housing | windows by duncan patterson
thresholds things mediators actors presentation
on windows liminal panes
1 In John Hejduk’s strange and compelling Vladivostok , he recasts the typical buildings of a European city as characters engaged in a play. I like to think of the mundane stage set of the domestic interior in the same way. It has the same sort of archetypal characters that occur in theatre, except that rather than villains and heroes, fools and placaters, it has doors and kitchen sinks, chairs and beds. Think of the window and the hearth. The hearth, the staid private ballast, holds the centre while the window pulls towards the fleeting world outside. Between them the room stretches. The chair doesn’t know which way to turn, but the ottoman and the kitchen sink have clearly chosen sides. The mirror tries vainly to ignore them both and stare straight ahead at the painting on the opposite wall, but, being a mirror, it can’t stop stealing sideways glances. And all this before we even bring the live actors on stage. The story deepens considerably when people enter — looking out of windows, cloaking their windows, using them as display cabinets, as stages. The window comes by its meaning in many ways. 2 People do not exist but they exist amongst things. This is a truth that Actor Network Theory has been trying to re-introduce into the practice of sociology since phenomenology. Actor Network Theory wants sociology to abandon disembodied notions of the social and to instead focus on the nitty-gritty of how the social is made. Architects should be paying attention to this. Fundamental to the approach of Actor Network Theory is the sense that things such as windows are implicit in the emergence of the social. The social is not a complete entity, like a ball of wax, but a series of connections. And windows, with their sills, heads and jambs, their sashes, panes and mullions, are part of our social reality. They are conduits through which we perceive and communicate, and they can even be made to speak for us. In Actor Network Theory, windows are interesting in how they relate us to others, and because we use them to make statements. But, to be of interest to Actor Network Theory, as Bruno Latour writes in Reassembling The Social , things ‘have to be actors and not simply the hapless bearers of symbolic projection’.
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