 Lorentz-Stadler, that counts at rate? Yes. Ah, very good. From ETH Zurich, tell us how you came to the study of privacy in these topics. Actually, it's a quite peripheral theme of my research. But perhaps I can show two points of contact. The first one, I worked on an architectural writer and architect, Herman Mutasius, who studied the English house around the end of the 19th century, which is considered as a apogee, in some way, of the private house. The English house. The English house around 1890 to 90. And he brought into Germany, and the transformation he made showed quite a different conception of how to live inside a private house. So this would be one point. The second point is that our research in the last year with my students at ETH is on the crossroad between architectural history and history of technology. And we have been working for three years on the threshold. So quite a physical element. A physical threshold. First, we began with the threshold. And after that, we, of course, discovered that there is a lot of metaphorical and use of the threshold, which has to be considered. By the threshold, you mean the literal boundary? Actually, we began with this element. But if you study it, and if you make a typology, it goes from air curtain to revolving door to elevator to body scanner RFID technologies. So suddenly, there's a question. I feel like now I have a great word about to ask for a stock tip. What's the threshold of five years from now so I can buy soon? Where are thresholds going? Actually, there is a lose of materiality. So probably it will be in new media or new technologies, I think. But it doesn't mean that the old one are going to be destroyed. And that's actually the topic I want to present here. Well, let's have it. I have some slides. So probably it's better I go there. Please. So as I told, I am going to present a small summary of the research we conducted with our students in seminars at ETH. Privacy has long been associated with enclosed space of the interior. This conception is revealed in expressions such as one's own four walls or in the popular demand of a roof over one's head. They convey a desire for intimacy and protection, which has come to be virtually synonymous with an interior space enclosed on all sides. This model finds its apogee in the 19th century Victorian house and its notion of privacy. There, privatos as opposed to this publica has definitely become a positive category. In the Victorian house, the private rooms are clearly distinguished spatially, but also by program and character. Similarly, the 19th century city is constituted on the one side by its public institution and on the other side by private houses. The first of being to the rule of the embellishment, the latter to those given by the law. But this understanding of the wall and hence of architecture as a limit between an interior and exterior space between the private and public sphere has been challenged over the last 150 years by a variety of architectural concepts. The open space, for example, which led not only to the fusion of his two individual rooms, but also to the appearance of the clear borders between indoors and outdoors. Or the unprivate house, where the intimacy of the interior was transformed into an intimacy, a state of being permanently accessible. Or the domestic interface, which defines living space no longer in terms of its walls and roof, but as a hub of various nets of infrastructures and energy. But what is as evident as these emancipatory departures, which demanded that architecture spatial boundaries become completely permeable to light, air, energy, and information, is that architecture has not been dissolved into a space of flow. On the contrary to the traditional wall, a range of new technologies designed to regulate the various currents of people, objects, liquids, and information have been added. Apparatuses, such as turnstiles, sliding doors, and the air curtain. Technical devices, such as a doorbell intercom and chip card reader. Or infrastructural amenities, such as space disposal units, elevators, and water supply. Unfortunately, you don't see it well. This would be a collection of these devices and apparatuses. Thus, on the one hand, one finds a notion regularly undepined by theory of an open house, a threshold-less space that aspires to fuse seamlessly with its environment, the broader context, or network. But on the other, so largely ignored by historiography to date, an increasing series of artifacts that allows this open-ended space to be even more reconfigured, delimited, and controlled. Best examples are the airport, a transitional space by excellence, or highly specialized building like the laboratories. What then are the implications for architecture and the related notions of privacy when the traditional forms of opening, such as door and windows, see place to an automatic revolving door, a body scanner, or an air curtain? When the exterior or interior walls as the traditional border between private and public is reconfigured, or even replaced by a series of devices and apparatuses? And what are the implications for a human being who can no longer distinguish between an interior and an exterior and resides permanently, quite literally, in that milieu and interim space? Three aspects may be posited here. First, the growing significance of technical apparatuses and devices throughout the 20th century prompted a radical review of architectural practice. Till recently, the traditional door guaranteed a clear boundary between interior and exterior space, the possibility of connection on the one side, and of complete privacy, as sociologist Georg Simmel put it. The proliferation of increasingly differentiated threshold devices led conversely to the fragmentation of the hither-to-uniform border. It was broken down into a sequence of individual elements, each of which drew new, functionally well-defined borders in a highly individual manner. As for instance, in Diller & Schoffy de Spracerie in New York, where the guest appears on the screens even before entering the space. Actually, you see here the camera and the projection, which happens inside the room. Second, given these devices' growing capacity for differentiation and individuation, then close and uniform space conceives still at the close of the 19th century as a common backdrop to all possible types of relationship, architectural, social, legal, or also aesthetic. Now see the place to an endless number of autonomous, partly overlapping, but highly specialized spheres geared to the individual purposes, as of security, hygiene, climate control, or even to olfactory and optical monitoring. Challenging the hither-to-uniform categories of the inside and the outside, and thus of privacy and publicity. Where and when does one enter the Prada shop in Los Angeles, one may ask. Devices are anthropomorphic, not only because they are designed by men and meant to facilitate his activities or accomplish them on his behalf, but also because they in turn shape men and his activity by prescribing certain behaviors. New technical devices herald new, differentiated, and interactive experiences of the threshold. These are punctuated by instances of recognition, passage, cleansing, or when access is assured of absolution and so forth. They subsequently appear to break down whatever was hither-to-perceived as a uniform, as a uniform idolized body of the users into individual organs, each of which is compelled to cooperate on a specific task at a certain moment. A leg activates a light barrier sensor, a body shell sets off metal detectors, an iris is scanned in the biometric control and so forth. Thus the passage through a border is split into individual moments and hence fragments the body whose integrity can consequently