The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

Part II: Filtering Tactics
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Adrian Forty
has taken the place for me beside the first intoxicated tastings of the
music itself. 4
But if the above sounds as if Levin was indeed attracted by the physical elements
of the building, what he goes on to say suggests that this was not
the case:
At the end of a concert, the audience could not bear to leave, to go
from this beauty and opulence into the drab world of postwar
Britain, still exhausted, shabby and rationed; we wandered about
the corridors and walkways, clearly determined to remain there all
night. After a few days of this, the attendants . . . improvised a solution;
they went to the top of the building, linked arms, and
moved slowly down from level to level, very gently shepherding us
all into the main foyer, and thence, even more gently, into the reality
outside. 5
As Levin makes clear, being in the Festival Hall was better than being outside.
If it was “reality” outside, what was it inside? Whatever it was, it was
not an experience of atomized individuals but was in some sense social, and
collective.
The question of the “I” who is the subject of all experience is a
theme of Jean-Paul Sartre’s major work on phenomenology, Being and Nothingness,
first published in French in 1943. While one would hardly expect
what Sartre wrote to have informed the perception of visitors to the Festival
Hall, the problem on which he focuses, the constitution of the self in terms
of its relation to others, can be said to be one that belonged to the period in
which the Festival Hall was created. Sartre writes about the three dimensions
of the body’s being. The first dimension is that “I exist my body.” The
second dimension is that “My body is known and utilized by the Other.” It
is only through this second dimension that a possibility of the subject’s consciousness
of his or her own bodily existence can occur. The third dimension
of being occurs when “as I am for others, the Other is revealed to me as the
subject for whom I am an object.” 6 In other words, only in the third dimension
of being does there occur the possibility of social being, through the
mutual exchange of seeing. It is a recurrent theme of Sartre’s book that our
only knowledge of our self is in the view that we receive back of the self from
the other who sees us. “The Other holds a secret—the secret of what I am.”
And he continues, “the Other is for me simultaneously the one who has
stolen my being from me and the one who causes ‘there to be’ a being which
is my being.” “We resign ourselves,” declares Sartre, “to seeing ourselves
through the Other’s eyes.” 7