Private and Public Space:Interiority and the Build Environment

The central concern of this paper will be to give an account of the emergence of

interiority from its origins in late antique Christianity to its re-emergence in the eighteenth and

nineteenth centuries with specific consideration to the way ideas of interiority inform the design

of the built environment. By built environment I mean all the built spaces both private and public

which constitute the environment where people live. In both early Christianity and early

modernity, the phenomenon of interiority arose for different reasons reflecting the interests of the

society at the time. Modern interiority is characterized by a retreat from public life and a

transformation of the individual's self-understanding in relation to the external world. Through

an examination of the uses and structural form of private and public spaces, antique and modern,

I hope to shed some light on how interiority is represented in the built environment.

The modern individual's sense of self is defined by interiority. Interiority privileges

inward reflection, and is characterized by an inner reckoning with the senses, emotions, thoughts,

as well as spiritual and aesthetic sentiments. Behind the principle of interiority lies a fundamental

distinction between the inner and the outer. This dichotomy is not uniquely modern, but finds its

earliest expression in the ideas of the Christian Church father St. Augustine. Augustine expressed

the distinction between inner and outer in Christian terms as a conflict between the worlds of

flesh and spirit. This idea was itself an adaptation upon the Platonic dichotomy between the

Forms and the world of bodies. In de Trinitate XII.i, Augustine distinguishes the inner from the

outer realm in relation to man. The outer realm is said to correspond to the world of carnal flesh,

the bodily forms of temporal existence, and that which man shares in common with beasts. The

inner realm is said to correspond to the spirit. For Augustine the inner realm of the spirit is held

higher than the outer realm of flesh because the inner path leads to truth, and truth is God. “Noli

foras ire, in teipsum redi; in interiore homine habitat veritas” (“Do not go outward; return within

yourself. In the inward man dwells truth”).[1] The Augustinian command to turn inwards brings

the individual into a position of radical self reckoning. If what is true is to be found within, then

the realm of interiority becomes the ideal framework in which the individual should understand

himself and his place in the world.

Augustine's recognition of the primacy of interiority is the culmination of two centuries

of intense debate among early Christian thinkers concerning the dichotomy between flesh and

spirit. Perhaps the best historical record we have of the legacy of Augustine's definitive

contribution to this debate is not to be found in any written document, but through a close study

of the buildings and interior spaces of early Christian temples in the the fourth and fifth

centuries. The emergence of Christianity as the state sponsored religion of the Roman Empire in

the fourth century required the the design of a new type of spiritual building distinct from the old

pagan temples. The Christian temple-buildings of this period reveal a reckoning with the issue of

interiority and the tension between the inner/outer dichotomy through the specific design and use

of space. Augustine's reflection upon the sacredness of man's interior soul seems to have served

as a metaphorical blueprint for the design of the Christian temple, where the interior space of the

building is held to be sacred and the locus of truth, and the exterior space around the building is

held to be secular.

In the fourth century Christian temples began to be designed in the style of the Roman

basilica, or appropriated existing basilicas for this purpose. The first documented basilica in the

Roman Forum appeared in 184 BC. By the time of Christian appropriation, the function of the

basilica in the Roman world had transformed to suit many uses. Depending on the geography of

the site and the needs of the citizens, the basilica served a variety of functions; as centres of

commerce for butchers, grocers, and merchants; courts of law and legal businesses; centres of

government bureaucracy; or simply as public symbols of the Imperial power. In all cases the

defining feature of the basilica was its role as a public space. The architecture of the building

reinforced this public role. They were long and rectangular structures, flanked by a hall of

columns on each side. Entrances on either end of the space encouraged movement from one side

to the other, and forced face-to-face encounters among individuals travelling in opposite

directions. The public significance was also reinforced by the central location the basilica often

occupied in Roman cities and towns. The important public role of the basilica is emphasized here

in order to demonstrate the gravity of the transformation that occurred when the use of the

basilica was transformed from a public venue to a Christian temple. Although the transformation

was not in any sense architectural, the affect brought about by the change in use of the space

proved to be just as dramatic. As newly consecrated sacred space, the basilica-cum-church lost

its identity as a public space and assumed the physical embodiment of interiority. Here we see

the primacy of interiority championed by Augustine manifest in stone. The long straight columns

which once ushered movement between poles and encouraged public interaction, now served as

harsh lines indicating where the external world ended and the superior internal world began. The

emptiness of the vast tomb-like chamber once filled with the chatter of people, now silenced. In

its place, the interior space of the building compels the individual to confront their own interior

realm.

