MATTHEW BEAUMONT, University College London

Do we feel at home in the cities we inhabit? In this paper, I explore aspects of the role that buildings play in reinforcing both the concrete and more abstract forms of the feeling of not being at home in the urban environment. I am interested not simply in how we relate to buildings, as sentient beings, but in how buildings, as effectively animate entities, relate to us. To put it in pathological terms, I am interested not only in how we look at buildings but, more significantly still, in how buildings look at us; that is, in how we internalize the gaze of buildings. Applying ideas taken from Slavoj Zizek and Jacques Derrida, I examine the ways in which, in the current conjuncture, a specific type of contemporary architecture, which I characterize in terms of its ‘visored’ facades, dramatizes this intrusive, even offensive, relation to the individual.

Discutant / Thierry Labica, Université Paris Nanterre