Privacy

Definition

Privacy is the socially negotiated condition by which individuals or groups control access to themselves, their bodies, their information and their space — the achieved distinction between public and private realms. In the wiki's sources, privacy is never a simple property of rooms. It is positional (Ardener: "the entry of a stranger may change a private area into a public one" — privacy as an achievement of social situation, not architecture alone); it is a design product with a history (interior histories are organized, on Rice's critique, around "the continually present themes of privacy and domesticity"); and it is a limit-test for design programmes: Croft's Schröder House analysis makes "the nature of public/private space" "central to any analysis," showing that a transformable interior which dispenses with conventional privacy (the bathroom that must be made "by pulling out walls around the bath") becomes "not more egalitarian but more dictatorial," until "ultimately, Schröder craved greater privacy." The concept's stakes for the wiki: privacy is what the flexible interior trades away, what the domestic interior promises, and what queer theory destabilizes when it challenges "traditional 'normal' ontologies of home, for example, home, privacy and publicity." Edelman's men's room gives the concept its most public case: the room "set apart… to provide a culturally designated 'privacy' in which to respond to the body's demands" that "houses two highly differentiated spaces that re-establish within it the consequential distinction between public and private zones, mapping each of those attributes onto specified zones of the male subject's body" (Edelman, p. 104) — privacy as a designed distribution of exposure, stall against urinal, "strategically bicameral" (pp. 104–105).

A further, philosophical-historical register appears in Teyssot's chapter: privacy as privateness — the subject-position theorized before it was designed. Kierkegaard is "perhaps the first theorist of privateness, the first theorist of the inwardness that the German had defined under the word Innerlichkeit" (p. 345): privacy here is not control of access but a metaphysics — "the subject as the only truth," reality as "only his thinking within his room," the window's outside "merely an illusion." The register also supplies the concept's genealogy and its exclusion: private space was in the seventeenth century "the place of the relationship between an individual and God, the place of prayer," transformed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries "into a space of intimacy" (pp. 345–346) — privacy migrating from theological to psychological definition — and the world of reflection has an entry condition: "Were one homeless or without 'a room of one's own,' one could not belong to this world of reflection" (p. 346). Its pathological form is Adorno's "isolated privacy": the window mirror's occupant, "solitary, inactive, and separated from the economic processes of production," in a room whose glass "testifies to objectlessness" (p. 347) — privacy overachieved to the point of mourning. See inwardness, bedroom.

Key Thinkers

• Catherine Croft — privacy as the analytic test of transformable living: the flexible interior "provokes the limit of what is acceptable and tolerable with regards to privacy, even within the social atmosphere between family members" (2000/2006).
• Shirley Ardener — privacy as positional achievement: private/public as one of the cross-culturally variable classification pairs; the stranger's entry that converts private into public (2006).
• Adolf Loos — the privacy logic of the modern interior: domestic life as "an intensely private affair reserved for the interior" — a logic that applied to domestic projects but not to commercial projects or public figures (via Deyong).
• Mark Taylor & Julieanna Preston — the editors who stage privacy as contested: queer theory deployed "to discuss complexities of public and private space," destabilizing "home, privacy and publicity" (2006).
• Lee Edelman — privacy's bicameral distribution: the men's room's "culturally designated 'privacy'" mapped onto body-zones — the genitals "acquir[ing], through the openness of the urinal, a relatively 'public' status" while the stall's partition holds the check (2006). See mens-room.
• Bill Hillier & Julienne Hanson — privacy's syntactic definition: privacy as the inhabitant's "special access to and control of the category of space created by the boundary," against the visitor who "may enter the building temporarily, but may not control it" (1984/2006). See inhabitant-and-visitor.
• Georges Teyssot — privateness as theory and pathology: Kierkegaard's privateness as privacy's first theorization; the prayer-to-intimacy genealogy; homelessness as exclusion from the world of reflection; "isolated privacy" as the window mirror's product (1996/2006). See inwardness.

