Architecture and Contingent Subjectivity. Robin Evans

By Joy Knoblauch

Almost never does detailed research, informed by a rich theoretical background, tackle privacy and intersubjectivity in the discipline of architecture, except in the early work of one architect: Robin Evans. His early work at the Architectural Association, from 1963 to 1982, attempted to use the design of housing to foster a specific mental state which would invert the alienation of postwar public housing. In particular, his goal was to nurture an easy sociability, something he felt had been lacking in domestic life since the nineteenth century. In his wellknown essay “Figures, Doors and Passages”, he suggested that the root of this deficiency was a nascent dividedself, the evolution of modern institutions and the advent of hallways. His theory of history was inspired by an admiration for Michel Foucault’s genealogical approach and R.D. Laing’s theories of the dividedself, among others. In this way, he wrote about a type of subjectivity which is contingent upon its social, historical and architectural context.

The essay is reasonably wellknown but the disappearance of the design studies which preceded the essay constitutes a crucial lesson for architects. A combination of accident, local fights, the reception of the visual aspects of the work and a larger shift in the direction of architecture in the early 1980s led to Evans’ abandonment of the study of domestic circulation and sociability. None of this was inevitable, but nevertheless the absence of his early work in the canon of architecture has contributed to the impoverishment of the discipline in terms of theories of contingency and the problem of housing design.