Since the fourth century, Augustine's “doctrine of interiority” has entered the Western

intellectual tradition through the dominance of Christianity. The Christian emphases on the

primacy of the soul, the individual's private communion with the divine, and the expression of

faith through private deeds, established the centrality of private man as the measure of the world

(in the Middle Ages) and the highest end and good in society (since the Enlightenment). If the

rise of Christianity in the fourth century stands at the dawn of the emerging significance of

interior man, then the eighteenth century Enlightenment was its watershed moment. In the

centuries before the Enlightenment, the Christian framework of the world provided man with a

fundamental understanding of his place in creation and in relation to the divine. In this

framework, man was at the centre of creation, and the world was measured against his needs.

Order in the world was imposed from above, either from the harmony of the moving spheres, the

organizing principle of the Forms, or from the “natural” organization of social rank and class.

The great contribution made to the doctrine of interiority in the eighteenth century was the idea

that in so far as man was the measure of the world, he was also responsible for providing its

order. In this new framework, the individual brings order to the world through his relations with

other individuals and their desire to ensure mutual happiness and benefit. This utilitarian

conception of order forfeited the idea of an omnipotent god in favour of human reason and

agency.

The enlightenment model of order operated on the principle of the integrity of the

individual as a rational and responsible being. The vindication of interiority as the source for

moral as well as social and political order had dramatic ramifications for the societies who opted

to take up the new framework. The French Revolution is arguably one example. However I

should like to ere on the side of caution here, as I feel that the attempt to identify specific causes

for historical transformations is inherently problematic. I opt instead to stand on the shoulders of

the twenty-first century intellectual Charles Taylor, whose work on the modern social

imagination frames the eighteenth century conception of order based on the utilitarian principle

of exchange for mutual benefit as a fundamentally economic model of order.[2] Taylor's use of

the language of economy is only incidentally related to the definition of economy as the

capitalistic trade of goods. For Taylor, utilitarian relations of order are economic in the original

root meaning of the word. Economy comes from the Greek oikonomia “household management,”

which is itself derived from the Greek root oikos for “house.” The implication is that relations of

order in the modern framework exist between equal individuals as if between members of a

household, rather than between a godhead and lowly creation.

Charles Taylor is indebted to the twentieth century philosopher Hannah Arendt for his

understanding of oikonomia as an ordering principle of modern society. Arendt conceives that the

centrality of oikonomia in the eighteenth century is symptomatic of a radical transformation of

the essential dichotomy between the private and the public realm, which has characterized

Western thinking since antiquity, to include the emergence of new dimension, the social.

The emergence of society—the rise of housekeeping, its activities, problems, and

organizational device—from the shadowy interior of the household into the light of the public

sphere, has not only blurred the old borderline between private and political, it has also changed

almost beyond recognition the meaning of the two terms and their significance for the life of the

individual and the citizen.[3] With the rise of the social, the individual experiences a loss of their

sense of privacy. This is because the activities associated with the private realm before the rise of

the social—housekeeping, literally the maintenance of one's home and health—are now satisfied

by social institutions such as the centralized state and the market economy.