Related Concepts

• Domestic Interior — the interior's historical promise: the dwelling as the private sphere's built form; Benjamin's private individual who "needs the domestic interior to sustain him in his illusions."
• Boundaries — privacy's material instrument: walls, screens, partitions and thresholds as the devices that hold the private/public line — movable when privacy must be made rather than given.
• Partition of Space — the ordering system whose private/public pair is one of the cross-culturally variable criteria of classification (Ardener).
• Enclosure — the disciplinary limit case: the delineated, controlled territory; Croft's prison comparison gives flexible enclosure a disciplinary reading ("proscribed actions at proscribed times").
• Separate Spheres — the nineteenth-century doctrine that assigned privacy (and the domestic interior) to the feminine sphere and publicity to the masculine.
• Flexible Interior — flexibility's cost: transformability can dispense with privacy (the made bathroom) while promising freedom; the Schröder House as the case study.
• The Men's Room — privacy's bicameral public case: the partition "that distinguishes the privacy of the stalls from the exposure of the urinals and sinks," each chamber "hold[ing] the other in check"; the reversed pudeur values ("you don't show your ass in the men's room, and you don't conceal your dick") as privacy's law written on the body.
• The Dialectics of Outside and Inside — Bachelard's phenomenological ground: the felt intimacy of inside space from which privacy's social negotiations depart.
• Inhabitant and Visitor — privacy's syntactic form: the three-part interface (inhabitant–visitor–stranger) in which privacy is the inhabitant's control of the category, visitors enter legitimately without controlling, and strangers do not enter at all (Hillier & Hanson).

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Movement and Myth (Croft 2000/2006) — the concept's design-critical case: "Central to any analysis of the Schröder House is the nature of public/private space"; the realms "must have been clearly delineated as private" for the user even when the plan is legible in any partition state; the made bathroom as "the antithesis of a relaxing experience"; the prison analogy; and "Ultimately, Schröder craved greater privacy" — the client for whom flexibility was designed wanting privacy back.
• The Partition of Space (Ardener 2006) — privacy as positional: "the entry of a stranger may change a private area into a public one" (p. 17); public/private and inside/outside added to the cross-cultural classification pairs (Hirschon's modern Greeks as "a particular concern" with these oppositions, p. 19).
• A history of style and the modern interior (Deyong 2018) — the Loos privacy logic: "for Loos, the domestic life of the individual was an intensely private affair reserved for the interior," applying to domestic projects but not commercial ones or public figures — privacy as a historically specific, person-specific rule, not a general spatial property.
• Rethinking Histories of the Interior (Rice 2004/2006) — privacy as the essentialist historiography's organizing theme, now critiqued from the primary text: interior histories seek "the continually present themes of privacy and domesticity in relation to the stable categories of the interior and its inhabiting subject"; the shared fault of "histories of privacy, domesticity and the interior" is "a post-nineteenth-century way of seeing… which is itself not appreciated within an historical context"; and Perrot's counter-realization — "the ultimately private nature of the evidence of privacy" — against Gere's shift of the interior's representations "from being familial possessions to becoming historical, and therefore public, documents." Privacy is thus doubly problematic for its own history: its theme is a historical formation, and its evidence is structurally private (the albums' "almost secret possession"). See bourgeois-interior, interior-view.
• (Re)constructing Histories (Hollis 2018) — privacy as the historiographic constant: Rice's critique that interior histories "seek to establish a domain of study wherein one can recognize the continually present themes of privacy and domesticity in relation to the stable categories of the interior and its inhabiting subject"; and "interior architecture was seen as another iteration of the unstable relationship between the private and public spheres."
• Proximities (Taylor & Preston 2006) — the destabilization: queer theory used "not to reify the lesbian or homosexual but to discuss complexities of public and private space and the containment of an identity," challenging "traditional 'normal' ontologies of home, for example, home, privacy and publicity" (p. 11).
