PUBLIC SPACE: ARCHITECTURE'S PLACE OF DWELLING AND COMING INTO BEING Professor Zeev Druckman

PUBLIC SPACE: ARCHITECTURE'S PLACE OF DWELLING AND COMING INTO BEING
Professor Zeev Druckman
(English Translation by Elen Rochlin)

When we come to place ourselves in the world, all the concepts of existence that have ever been thought up by human beings throughout all generations are cast at us in a chaotic pell-mell. True enough, we do have at our disposal precedents, experience, a given situation, accumulated knowledge, global technology to appeal to. Yet all these are nothing but part of the "torrent" of concepts and phenomena which do not help to make simpler the existence of a clear and distinct horizon. Comparable to the exploding of meteorites.

As one possible practice, we attempt to get involved in this stream by means of cross-section and sifting planes, where every sieve captures and accumulates no more than one single concept at a time, while the rest go right on streaming through it onto other sift planes.

Let us assume a plane which collects concepts associated with "multifacetedness" (or "multiplicity of facets"), and below it a plane which collects concepts circling about the question of "How does one

inhabit?" and a third plane which collects concepts of the urban and the universal, or, more exactly, concepts of inner and outer limits, and lo, we find ourselves experiencing the accrual of a "mound" of sorts, one built up of planes upon planes, not as a time receptacle, but as a receptacle for consciousness where we must find the system of relations between one plane and another, saturated as they are with notions of temptation, of nearness, and of self-distancing. And so we ask ourselves, who lives in the plane of temptation, and who lives in the plane of disengagement.

The public space is always created in the vacant place of temptation. This is the quiet place, or the Silent Space, which constitutes the unoccupied essence awaiting that all the others should gather and go, and that additional others should come, a place of hospitality for all the others, a place of ever continuing coming to be.

The elements which characterize public space are, in principle, two: the first is that we grasp it as public, such that any human is entitled to subsist in it, and the second characteristic feature is what we do for ourselves, or, more exactly, how we appropriate this space for ourselves.

Doing for ourselves means that because the world is a world divided, and this is what makes it possible for us to fashion our share in the world in those things that are beyond time and place, we know that all

human doings, science, art, and the like, we derive from ourselves as participation in the public world. It follows, therefore, that architecture by its very nature is a public affair; it deals with the being of public issues; it is certainly a lofty expression for the being that is derived from ourselves as participation in the world.

The notion of the "public" pertains first of all to what appears in a public which is watched and listened to by others; the presence of the Other concretizes for us the reality of the world and the reality of ourselves within it. There is no public space without the Other; an ongoing confrontation must obtain between whatever we may be in the process of thinking through at the present moment and what is being thought through by others. The confrontation is a precondition for the existence of the concept of the "public," and sometimes the confrontation can bring about the negation of the original contents.

The meaning of the concept of the "public" is actually the world itself, which is to a certain extent separated from our private world in it. This world is not identical to the ground or to nature as a limited place for residing in, these last referring mainly to those things which are the work of human hands. To live in the world necessarily means that there is something to be found among those living in it such that they see in this particular thing their public concern.

The world, like any mediator or go-between, joins together and separates at one and the same time.

We know that the end of the public world—and this is an outcome of the functioning of the public space—occurs as soon as it is conceived of and observed in only one aspect and no more, and permitted to present itself from only one point of view (compare Hannah Arendt in her book The Human Condition). That is to say, this is when no confrontation takes place, in effect, with any other party, such a confrontation being a precondition for the existence of public space. And if there is no public space, then architecture does not exist in the poetic sense of "architecture," this being the sense of moving on to the object itself, with the implication that things must be observed and presented as having more than one single aspect in order that the world may go on existing as a mediator or go-between. We know that what is problematic in large societies and large publics is not so much the numbers of people, but rather that the world as a mediator or go-between has lost some of its capacity of bringing them together. Concepts such as alms or charity in Christian philosophy, patriotism, and the vision of the family, are

mediators of sorts, but mediators or go-betweens without a physical concretized world (thus becoming tantamount to worldlessness). Note, then, the rule of law and order.

