THE QUESTION OF PUBLIC SPACE AND IDENTITY

Russian Pavilion 2014 Venice Biennale

In 1958 Hannah Arendt in The Human Condition wrote “what makes mass society so difficult to bear is not the number of people […] but the fact that the world between them has lost its power to gather them together, to relate and to separate them.”

The last two weeks in Moscow and London, talks of designing spaces reflecting identity and generating interaction had been a recurring theme. In Moscow, architects voiced their concern on lacking or losing a once prominent architectural language that marked Russian Identity whether it was during the Soviet Era or Post Soviet Era specifically before Putin’s rise to power. In London, developers strove to build spaces that are inclusive to all the diverse ethnic communities, and local architectural firms were so keen on showing their proposals of public spaces (David Adjaye’s Idea Store in London, and Amanda Levete’s EDP Foundation in Lisbon). Interestingly, the Russian Pavilion for this year’s Venice Biennale replicating an international trade fair is an ideal model that reflects the struggles of today’s architectural world. With globalization and the influx of people migrating to all corners of the world, how do you define an individual’s identity, let alone a country’s architectural identity? And how do you design a space that is ‘inclusive’ for ‘everyone’? When claiming it is for ‘everyone’ who is within this scope? The British, the Bengalis, the Hasidic Jews and many other communities have very specific notions of public space. Is architecture capable of addressing these perceptions? Hannah Arendt called for the revival of the public realm which according to her is synonymous with political discourse, a space of contestation that eventually leads to an understanding. Interestingly, blogs, forums and other forms of online networks in virtual space have been more successful in providing a platform for political discourse than public spaces. Perhaps as architects we should strive to design spaces that generate friction to spark discourse rather than smooth spaces that pacify an existing system.