• The Sterility of Perfection + The Rule Breaker's Success (Baldwin 1972/2006) — privacy at the scale of taste and possession: the decorator's failure condition is not achieving "that wonderful warm atmosphere of a private, personal place" (p. 27), and wholesale acquisition is "almost an invasion of privacy" (p. 28) — privacy as the personal room's condition, purchasable by no single act.
• From ambient environments to sentient spaces (Gattegno & Johnson 2018) — the data-era register, at urban scale: the pluggable grid "rais[es] issues of ownership, privacy, access, and capitalism" — "Who owns the data? Who disperses it? What data is represented and how is it selected?" The harvested city makes privacy an infrastructural question: Datagrove "harness[es] data that is normally nested and hidden in smartphones" and "amplifies this discourse into the public realm"; Murmur Wall retransmits "trending search terms" as illuminated public text. Privacy here is no longer what the room protects but what the network exposes — and the design counter-move is Murmur Wall's whispers, the public's ability to tag and override the retransmitted feed "analogous to graffiti on an urban surface."
• Men's Room (Edelman 1996/2006) — privacy's queer-theoretical public case: "The men's room, set apart as it is to provide a culturally designated 'privacy' in which to respond to the body's demands, houses two highly differentiated spaces that re-establish within it the consequential distinction between public and private zones, mapping each of those attributes onto specified zones of the male subject's body" (p. 104); the genitals' "relatively 'public' status" at the urinal against the anus's "weightier burdens of social embarrassment" (p. 104); the "strategically bicameral" partition, "like the U.S. Congress… allowing each part of its legislative body to hold the other in check" (pp. 104–105); and the stall's "cloistered protection" as the refuge offered when the urinal's exposure is refused (p. 105). See mens-room.
• Berggasse 19: Inside Freud's Office (Fuss & Sanders 1996/2006) — privacy's photographic exposure: the editors' headnote's street-photography reading — "Recognising that the original photographs utilise techniques and strategies of street photography, Fuss and Sanders suggest that this private chamber of close and personal exchange, of intimate interiorities, is turned inside out for public display via the photographic images" (p. 117) — privacy not breached but converted, the private interior's intimate transaction made public by the archival image; and the room's internal privacy machine: the mirror on the window that "redirects the gaze inward," keeping the view private even from its occupant. See mirror, architectural-photography, interiority.
• Buildings and their Genotypes (Hillier & Hanson 1984/2006) — privacy's syntactic definition: privacy is not a property of walls but a position in the building's constructed social order. "Every building, even a single cell, identifies at least one 'inhabitant,' in the sense of a person with special access to and control of the category of space created by the boundary" (p. 151); visitors — "pupils in a school, patients in a hospital, guests in a house, and prisoners in a prison" — have "a legitimate reason to cross the boundary of a building, but… no control over that building and their social individuality is not mapped into the structure of space" (p. 151). Privacy is thus the inhabitant's control over the category of space that the visitor may temporarily occupy and the stranger may not enter — an interface whose ratios are set by the permeability structure (gamma-analysis), which explains why the same plan can grant a guest access to some cells and withhold others. See inhabitant-and-visitor, transpatial-solidarity.
• 'House Beautiful': Style and Consumption in the Home (Madigan & Munro 1996/2006) — privacy's relational-benefaction form, the domestic-sociological register: "We argued that an important element of familial ideology was that the home should be a relaxed 'back-region' where material wealth and show is much less important than the human relationships sustained" (p. 224) — the Goffman-inflected claim (the 1993 Munro & Madigan "Privacy in the private sphere" study) that privacy's value is what the household can do in it (relax, welcome, withhold show) rather than what walls exclude. The finding extends Ardener's positional privacy into the moral register: the same room can be relaxed and exposing ("the recognition that the home may also be revealing about the household," p. 224), so privacy is negotiated not just at the boundary but within the household's judgment economy — where respectability's standards (cleanliness, tidiness) make the private realm continuously legible to its own inhabitants (see respectability, domestic-interior).
