What Architectural Images Do
Recently I was at a large London architectural office for a meeting to discuss whether spandrels on a residential tower in the city’s south east should be expressed in glass, metal or stone. The end of the discussion took a different tack and became an opportunity to discuss how the building was to be represented to the public in an exhibition of the design in its respective borough. It was quickly established that the question of the height of the building (then pencilled in at 198 metres) was the first problem the residents would have with the scheme. Thereafter much of the discussion was geared towards how the height could be downplayed in the imagery so the prospect of its construction would simultaneously excite the public yet subdue its true height. The office demanded that a cabal be formed immediately to confront their fear that local residents of myriad enthusiasms and political leanings could turn, and stem their architectural desires from becoming real. It was decided that the images were to suppress the height of the building by choosing a strategic point at which to illustrate it with the right angle of perspective.
The architectural image is not just tailored to censor or accentuate aspects of a design, they also contain an intrinsic duality that is used by the architectural press to exploit the disconnection between viewing and inhabiting, namely that a temporal empirical reality which governs inhabitation is lost and replaced by the frozen eternal Idea. The image as a limning of material form negates architecture’s own ability to harbour ‘the external conditions of political and social struggle’[1] that ‘scatters us around in a maelstrom of controversies: namely passions, subjectivities, cultures, religions, tastes.’[2] Architectural images are so beguiling because they are political vacuums. This loss of the political dimension of space in the image masks everyday life and serves only to suggest a utopian clause of architecture: its triumph over mediocre design.[3]
The images of the residential tower in question was also to be framed in such a way to coax audiences into falling for what Robin Boyd called the feature eye-trap set by the architect[4], when we ignore what is around the gestalt, or dominating thing. A double-team of: a system of Hegelian negations that are describing what the architecture is not, and traps that focus our attention, both haggle our deepest desires to inhabit the image itself. The image creates a division of lived-space between the Real spaces we normally inhabit and what it offers us as an antidote to our space-poor experience. This becomes particularly challenging as the pervasiveness of the architectural image in contemporary culture contends with the inhabitation of our Real space because images are equipped with political and emotional instruments that don’t come with us when we visit Real space.
This reality loss is many things: the press’ cash cow, slippage, it just happens, the audience doesn’t notice or they don’t care, or comment ironically, or a part of a large ironic commentary on the way we live now, artistic in nature, postmodern paraphernalia. Whatever it is, it is endemic.
WYW - Only Look Here, and Here.
Bibliography
Boyd, Robin, 1963. The Australian Ugliness. Sydney: Penguin Books Australia.
Latour, Bruno, 2001. “Which protocol for the new collective experiments?” in Ciudades para un Futuro más Sostenible [Online]. Available at: http://habitat.aq.upm.es/boletin/n32/ablat.en.html [Accessed 25 August 2011].
Vidler, Anthony, 1993. “Spatial Violence” in Assemblage, no. 20 (April), pp. 84-85.
Žižek, Slavoj, 2007. “Censorship Today: Violence, or Ecology as a New Opium for the Masses” in Lacan dot com [Online]. Available at: http://www.lacan.com/zizecology1.htm [Accessed 25 August 2011].
[1] Vidler (pp.84)
[2] Latour (2001)
[3] Žižek (2007)
[4] Boyd (1963, pp.186)
The Social Home
There is a peculiar habit of “Austericans” (members of a society whose New culture takes over its indigenous civilisation) Robin Boyd was ever the serial neologiser (Featurism, Austerican, Bushmanist, etc.) whereby they find privacy in their own car. Marshall McLuhan called this a “hidden ground” behind the use of the car. Australians paradoxically go outside to be alone and go home to be social, which explains the average oversized Australian car. Whereas a great majority of the world goes home to be alone and finds the social world outside, which would explain the popularity of the small European/Japanese two-door. So while the car bites back in the face of the motorist by being at once a hermetic private space where the driver is alone, immobilised in the gauntlet of traffic we all know so intimately, the Australian home is a social space, requiring the sort of finery on show for when guests arrive: the very same Featurist things that made Boyd cringe crimson red.
