SINGULAR COLLECTIVE OF THE MULTIPLE SELVES
For this paper I want to challenge two assertions: 1) that the definition of the social dimension of architecture is restricted to groups or pairings of individuals and 2) that increased sociability is synonymous with good architecture. I must preface these thoughts with the disclaimer that clearly the social aspect of architecture does, indeed, concern the relational contracts formed between large groups of people, and, that increased social contact between disparate cultural groups is ideal. But, in the spirit of playing devil’s advocate I would like to abandon these preconceptions. To the first point, the majority of the architecture and architects engaged with designing the social are typically invested in designing for the public, generally creating urban spaces that were intended to be filled with large groups of happily conversing people and the sound of clinking glasses. I want to expand the definition of the social dimension of the discourse to it’s bare minimum, what I will call the singular collective of the multiple selves. By this I mean that the social dimension of architecture can and often does include the aberration of normative behavior even on or at the scale of the individual. To the second point, I want to rebut the convention that the social dimension of architecture should be in service of providing amenable or comfortable spaces. There seems to be a wash of contemporary projects that manifest ideas of engaging the public simply by adding token programmatic responses (coffee shops, bars, lounge seating). Having enjoyed this semester I now feel armed with the vocabulary and the conceptual insight to be able to say that the social dimension of architecture persists at all scales, even those with just a single individual, and that the creation of ‘social condensers’ or publically-comfortable spaces is not the sole providence of the social aspect of architecture. In order to make this argument I’m going to retroactively (and obsessively) analyze a piece of furniture I built last year, with the help of several like-minded projects and articles we read this semester.
BREAKDOWN
Last year I was given an Audio Technica lp120 turntable and two vinyl LPs (compilations of Johnny Cash and Sinatra) as a birthday gift. Long hours in studio and obsolete weekends pre-vented me from building a shelf for them so these new objects had to occupy a space against the wall on the floor for a couple months. As my small LP collection grew the desire to store them and simultaneously showcase them to anyone who might visit began to become para-mount. What followed was a series of design intentions that were voiced by clearly different aspects of my personality, each with its own ambition and set of aims. Being a college under-graduate I don’t, surprisingly, have the funds to sustain an ongoing interest in vinyl LPs. I de-cided that, in order to mitigate my own behavior I was going to design a piece of furniture that would simultaneously showcase my growing collection while paradoxically preventing me from purchasing beyond my means. Taking the average cost of an LP and multiplying it by the width of the record, sleeve, and accompanying artwork/lyrics contained inside I was able to assess how much shelf-space I would be permitted before my wallet ran dry.
Taking this length I decided to create a surface that protruded from the wall on which to store and display the records. The angle of that surface was determined in order to allow it to strike the fulcrum of balance of an upright record precisely at the point on the shelf where I would begin making desperate calls home begging for more money. In simpler wording, the shelf was cut long enough to match the length of my finances, at which point the surface became too narrow to store any more vinyl without them falling to the floor, and thereby (hopefully) curbing my musical self and financially-irresponsible self.
To finish the piece, the top portion of the shelf cants further out from the wall to cre-ate a rectilinear surface whose back side completely disengages from the wall to create a space to place the record-player and thread/hide cords running behind to outlets and speakers stored underneath.
RETRO-ANALYSIS
What I find interesting is that this simple albeit subtly complex design engages dif-ferent levels of the social spectrum, as well as different (and competing) elements of my own personality; a kind of public of multiple internalized selves. Additionally, it became immediately apparent that such a simple architectural gesture is able to make use of some of the language architects like Tschumi and Banham use to describe concepts and architecture that normatively operate on larger and more overtly-spatialized scales.
What’s obvious is that there is an internally-competing set of individual selves that seek to ‘violently’ mitigate each others’ behavior through built and spatial form. Tschumi writes extensively on what he calls the “fundamental and unavoidable” violence in architecture. Tschumi writes that “this also suggests that actions qualify spaces as much as spaces qualify actions; that space and action are inseparable and that no proper interpretation of architecture, drawing or notation can refuse to consider this fact” (Tschumi 44). In his essay ‘Violence in Architecture’ the ubiquity of violence in architecture is likened to the relationship between doctor and patient, prisoner and guard, order to chaos. Like the center spire of Bantham’s panopticon the shelf seeks to mitigate my behavior by ‘violently’ imposing itself on and limiting my actions. There is also an implicit sensibility of reciprocity to what Tschumi seems to be suggesting. That is, as architects we do violence upon materials and spaces in order to bring into existence a set of relationships and adjancencies that, in turn, do violence upon us by altering our daily routines, our means of relating to one an-other, or perhaps the spatial and mental maps we begin to construct of a building.