• Living in Glass Houses (Melchionne 1998/2006) — privacy's transparency limit, the concept's strongest architectural negation: "The glass walls render the occupant perpetually self-conscious of being watched" (p. 229) — privacy lost not by opening a boundary but by making the boundary itself transparent, enclosure retained (plate glass "enclos[es] the structure," p. 228) while exposure is total (from outside, "one gets a free view into the interior as well"). The register names privacy as dwelling's constitutive association: "The Glass House contradicts the long-standing Western association of dwelling with enclosure, privacy, and relaxation. As these tendencies are deeply entrenched, one can never get used to the Glass House and so can never truly inhabit it" (p. 229) — privacy so entrenched in the Western dwelling-association that its absence blocks habituation itself; and privacy appears twice more as the lifestyle pattern the ideal space abstracts from ("in relative abstraction from conventional lifestyle patterns marked by privacy, informality, and comfort," p. 231) and as what the weekending occupant flees to the outbuildings' overflow. Where Ardener makes privacy positional and Croft makes it a design test, Melchionne makes it the entrenchment test: the measure of how much an interior can change before it stops being inhabitable at all. See glass-house, dwelling, enclosure.
• Architecture and Interior: A Roam of One's Own (Taylor 2001/2006) — privacy's voluntariness criterion, the concept's psychological-conditions register: the interior as "a place of reflection and withdrawal from the chaos of 'out there?'" (p. 342), with withdrawal's worth made conditional — "Might our sense of 'interiorness,' our interpretation of the interior depend on whether we, as inmates, are confined of our own accord, have encounters we initiate, and the manner in which we re-live memories and are moved by them?" (p. 342). Privacy here is not a property of enclosure but a relation to it: the same room is refuge ("a refuge, a place of order, 'dry land'" against "the outside… dark and watery," p. 341) or prison ("a prison, constructed of conventions and illusions," p. 342) depending on whether the confinement is self-chosen — with Gilman's rest-cure room and Lily Bart's tenement as the imposed-confinement limit-cases, and the renaissance warning that privacy fails structurally when the outside is as ordered as the inside ("there would be no withdrawing for they are spatially the same," p. 342). The voluntariness criterion gives the page's positional (Ardener), syntactic (Hillier & Hanson) and transparency (Melchionne) registers a subjective floor: privacy is what self-chosen enclosure makes possible. See refuge, the-madwoman, interiority.
• Boredom and Bedroom (Teyssot 1996/2006) — privacy's philosophical-historical register: Kierkegaard "the first theorist of privateness, the first theorist of the inwardness that the German had defined under the word Innerlichkeit" (p. 345); the genealogy of private space from prayer ("the place of the relationship between an individual and God," p. 345) to intimacy (pp. 345–346); the exclusion thesis — "Were one homeless or without 'a room of one's own,' one could not belong to this world of reflection" (p. 346); and the pathological form, Adorno's "isolated privacy": the window-mirror occupant "solitary, inactive, and separated from the economic processes of production," the glass that "testifies to objectlessness," and "Mirror and mourning hence belong together" (p. 347). The register predates Taylor's voluntariness criterion by five years and gives privacy a material-economic floor: the room of one's own as the entry-fee to reflection's world. See inwardness, bedroom.
• Inside Fear: Secret Places and Hidden Spaces in Dwellings (Troutman 1997/2006) — privacy's exploratory childhood register, and its fortressed adult form: fear-work performed "undetected" — "From within the safety of the house, I can venture to its edges, its perimeters, and, undetected, experiment with facing my fears of the dark, of the adults, of a large noisy world" (p. 357) — privacy as the condition of the child's unobserved self-testing, the hidden spaces (hidden-spaces) as privacy's exploratory geography rather than its retreat. And the adult counter-case: the back bedroom behind "a large heavy metal door with two locks, a bolt, and a chain" (p. 359) — privacy achieved as fortification, the peripheral room secured against the building's own depths. Where the page's other registers ask what privacy is worth (voluntariness, entrenchment, control), Troutman's asks what privacy is for: the unobserved encounter with fear. See childhood-spaces, hidden-spaces, bedroom.
