 And this session will be moderated by Jeff Rieschner, who has recently joined the Harvard faculty from Stanford. We ran the Stanford Humanities Lab. And here at the Berkman Center, he's founded the Meta Lab, which aims to provide a new institutional home for Harvard's digital art, design, and humanities communities. List for this session. Yeah, in a second. Welcome to the second session here. Hello, everybody. I'm a cultural historian. And of course, I thought in this group I should prepare myself to talk about the question of privacy. So I went and read the main manual that cultural historians go to on the subject of the history of private and public life, which is George Duby and Philippe Barriès's 3,000-page history of private life. And one of the morals of the scale of that five-volume project really is, of course, that notions of privacy and the public domain are highly culturally and socially constructed. And as the session this morning suggested, they're not just constructed in the physical sense, but also in a series of figurative senses. And in that realm of the figurative, I think that the way in which performance, social performances, enter the picture is one that is a particularly rich thread for investigation here. And I wanted to start out by, I'm sorry, Beatrice, I'm going to just jump here. But the point that I started getting interested in this question as a cultural historian was I ran across this object at the Saint-Croix-Piedu many years ago, which I ended up writing a couple of articles on, which is George de Kirico's 1914 portrait entitled of the poet Guillaume Apollinaire entitled Premonitory Portrait of a Poet. 1914, when I saw it, I thought, was there ever a case before this painting of a portrait of somebody wearing sunglasses? And second question, when were sunglasses not only invented, but actually used outside of their original use environment? And the answer is this is the first such case. And it's a particularly interesting example because it stages a form of performance of privacy that's very charged with meanings. It constructs a whole portrait of the poet as a celebrity. Apollinaire was one of the first highly prominent public cultural figures of his kind. He was a critic who wrote for some of the major journals of his own time. He is associated with Cubism's emergence as a widely perceived, even global cultural current. And I became interested that what you see up in the upper portion of the painting is actually Apollinaire's actual silhouette hidden behind a window frame. And what you see in the foreground, which is the putative portrait of the poet, is, of course, also a staging of the poet as a figure who's evoking a whole genealogy of classical poet prophets like Homer, the blind poet, the poet whose vision is associated precisely with his lack of the ability to see, a kind of internal vision that substitutes for external vision, all of which is a long and roundabout way of simply suggesting the cultural, even the anthropological complexity of these sorts of notions that are occupying us today. And this, by way of a transition to the first of our speakers, Beatriz Colomina, who is a very distinguished architectural historian who teaches at the School of Architecture at Princeton. And Beatriz, do you want to take over here? And I will put you back on your front page, I think. There we go. OK. Thank you very much. I'm, of course, very happy to be here with all of you, thinking about these questions that I always think are kind of these weird questions that I think about. I mean, my first interesting questions of privacy and publicity actually was my dissertation, which ended up being this book, Privacy and Publicity. But it was the 80s. And, of course, talking about media and communication and architecture was kind of an atema. And, of course, we have come a long way now. There are a lot of people thinking about it. But I think it's interesting in the context of this symposium to think about the ever-shifting boundaries between private and public. It is crucial to understand that architecture itself is inseparable from technologies of communication and vice versa. And, in fact, this relationship between architecture and technologies of communication, as I say, have been my only obsession and ongoing obsession, the only obsession in my work. To put it very quickly, for me, the history of the modern window is a history of communication. I have tried to demonstrate, for example, that the Corbusier's horizontal window is inseparable from or unthinkable actually, outside cinema. And not only because the Corbusier thought that film was the most appropriate media to represent modern architecture, but because of the way in which the house itself, all of a sudden, and you cannot imagine, I don't have time to go into it, how polemical to do a horizontal window was. But the view and frames of the world is already cinematographic. So think about architecture as a frame for a view. And then, moving to mid-century, I think, I have tried to demonstrate that the Imsh House, for example, is inseparable from a color slide. And not only because they represent their house in this film, for example, which doesn't use camera movement, but multiple slides that they have taken over the course of their life there. But more importantly, again, because the vision that the house, the Imsh House, makes possible. And that's why it's so different from the houses of the modern movement, from the houses of the Corbusier, of Omis, the frame, a horizontal view of the world is more of a kaleidoscopic, colorful view of the world, which is more in consonance with the color slide. And finally, I will say that the picture window at mid-century is inseparable or unthinkable outside. Television is not a coincidence that the picture window is introduced massively in the United States at the same time that television becomes also common. So the house, let's say, in this very brief kind of almost kind of schematic thing broadcasting to the outside world family life. So in each case, the ambitions of modern architecture to dissolve the line between inside and outside is, in fact, realized by absorbing the latest technologies of communication. So each communication is basically all about bringing the outside in. For example, we're reading a newspaper or watching television or getting the inside out. For