DEPARTURE
But it is at this point that I would like to diverge from Tschumi’s analysis in that it doesn’t seem to extend far enough in scale. Tschumi uses infamous examples of architecture such as the Pan-opticon, Jewish concentration camps, and Hospitals, as examples of the implicitly violent nature of architecture. His choice of examples seems to undercut the ubiquitous nature of his claims in that he has opted to use spaces of physical violence or restraint in order to illustrate the omni-presence of spatial coercion. While this certainly makes his case he seems to forget the more banal examples of daily coercion that take place, even at the scale of furniture, say. His vo-cabulary of spatial violence includes “dangerous staircases, those corridors consciously made too narrow for crowds, [which] introduce a radical shift from architecture as an object of con-templation to architecture as a perverse instrument of use...”(Tschumi 45). These are accurate, but slightly obvious examples of architecture working to cause aberrant behavior in otherwise unfettered human trajectories. But what of the bench that forces you to face away from the group, or the pairing of tables that cause awkwardly one-sided conversations in group discus-sions? His examples also suffer from the implicit association of violence imposed by humans on other humans, and foregoes those examples when the violence is being imposed on oneself.
This is what strikes at the element of reciprocity in his argument, I do violence on a piece of birch plywood and the wall of my bedroom in order to create a piece of residential-scale infrastructure that, in turn, does violence on me. But the point to be made is that the process of behavioral change does not necessarily need to engage a notion of the public at any point. The object, and it’s conceptual nature, are entirely reflexive. In this sense the object permits me to be both prisoner and guard simultaneously without the necessity of involving secondary or tertiary parties upon whom the action is taking place.
One project that bears many similarities to this might be Lars Lerup’s Vehicular Furniture se-ries for SFMoMA in 1990, specifically leanto closet. The protrusion of the leanto closet permits easy access and portability giving to furniture an element of democratization and mobility that is otherwise rejected by implements of storage. This, too, engages with the behavior of the individual and permits an alteration of behaviors and spatial gestures. However, in direct contrast, where the leanto closet lends a social dimension through mobility and alteration, the shelf lends a social dimension through restriction and Tschumi-esque violence. Two sides of the same coin, one is clearly the optimist and one the cynic, but equally attempting to resolve aspects of daily life through small albeit significant geometric execution.
A PUBLIC OF MULTIPLE SELVES
This is a good segue into an examination of the internalized public that this object seems to bring out. The notion that I can be both guard and prisoner at the same time implies a simul-taneity and a duplicity of competing interests. As I retroactively analyze this piece of furniture it becomes evident that there are roughly four characters that act in a sequential and hierarchical order to bring this shelf into existence. The musical self wants more records, a kind of Freudian id he simply wants more music, more material, more experiences. The financial self immediately trumps the musician, he decides that purchasing records is to be permitted, but only within the bounds of modest and sensible financial means. The aesthetic self, derived largely from my education and personal affectation with craft-architecture, stipulates that this self-imposed system cannot be broken. I could cheat the system by using the top surface for storing even more records, but this would be to disobey the rules of the system entirely and aesthetic (read: obsessive compulsive) self says this won’t do. And finally, egotistical self demands that the records be displayed for immediate self-gratification. I do have a closet, there is ab-solutely no need for an elaborate behavior-correcting shelf to occupy my room, but egotistical self says it is absolutely necessary.
While this may be delving too far into the psychosocial I believe it is important to acknowledge so we can conclude that private (as opposed to public) is not synony-mous with the non-social. The definition of social, like Tschumi’s violence, is implicitly ubiquitous. After all, what aspect of architecture does not carry some element of the social in its manifestation? There is such thing as the social dimension of the singu-lar if we are to expand the definition of the social to include any spatial gesture that seeks to interact or alter human behavior.
