Article
Promiscuous architecture, by any means necessary
Gideon Boie
14/10/2025, Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther und Franz König
In the search for a socially just and liveable city, the focus is usually on public space, the street in particular. In Jef Cornelis’ iconic film De Straat, architecture critic Geert Bekaert deplores how the street has been reduced to a mere ‘machine for movement’, serving largely as a means to commute from one destination to another. 01 [Fig. 1] The social disintegration of public space leads Bekaert to speak somewhat nostalgically about the ‘need for the street’. He points to the example of the trulli in the southern Italian region of Puglia, highlighting the lively atmosphere in the narrow streets between the limestone houses. There, the street is a natural extension of the living room, the doorstep serving as a magical mediator between the public and private lives of the inhabitants.
The decline of public space is a topic with a long tradition in architectural theory, most notably in critiques of modernist town planning. The challenge is often framed as the need to reclaim the street as a polyvalent public space, in opposition to the modernist dogma of functional separation. In mid-20th century New York, Jane Jacobs famously rebelled against modernist principles, calling for ‘eyes on the street’ and celebrating the everyday movements of pedestrians as ‘sidewalk ballets’. 02 [Fig. 2] At around the same time, on the other side of the Atlantic, Aldo van Eyck made a name for himself through the design of a series of outdoor playgrounds in Amsterdam, using repetitive, modular elements to animate neglected areas of the city. 03 [Fig. 3]
The redistribution of public space is a worthy cause, one that is certainly still worth fighting for today, but it cannot be separated from an urban model that considers the private domain as the holy of holies. Reflecting on the suburban condition in Belgium, Wim Cuyvers describes the front garden as a shooting range solely intended to keep unwanted intruders at a distance. 04 Might public space in the city function in much the same way? The city is a collection of built objects used for living stacked next to each other along the street, each individual plot only a few metres wide, arranged together to form a closed building block. Public space keeps people at a distance—it avoids uneasy interactions between the private interiors of the city, protecting the life inside. The doorstep marks the threshold.
Linking private spaces
The conservative role of public space suggests that the future of the city lies not just in animating the street, but first and foremost in establishing a new synchronisation between the various ‘private’ elements of the city. Having a playground around the corner is all well and good, but it does little to address the isolation that can often be experienced inside residential properties. In fact, the ‘jumping, joyous urban jumble’ so admired by Jane Jacobs might very well coexist with, or even mask, processes of social disintegration unfolding within individual households. The true challenge, then, is to rethink the strict divisions between private bubbles, as suggested by Giambattista Nolli in his famous map of Rome (1748). The ‘new topography’ of the Nolli Map does not merely include temples, churches, market halls and courtyards in its mapping of public space, it opens up a completely new kind of space altogether.
Central in the Nolli Map is the massive urban ‘black’ block—this not only radically excludes the public, it also remains mute, revealing nothing of what goes on inside. Subdivisions and entrances are conspicuously absent from the new topography. Instead, the suggestive openings of temples, churches, market halls and courtyards serve to mediate between these monolithic black blocks and the surrounding public space. While streets and squares remain, to some extent, part of a ‘movement machine’ even in the new topography, something else emerges in the suggestion of newly opened spaces. This something else is revealed in the appearance of ‘third spaces’ that are somehow public, insofar as they are rendered in white, yet at the same time ostensibly private, embedded within the black blocks. Some function as passages; most are cul-de-sacs and thus destinations in their own right.
These newly opened spaces transgress established boundaries of property, domesticity, and kinship, creating possibilities for social interaction, cultural exchange, mutual support, and more. Here, I follow the recent definition of interdependency as introduced in The Care Manifesto, written by the Care Collective. 05 [Fig. 4] Writing from a feminist perspective and a sociological background, the authors expand the concept of care beyond physical, hands-on support for those in need to also include the emotional attachment we have to others, as well as the responsibility we take for the living environment. While the former is usually organised through public institutions, the latter often emerges through collective action by people who recognise their interdependence and spontaneously pull together.