example, when sending a letter just to talk about all media, and I think it's not an accident, then this advertisement for picture window has precisely this mailman arriving in this house, so it's probably not by chance. Then in architecture, you can see that glass has always represented this act of communication. It's almost as if glass takes over more and more of the building as systems of communication becomes more fluid. My current interest in this phenomenon has been to explore the possibility that transparency in modern architecture is directly related to medical technologies of imaging the body. From that point of view, the logic of the sheer glass walls is actually the one of the x-rays. That is, the inner structure is reveal, but by a new technology that allow you to look through the outer skin of the body. Mies even start describing his work in the early 20s as a skin and bones architecture and refer to the structure of his glass skyscrapers that you can see here as the skeleton, rendering them as you can see as if they were seen through an x-ray. Now this probably is obvious to you when I'm saying it now, but nobody, nobody in almost 100 years of writing about Mies have pointed that, and it's obvious. Not only is it obvious when you look at the buildings and you see finally, or for the first time, a building is rendered, is conceived, as if you were seeing it through x-rays, but also, it's also obvious in the sense that Mies was fascinated with x-rays, collected x-rays, published x-rays, or any scholar with a head should see that the man is obsessed with x-rays, right? This is Mies himself in his magazine, G. But Mies is not alone, books of modern architecture, as you can see, they are filled with images of glowing glass skin revealing inner bones and organs. Think about Le Corbusier's project for a glass skyscraper in 1925, about Walter Gropius, the Bourbon exhibition in Cologne of 1914, seen in all the books of modern architecture as the beginning of modern architecture, and they all focus on the same thing. This miraculous thing that happens when you look through the corner and you see the staircase, as you see inside. Many other examples, Mendelssohn's shock in the Parma in Stuttgart, 1926, the glass palace in the Netherlands in 1935, the house of George Kek, the crystal house in the fare of Chicago of 1933, the project and reliance of Mies for a glass house in the hillside of 34, the Bucky Fuller Diamaxion Tower, also of 32, and many, many other countless examples in which you also have this, always this ex-ray, let's say, vision. But if all these were kind of experimental designs from the early decade of the 20th century, not really habitable, they are not, they are mostly unrealized or in drawings, but mid-century, they really completely see-through a house becomes a mass phenomena, and that happens exactly at the same time that ex-rays are not only at a high level, like in the houses of Johnson and Mies, but also in everyday houses through the picture window, and that is actually not a coincidence, it's not by chance, I mean, that it happens exactly at the same time that ex-ray also becomes a mass phenomena, that is what it was used before in hospitals only to see the bodies of those with already showing symptoms of the disease is now expanded to the entire population, and here you have someone sending a photograph to his boyfriend, Mary, to Tom with love, so people have only, not only to present the image of themselves and their healthy being, but also, you see, I'm also clean inside, so it's not by chance that there is this coincidence. In fact, there is a clear association between ex-rays and glass houses in popular culture. This is a Coder laboratory film on the pictures of ex-ray for disease prevention, and so is this woman with a swimming suit, being ex-ray, and as the body passes through the machine, and you see the ex-ray body of the woman, the narrator, which of course is a man, says that this young lady, to whom henceforth a glass house will hold no terrors, will, after an examination of her radiograph, be reassured that she is indeed physically fit. Okay, so what is wrong with this sentence? It's normal to say that she will be reassured that she is physically fit after an ex-ray, but what the narrator have introduced in the middle is what is interesting, that henceforth he will not be afraid, he will not have any terror living in a glass house, so here the glass house is acting as a symbol of both a new kind of surveillance and of health. Exactly the same kind of associations can be seen in the discourse around canonical words of modern architecture. For example, in an interview in House Beautiful, Edith Farnsworth, the client of Miss Bander-Roy, and a famous or successful at least doctor in Chicago, compare her famous weekend house designed by Miss Bander-Roy to an ex-ray, right? And goes on to say that there is a local rumor that the house is a tuberculosis sanatorium. Let me tell you exactly what she says because it's kind of funny. I don't keep a garbage can under my sink. Do you know why? Because you can see the whole kitchen from the road on the way in here and the can will spoil the appearance of the whole house. So I hide it in the closet farther down from the sink. Miss talks about free space, but this space is very fixed. I can't even put a cloth hanger in my house without considering how it will affect everything from the outside. Any arrangement of furniture becomes a major problem because the house is transparent like an ex-ray, right? So it's making exactly the same. And it's kind of funny to me that she's obsessed with the garbage can when you see the photographs, in fact, from the road. You not only see the kitchen, but what you really see clearly is the bed, right? But never mind. The garbage can as the ultimate kind of. And now it's interesting with the discourse about privacy, the garbage can. Maybe she was onto something. The garbage can contains a lot of information about you. Anyway, I don't think she was thinking that way. In any case, the development of the ex-rays and of modern architecture coincide. Just as the ex-ray exposes the inside of the body to the public eye, the modern building exposes the interior that which was previously private is now subjected to public scrutiny. The threshold of the private is no longer in the outside