ABSTRACT
Central to the function of public interiority is an invested interest in conscripting new spatial subjects through the commons. 1 Challenging epistemological conventions around public space, the texts in this section are reframing our understanding of the outside. They conceptualize the outside as both a place and a set of relational sociopolitical conditions that can be reimagined through design. Asking the reader to consider who we are in the public sphere, alongside who we can become in relation to one another, and to place. In a letter to architect R. Buckminster Fuller, feminist writer June Jordan writes about her belief in the role of architecture to advance the daily qualities of urban life, “I also believe that the architecture of experience deeply determines an incalculable number and variety of habits—i.e., the nature of quotidian experience.” 2 She continues by connecting this idea of an architecture of experience to well-being,
I would wish to indicate the determining relationship between architectonic reality and physical well-being. … This requires the redevelopment of an idea or theory of place in terms of human being… of space cherishing as it amplifies the experience of being alive, the capability of endless beginnings… 3
Jordan’s vision of designing a place that centers our aliveness presents a new set of questions around the spatiality of our being. How does urbanity facilitate or constrict the ways in which we come into being? How are our public lives as individuals and a collective civic body formulated through the built environment?