We invite proposals for this session at the 2026 conference of the European Architectural History Network which Aarhus University will host. DEADLINE 19 September 2025.
This session explores the complex relationship between privacy, the private, and architecture throughout history. While privacy in Western contexts extends beyond individual concerns to shape relationships with space, self, and community, architectural history has yet to fully engage with privacy as a critical lens of analysis.
Despite extensive scholarship on public and private realms in other disciplines, privacy remains underexplored in architectural discourse. Drawing on theoretical frameworks established by scholars like Jürgen Habermas, Hannah Arendt, and Michel Foucault, who have examined the evolution of public/private distinctions and spatial power dynamics, this session aims to bridge this gap. More recent contributions from scholars such as Beatriz Colomina on the mediated nature of modern architectural privacy, Georges Teyssot on the body’s relationship to domestic space, Mette Birkedal Brunn on Early Modern Privacy and privacy studies method, and Peter Thule Kristensen on Early Modern Privacy and architecture will further inform our discussions.
Rather than simply applying existing privacy theories to architecture, we seek an interdisciplinary exchange that allows architectural elements to be reinterpreted through privacy studies and privacy concepts to be reconsidered through architectural analysis. We are particularly interested in how architecture becomes symbolically charged with privacy meanings, and conversely, how privacy is shaped by architectural forms and practices.
To provide focus for this broad topic, we encourage papers examining privacy and architecture from the Early Modern period to the present, a timeframe that encompasses critical transformations in Western conceptions of privacy alongside significant architectural developments.
This session invites contributions examining specific building typologies where privacy plays a central role in their conception, organisation, and use. For example:
Monasteries and convents: These structures provide rich case studies in how architecture regulates private devotion, communal living, and isolation. From the individual cell to the cloister, monastic architecture influenced Western conceptions of privacy and continues to resonate in staging prayer, study, and spiritual intimacy.
Domestic architecture: From the development of corridor plans that separated servants from family life in 17th-century homes, to the open-plan living of modernism that reconfigured private/public boundaries, to contemporary smart homes with surveillance capabilities that redefine intimacy.
Civil and military buildings: create spaces of secrecy, shelter, and privacy through secure architecture, restricted access, and controlled spatial organisation.
Healthcare facilities: The evolution of hospital wards from large common rooms to private patient rooms reflects changing attitudes toward privacy in healing environments and medical ethics.
Educational institutions: Boarding schools, dormitories, and study spaces reveal how architecture shapes learning through varying degrees of privacy and surveillance.
Cultural institutions: Museums, libraries, and theaters that simultaneously offer public access while creating zones of private contemplation, study, or viewing.
We welcome papers exploring diverse architectural elements that frame privacy, including:
Urban plans that establish public/private boundaries
Spatial hierarchies and circulation patterns that control access and visibility
Thresholds, screens, and partitions that mediate between private and public realms
Sensory dimensions of privacy through acoustics, lighting, and material properties
Domestic elements like alcoves and private rooms that accommodate bodily needs
Documentation practices that reveal or conceal private aspects of architectural use
We particularly value contributions that examine concrete examples and take critical stances on the relationship between privacy and architecture, questioning conventional narratives and offering new interpretative frameworks.
