The Public Interior and its Purpose: a re-assessment
Mark Pimlott (TU Delft - Situated Architecture)
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Abstract
After COVID-19, might one think of the public interior differently? Might the public interior treat the people who use it differently? There is a long history of the public interior shaping or conditioning its subjects and forming subjectivities. Rarely do those subjects challenge the projections of public interiors or alter their conditions. One might imagine (or hope) that the orderly submission to consumption or other subtler exhibitions of power might be diverted by other possibilities, by, say people-watching with civility, or by associations that are independent of prescribed modes of behaviour. One is largely aware that the public interior becomes public by some common consent – it is taken to be public –when it is in fact most often a privately owned, operated and secured space, which implicitly filters its public, and very often does so explicitly, affording limited enfranchisement or denying it entirely as it does so.