoto well-intentioned but ineffectual, as if he was all about Sunday swapmeets in a corner of some town square beneath some garish painted street mural. I think it’s partially because of my fear of that being the case, I’m translating this book in the first place. Anyway, let’s have a look! As always, many words are italicized to show they’re being used with specific meanings we’re probably familiar with by now.

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1. Housing for “Sexual Relations”

The Local Community Sphere as a design topic

Local Community Sphere was a design topic set for masters students at Yokohama National University (Y-GSA). The topic asked students to choose an area of housing with special characteristics and then redesign the entire area. It could be suburban, or a commercial district, or a residential area with special characteristics, a high-density area, a shopping street, somewhere in the mountains, somewhere on a slope, an area with a high population of elderly … students had to survey the various characteristics of the place they had chosen and not only design housing for the sake of living, but to think about it along with the energy and transportation infrastructures, care for the elderly and the education of the young. And also the local economy. The topic was not to be about housing as one house per household but require thinking about local communities and their infrastructure. The reason why I chose this topic as a studio topic was because I was reflecting deeply as an architect upon the the methods of design of housing and the methods for the supply of housing we had used up until then were fundamentally mistaken. Housing until now has all been about the provision of private space. The supply of housing has been about space that is seen from the managed space of the outside, and spaces that have an intimate relationship with the interior.

Post-WWII Japanese housing was supplied as ‘housing for living in’ and was architecture for no purpose other than that. It was heavily influenced by thinking evident in all housing from 19th laborer housing to The Bauhaus. What was supplied was housing premised on one house per household. It was housing for the performance of the private activities of the household. It was space made only for the maintenance of [Arendt’s] cyclic life processes (reproduction for the sake of life). It had no purpose other than that. This housing had no threshold and was isolated from the world outside. A space so isolated from the world outside was a special space indeed.

The space of society removes the perception of being with others

Since the Mulhouse laborer housing, the mutual separation of houses has existed to manage the labourers living in them. The houses made today in Japan exist for the same purpose. However, we who live in those houses have absolutely no awareness that we live in such special spaces. These closed houses were supplied in large quantities after the end of WWII, as we came to think of these houses as standard houses for standard families, and that this format was the standard house. One house per household is the materialization of the idea of equality. All houses are supplied to be the same as all other houses. They are standard houses. The people living in those houses live in them as standard families the same as other families. By living in such housing, we make us and our households into standardized households[/families].

The space that is society is intimately related to the system for the supply of housing for one house per household. However, for as long as we inhabit housing built as one house per household, we are unaware of the fundamental contradiction of such a society. This fundamental contradiction is that society is nothing more than economically organized space. In this space that is society, the consciousness that one is together with many other people is totally excluded. All other people are other people who work for their respective personal gain. Other people are a sameness that is the opposite of a majority. Arendt writes that rather than this society being dependent upon equality, “it is dependent upon sameness.” (The Human Condition, p. 241) “The human majority …. is” established by being “different from equality.” (ibid., p.246) Even if there is equality, the loss of difference means the sense of majority is already lost. There is no reason for people to be together if people exist for their own respective personal gain. Nevertheless, we in the space of society must live with these others. This is the fundamental contradiction. The space of society is a space where the perception of being amongst others is lost, along with the perception of being in it with them.

Housing continues to be made to negate this perception of sharing the world.

I have a feeling that the previous five sentences will be the tuning point of the book.

Having lives that are completely private means people must be deprived of what is essential for them to live completely human lives. They are being robbed of the world. “They are being robbed of the reality that comes from seeing and hearing other people” (ibid., p.87). “Other people are what these lives are missing. To put this the other way, something is not seen as a private life as long as one can be seen by others, and so may be thought to not exist. What a person with a private life does has no meaning or importance for others and so what is important for a person with a private life is of no concern to others.” (ibid., pp.87-88) Arendt terms this phenomenon “the loneliness of the public”: (Ibid. p.88)

“In public society, isolation is most extreme and takes an anti-interpersonal form. The reason why it is most extreme is because it is not just the public sphere that is destroyed but the private realm as well, and it is not just the person’s place in the world that they are robbed of, but their private home and private sphere as well.” (ibid.) The public realm and the private realm are connected and so when one is destroyed the other is also. This destruction allows their connection by the space of society that is a space that exists only for the purpose of money. It is a bureaucratically managed space. On the other hand, the one house = one household is the place within society “that has the most important function of protecting that which is intimate”. (ibid. p.61) This ‘protection‘ is in the sense of being managed externally,

Sexual relations are limited to the family

So what does it mean then to be robbed of the private household. It means to be robbed of the longevity of the private household as the private sphere (the gynaikeion in Ancient Greece) is hidden even further within, and separated by the threshold. However, despite being separated, the warmth of the hearth of the gynaikeion was still the reality of private life. The warmth of the hearth was still the place to return to. Its longevity was guaranteed. The home was the place that continued to have permanence. The home that continued forever was one part of the world but, in contemporary society, the private household has no permanence. As we have already seen, the private house has lost its threshold to become a place for a private life closed to the world. Houses are not made for permanence but for (intimate) private lives. The house is a place for intimacy and friendship. It has the meaning of a place for sexual relations. These have no permanence.

