E.1.1 Spanish Camarines with Porcelain, Ceramics and Glassware from around 1600: Female Private Spaces or Reception Rooms Fit for a King?

• Joanna Ciemińska, University Nova

This study analyses the display rooms known in Spanish as camarines. In vogue in the second half of the 16th and in the beginning of the 17th century, they were used for the display of a rather defined set of objects—Chinese porcelain and European ceramics and glassware. Although there have been punctual references to camarines in literature on the history of collecting, they have never been methodically investigated. The confrontation of primary and secondary sources, such as inventories of goods, normative writings, theatre plays and visitors’ reports, allows to perceive an intriguing number of ambiguities and uncertainties concerning the purpose, typology and uses of these spaces. Camarines could refer to rooms but also to their contents or to a type of display furniture; serve as a retreat, or as a highly representative space reserved for the reception of distinguished guests. Although defined as small, they could be as large to hold a lavish dinner. They could be spatially and semantically related to religious spaces, such as oratories, but also criticized by the Catholic Church authorities for their luxuriance connoted with ungodly futility. They were by definition associated with the notion of seclusion and secrecy, but in practice also served the purpose of representation and sociability. According to commentators, they were gendered female, but the inventories of goods prove the reality was less clear-cut. This paper’s aim is to redefine the camarín as a type of early modern collector’s space and display room exemplifying the 16th and 17th-centuries blurred and constantly renegotiated boundaries between the private and the public, notions which came to form a stable and hierarchical binary only fairly recently in history.

keywords: privacy, history of collecting, Chinese porcelain, display rooms, history of architecture

E.1.2 Queer Utopia in E.1027: Eileen Gray’s Transatlantic Escape

Sara Shields-Rivard, Queen’s University

In José Esteban Muñoz’s Cruising Utopia (2001), he states that “we must dream and enact new and better pleasures, other ways of being in the world, and ultimately new worlds.” (1) While this statement is a characteristic driving force behind utopian conception, the author is proposing it in the context of queer utopias. The utopian desire to conceptualize new realities and futures often materializes itself alongside the intention of controlling, reforming, and/or eradicating deviancies and moral corruption through the meticulous design of spaces—a pitfall of High Modernism, informed by skewed early twentieth-century theories of degeneracy. What seems to differentiate queer utopia from its predecessors lies in its conceptualization as a space that enables its inhabitants to exist away from oppressive gazes, rather than under them; it allows for a simultaneous freedom and privacy, rather than control and surveillance. E.1027 (1926-1929), designed by Irish-born, Paris-dwelling interior designer and architect Eileen Gray (1878-1976), serves an example of the ways that queer identities can inform the design of more inclusive utopian spaces. As a queer manipulation of modernist visual power, Gray implements a visible-invisibility throughout the Roquebrune-Cap Martin home, speaking to the dynamics of hiding and coming out at stake with queerness in the interwar period. For example, all entrances and exits are hidden from view, with exclusively seaside windows, blocking unwanted gazes from the land, highlighting the inhabitant’s needs for privacy and freedom. The home also employs dreamy, escapist, maritime themes, recalling the design of boats and their cabins with its white and blue color scheme, use of sail cloth in the awnings and deckchairs, her ocean liner-inspired Transat armchair, as well as a map with the inscription “INVITATION AU VOYAGE,” corresponding to the eponymous 1860s Charles Beaudelaire poem, referencing the Greek island-haven of Lesbos—a queer utopia.

keywords: architecture, utopia, modernism, queer, privacy

E.1.3 Perturbed by Noise: Acoustics, Communication, and Privacy in an Open Office

Joseph Clarke, University of Toronto

Noise was among the most contested issues in the large open offices that proliferated after World War II in Europe and North America. Unpartitioned Bürolandschaft or “office landscape” workplaces were meant to improve employees’ communication, but their acoustic design became fraught with worker anxieties about distraction and diminishing privacy. While early remediation efforts sought to quiet the office, in the 60s, designers began to recommend the addition of white noise to mask distractions. “The noises act as invisible walls,” a business magazine explained. To the celebrity media philosopher Marshall McLuhan, the use of sound as a space-defining element was part of an epochal transformation in human communication, one that especially challenged Western conventions of privacy and publicity. This paper will examine the shifting concepts of personal autonomy, community, and collaboration as reflected in the acoustic design of midcentury corporate offices, focusing on the Herman Miller Action Office line of workplace furniture. The paper will track the optimism about open offices as reflected in the discourses of design, engineering, and management, and measure these high hopes against empirical studies of user satisfaction and productivity. Enthusiasm for open office design waned in the mid-70s, and before long cubicles became notorious emblems of drudgery and the precarity of neoliberal bureaucratic work. Nevertheless, as this paper will argue, the judicious spatial deployment of noise remains a relevant approach when considering how architecture can help or hinder privacy, communication, and collective thought.

keywords: architecture, acoustics, communication, office, bürolandschaft