A critical reading of a paradigmatic Metro Station: the tail of the peacock

Abstract

A new and paradigmatic metro station in Paris, the Metro Saint-Lazare, is set into a critical framework in a thesis based in theory. The thesis draws on a wide range of architectural, sociological, philosophical, literary and psychological theory to invoke a generative influence on future architectural spaces. A Janus threshold of space created in light, its Lentille entrance presents a mythopoetic metaphorical boundary. It is at once a passage of transition and a spatial boundary between an above-ground experience and one which is underground. It is a threshold of phenomenological experience and Benjaminian philosophical concepts. It initiates a cycle of metamorphosis of the commuter from an individual identity to that of one of the crowd, and back again. Natural light is the central feature of the metro station and light is central to the discourse. Light is the medium of the spatial message. The medium is the messenger. The message is one of power and control. Light controls subjective experience. Light controls the perception of spatiality. Spatiality in light is identified as a means of societal control. Societal control by panopticism is denied. New contemporary social, economic and technological control systems evolve continuously and replace those that exist. Control systems in the twenty-first century are likely to become superseded such that control may not appear to be control. Vertical spatiality and power relations coincide on the "clock-stage" of the fourth level mezzanine. Verticality is the instrument of a gaze which devolves into a Lacanian tripartite search for the seeing-of-oneself, a protective mechanism of the individual in the crowd. Theatre demands attention. Attention is the key to the operation of non-coercive forms of control. The theatricality of the gaze is power, and power resides in the spatiality of the theatre. Horizontality provides a chiasmic interchange with vertically. Reversibility of subject and object resides in the body of the commuter. Interchange engages the body as much as spatiality. Control is reciprocal between embodiment and spatiality.