MATEUS GONÇALVES DE MEDEIROS

Based on the work of Walter Benjamin, this paper investigates the concept of space that emerged in the emergence of the bourgeois metropolis of the 19th century, through an aesthetic perspective that, benefiting from the material thinking of architecture – as well of art in general – takes the concept of space in three of its configurations: interior, exterior and threshold. The hegemony of bourgeois values that would influence the constitution of the modern idea of urban space marked both the architecture and decoration of residential interiors and the urban conception of the western metropolis: the house became an increasingly isolated and private environment, while the street weakened its significance as a place of collective sharing. This transformation became clear in the threshold spaces where past and present interpenetrated and coexisted, environments that intertwined the old and new ways of life, enabling Benjamin's materialist historian to recognize what was hidden in history and to question traditional historiography based on the historicist ideology. Furthermore, the 19th century consolidated a spatial conception that strengthened the establishment of boundaries that rigidly divided the interior — the private, isolated and exclusive internal space — and the exterior, the public external space that was politically weakened and reduced to its function of passage. In this context, the physical space of the interior became an expression of interiority while at the same time demanding compensation for the loss of the collective meaning of the external space as the experience of the common was weakened. The new rules of social interaction between anonymous individuals typical of the big city normalized the social and emotional disconnection of the community. A privileged object of observation for understanding the transformation of political experience with the advent of modernity, 19th-century Paris presents not only a model of a metropolis, but a snapshot of the transition, of the significant moment in which a place-instant of threshold between different perceptions of life and experience coexisted. Manifesting the uncertainty and instability that underlies modernity and its character of constant transition, the threshold reveals itself as an object, but also as a method that highlights contrasts and affinities without the limitations of a synthetic rationality that abandons divergences, keeping contradictions alive and visible welcoming and learning from differences.