• Home: Territory and Identity (Wise 2000/2006) — privacy named among the home-coding's values and disarticulated from it: the home-term's "strong articulations of the term to gender, passivity, leisure (gendered, again), both household and sexual labour" (pp. 394–395), and the disarticulation-programme's target list — "ideas of stasis, nostalgia, privacy, and authenticity (which, as Doreen Massey has argued, are then coded as female)" (p. 395) — privacy itself named as one of the values whose coding to the feminine the open, dynamic home-concept refuses. Privacy here is not contested as a value (the editors' queer-theory destabilization) but exposed as an articulation: the private's gendering visible at the level of the word. Where the page's other registers define privacy (positional, syntactic, transparency-limit, voluntariness), Wise's names its ideological work: privacy as one of the values by which "women [are articulated] to enclosed prison-homes while the men wander free" (p. 395) — the concept's political charge inside the home/house separation. See home, separate-spheres, gender-and-the-interior.
• Towers in the Park, Bungalows in the Garden (Keil 2015) — privacy's societal-glue register, the suburban-settlement ideology of privacy: "Privacy was seen as the glue of society and the protection of the family all at once" (p. 581) — privacy not as personal condition but as societal cement, the single-family home's ownership "pitted against 'the lodger evil' and the 'unstable tenant'" and considered "a societal goal with ancillary benefits of great value" (p. 581); and Harris's continental finding, quoted — "'just about everyone felt that home ownership was a good thing. They believed that it reinforced the independence of the family, encouraging thrift and reducing demands upon the public purse'" (p. 581), with "the disciplining effects of home ownership on workers and immigrants… especially emphasized." Privacy here is the suburban mythology's social technology: the value through which property ownership and family protection were fused into the settlement's moral architecture — the private quest one of Harris's "three suburban stereotypes about North American suburbs" ("the ideal quest for privacy; conformity with the suburban ideal; and the common misgivings among researchers about suburbia," p. 582). Where the page's other registers define privacy as control, position, voluntariness or entrenchment, Keil's names its ideological labour: privacy as society's glue — and the myth that hides poverty and diversity behind the picket fence (p. 580). See home-ownership-democracy, real-existing-suburbia, separate-spheres.
• Designing a Place Called Home (Wentling 2017) — the rear-yard privatization register, the concept's market-economics account: the historical inversion — outdoor amenities "were located on the front or sideyards of the house… In effect, we have seen most of the design emphasis turn away from the front and side of houses… all key orientations and amenities are now focused on the rear of the lot for maximum privacy" (p. 69), with the design reading: "housing designs seem to be acknowledging that people are becoming more antisocial, private, and internalized" (p. 83); privacy's physical apparatus — privacy walls and fences ("Homebuilders cannot ignore the typical homeowner's intense interest to establish a territory or at the very least develop a measure of privacy in the rear of their property," p. 114; Providence Park's integral 3-ft/6-ft garden walls, p. 115); deck privacy ("so high above grade people feel like they are on a stage," p. 112); and the multifamily version — distance, screen walls, staggered decks (pp. 210–211). Where Keil names privacy as settlement ideology, Wentling prices it: privacy as the commodity the production system must deliver in the rear, at the cost of the public street face (see home-ownership-democracy, cul-de-sac, porch).