The rise of the social sphere and the displacement of the private realm in the eighteenth

century required the individual redefine the meaning of interiority. Arendt observes that the

eighteenth century witnessed a flourishing of poetry, music, and the rise of the novel—arts which

engage the individual in a searching dialogue with interiority. At the same time Arendt notes

there was a drastic decline in public arts such as architecture.[4] It was also during this period,

and in the century that followed, that the role of the home—the privately owned interior spaces

of the new bourgeoisie—took on a greater significance in daily life. In the nineteenth century

especially, the home became a refuge from the pressures of the external world brought about by

the Industrial Revolution and the chaos and filth of city living. “Stated boldly, “home” became

the secular version of spiritual refuge; the geography of safety shifted from a sanctuary in the

urban centre to the domestic interior.”[5] The belief in the interior as the the refuge of truth and

sanctity was a legacy from Christianity. However, in the eighteenth century, the need for escape

from the encroaching pressure of the social realm on the private could no longer be satisfied by

this antiquated notion of interiority. The church was no longer a suitable refuge because the

afflictions of the soul faced by the modern individual were no longer spiritual, but

psychological.

The psychological experience of the modern individual in the eighteenth and nineteenth

centuries was characterized by the partitioning of experience. Whereas the citizen of Athens in

the fifth century BCE might have concerned himself with the distinction between the Good of

the Forms and the trappings of the world, or the fifth century Christian with the dichotomy

between the spirit and the flesh, these dilemmas were essentially moral problems and afflicted

the individual on the private level. What was at stake for the Athenian citizen was the life of

happiness, and for the Christian, admission to heaven. However for the eighteenth century

modern, the fragmentation of the world into various realms, social and political, private and

public, interior and exterior, forced the individual to experience the world as fragmented. The

attempt to bring order and clarity to the interior space of the home was an attempt to reconcile

this fragmentation. However, “the process of fragmentation begun in the public realm simply

continued into the private sphere via the division of labour. Separation created division in the

family as much as it did in the street.”[6] By the nineteenth century the interior space of the

home reflected the same fragmentation that characterized the interiority of the modern soul.

Domestic design reflected this fragmentation by dividing the home into private and public

spaces. Specialized rooms were created to fulfil a variety of functions including cooking,

bathing, and recreation.[7] As the modern individual retreated further into the interior spaces of

the home, the external world was increasingly understood as more than just a world of

fragmentation, it became wholly other, unintelligible, and by extension dangerous.

The desire to create physical spaces of privacy distinct from the external world is

characterized by the modern conception of interiority as a turning away from the social and

public. The physical form of the private home is the embodiment of this concept. At the basic

level, the outer walls of private spaces indicate a boundary between inner and outer realms. In

this way, the wall is a transitional structure occupying both interior and exterior space

simultaneously and indiscriminately. The wall only assumes a definite functional purpose

according to the needs of the builder. For the nineteenth century builder of the private home, the

exterior wall fulfilled two needs: definition and protection. The wall defines the boundary of

private ownership and intimate space, while also providing protection from the external.

Anything which does not fall within the reach of private ownership and intimacy is unfit for

protection and resigned to the realm of exteriority. Under this arrangement, the physical space of

the home encourages familiarity and comfort with the private and reinforces uncertainty and fear

of the public.

The modern American sociologist and student of Hannah Arendt, Richard Sennet,

identifies the modern retreat into interior space as a response to the “fear of exposure.”[8] The

world outside the home, the public life of the city and the oikonomia of society, exposes the

individual to uncertainty. On the streets and among the crowds,[9] the individual is forced to

confront the uncertainty of “his inability either to be at home in society or to live outside it

altogether.”[10] In the confines of the home, “all experiences with the world as well as with other

human beings, [are reduced] to experiences between man and himself.”[11] Arendt conceives

that the rise of society and displacement of the private realm, the retreat into interiority, and the

rejection of the public experience, has resulted in the individual developing a sense of world

alienation.

