No more partition walls! That's the motto printed on the heroic foreheads of our architecture studio teachers. Anyway... I'm sure many of you live in houses with a living room and a very long dark corridor to which all the rooms open... (?) (silence). The feverish theorist inside their mind imagines our families - I suppose - as the sculptural athletes of the Downtown Athletic Club: constantly prepared for the tough spiritual exercise of living modernity, in transformative confrontation with our own housing. Without hesitation, today's men and women perpare to set their home in a unique space in which there is no room for lies or privacy. The result is of an almost brutal totalitarianism: walls that do not reach the ceiling, gazes that scrutinise everything, unlocked rooms.

 

But where do all these theories come from? The professors decidedly ignore real day-to-day dynamics in the search for a modernity that, if anything, should be directly ourselves. The walls of our houses, meanwhile, maintain upright all their meanings: a private chat, an undisturbed nap, a quiet masturbation, a postponed tension, two glances that avoid each other. That's why we don't tear down partitions, because it would be like amputating an essential part of our social anatomy. To deny the partition is to deny that life is shared, for better and for worse.

 

I had thought of calling this a ‘Manifesto of the partition wall’ or something like that. Manifestos precede revolutions, turns in thinking. But in reality there is no revolution to be made here because outside the classroom, the most diverse partitions remain solid, stoic, undeterred.