A Topology of Everyday Constellations

Today, spaces no longer represent a bourgeois haven; nor are they the sites of aclassical harmony between work and leisure, private and public, the local and the global. The houseis not merely a home but a position for negotiations with multiple spheres -- the technological aswell as the physical and the psychological. In A Topology of EverydayConstellations, Georges Teyssot considers the intrusion of the public sphere into privatespace, and the blurring of notions of interior, privacy, and intimacy in our societies. He proposesthat we rethink design in terms of a new definition of the practices of everyday life. Teyssot considers the door, the window, the mirror, and the screen as thresholdsor interstitial spaces that divide the world in two: the outside and the inside. Thresholds, hesuggests, work both as markers of boundaries and as bridges to the exterior. The stark choicebetween boundary and bridge creates a middle space, an in-between that holds the possibility ofexchanges and encounters. If the threshold no longer separates public fromprivate, and if we can no longer think of the house as a bastion of privacy, Teyssot asks, does thebody still inhabit the house -- or does the house, evolving into a series of microdevices, inhabitthe body?

Georges Teyssot, Professor in the School of Architecture at Laval University, Quebec, has taught the history and theory of architecture at the Istituto Universitario di Architettura of Venice, Princeton University's School of Architecture, and the Department of Architecture at ETH Zurich. He is the author or editor of many books, including Interior Landscapes and The American Lawn.