I have demonstrated what affect the rise of interiority in fourth century Christian

thinking, and its subsequent transformation in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, has had on

the way we build, use, and think about private spaces in our built environment. However, I have

only painted half the picture. For just as the realm of the interior and private exist only in so far

as they are distinct from the realm of the public, the concept of private space does not exist as

such unless it is distinguished from public space. It is with respect to this public realm that I will

now turn my attention. Using Hannah Arendt's philosophy the public realm as the location of

human Action as my foundation, I will contrast ideas about the public realm and the design and

use of public space in Classical Athens to ideas about the uses and function of the public and

public space in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. I will pay particular attention to showing

what affect the phenomenon of modern interiority and world alienation has had in influencing

trends in the design and building of public spaces such as parks, squares, and streets in Western

cities.

What is the public realm? According to Hannah Arendt, the public realm is the common

world that exists between humans with respect to their nature as humans. The public realm does

not occupy geographical space by definition, rather it exists as a concept. The concept of the

public realm can be identified by two criteria. First, the public realm is made intelligible by the

appearance and mutual recognition of subjective individuals. “The presence of others who see

what we see and hear what we hear assures us of the reality of the world and ourselves...”[12]

Second, the public sphere “signifies the world, in so far as it is common to all of us.”[13] The

public realm exists in whatever is common between humans and allows the individuals to relate.

“Only where things can be seen by many in a variety of aspects without changing their identity.

So that those who are gathered around them know they see sameness in utter diversity, can

worldly reality truly and reliably appear.”[14] The public realm ceases to be when one of these

criteria are not met. If individuals loose subjectivity, such as in mass society, mutual recognition

becomes impossible. On the other hand, when individuals cease to be able to gather around and

relate to a common world, the relations between individuals cease to have meaning.

There are three fundamental human activities, or vita activa, which correspond to

different conditions under which life is lived. The vita activa which founds and preserves the

public realm is Action. If the public realm is the venue where man appears as man, then Action is

the method. Action is the means by which humans distinguish their uniqueness in the public

realm, and as such assert their existence in the world. In the public realm, the individual reveals

who he is through his actions and words.[15] “Action alone is the exclusive prerogative of man;

neither a beast nor a god is capable of it, and only action is entirely dependant upon the constant

presence of others.”[16] For Arendt, Action, not reason, is the essential feature which sets man

apart and above all other beings. The implication is that even a god is incapable of Action

because of the limitations of omnipotence. Only the man who lives in the public sphere among

other men has the opportunity to engage in this most important, distinguishing, and human

activity.

The nature of the relationship between Action and the public realm is one of mutual

dependence. Action cannot exist outside the public realm, and the public realm cannot exist

without Action and speech. Action is “the only activity that goes on directly between men

without the intermediary of things or matter.”[17] In this way, action is the most political of all

human activities because it is the one specifically characterized by plurality. This recognition of

the essentially political nature of action was realized first by the Greeks and came to fruition

during the the height of Greek civilization, the Athenian polis in the fifth and fourth centuries

BCE. According to Aristotle, action (praxis) and speech (lexis) are the two human activities

which constitute the bios politikos, or the political life of the polis man. “To be political, to live

in the polis, meant that everything was decided through words and persuasion and not through

force and violence.”[18] The centrality of action and speech to life in the Greek polis indicates

that the city-state epitomized the ideal of the public realm. Nowhere was this public dimension of

the polis more evident than in the Athenian agora. The agora formed an essential aspect of life in

the Greek polis and served a variety of different public functions, including civic governance,

public debate and oration, music, theatre and religious dancing, and the buying and selling of

goods. The unifying feature of all these discreet uses of public space was that action and

language formed the basis of all public exchanges. As the embodiment of the Athenian public

realm, the citizens who filled the agora were very much aware of the public context of their

actions and speech, precisely because it was through them that the bios politikos was lived. In

this sense, order in the agora was not imposed structurally by isolating public functions into

separate spaces, but was maintained by the sanctity of the agora as public realm.

What allowed the Athenian agora to be such a spectacular success in facilitating the vita

activa of action and language, has more to do with the citizens desire to engage in the public

realm, than any trick of architectural design. The Athenian wanted to be in the agora, because the

agora embodied the bios politikos of public life. In contrast to this, the nineteenth century

withdrawal from public life has rendered authentic action in modern times almost impossible.

