Mediated Loneliness

Ben Lazare Mijuskovic, Christina R. Victor, Juhani Pallasmaa, Fernando Nieto and Rosana Rubio

LOBE_discussion

Speakers:
BM = Ben Lazare Mijuskovic
CV = Christina R. Victor
JP = Juhani Pallasmaa

Hosts:
FN = Fernando Nieto
RR = Rosana Rubio

Audience A= sociologist Dr. Richard Pieper, University of Eastern Finland, Department of Social Sciences, Social Work
Audience B = architect and philosopher Gareth Griffiths

FN: Thank you very much for the interesting lectures we have had today. We will now have a sort of round table discussion, and we ask the audience to participate as well.

So, it’s not easy to wrap up these topics, but we have tried to gather together in an interesting way a bunch of comments and questions for this discussion. To get the dialogue started, one possible framework is the topic of loneliness and its relation to the built environment; it’s a distinction on three levels, which has to do with three different scopes and, at the same time, three different scales.

The first level is the outside, representing the ‘strange’, the ‘unknown’, the place for ‘estrangement’; for us architects, it is the ‘city’ in its broadest sense. The second level would be the community, representing the ‘nearby’, the ‘known’, the place for ‘proximate relationships’; for us architects, it could be the ‘neighbourhood’, but also the ‘communal spaces’, both within and without the buildings. The third level would be the inside, representing the ‘private’, certainly the ‘intimate’, the place par excellence for ‘loneliness’ or ‘solitude’; for us architects, it is the idea of ‘home’.

Read the full article here.