Chapter Two - Experiencing Spaces I – People and Privacy

Summary

‘These days, only the powerful can demand privacy.’

Happy Moscow isn't entirely accurate when it states that only objects are left, surviving in the dark. As poetic as it sounds, there are not simply things that allow us to see the past, but rather a combination of objects, buildings and people that can tell us their histories and biographies. This chapter adds the next element of our analysis: that of the spatial properties of buildings, and how they can be ‘read’ in combination with other factors to view not only the places but the people within them.

The main method employed here is based principally on access analysis as proposed by Bill Hillier and Julianne Hanson. Hillier and Hanson argue that a building, in and of itself, serves the purpose of organizing the space it encloses, and organizing that space is tantamount to organizing the people within those spaces. The methodology is outlined extensively in their monograph, and it is proposed as a universal method to approach buildings that has been utilized by disciplines including anthropology, archaeology and architectural history to understand the subtleties of space in a variety of contexts. As outlined in the introductory chapter, it is not a methodology without its critics, especially in stripping the spaces from other factors including the materiality of the buildings themselves, but certain layers such as reading gender or materiality in the analysis can be added to a ‘pure’ spatial analysis to read the spaces with their manifestations of their physical realities. Since the publication of Hillier and Hanson's theory and method in the mid-1980s, there have also been increasingly nuanced and theorized approaches seen in areas such as phenomenology, landscape studies, materiality, thinginess and agency theories. For example, ideas of sensory experiences in places augment a view of the past in decentring visuality as the primary or sole experience of a place. Works such as those by Ben Jervis enliven the social expressions of medieval pottery through marrying Actor-Network Theory à la Bruno Latour and the engagement of people with materials, furthering the ties we can make between people, objects and places.