However to speak like this is to suggest that the modern individual has chosen to abandon the

public realm, when in fact the reality is that an authentic public realm has not existed in any

Western society for nearly two hundred years. The modern individual does not choose to ignore

the public realm, the public realm is simply no longer an option. How has this state of public

decay come to be? And what affect has it had on the way modern Western societies design and

use “public space” in the built environment?

Two pillars stand as essential criteria for the existence of a public realm. The death of

the public realm is symptomatic of the modern inability to meet these criteria. The rise of the

social realm in the eighteenth century heralded the loss of subjectivity. The traditional needs of

the private realm were increasingly being fulfilled by advances in technology fuelled by rapid

industrialisation and the expansion of the market economy, such that the individual was forced to

re-evaluate the function of the private realm. The new social realm was characterized by

efficiency and economic interests, automation and the division of labour. In this framework,

where order is governed by oikonomia, the needs of the individual are overlooked. The result

was a rebellion of the individual against the increasing conformity of mass society. “With the

emergence of mass society, the realm of the social has finally, after several centuries of

development, reaches the point where it embraces all members of a community equally...”[19]

This rebellion took the form of an extreme psychological as well as physical retreat into

interiority. Overrun by the interests of the social realm, the public realm ceased to be the locus

for authentic human action, and instead became a stage for the exploitation of self interest.

“What makes mass society so difficult to bear is not the number of people involved, or

at least not primarily, but the fact that the world between them has lost its power to gather them

together, to relate and separate them.”[20] What remained of the public world “between”

individuals who retreated into interiority was not an authentic public realm, but a realm of

artifice and works. According to Charles Taylor, in the nineteenth century a new public forum

was established for the exchange of ideas. This forum took advantage of new technologies in

mass print media and distribution such as books, newspapers, pamphlets and other private

publications. The print media provided a public space in which individuals of disparate

backgrounds could gather ideas and discuss things of public importance. This new public forum

discouraged face-to-face encounters, preferring instead to engage dialogue from the armchairs

and desks of privacy. As a forum of public expression, print media is characterized by the feature

of interiority. It is not surprising that a tradition as insular and inward looking as the West in the

nineteenth century should establish a means of public expression which privileged privacy and

anonymity of the individual over authentic action or speech. The print media is understood as

operating in the public sphere only in so far as it is populated by the ideas and words of the

general public, and is seen by the general public. However, in the Arendtian conception of what

constitutes the public realm, this is not enough. For the true public realm occurs when human

action and speech are exchanged authentically between individuals without recourse to third

party-mediums, and when the exchange is not burdened by insularity.

For Taylor the modern public sphere is a space of discussion. It happens through our

media, through public discourse, and through other cultural mediums such as art. For Taylor the

public sphere is not a place where action happens, but a place where consensus is drawn. The

only distinction Taylor makes between the ancient sense of the public sphere and the modern is

that the interlocutors in the public realm of ancient Greece were ultimately the same people who

later made decisions in the government. Whereas the discussion which takes place in the modern

public forum of the print media is independent of government. Thus the modern public forum is

“extra-political,” and serves a social function as as a sort of check and balance mechanism

against the state.[21] To my mind, however, Taylor's thinking gives an inadequate account of the

problem with the modern public realm. Taylor wishes to reduce the importance of the public

realm, in both Classical Athens and modern Western societies as nothing more than mere by-

products of democracy. Accordingly, the “extra-political” status the public realm has taken on

since the eighteenth century only reinforces the modern disassociation between public and the

political.