The architecture of interdependency
One of the most significant practices presented in The Care Manifesto is the opening up of public buildings and facilities to a broader range of different users. Highlighted cases include the reconfiguration of a theatre hall lobby into an ‘open foyer’ where everyone is welcome, regardless of whether they have paid for a ticket or not, and a municipal library that integrates different social services. 06 [Fig. 5] The examples are well chosen to illustrate the politics of interdependence, since they draw attention to how public buildings often function much like private entities in the cityscape. In the typical Belgian urban block, a theatre can be just as closed and inaccessible outside box office and performance hours as any surrounding private building. For that reason, opening the lobby to atypical users is perhaps the only way for a theatre to function as a truly public building.
The becoming-public of a public building is exemplified in Ouest’s transformation of the Théâtre Le Vilar (2015) in Louvain-la-Neuve, a 1970s new town built on a concrete slab above an underground road infrastructure. Ouest’s most striking intervention is the addition of a new outdoor staircase directly connecting the street level with the theatre’s main hall on the first floor. Through this act, the theatre embraces the street as an extension of its cultural programme. Despite the above-ground public space in Louvain-la-Neuve being fully pedestrianised, it largely remains a transitory ‘machine for movement’. In this context, interdependency is established through the inverse gesture of opening up the cultural space to different uses and users. As a welcoming and accessible invitation to the public at large, the new staircase becomes a monumental symbol of this interdependence.
A similar transformation occurs at the Scarabaeus – SKA Cultural Centre (2019) in Schaerbeek, housed in a former cinema-turned-theatre and an adjacent townhouse along the Chaussée de Haecht. By installing a café and public foyer behind a new glass façade on the ground floor of the former townhouse, Ouest introduce a social programme to the otherwise rather monotonous main road. The theatre’s performance space likewise opens towards the street, with the stage positioned behind a large glazed façade in the former cinema’s entrance. The same tactics are applied on the other side of the building, on Rue Creuse, which runs parallel to the main road. Through these programmatic interventions, the theatre breaks open the typical urban block and its sharp demarcation between private dwellings and the street.
More interdependency
Mediating the boundary between public and private can be an interesting play, but interdependence is most radically present in the bridging of the city’s different private realms. Key to this is breaking open the bonds that have traditionally organised our society—family,
communities and social networks—and replacing them with alternative kinships. References for the Care Collective are the reimagination of childcare through practices of ‘other-mothers’ in African-American communities, the experimental collective living arrangements of second-wave feminism, and the ‘families of choice’ formed within LGBT circles. 07 These practices of care are built based on real engagement between the people involved, sidestepping traditional structures that tend to prioritise family relationships or communitarian bonds.
Similarly radical practices of care provide the foundation for alternative forms of self-management in the city, such as common gardens, open streets, or collective housing. 08 Respective examples from the Belgian context are ParckFarm, OpenStreets, and Community Land Trust. 09 In these cases, property relationships do not matter so much; what counts are the ways in which these alternative urban practices build new relationships within the neighbourhood. Ownership may remain in public hands, certainly in the case of the street, yet local residents are nevertheless enabled to temporarily animate the asphalt with dance, workshops, and more. 10 The question remains as to how this logic of interdependency might apply within the limits of architecture and individual buildings.
Here again, the work of Ouest offers a line of flight. Théâtre Le Rideau (2014) in Ixelles is a cultural space organised around a former coal depot that integrates several former town houses and rear extensions within a closed building block. In this case, the project’s greatest impact in terms of interdependency lies in what was not built. Since space and budget were both limited, the decision was made to omit an originally-planned (and expensive) professional kitchen, prompting the theatre to instead make use of the many existing restaurants in the neighbourhood. This gesture not only reduced costs, it also allowed links with the local community to be strengthened. During the restrictions of the COVID-19 pandemic, the cultural space of the theatre became a spontaneous meeting point for a range of different projects, from tree planting to picnics. Locals have even taken to using the name of the theatre as the unofficial name of their neighbourhood.
