Housing and intermediate spaces: porters and porter’s lodges at Barcelona

Abstract

This report is about analysing porters and porter’s lodges as institutions and spaces where tensions and contradictions of modernity can be shown. We would like to point out how theses intermediate spaces and moral persons are situated in the middle of a classical oppositions serie of modernity. The main purpose of this work is analyse how porters and porter’s lodges appear historically like institutions of the city, and how the are positioned within the following oppositions of modernity: 1) public / private; 2) community / contract; 3) formal / informal; 4) order / disorder; 5) connaissance / secret.