'...Relates and Separates Men at the Same Time': Hannah Arendt’s understanding of the world-of-things and its relevance for the field of architecture

The world is a crucial term in Hannah Arendt’s oeuvre, as might be concluded from the title of the biography on her work and life For the Love of the World by Elisabeth Young Bruehl. World is not just the abstract globe, but consists of concrete artefacts, produced by human beings to make the earth in an environment that is inhabitable for human beings. It is a world-of-things, she states. As is clear, Architecture plays an important role in this perspective, as it in a very concrete way constructs houses, roads, townhalls, schools, and other interventions that make the earth inhabitable and that enable human life to flourish. Arendt moreover stresses how this world is both the context of collective life (it is the world that we have in common), but also the prerequisite for political life. Arendt briefly addresses how she understands this common feature of the world in a well-known passage in her book The Human Condition (1958) ‘To live in the world,’ she writes, ‘means essentially that a world of things is between those who have it in common, as a table is located between those who sit around it; the world, like every in-between, relates and separates men at the same time.’ In this paper I will discuss Arendt’s notion of the world as an entity that at once gathers and separates, and how that informs her important notion of ‘the space of appearance’ as a model for the public realm