limit of a building. It is being relocated. And this is interesting. Johnson talked many times about how he did feel private inside his glass house, despite the fact that all the journalists were asking him, don't you feel like you are in a glass bowl, like a fish in a glass bowl? Privacy is now paradoxically even today, I think even more clearly today, in public. Something that is all too obvious today were the users, for example, the sense that you have of privacy with a cell phone called creating an intimate space in the heart of a public space or in the opposite direction, projecting the most intimate details of one's life to a wider and wider audience through the social media. In a sense, the Kodak film understood this new paradigm. There was nothing to fear in ex-rays or in glass houses. The ex-ray in a way had already acclimatized all of us to live in glass houses. The most inner secrets of our bodies and our private lives were now floating or are now floating in public. But what is happening then in the outside of the buildings when private and public has gotten so confused? Having dissolved the walls into glass, the question now has become in architecture how to dissolve the glass itself, the last, let's say, delicate boundary between inside and outside. The relentless quest for a fluidity between inside and outside is no longer simply a drive towards transparency and the glass box has become something else. Sanas Toledo Museum is a symptom of this development. At first sight, it seems that the Toledo Museum project is a perfect example of transparency and all glass, pavilion for all glass objects in the glass city of Toledo. In this sense, Sejima inherits the Mission Tradition of Radical Transparency in the standard probability image, which is this one, the wide-trim pavilion, sits in a park uncannily echoing some of Miss Canonic projects, such as the Farnsworth house that you saw before, or the 50 by 50. But what strikes me about all this credit, well, credit is more positive, credit is more, but this interpretation that Sana is simply inheriting Miss project is that it seems like, to me, that architectural critics don't really look very closely or don't even look at all because Sana's vision is actually not crystal clear at all. The glass pavilion seems to be more about a blurring, precisely, of the view, a softening of the focus than about the kind of radical transparency of the early avant-garde architecture. With Sejima work, no structure is ever revealed. Her buildings are not even structures to look into or look out from. They are optical devices with invisible mechanism. The real view is not from the outside looking in or on the inside looking out, but the inside looking even further inward, not to discover the secrets of the building, but somehow to be suspended in the view itself. So in Toledo, the view, the visitor is literally suspended between the carving walls of glass. What you see through the glass layer in front of you is another layer and then another one and then another one. And looking through all these layers, the vision is distorted with the curves accentuating the dystortium. It's also fascinating how even the walls, the outer and the inner and outer limits of the wall are exposed. You can see here in the plan not these double walls of glass in the picture. I hope you can see the limits. So you can see even the gap between the walls. So even the space, the inaccessible space of the wall is now visible. So if she is the inheritor of mission transparency, she goes beyond transparency into a whole new kind of mirage effect. So after centuries of architecture organized by the straight lines of the viewing eye, we now have an architecture formed by the soft dystortions of the gaze, a kind of more tactile experience of vision. To enter a Sejima project is in a way to be caressed by the subtle softening of the territory, even the reflection of the trees in the outer layer of the glass have a softness that you never find in myths, whether it's in the rendering or in the full-size-realized project. So X-rays cutting through the outer layers to reveal secrets give way now to inner layers, endlessly folded and overlapping fabrics that intensify the mystery rather than remove it. The X-ray logic absorbed by modern architecture culminates in this dense cloud of gosly shapes. Today, there are new forms of advanced surveillance technologies that are operating in the city. And they offer new models of vision that can act in a way as paradigms of the window. We cannot predict which of these technologies will be absorbed into architecture, but some of them are already impacting the environment. And again, what interests me is that they produce, again, a kind of blur vision. I'm talking about handheld scanning devices capable of seeing through buildings, through clothing, through walls, and that increasingly used by the military, by the police, and are effectively making solid walls act like if they were glass. Forward-looking infrared, for example, FLIR, which is in fact thermal image, is one of those technologies in which seemingly solid walls no longer offer privacy. Indeed, the scan may reveal activities that have already finished. You can be exposed after you have left the building. So the heat signature remains for a while. I like this kind of idea of delay. So you may have been dealing with marijuana there, but you're already gone and nobody's in the building anymore, but the heat signature remains. Another, of course, very well-known now through all the debates about privacy is the passive-millimeter imaging PMI, which is used, of course, in U.S. customs and now everywhere to detect hidden weapons or contraband in clothing, bags, and vehicles. And it is as if they detect the outer layer is completely stripped away. And, of course, the images are also interesting, but you can see the same thing I see. Then there is, of course, the Kaya lens, which is illegal in the United States and Europe but available through the internet, I think. Anyone can use a camera, even a cell phone camera, and see through clothing by concentrating on the infrared spectrum. So the mid-century fear of loss of privacy in the glass house and with the X-ray has reappeared. It is as if with each new technology that exposes something private is at first threatening and then absorbed into everyday