A Topology of Everyday Constellations

The threshold as both boundary and bridge: investigations of spaces, public and private, local and global.

Today, spaces no longer represent a bourgeois haven; nor are they the sites of a classical harmony between work and leisure, private and public, the local and the global. The house is not merely a home but a position for negotiations with multiple spheres—the technological as well as the physical and the psychological. In A Topology of Everyday Constellations, Georges Teyssot considers the intrusion of the public sphere into private space, and the blurring of notions of interior, privacy, and intimacy in our societies. He proposes that we rethink design in terms of a new definition of the practices of everyday life.

Teyssot considers the door, the window, the mirror, and the screen as thresholds or interstitial spaces that divide the world in two: the outside and the inside. Thresholds, he suggests, work both as markers of boundaries and as bridges to the exterior. The stark choice between boundary and bridge creates a middle space, an in-between that holds the possibility of exchanges and encounters.

If the threshold no longer separates public from private, and if we can no longer think of the house as a bastion of privacy, Teyssot asks, does the body still inhabit the house—or does the house, evolving into a series of microdevices, inhabit the body?

A Topology of Everyday Constellations opens the reader up for a profound discussion, initiating the process to reconsider what it means to dwell and how our physical appliances reconfigure our lives. Another thought-provoking result of The MIT Press' Writing Architecture series, Teyssot's discourse is disturbingly, seductively complex.—Arcspace—Georges Teyssot, Professor in the School of Architecture at Laval University, Quebec, has taught the history and theory of architecture at the Istituto Universitario di Architettura of Venice, Princeton University's School of Architecture, and the Department of Architecture at ETH Zurich. He is the author or editor of many books, including Interior Landscapes and The American Lawn.