Intimate Metropolis ─ Urban Subjects in the Modern City

Intimate Metropolis explores connections between the modern city, its architecture, and its citizens, by questioning traditional conceptualizations of public and private.

Rather than focusing purely on public spaces—such as streets, cafés, gardens, or department stores—or on the domestic sphere, the book investigates those spaces and practices that engage both the urban and the domestic, the public and the private. The legal, political and administrative frameworks of urban life are seen as constituting private individuals’ sense of self, in a wide range of European and world cities from Amsterdam and Barcelona to London and Chicago.

Providing authoritative new perspectives on individual citizenship as it relates to both public and private space, in-depth case studies of major European, American and other world cities and written by an international set of contributors, this volume is key reading for all students of architecture.

Vittoria Di Palma is Assistant Professor of architectural history in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University, New York.

Diana Periton is an architectural historian and critic. Between 2004 and 2007 she was Head of History and Theory at the Mackintosh School of Architecture in Glasgow.

Marina Lathouri co-directs the Histories and Theories Graduate Programme at the Architectural Association School of Architecture, London.

Introduction Vittoria Di Palma, Diana Periton, Marina Lathouri 1. Urban Life Diana Periton 2. Heads: Philip-Lorca diCorcia and the Paradox of Urban Portraiture Hugh Campbell 3. A Space for the Imagination: Depicting Women Readers in the Nineteenth-Century City Kathryn Brown 4. ‘So the Flâneur Goes For a Walk In His Room": Interior, Arcade, Cinema, Metropolis Charles Rice 5. Exhibitionism: John Soane’s ‘Model House’ Helene Furján 6. Private House, Public House: Victor Horta’s Ubiquitous Domesticity Amy Kulper 7. Drawing and Dispute: The Strategies of the Berlin Block Katharina Borsi 8. ‘The Necessity of the Plan’: Visions of Individuality and Collective Intimacies Marina Lathouri 9. City is House and House is City: Aldo van Eyck, Piet Blom, and the Architecture of Homecoming Karin Jaschke 10. Urban Play: Intimate Space and Postwar Subjectivity Roy Kozlovsky 11. Pervasive Intimacy: The Unité d’Habitation and Golden Lane as Instruments of Postwar Domesticity Christopher Hight 12. Zoom: Google Earth and Global Intimacy Vittoria Di Palma