be experienced only by traversing a whole variety of distinct borders. But what one may ask could be the role of the architect in such a world. Today, what must be challenged is not so much the recurrently voiced notion that the liminal function of architecture is about to go down the drain, owing to an endless flow of stream of people, objects, liquids, energy, and information. This is hardly credible affirmation, given that the massive and enduring architectures currently under construction in the Western world outstrip any we have seen so far. Nor is it, on the contrary, the notion of privacy bound to the four walls and the roofs that must be challenged. It can be done or not. But for more prosaically, what is at stake is the idea of the limit itself, architecturally and otherwise, as a mean of segregation, fragmentation, specialization. Anthropologist Arnold van Gevetnep oppositely defines the difference between a border and a threshold. In contrast to the border, which can be closed to outsiders, the threshold comprises a neutral zone between the limitation. It is manifest at the territorial level, as well as in urban correlation, such as a village, town, district, temple, or house. This zone decreasing steadily in scale and in degree of public impact may be declined as a landscape space, such as desert, swamp, or jungle, through to single architectural element, such as a gate, a portal, a door, or the physical threshold. To this, of course, it would have today to add the different threshold devices and apparatuses created by the new technologies, but also the technologies which have invaded our bodies. For a long time, privacy and public space have been defined by opposition, such as separation. But what van Gevetnep has shown is that the limit must not be divisive, but can be connective, that it is not only bound to a limited experience, but is designed actually to transcend it. What seems at stake now is not so much a lust of privacy, but the unique necessity to constantly and publicly renegotiate the border and its consistency. Thank you so much. And what a fantastic way in which PowerPoint actually makes what you're talking about come alive, at least for the slides that weren't washed out because of our projector, for which we apologize. But what an amazing way of explaining, for instance, how thresholds can matter and how they need to be defined the way you think of them, say, in that English house of you cross from one to another. So I wonder, Laurent, I hope this is a playful challenge and not too playful by half, you tell me. Both to illustrate the ways in which you show how a built space represents so many decisions by an architect, by a designer that endure, that affect the way we live our lives, and to illustrate your point that the way things are aren't the way that things have to be. They can be redesigned to these spaces. I'm curious, just to be self-referential for a moment, here's a room with people and a baby, and it's a space that is very familiar to us. You shurned up for this workshop, the fact that it was in this room was like, hmm, nice burled wood, you know? Like, all right, it's a classroom. I wonder if you could take a moment and deconstruct this room, its relation to our function as a group, to our desire within this group during this meeting to be both very public and private, particularly as we're working with our technology. You chased it away, Jonathan. The baby just left? Yes, yes. On its own locomotion? I think because of your joke. I see. This man will insult a baby. It was a friendly cry out, what can I say? So, more private than public. The baby tweeted, yes. But finally an actual use for Twitter, it's for babies. So, we digress. The question is, what can you tell us about how the environment we're in right now is shaping how we're deciding to talk about an intellectual topic and are there ways in which you could imagine it being reshaped that would change how we're about to talk about this topic? Actually, this is an interesting topic because it's a typical question for church spaces. The Catholic Church has this long, narrow, narrow main space for processions. And the Protestant space has always been a space of communication. So, it's much more like a theater space where there is a direct or should be a direct contact between the preacher and its public. And obviously here we are still in such a way we are not really discussing with the public but we have a kind of hierarchical situation. Perhaps it's good but we have it here. Is this space more Catholic or Protestant? It would be more. We have to work in such typologies. It would be more Protestant. But another interesting topic I was thinking by crossing as a campus is, for instance, the difference between Austin Hall and the Science Center. And I think these are two buildings that really show this kind of difference between Austin Hall, this building by Richardson, which has a really monumental and symmetrical facade with some stairs which goes up. It's really in cooperation of the institution. While the Science Center is completely open actually to the campus and to the lane and there is not any more such a clear boundary inside and outside and people walk through and use it much more as a kind of place of encounter. So there's Austin Hall and you were saying the place of encounter is more like the Science Center or more this? Science Center. And I guess it's the interior space you're talking more about than the exterior. But also the way the entrance is done which is more... And so I was trying to say that Austin Hall is quite a traditional institution. It's clearly an outside and an inside and then there is this porch as a real threshold space which separates and connects the both. And in this building it's much more diffuse. When do you begin to be in the building? Is it when you are under the roof? Is it when you cross the door? Or is it when you are in the main gallery in the center of the building? So I think there you can quite nicely show... Which finds you might get drawn into this building by matter of degrees. So you come for the little fog pool to the right and then find yourself under the awning because it's wet and then you find yourself inside because you smelled the coffee. And Austin Hall you may have to make more of an explicit decision like the Supreme Court of the United States to mount the stairs and open the door. That's a threshold. We're trying to keep them out John. At the Supreme Court. Well that's in Austin, yeah. That is certainly I guess the message you're saying the building is conveying. Is it more inviting? Spatially, yes. Spatially, yes. It's spatially more inviting. We can't speak to the rest of it. It is the science center after all. And so this room, back to this room for a moment. This is a room with big thresholds, right? Yes. This has a threshold between inside and outside, between front of the room and back which is only the crazy people sit up front. And no offense. And we could change the thresholds here, right? We could, yes. Which I guess would make it harder to hold a class because I would hear babies from far away. Absolutely. There is one example actually in the Seattle library where the upper seats are quite public and the more you go down the more encloses the space. So there were some tries to do it. And this is a typical example where I think the thresholds have been or the architect has been working on the threshold. For instance, the sidewalk is inside the building. Or as you see, the auditorium is completely open on the top. And when you walk down you come into much more traditional. And here you could be drawn into a lecture that you weren't able to attend. And you can left when your child is... Exactly. Where the escalator goes, where he's sitting. Terrific.