life. So for us, the fear of the glass house or the X-ray is almost quaint today. We may feel fear about the radiation but about the exposure. Even the grainy images of surveillance seems already less invasive now, almost reassuring compared with the new technologies. Perhaps today's scanning technologies will also seem quaint in the future since each new technology goes deeper and deeper into the private, the definition of private changes in response to each one of those invasions. So in conclusion, in changing our understanding or definitions of public and private, the new surveillance technologies like the technologies that emerged in the early years of the last century changed our understanding of architecture. Architecture is never threatened by new technologies. On the contrary, it fits on them, right? So what I would like to say is that privacy is increasingly defined by a new kind of blur between hyper-public space to take your term for this conference, which I like very much. The intentional blurring in the airport scan is supposed to protect this word about the loss of privacy. Privacy is no longer defined by a line. Privacy is established by a blurring precisely of the most public space and you can hide for a while between this blur. So returning to your question about what is the role of the sign in hyper-public space, it could be a precisely about this blur, about how this blur might be treated as a kind of new tactical operation, a kind of space, a new kind of interior that can be defined. So this is something, for example, that architects like Jurgen Meyer that has been obsessed with the encryption in this, for example, in these envelopes, where you get your pin for your credit card. He's been an architect collecting these patterns of encryption since the 90s, right? Since he first received his paycheck at Harvard and realized there was this thing that was not in Germany, wherever he's from, right? And he's been collecting this and designing things on the basis of this pattern for inscription. So architects, they always have interest in the new technologies. Thank you very much. As we're transitioning here, I'd like to open the conversation up also to Ethan and Dana, and maybe just to begin a brief discussion here and then we'll move on to Dana Boyd's presentation. I guess the question I wanted to ask about Therese that seemed to me might most tightly intersect with a larger conversation that's going on in this day of discussion really is who owns the hyperpublic. I mean, the lineage of glass architecture that was invoked so richly in Therese's talk is largely focused on structures that are really expressions of authority and power in some sense. I mean, they're exceptional structures in a sense. They're associated with either the kind of privilege associated with the villa sort of rural or suburban locations that, for instance, the Johnson glass house is built in or with Mises Skyscraper, which is a project that was meant as a kind of a structure that would literally crystallize the values of his own era, become a glass house in the sense of an emblem for a new model of a transparent society. I mean, many of the Toledo Museum project, these are exceptional structures. They are as remote as conceivable from public housing projects or all kinds of other sort of vernacular architectural spaces. So I guess I'm just interested in this question about what is the relationship between this dream of a kind of architecture of transparency or then an architecture that's built around a blurred relationship between interior spaces and exterior spaces and the broader social context in which those structures are just one dream among a whole series of other practices. That's precisely why I brought the question of the picture window. It is true that the glass house of Philip Johnson on the Farmsworth house are unique structures. That is how most architects work. It's almost impossible to advance thinking in architecture without a sponsor. Architecture is not something that everybody wants to pay for that extra amount. I mean, like the same people that are willing to pay for a house by the Corbos or Mies in the 20s are the same people that are able to buy a Mondrian as well, right? So the same people that visited the International Exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art mark in 1931 is the same people that will also have gone to see an exhibition of modern art. Are we discarding modern art or modern architecture for that reason? I don't think so. But something else happens at mid-century. The Museum of Modern Art itself had to rethink its role, right? And built a couple of houses in the courtyard of the museum, built one-to-one so that you could actually walk into them to offer precisely this dream, I mean, opening their public, opening their audience to a much wider public. So the dream of the Transparent House at a mass level exists in the United States, particularly after the war. It's very interesting to hear, for example, and Tensa running the magazine Arts and Architecture. And he writes already an editorial before the end of the war. And it's all connected to the war. It's fascinating how he says people coming from the war have become views to the machine and they will not be interested anymore to live in picket-fenced houses with pitch roofs, et cetera. They will want a transparent glass house with all the latest technologies, et cetera, et cetera. So it was like if the war in his mind had educated the public, the new sensibility. And for a brief period, there is this very beautiful moment in the United States before all the banks got involved and they wouldn't give you financing for a modern house that tons of people signed for the most extraordinary house, like the Viscita House of Buck, Mr. Fuller, or the extraordinary success of the case study houses in California, you can see those are a little bit upper, but there are also all these developers in California particularly, like Leif May and others, right? That did modern houses. So there would be an interesting story to be told about in a sense of the democratization of this model in the course of the 20th century. Yeah, yes, but immediately after the war, right? It becomes at the same time that Johnson is building his house, they are developers in California providing transparent houses to huge amounts of people.