The failure of nineteenth century print media to sustain a forum where authentic human

action and dialogue could take place has as much to do with the confused values of the society in

which it was born, as well as the physical limitations of the medium in failing to provide a space

for personal encounters between individuals. Public spaces are the most essential dimension of

the built environment because they are the forms in which the individual confronts their essential

nature as social and political beings. How public space is designed is informed by considering

the social value of the public realm. When public spaces are used, either in accordance with the

functional purpose of the space, or in some other unforeseen way, the individual engages the

public realm in a dialogue. This exchange between human and built environment reveals how

that individual understands himself as a private being in relation to the public realm. In this way,

the built environment plays an equally important role in shaping the individual as the individual

has in shaping the built environment.

The modern condition of world alienation and the lost sense of a public realm has

dramatically shaped the form of public space in the modern built environment. Since the retreat

into interiority in the eighteenth century, the originary function of the public realm has been

forgotten. The individual has grown increasingly more insular while the external world has

become more uncertain. The modern man privileges private space above all else. His privacy is

guaranteed by law as a right in Western societies. He carries his privacy with him everywhere he

goes; it extends outside his body about an arms length. You can see him defend it when he

changes seats on the bus because someone is sitting too close. The fear of exposure leads to the

creation of public spaces which seek to minimize spontaneous and random encounters with the

other. We minimize the threat posed by this external other by building public spaces which

discourage authentic action and speech. The modern city, in North America particularly, is

devoid of public squares or forums. When they are present in the modern city, the originary

purpose of the space has been forgotten. Instead the public spaces in the modern built

environment correspond to the values of the society. Utilitarian spaces such as roads are built on

a grid system to ensure order and efficiency, and urban parks which designed to help the

individual “escape” from the city rather than authentically engage the public realm.

Roads have always served a functional purpose for the people who build them and use

them, and the built environments which they connect. They are arterial veins which allow the

movement of vital resources such as humans, food, and trade between locations. Because of their

immense significance to the vitality of the city, the outline and design of streets has always been

of special importance to city planners both ancient and modern. Babylonia and ancient Egypt

built their roads in a grid pattern. These grids became expressions of culture and the order

imposed by intersecting right angles symbolized the rationality of civilized life.[22] The idea of

intersecting roads to indicate the spiritual centre of the city was adopted by the Romans, who

built their cities and towns by establishing an axis at the centre which was meant to be a

heavenly copy of celestial order. In contrast to the balance between civic order and spiritual

harmony demonstrated by the Roman design of roads, town planning and road design in the

Middle Ages was positively spastic. The affect of the Augustinian doctrine of spiritual interiority

held Western society in a grip which transformed the way people thought about public space. The

primacy of the church had achieved new heights in the Middle Ages.

The medieval builders... knew only that secular space had to look unlike sacred space.

This happened as the secular buildings of these cities grew jumbled together, the streets twisted

and inefficient, while the churches were carefully sited, their construction precise, their design

elaborately calculated.[23] The Medieval conflict between sacred space and secular space is

simply another manifestation of the classical dichotomy promulgated by Plato and later taken up

into Christian thinking by Augustine. It is interesting to observe how radically Medieval builders

took to embodying the distinction between sacred and secular space in the design of the town—

even to the point of making civic life inefficient.

In the modern city the grid system has been reintroduced as the preferred model for the

design of roads. North American cities were the first to use the grid pattern in a different way

than the Romans. Whereas the Roman city was walled and growth and density encouraged

within the limits of the town, the North American conception of the limitlessness of land and

bounty of resources built gridded cities to extend seemingly indefinitely. “American's saw the

natural world around them as limitless... the conviction that people can infinitely expand the

spaces of human settlement is the first way, geographically, of neutralizing the power of any

geographical space.”[24] We can see evidence of this at work in the vast gridded expanse of

streets in Manhattan above Greenwich Village, with numbered streets extended north well above

two hundred. The North American tradition of urban planning in the nineteenth century was to

impose the grid form on the land regardless of the natural contours of the site or the problems of

rivers.[25] This attempt to impose order on an unsympathetic natural space may be a response to

the modern disconnect from the exterior world. The desire to extend streets indefinitely into the

horizon may be a reaction against the modern experience of decreased horizons. Arendt holds

that “precisely when the immensity of available space on earth was discovered, the famous

shrinkage of the globe began... Men now live in an earth-wide continuous whole where even the

notion of distance... has yielded before the onslaught of speed.”[26] The advances in technology

and efficiency which are driving the process of decreased horizons are the same processes

responsible for the alienation of modern man.

