The Concept of Difference in Architecture: Transpositions Between Insides and Outsides

Abstract

Postmodernity unhorsed the subject as powerful creator of life, showing not only that it is not in direct correspondence with the world, but furthermore that it is not even in control of itself. In this context, philosophy introduced an understanding of the world based on the concept of difference. Specifically, structuralism acknowledged difference as a poetics of ambiguity in the service of communication, while poststructulalism proclaimed difference as the impossibility of meaning. In this paper, we critically interpret these approaches in reference to the criterion of interiority/exteriority. Difference under structuralism introduces meaning as totally inside constructed, although towards outside operating. The figurative internalization of the postmodern architecture presents exactly the disconnection of meaning-making processes from the social context and their orientation towards consumption’s external experience. In addition, under the poststructuralist conception of difference the meaning lies exclusively outside and the corresponding trends of architectural creation, while in a way approximating freedom, seem also to contribute to a cultural disempowerment of critical ways of life and thinking. In distance both from the subject’s restriction inside and its abandonment in the tragedy of the outside, we suggest a Bakhtinian conception of difference which allows a creative continuous motion between interiority and exteriority, by both decomposing and producing meaning, always within the conflictual reality. In this direction, architecture may call for a spatial ethos of justice, a carnival polyphonic space of open boundaries between insides and outsides, which, although retaining their identities, they do not construct impenetrable territories as, in a sense, they are always at the critical limit.