THE GIZMO
The second part of my contention is born out of a desire to rebut the tacitly-accepted idea that designing the social must, as some level, default to a notion of creating public comfort. Contemporary discourse on the social dimension of architecture is wrapped up in architecture acting as a kind of social corrective in service of creating situations of intensified contact between currently-disparate user groups. While this is absolutely valid, I believe it also misses that small family of spatial gestures that serve as aggressive but cathartically necessary social correctives. Reyner Banham’s essay ‘The Great Gizmo’ bears out many of the points that this modest piece of furniture attempts to achieve. In describing what he conceptually refers to as the ‘the gizmo’ he writes:
“a characteristic class of US products - perhaps the most characteristic - is a small self-contained unit of high performance in relation to its size and cost, whose func-tion is to transform some undifferentiated set of circumstances to a condition nearer human desires. The minimum of skill is required in its installation and use, and it is independent of any physical or social infrastructure beyond that by which it may be ordered from catalogue and delivered to its prospective user.” (52)
Like the Banham-Gizmo the shelf is a self-contained unit whose purpose is to transform an undif-ferentiated set of circumstances. Beyond the design the shelf is a simple instrument, both in its use and its installation. It is also independent from a social infrastructure, though, as previously discussed this does not imply it is divorced from the social entirely. Furthermore the shelf fulfills perhaps one of the most important criteria of the Gizmo, which is that it is disposable. When my lease for the apartment expires the shelf will be dismounted, the holes will be filled in, new paint will be applied, and its presence will have been rendered obsolete. The shelf is, indeed, a Banham-Gizmo in almost every respect save one. Banham discusses that the ultimate aim of the Gizmo is the rendering of a condition “nearer to human desires.” While that could be said about the shelf, it’s actual purpose is to create an explicitly undesirable condition in order for me to achieve my ambition. In many ways it could be described as an instrument of iatrogeni-sis. In medical terms a drug that is described as iatrogenic is labeled so because in resolving an ailment it often causes a secondary set of symptoms. In a similar fashion, the ailment the shelf attempts to cure is achieved by causing further discomfort (namely, prohibiting me from purchasing more records).
Banham finishes by describing that the “the structure of the US house becomes little more than an undifferentiated shell within which the gizmos can do their work (54)”...their work being the “criticism of [their] surroundings”. (55) In this I am both the originator and the focus of the criti-cism that this birch surface seeks to recognize, but not through the amelioration of the social condition (as in specific cases like Bottleneck Bench or PS1 Purple Haze entry) but a resistance to it. As is the case with these projects the Gizmo seems to imply a comfort-inducing gadget that resolves an unpleasant aspect of life, but in the case of the shelf we see the gadget oper-ate as the unpleasant aspect of life in order to achieve my ambition.
RETICENCE
It is clear why this breed of architecture or spatial gesture is avoided, in that it is too eas-
ily interpreted as a new Panoptic use of the built form in order to fascistically control human behavior. What ultimately denies this title is that I am the sole perpetrator of my own fascistic environment. It seems that we are still mired in a kind of discursive retreat from the aggressively authorial. The destruction of the Pruitt-Igoe housing project in 1954 trumpeted the beginning of modernist-refutation in this country and elsewhere. As a result the overbearing ethos of con-temporary architectural discourse concerns ambiguity. It seems better (and safer) to propose spatial relations and social conditions that are left entirely un-designed so as to account for the unaccountable. The excitement of the potential is substituted for the conviction of the authorial. This reminds me of a comment made by Sarah Whiting in reference to a project in our studio when she described it as filled with ‘antiseptic design.’ Her contention was that the project had been conceptually developed to the detriment of the design, that rectilinear boxes of varying shapes had been substituted for idiosyncratic space as a default measure in what appeared to be a hastily-constructed response to a socially-complex system. In this I believe she was referring to the issue of authorship that we’ve been discussing, that antiseptic design is not synonymous with limitless possibility, nor ambiguous space with infinite programmability.
Similarly there seems to be a reticence to engage architecture at the scale of the individual. Architecture, after all, should be for the masses, in service of a greater ambition of social connectivity. It would seem that the success of a built project is directly correlated to the number and variegated nature of the people it manages to affect. This is the underpinning sentiment of projects like WorkAC’s Urban Farm project for the 2008 PF1 exhibition. The intention of the project appeared to be the potential for urban ecological and agricultural renewal. While this project in itself would not be sustainable, perhaps it could serve as a template that could gen-erate new typological interventions in contexts that, by definition, required a division of labor, white collar and blue. But which public is the exhibition really appealing to? The crowd that attends PF1 exhibitions is, one could argue, hardly a variegated group. This is not an exhibi-tion for the masses anymore than high-brow art installations at MoMA are for the masses. This does not imply futility in attempting to design the social, but rather seeks to understand that, at some level, all projects that engage the social are residing on an idealized image of the public as being an evenly-distributed sampling of the city’s population, all eager to be recapitulated through built form.
TAKEAWAY
While it might seem obsessive to analyze furniture at this level of detail, it is important. Impor-tant because it illuminates certain aspects of our profession that go undefined and unexplored when words like social and public are invoked. These terms carry with them connotative bag-gage that, in my opinion, works to exclude the more fetishistic aspects of what we do as spatial designers and self-proclaimed arbiters of social interaction. Even at the level of furniture there is a default assumption that, when engaging the social dimension, the object must be facilitat-ing conversation, interaction, intercourse, exchange. While this is obviously true, it is not true in totality. Violent, unpleasant, and even disruptive exchange with the various manifestations of oneself is equally as valid a component of designing the social as any other, and it is this mentality that I hope to deploy in my future work next year at DS+R whose repertoire, at times, seems to cater to this kind of fetishistic and intimate type of design.