When does empty extension turn into public space? Extension, or space, becomes public in accord with the character of its boundaries, that is, in accord with the architecture of its boundaries, which retains deep within itself the value of civility: manners, politeness, brotherhood. This is a system of relationships with other urban phenomena in which, too, the value precondition of civility is in existence.

There, between the individual and the general, or the private and the public, in effect, at this limit is where architecture (...) subsists, and, if you will, there are those who claim that this is where the bringing to presence of the concept of truth is to be encountered.

I purpose to say a few words about nature as something connected to our present discussion.

There is no connection, in my view, between nature and architecture, architecture dealing with boundaries or limits (as described above), while nature is free of limits altogether. Architecture is interpretive, commentarial, deliberating, hesitant, while nature is an iron wall innocent of any such moments; architecture is between the private and the public, while nature is not private and not public: it is beyond society.

For the purpose of achieving further understanding, I would like to deal briefly with the notion of the "extended phenotype." The phenotype, as is well enough known, is the bodily expression of the genotype which contains within itself the totality of the genetic information about a given body. The technical term "phenotype" is used to refer to the bodily instantiation of any gene whatsoever out of the complex of available genetic knowledge. In his book The Extended Phenotype (published by Oxford University Press in 1982), Richard Dawkins (A few words about him: Clinton Richard Dawkins, born in 1941, is a British biologist and author of the 1976 book The Selfish Gene in which he presents A gene-centered understanding of evolution. he defends his ideas against criticism IN the sequel, The Extended Phenotype, in which he propounds the view that the effects of a gene are not limited to the body of an organism, but can affect its environment*) says that the extended phenotype is everything that a living organism does as based on its genes, except that some of the outcomes of the organism's behavior are to be encountered outside the parameters of the organism's biological-phenotypical body. As examples Dawkins cites birds' nests, beaver dams, bagworm cases or caddis houses, and spider webs: all these are not phenotypes of the living organisms in question, but rather their extended phenotypes. For human beings, culture is their extended phenotype, this being a higher level of organization than

a solitary human being.

As already noted, the human and physical space is the extended phenotype of the available cultural genotype in any society. Thus, when a human being is born in a particular place, he or she accepts

and internalizes the culture of that place as an extended phenotype on the basis of which "memes" (as derived from the word "memory") take shape in him or her. These last constitute the "memetic code" by

means of which the human being will connect to the space and function creatively in it. Just as genes propagate from one body to another, so, too, "memes" propagate from one mind to another. The spatial location of this distribution is, in effect, what is for us public space. So much, in brief, for Dawkins and his colleagues, the social scientists.

I would also like to avail myself somewhat of an especially tall tree: St. Augustine, the bishop of the city of Hippo (in what is Algeria today).

Augustine exercised, and to this day continues to exercise, an enormous influence on Western culture; he is one of the most outstanding figures responsible for the shaping of Christian knowledge, especially thanks to his work, The City of God (De Civitate Dei, also known as De Civitate Dei contra Paganos, The City of God against the Pagans). And I would like to say a few words on his role in shaping the Christian understanding of the Sacraments. He defines the Sacrament as "the form, visible to the eye, of Divine loving kindness, which is not visible." We can say, then, that the Sacrament is an entity which represents and brings to presence, by means of a kind of transparence, a different entity. For instance, the

Holy Sepulcher, by means of which we learn about the death and the resurrection of Jesus. The Sacraments are a type of mystical mediator of loving kindness which, by means of the compilation of certain texts and certain words, achieves a closeness between the believer and God. In my opinion, Augustine makes it possible for believers to be active. One has to go on discovering the invisible loving kindness and, like everything whose meaning is beyond the thing itself, so, too, the basic Sacrament

achieves the creation of new sub-Sacraments as the space about a human being continues to grow.

The two examples which I introduced, the "extended phenotype" from Dawkins and Augustine's Sacrament, enable us to wonder at the meaning of architecture which is beyond the limits of the basic object and which has the persistent feature of endlessness, bringing about an ongoing search for the point in time at which we understand the meaning of place.

It follows that any given architectural act in which we find meaning that reaches beyond the fundamental meaning of the act has the ability to (...) in shaping the

public space.

Professor Zeev Druckman

(English Translation by Elen Rochlin)