• The Death and Life of Great American Cities (Jacobs 1961) — the concept's urban-paradox register: privacy in cities is produced by public life, not protected from it. "Privacy is precious in cities. It is indispensable… In small settlements everyone knows your affairs. In the city everyone does not — only those you choose to tell will know much about you" (p. 58). Against the planning-literature reduction ("Architectural and planning literature deals with privacy in terms of windows, overlooks, sight lines… This is simple-minded. Window privacy is the easiest commodity in the world to get. You just pull down the shades," p. 59), Jacobs defines real privacy as "the privacy of keeping one's personal affairs to those selected to know them, and the privacy of having reasonable control over who shall make inroads on your time and when" (p. 59) — citing Padilla's Up from Puerto Rico: select are those "permitted to drop into the kitchen for a cup of coffee." The mechanism is the sidewalk's "almost unconsciously enforced, well-balanced line showing, the line between the city public world and the world of privacy" (p. 62), demonstrated in the keys left with Joe the delicatessen keeper ("we trust him first, to be a responsible custodian, but equally important because we know that he combines a feeling of good will with a feeling of no personal responsibility about our private affairs," p. 60) and in Bernie Jaffe's refusal ever to introduce customers to each other ("That would just not be advisable," p. 61): "This line can be maintained… because of the great plenty of opportunities for public contact in the enterprises along the sidewalks" (p. 62). The catastrophic inverse is the project's "togetherness or nothing": without public life, residents "must settle for some form of 'togetherness,' in which more is shared with one another than in the life of the sidewalks, or else they must settle for lack of contact. Inevitably the outcome is one or the other" (p. 62) — privacy destroyed by forced sharing or by total avoidance, the Lurie findings on families who "keep them upstairs" to protect their last remnants of privacy (p. 67). Where the page's domestic registers treat privacy as the interior's work, Jacobs relocates its production to the street: privacy is a capacity the public infrastructure of small enterprises gives, and planning removes. See public-characters, eyes-on-the-street, separate-spheres, boundaries.
• source-notes/lawrence-2006-social-spatial-temporal-factors
• source-notes/vanucci-2018-inside-out-outside-in

Open Questions

• Is privacy a condition (something a room has), an achievement (something occupants do, as Ardener's stranger shows), or a performance (something the Schröder partitions' user must act out nightly)? The three sources imply all three — which is design's responsibility?
• Croft's case shows flexibility and privacy in tension: transformability makes privacy an act (draw the walls) rather than a given. Can a flexible interior design for privacy — or does every reconfigurable boundary merely relocate the private/public negotiation onto the occupant's labour?
• Ardener's and Croft's privacy is familial and domestic; the editors' queer-theory framing destabilizes "home, privacy and publicity" altogether. Can the concept hold both the woman who "craved greater privacy" within her family and the theorist who questions why privacy is the home's value at all? See gender-and-the-interior.
• If interior history is organized around "the continually present themes of privacy and domesticity" (Rice), is privacy a transhistorical constant or a bourgeois formation — and what would an interior history that did not take privacy as its theme look like?
• Rice's primary text adds Perrot's problem: "the ultimately private nature of the evidence of privacy" — privacy's own history must be written from evidence (the albums, the photographs, the house museum) that became public only by ceasing to serve privacy. Can a history of privacy escape this circle, or is privacy's historiography necessarily a history of privacy's breaches — each source a conversion of the private into the public document?
• Gattegno & Johnson's data register relocates privacy from the room to the network: the smartphone's "nested and hidden" data "amplified into the public realm" by a whispering wall. Is urban data-privacy then the interior discipline's business (the harvested interior of the smartphone as the new domestic interior — cf. Teston's "identity exists in a smartphone"), or a platform-regulation question design can only protest? And does Murmur Wall's graffiti-override ("circumvent, interrupt, and question the information represented") constitute a privacy practice, or a participation-alibi?
• Edelman's bicameral room shows privacy operating within a public interior as a zone-system of the body rather than of the plan: is the stall/urinal partition privacy's purest architectural form (privacy and exposure designed as one system), and what would it mean to design a washroom whose zones refuse the mapping of privacy onto specific body-parts?