THE PASSAGE

The Passage

More than two decades ago, Robin Evan’s essay “ Figures, Doors and Passages” offered one of the clearest and most compelling arguments about “ the plan and its occupants”. The invention of the corridor as the primary organizational space of the domestic interior; he argues, did not simply mark a shift in architectural styles of conceptions of space. Instead, it indexed the reconfiguration of the family and social organization in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In the Palladian villa, every room was linked to its neighbours through multiple doors. The occupants and visitors to the house would flow through sitting rooms, bedrooms and so on. The plan is one similar to the Indo-Portuguese houses seen earlier in this text. There was no separation between circulation and room, suggesting that ideas of privacy and intimacy were perhaps not what they are today. Evans demonstrated how the introduction of the corridor did not simply separate circulation from the rooms, but also how each room enjoyed only one access point to its connective spine.  The house, its spatial configuration and connectivity, was a diagram for a different concept of domesticity and intimacy based on moralities, social organisations and regimes of labour. While previously it would have been completely normal o walk through a child’s bedroom on the way to one’s own, the parental bed and the children’s room were now kept strictly apart. It is at this time, that “childhood” was invented as a discrete period in modern life, and bourgeois notions of romantic marriage took hold. Additionally, the corridor also spoke of efficiency. Before, the use of a room might have inhibited access ( through locked doors; now all such tensions are smoothed away via the passage. Moreover, this reading can be extended to suggest that it is not simply the house that responds to different social structures, but that these architectures also train their subjects. Unlike Heidegger’s notion of passive domestic domains, perhaps the house, as Mark Cousins has recently suggested,  is rather, a site of training , discipline and possibly aggression. In other words, one must learn how to live by becoming domesticated. The architectural concept of the corridor and its plan engages a subject who could not exist outside that space.  

         The following is the O House by Hideyuki Nakayama, located in Kyoto, which takes the form of a passage off of the main street. The program of the house is neatly tucked around corners of the large open 'corridor'. It is an experiment that challenges passer-by's to walk in...or walk by...