“Sexual relations are carefully closed off.” “Sexual relations are organized into households in units of husband and wife, and absorbed into function of reproducing.” “Husband and wife legitimately dominate the production of descendants.” (Foucault, The Will [?], p.10) The family is constrained by sexual phenomena, and sexual relations are constrained by the function of reproduction. “Even in the space of society and within each household, the one place where sexual relations are acknowledged as the most useful and productive place is the parents’ bedroom.” (ibid.) In worker housing, much care was taken to separate the parents’ bedroom from the others.

Yesterday, I was introduced to Community and Privacy: Toward a New Architecture of Humanism – a 1963 book by no-so-unlikely bedfellows Serge Chermayeff and Christopher Alexander. The last part of the book has examples of houses they critique. Given the space and attention given to these critiques, I guess these are examples of the eponymous new architecture of humanism. These new humanist houses are often arranged around courtyards and even if they are attached, full height walls isolate them from their neighbours. The criteria for those critiques are, in order, 1) Entry lock to house, 2) Separate children’s access, 3) Buffer, parents/children, 4) Lock to parents’ bedroom, 5) Can living area be isolated?, and 6) Are outdoor spaces private? Chermayeff and Alexander are obsessed with 1) separating the house from the world, and 2) ensuring the kids don’t walk in on the parents having sex. It’s a bizarre fixation that seems to illustrate Foucault’s point. The codes implicit in industrial era ideal worker housing were still present and far more explicit in capitalist era ideal worker housing. In that sense, This new architecture seems neither new nor humanist.

The isolation of the parents’ bedroom from the rest of the house was very important whether it was Albert Villas or the worker housing at Mulhouse.The same applies to The Bauhaus’ housing theory that aspired to standarization. “Constraining sexual relations into the framework of reproduction” links reproduction to the labour force. In other words, the limiting of sexual relations to the purpose of reproduction came about when housing began to be provided for workers. Prior to that, “the codes for what was vulgar, what was lewd and what was obscene were relatively relaxed when compared with the 19th century.” (ibid. p.9) Sexual relations were not confined to the bedroom of the husband and wife.

The eighteenth century brought the arrival of the salon as a reception room. These were mutually independent rooms arranged along a corridor in much the same way as houses were now arranged in rows along streets. In other words, the corridor was devised as a dedicated circulation space to maintain the privacy of the individual rooms as the 17th century awareness of the self became stronger. The room of the wife became the boudoir (= buder + oir) and a type of office or library in which the husband or others were not to sleep. In Paris, the husband of the house was to similarly have his own space to pursue his own sexual adventures.” (Manford, Historic Cities, Tomorrow’s Cities, p.328) The boudoir was the ante-room to the wife’s bedroom, and was a place for socializing. The entire house was a place for socializing, and sexual relations were one part of a wider social interaction.

My apologies for having to break it at this point. We’ll pick it up from here in 2025.

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2024/12/22 Ch. 5, pp. 187-195
2024/12/08 Ch. 4, pp. 179-186
2024/11/03 Ch. 4, pp. 175-179
2024/11/03 Ch. 4, pp. 169-175
2024/10/20 Ch. 4, pp.163-168
2024/10/06 Ch. 4, pp.159-163
2024/09/29 Ch. 4, pp.156-159
2024/09/08 Ch. 4, pp.152-155
2024/09/08 Ch. 4, pp.146-151
2024/08/25 Ch. 3, pp.135-143
2024/08/18 Ch. 3, pp.128-135
2024/08/11 Ch. 3, pp.120-128
2024/07/21 Ch. 3, pp.115-120
2024/07/21 Ch. 3, pp.108-114
2024/07/14 Ch. 3, pp.101-107
2024/06/30 Ch. 2, pp.92-100
2024/06/23 Ch. 2, pp.87-92
2024/06/16 Ch. 2, pp.78-87
2024/06/02 Ch. 2, pp.69-78
2024/05/05 Ch. 2, pp.66-70
2024/05/05 Ch. 2, pp.58-66
2024/05/05 Ch. 1, pp.46-55
2024/04/28 Ch. 1, pp.35-46
2024/04/21 Ch. 1, pp.23-35
2024/04/07 Ch. 1, pp.18-23
2024/03/31 Ch. 1, pp.14-18
2024/03/24 The Space of Power vs. The Power of Space: Preface pp. 7-11

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Revisited this week:

• Mission Statement
• It’s Not Rocket Science #3: Yakhchal
• It’s Not Rocket Science #11: Keeping the Water Out
• Architecture Misfits #38: The Unknown Architect