First, we take culture
Admittedly, most of Ouest’s projects involve cultural spaces, arguably the type of programme that is easiest to experiment with. Still, I believe these theatres constitute infrastructures of care, insofar as they integrate different sections of the local community and bridge the various private realms of the city. Their spontaneous character has undoubtedly less to do with the programmatic organisation of the theatres themselves than with the potential they offer for unexpected encounters in the everyday use of their spaces. We can only hope that the architects’ gesture of bending the brief outwards in the direction of the city will inspire curators and directors to rethink their cultural programming, beyond the black box and the walls of the theatre.
The broader question is how interdependencies might be strengthened in other urban programmes, such as housing or office blocks, where interdependency is ordinarily not just discouraged, but even forbidden or foreclosed. Interestingly, the Care Collective describes how alternative forms of kinship and social organisation can ‘migrate’ into the lives of people who do not necessarily consider themselves radical, thereby becoming quietly normalised. 11 Similar processes of normalisation have occurred within alternative approaches to urbanism. Once viewed as a marginal activist practice, born of necessity or triggered through indignation, the occupation of vacant land is today seen as an accepted form of city self-management. The political potential of interdependency lies in the spontaneous proliferation of such initiatives.
The ever-expanding urban politics of interdependence, continuously breaking open the public/private divisions of the city, invites us to rethink the challenges faced by architecture today. Referring to AIDS activist theory from the 1980s and 1990s, the Care Collective calls for an ethics of promiscuity. 12 In fighting HIV transmission during the height of the AIDS epidemic, activists paradoxically advocated for more promiscuity—not in the sense of acting ‘casual’ or ‘indifferent’ to one another, but, on the contrary, through multiplying and experimenting with ways of being careful with each other. Following this line of thinking, to promote promiscuity in the city today would be to proliferate infrastructures of care, by any means necessary, and experiment with new ways of being together.
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Bibliograhpic note: Gideon Boie, ‘Promiscuous architecture, by any means necessary’, published in: Iwan Strauven (ed.), Ouest – Urban Legend, (Köln: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther und Franz König, 2025), pp. 248-255.
Footnotes
01 Jef Cornelis, De Straat, 1972.
02 Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, (1961; Vintage, 1992).
03 Liane Lefaivre and Ingeborg de Roode, eds., Aldo van Eyck: de speelplaatsen en de stad, (NAi uitgevers, 2002).
04 Wim Cuyvers, ‘The Belgian House – the Waiting Façade and the Field of Fire,’ a+u: Architecture and Urbanism, no. 392 (May 2003): 20-24.
05 The Care Collective, The Care Manifesto, the Politics of Interdependence (Verso, 2020).
06 The Care Collective, The Care Manifesto, 49-51.
07 The Care Collective, The Care Manifesto, 35.
08 The Care Collective, The Care Manifesto, 49-51.
09 Gideon Boie, ‘The Activist Commons and How it Changes the City,’ in The Rise of the Common City: On the Culture of Commoning, eds. Louis Volont, Thijs Lijster and Pascal Gielen (Academic and Scientific Publishers, 2022), 33-46.
10 Gideon Boie, ‘Only Open Streets Will Save the City,’ A+ Architecture in Belgium, no. 305 (December 2023 – January 2024): 60-62.
11 The Care Collective, The Care Manifesto, 35.
12 The Care Collective, The Care Manifesto, 40-44.
Images
[1] Jef Cornelis, De Straat, 1972. Film stills.
[2] Jane Jacobs, chairman of the Comm. to save the West Village, holds up documentary evidence at press conference at Lions Head Restaurant at Hudson & Charles Sts, 1964.
[3] Aldo van Eyck designed around 730 playgrounds in Amsterdam between 1947 and 1978. Playground Bertelmansplein, 1947; Playground Nieuwmarkt, 1968 and Playground Laurierstraat, 1965.
[4] The Care Collective, The Care Manifesto, 2020.
[5] Announcement ‘Open Foyer’ in the Royal Festival Hall, London, 1983.
Categories: Architecture
Type: Article
