other minds
The drive for expressive transparency in modern architecture, and Learning from Las Vegas’s response to it, are intimately related to the skeptical dilemma about knowing “other minds” a problem that is deeply involved with the re-lationship between the inner and outer, transparency and opacity, expression and inexpression. As Cavell has put it: “At some stage the skeptic is going to be impressed by the fact that my knowledge of others depends upon their expressing themselves, in word and conduct. If skepticism about other minds, our ability to know the other, depends on an interaction between the inner and outer-upon the expressive capacities of a body and our willingness to acknowledge or avoid those capacities-then architecture’s deeply rooted investment in the metaphorics of the body, and its preoccupation with the relationship between the interior and exterior, would suggest that it is one of the privileged domains in which skepticism about other minds is dramatized. (Vinegar, 2008)