3. THE VALUE OF APPEARANCE
In The Human Condition Hannah Arendt clearly distinguishes between the public and private realms, where the human activities of labour, work and action take place. “Labour is the activity which corresponds to the biological process of the human body … The human condition of labour is life itself. Work is the activity which corresponds to the unnaturalness of human existence … work provides an “artificial” world of things … Action, the only activity that goes on directly between men without the intermediary of things or matter, corresponds to the human condition of plurality, to the fact that men, not Man, live on the earth and inhabit the world.”
As a product of work which transcends pure functionality, architecture has a powerful role to play as the reification of collective memory. “Acting and speaking men need the help of homo faber in his highest capacity, that is, the help of the artist, of poets and historiographers, of monument-builders or writers, because without them the only product of their activity, the story they enact and tell, would not survive at all.”
The public realm, in opposition to the private, is a place in which humanity and its artifice appear. This realm provides a “space of appearance” which “comes into being whenever men are together in the manner of speech and action.” Architecture has a two-fold role in the manifestation of this public realm: a product of work, it stabilizes the public realm and separates it from the private. As well, architecture provides a physical appearance for this “space of appearance.”