Richard Sennett

• Price: $11.50
• Paperback—48 pages (1998)
• ISBN: 1-891197-01-0
• Dimensions: 6.5" x 9"
• © 1998 The University of Michigan Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning, Richard Sennett, New York

Editor: Annette W. LeCuyer

Design: Carla Swickerath with Christian Unverzagt

Printing: Goetzcraft Printers, Inc., Ann Arbor

Sample Selection

Jerusalem is a very old city, and in ancient times those who lived in Jerusalem might have known how to respond to Mr. Nusseibeh's challenge by invoking examples from Athens, the center of civilization in the ancient world. We would never want to copy the social conditions of Athenian democracy. The majority of people living in the city were slaves, and all women were excluded from politics. But we can learn something from how this often fickle, intensely competitive people related democracy, such as they knew it, to architecture.

Athens. from roughly 600 to 350 BC, located its democratic practices in two places in the city, the town square and the theater. Two very different kinds of democracy were practiced in the square and the theater. The square stimulated citizens to step outside their own concerns and take note of the presence and needs of other people in the city. The architecture of the theater helped citizens to focus their attention and concentrate when engaged in decision-making.

It was in the Pnyx that the Athenians debated and decided on the actions the city would take. The Pnyx was a bowl shaped, open-air theater about ten minutes walk from the central square of Athens. Chiseled out of a hill. the Pnyx in form resembled other Greek theaters, and like them originally provided space for dancing and plays in the sixth and fifth centuries BC, Athenians put this ordinary theater to a different use, in seeking for order in their politics. Speakers stood in the open, circular space on a stone platform called a bema, so that they could be seen by everyone in the theater. Behind the speaker the land dropped away, so that words seemed to hover in the air between the mass of five to six thousand bodies gathered together and the empty sky. The sun from morning to late afternoon struck the speaker's face so that nothing in his expression or gestures was obscured by shadow. The audience for this political theater sat around the bowl in assigned places, men sitting with others who belonged to the same local tribe. The citi zens watched each other's reactions as intently is the orator at the bema.

People sat or stood in this relation fbr a long time, as long as the sunlight lasted. The theatrical space thus functioned as a detection mechanism, its focus and duration meant to get beneath the surface of momentary impressions. And such a disciplinary space of eye, voice, and body had one great virtue: Through concentration of attention on a speaker and identification of others in the audience who might call out challenges or comments, the ancient political theater sought to hold citizens responsible for their words.

In the Pnyx, two visual rules thus organized the often raucous meetings at which people took decisions: exposure—both of the speaker and of the audience to one, another—and fixity of place, in where the speaker stood and the audience sat. These two visual rules supported a verbal order, a single voice speaking at any one time.

The other space of democracy was the Athenian agora. The town square consisted of a large open space crossed diagonally by the main street of Athens. At the sides of the agora were temples and buildings called stoas, sheds with an open side onto the agora. A number of activities occurred simultaneously in the agora—commerce, religious rituals, casually hanging out. In the open space there was also, a rectangular law court surrounded by a low wall, so that citizens going about their business or making an offering to the gods could also follow the progress of justice.