School of Culture and Communication - Research Publications

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Start date: 1991 × Subject: cultural studies × Subject: architectual modernism ×

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    From glass architecture to big brother: scenes from a cultural history of transparency
    MCQUIRE, SCOTT ( 2003)
    The recent international popularity of the Big Brother television franchise has highlighted some of the ways in which concepts of public and private space are being transformed in contemporary culture. The fact that the primary scene of action in Big Brother is a hybrid television studio fashioned as a domestic dwelling - a 'home' in which people live which being watched by others - brings into focus many issues raised by the increeasing mediatisation of what was formerly private space. In this sense, Big Brother forms a lighting rod from the ambivalent hopes and ambient fears produced by social and technological changes which have given new impetus to the modernist dream of the transparent society. In this essay, I want to reposition the Big Brother phenomenon in the context of an ealier debate about domestic space which occurred during the emergence of architectural modernism in the first decades of the twentieth century. At issue then was the physical construction of the home, particularly through the increasing use of glass as a design element. While glass architecture is even more prevalent in the persent, its spatial impact - particularly in terms of its capacity to alter the relationship between the 'inside' and the 'outside' - has now been matched or exceeded in many respects by the effects of electronic media. By tracing the parelledl between the unsettling spatial effects produced by both glass consturction and the electronic screen, I will sketch a cultural logic linking the modernist project of architectural transparency to the contemporary repositioning of the home as an interactive media centre. This shift corresponds to the emergence of a social setting in which personal identity is subject to new exigencies. As electronic media have both extended and transformed the spatial effects of glass construction, they have produced significant pressures on both private space and public sphere. Heightened exposure of the personal and the private is creating unpredictable consequences, no least in the public domain.