In Attic Nights, the Roman lawyer and writer Aulus Gellius counterposes otium and nec otium, free time and time spent on occupations. Furthermore, to each of these episodes of leisure or activity he assigns a different architectural typology.

The veduta was a very popular genre of painting in the Italian Settecento that was characterized by panoramic views of the city that were so meticulous that some historians mistakenly believed that its followers —Canaletto in the forefront— perhaps used some kind of camera obscura to produce these urban panoramas. At the same time, appearing as an offshoot of the veduta, the capriccio in painting represented imaginary buildings and landscapes with a degree of accuracy that resembled absolutely real places.

Finally, Bentham’s panopticon, designed in the 18th century to monitor the prison population, seems to be perpetuated in the architecture of big shopping centres, museums and sports amenities, as though the impossibility of remaining hidden —or the punishment of being always visible—was a naturalized form of social control.

Public interiors are sometimes places consecrated to a ubiquitous and omnipresent eye, where citizens, with their comings and goings, their habits and their movements, breathe life into their gigantic scale, the pharaonic engineering of spaces that aspire to be urban landmarks while demanding that we use them.