FACING WINDOWS: NIGHT INTIMACY AND NATURAL VOYEURISM IN CONTEMPORARY CITY

Abstract

The paper explores the habitus of intimacy in the urban context as the ability to innately balance a variable sense of privacy with the natural voyeurism given by cities’ architectural and physical conditions. Indeed, especially at dusk and night, when most people live their intimacy, the glass facades that shape contemporary urban settlements prove to be the authentic thresholds between the public and private. With an extensive survey linking physics, psychology, mass culture, and architecture, we will see how, through windows, we continuously and unwarily build variable boundaries around us, adapting our intimacy and sensibility to our feeling for safe anonymity.