Windows and Screens

Event: Public lecture in English at the CCA around the theme of domestic space in response to the current exhibition ‘Rooms You May Have Missed’.

Abstract: the lecture introduces to the topic of the gaze, concerns about the rise and fall of privacy, and the concept of the “in-between.” Moreover, one might ask how the notions of window, door, frame, and screen have unfolded in time, and how, under new guises, they contribute to the emergence of a virtual terrain or digital topographies. As such, the relation between intimate and “extimate” is of a quasi topological nature, a situation in which the interior is turned into an exterior, like a Möbius strip, a closed, non-orientable surface with only one side and only one boundary.

Bio: Georges Teyssot is Professor at Laval University’s School of Architecture in Quebec City (QC, CA). He has previously taught history and theory at Princeton University’s School of Architecture (NJ, USA), and at the GTA in the Department of Architecture at Zurich’s ETH (CH). Among his publications translated in 12 languages, he has written the introduction to the volume of Diller + Scofidio, Flesh: Architectural Probes (1995, 2011). He was the curator with Diller + Scofidio of an exhibition on The American Lawn at the Canadian Centre for Architecture in 1998. He is the author of many books, including Die Krankheit des Domizils (1989), The History of Garden Design (1991, 2000), and The American Lawn (1999). More recently, he has published a book on Walter Benjamin. Les maisons oniriques, (Paris: Hermann, 2013); and a volume entitled A Topology of Everyday Constellations, in the“Writing Architecture Series”, (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2013), of which presently he is preparing the French version (Lausanne, CH: PPUR, Presses polytechniques et universitaires romandes, 2016, forthcoming).