Lost intimacy. Walls and curtains in the rebuilding of contemporary privacy

Abstract

The word transparency has lost its naivety. It has become a sign of opacity itself and architecture is no longer able to escape this radical change of meaning. The relation between clearness and architecture has had optimistic scholars or, at least, their theorists, but today transparency is neither a threat nor a promise anymore. Transparency has reached its paroxysm. So, is it still possible to build a filter that protects our overexposed privacy? This paper tries to rediscover the meaning of partition walls and curtains as filters. Even in a time when they have lost their power of separation, we can still discover experiences such as those carried out by Matta-Clark, Anne Holtrop, Luis Callejas or Petra Blaisse. They all work with those walls and curtains with different approaches. Those elements can underline the cultural, symbolic and physical value of the space they are within. Their curtains can produce a new kind of distance between exterior and interior life.