Architecture is all around us, we don’t realize it, but it’s there. It takes form of buildings, interiors, objects, art and space. As people we become part of the architecture through how we live within these public and private spaces, how we interact with those around us and how we adapt to what’s in the spaces surrounding us.
Public life is how we perceive and move within spaces of public and private. There is the idea that City=House and House=City, which is the idea that the activities we perform I different public spaces in the city, is the same as being at home in private spaces. The idea that these spaces in the city is the same as the the spaces at home. They are places everywhere we go and each serves a different purpose. For example the cinema is a public pace of leisure. Everyone can go to this space and enjoy their own experience in private.
We have become obsessed with the concept of utopia-city vector of the imagination. Personally this concept intruiges me hugely and im interested in the various creations of a utopian city of the future. The way I see it, is that through the many variations of our future city, is that public space plays a huge part with less of the private and domestic domain. This manifests with the fact that todays technology is consistently growing with less privacy and more openness. With social networks, modern day technology and computer systems, we are able to see and share with other people’s thoughts and spaces. Forever creating and producing new ideas/concepts. All these become interwoven with eachother, building a structure of a utopian future city.
The idea of separating people socially comes from hundreds of years ago. An example is the term ‘Polis’ used in the Ancient Greek. The term meaning a self governed city. Even the citizens were separated, only those within the city walls were considered, but then the concept was developed and classes were created. i.e. slaves and foreigners were not allowed to be part of society. Nowadays we have better communications due to different types of public space. For example using my experiences of schooling brings up the concept of public space having and impact on how we interact with others around us. Being in private school before I cam here, I was surrounded by almost all people of one class within the space called Queen’s Gate School, but when moving to Canterbury in university the public space became bigger and encouraged interactions with all kinds of people of various classes ad backgrounds. On the whole public spaces such as the London underground bring people from different places together in one space, even though we don’t stop and converse with one another our paths are intertwined, bringing us together without thought.
This also links with the idea of how we adapt and respond to things that happen between us through the spaces we are in. as I’ve said before technology also plays a huge part in the idea. For example our modern cities such as New York and Hong Kong with their bright lights and media centered spaces, impact us and influence our thoughts, actions and how we perceive our personal thoughts on spaces around us. The private spaces then become almost public. Again referring back to the utopian concept, architects can’t get enough of the idea of creating a space, building, or city that would be out of the ordinary, something we would all fantasies, but in actual fact non of these utopian ideas would ever work in the real world. Instead of what architecture is meant to be, about creating suitable spaces for certain purposes, we build buildings that are of what we desire making us selfish. This also verges on the concept of Rem Koolhaas’ term ‘bigness’. We don’t care that the building does not make sense, but instead we build a skyscraper to be taller than the others as if in a competition to be better than the other skyscraper. This leads to our modern cities consistently growing bigger and what we see as better, creating larger public spaces that surround and heavily influence people about the idea of what we desire, rather than people per sieving these spaces interpretation and using the spaces in their own way.
As a conclusion I see it as spaces are all around us, with each serving a different purpose and influencing us to act, interact, play and move in certain ways, depending on the space we chose to be in. We have our ideas about an ideal world, society and city, but not all these ideas can work in our world today. Architecture is about creating a space for a purpose, but are we getting carried away with new ideas/creations and getting lost in the imagination of an ideal world or a world in which we would prefer to live in?