Beijing, bed, and breakfast : unpacking transient identities

Abstract

Modernity requires people to appreciate cultural relativism, and to understand the contextual legitimacy of other people's way of life and values. This thesis explores the nature and use of physical spaces to increase the relativistic understanding of culture. Two notions of interior don by the bed and breakfast, this new typology: Bed refers to the physical and rhetorical image of the private realm, the loci of the unseeable and unspeakable Breakfast represents the semi-private realm of domesticity: its interactions, negotiations, and rituals. Exploring identity-making architecture, the proposed Beijing will bring together two private spaces: one of transience (identity without consciousness of place) and one of domesticity (place without consciousness of identity).