The North American fantasy of limitless city horizons manifests itself in this peculiar

manner of building public space. The most obvious topographical difference between the

classical city such as Athens or Rome and modern cities like Toronto or New York is the lack of

a defined civic centre. In Athens it was the agora, and in Rome the forum. Civic centres do not

exist in the modern city for the simple reason that civic life is not a feature of the modern

experience. Roman town planning conceived the axis of intersecting roads as the natural location

around which the community centre should form. North American planning rejected creating

civic centres because there was simply no use for such a public space. Even European cities

which still have public squares, plazas, or piazzas, in their urban topography do not make use of

the space in the way the space suggests. Often these open squares are ringed by restaurants or

cafés catering to tourists too modern to understand the significance of the public space they

occupy. The closest thing New York has to a centre is Times Square, which is the handmaid of

the market economy and the bastard child of the social realm. “Whenever American's of the era

of high capitalism thought of an alternative to the grid, they thought of bucolic relief, such as a

leafy park or promenade, rather than a more arousing street, square or centre in which to

experience the complex life of the city.”[27] The urban park constitutes a distinctly modern form

of public space in the city which has historically served a very different function than the civic

centre. The history of the modern urban park dates back to eighteenth century Paris and London.

Planners conceived the function of these pockets of greenery in the city as lungs to filter and

reduce pollution, rather than as retreats from city life. The first urban parks, such as Regents Park

in London, were enclosed by fences and not accessible by citizens. The idea was to direct the

flow of people around the park parameter to breath the fresh air.[28] Although the urban parks

which dot modern cities today, are open spaces free for all to enjoy. However in some way they

represent closure and isolation in ways which are perhaps more profound than the fenced parks

of a few centuries ago. The prototypical example of this is New York's Central Park. Frederick

Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux designed Central Park with the idea in mind to create a space in

which one could forget that they were living in the midst of a metropolis. In this way, Central

Park is not a place where the individual goes to be in public. Rather, it was design with the idea

of escape, turning inwards, and denial of the exterior and public realm. Perhaps Olmsted and

Vaux should be praised as visionaries of modern dissatisfaction and Central Park as a

masterpiece of modern world alienation.

Works Cited

Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. Chicago: Chicago University Press.

Taylor, Charles. Modern Social Imaginaries. London: Duke University Press, 2004.

Taylor, Charles. Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 1989.

Sennet, Richard. The Conscience of the Eye: The Design and Social Life of Cities. New York:

Alfred A. Knopf, 1990.

Sennet, Richard. Flesh and Stone: The Body and the City in Western Civilization. New York: W.

W Norton & Company, 1994.

[1] Augustine, Saint, Bishop of Hippo. De Vera Religione, XXXIX.72.[2] Taylor, Charles. Modern Social Imaginaries. p 71[3] Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. P 38[4] Ibid. p 39[5] Sennet, Richard. The Conscience of the Eye: The Design and Social Life of Cities. P 21[6] Ibid. p 27[7] Ibid. 26[8] Sennet, p 19-31[9] Ibid. xiii

[10] Arendt, 39[11] Ibid. 254[12] Arendt, p 50[13] Ibid. 52[14] Ibid. p 57[15] Ibid. 179[16] Arendt, p. 22-23[17] Ibid. 7[18] Ibid. 26[19] Ibid. p 41[20] Ibid. 53[21] Taylor, modern social imaginaries 89-90[22] Sennet. Flesh and stone. P 47[23] Ibid. p 12[24] Ibid. 48[25] Sennet, conscience of the eye, 50[26] Arendt, p 250[27] Sennet, conscience of the eye, p. 56[28] Sennet, Flesh and Stone, p. 325