Home owners, like mayors, keep a watchful eye over their public space, and ‘insist on featuring something…some symbol of his own success’1 and eagerly look for the next investment to garner status. As much as the home shapes histories of migration and material culture, ‘at least half of the monthly mortgage payments paid by the average Australian home owner goes towards sustaining meanings, rather than keeping out the rain.’2
And so admiration is received of a suburban home if it is associated with catalogue-style character, which requires regular consumption and the sort of finished quality not indicative of issues common to families like mortgage debt, sexism, domestic abuse, clutter, crime or any of the chaotic normalities that typify daily suburban life. Catalogue-style character and its ‘quality of empty perfection, however, is precisely why such images are so appealing to us.’3
Bibliography
Boyd, R., 1963 [1960]. The Australian Ugliness. Sydney: Penguin Books Australia.
Dever, M. 2006. “Introduction” in Exhibition Catalogue: Home. Melbourne: Monash University, pp.1-3.
Fiske, J., Hodge, B., Turner, G., 1987. Myths of Oz: Reading Australian Popular Culture, Sydney: Allen & Unwin.
Notes
1Boyd (1963, pp.132)
2Fiske, J., Hodge, B., Turner, G. (1987, pp. 26)
3Dever (2006, pp.3)
Wiry Ghosts and Informed Decisions
Again, this post takes snippets from a forthcoming article commemorating the 50th year in print of Robin Boyd’s The Australian Ugliness:
Boyd insists, that Featurist things are ‘non-intellectual, non-emotional and entirely optical’1 and that ugliness is class relative: ‘Georgian for high income, numb conservatism for the low, and for the great central majority coloured plastics, paint, and flat black steel welded into hard geometrical shapes.’2 Furthermore, he notes that non-English visitors regard ‘the difference between an English and an Australian accent [as] a class distinction, and that a visiting Englishman cannot really take seriously any intellectual or artistic idea [of Australians]’.3 As though in accordance Boyd feels that ‘in England, unlike America and Australia, there is always something of genuine beauty around the corner, a medieval church or a glimpse of field, hedge and honest stonework, even if it is hemmed in by rival service stations and haunted by the wiry ghosts of electricity and telephones.’4 Comparatively, in Australia he finds ‘diggerdom where all men are equally inferior.’5
L to R: High income, low and the Great Majority. (The ever-desirable Phonia-Colonial style, Wolfgang Sievers’s Housing Commission flats and post-Fordist plastic cells.
But Boyd wasn’t alone in attacking the masses and their decorative misdemeanours. Starched, dyed-in-the-wool modernists Adolf Loos and Le Corbusier alike, were a little more stern. Loos: primitive people ornament. Le Corbusier: everyone else has eyes that do not see.
Whether, as Boyd points out, Featurist decisions and objects are “non-intellectual” or markers of class distinctions is open to doubt. Even people equipped with the minimum of will, voluntarily choose to conform, or fall victim to Kant’s notion of public reason. Immanuel Kant’s thinking contains a notable distinction between public and private reason. The former regards the masses following prescribed knowledge rather than thinking for themselves, and the latter regards the masses taking initiative, working things out for themselves. But to Kant, the majority is always wrong. A liberal market economy defines freedom of choice as key, and uses forces to invite participation. Freedom of choice and participation mixed with Slavoj Žižek labels as a spontaneous unreflective ideology where the masses actively choose stupidity leaves Boyd’s argument that the general public are stupid, conformist or conservative misleading and borderline offensive. Masses, rather, skirt rational decision-making unaided and indeed provoked by a remorseless market.
Wiry ghosts of electricity and telephones.
Add to that Loïc Wacquant, recounting that ‘the culture of everyday life, the production of desire, [is] generally not much interested in the state’6, nor class distinctions or even about making rational and informed decisions. Responsibility to original thought is taken away from the masses. Featurism flourishes amidst an inundation of perplexed, run-of-the-mill choices orchestrated by the market.
Bibliography
Boyd, R., 1963 [1960]. The Australian Ugliness. Sydney: Penguin Books Australia.
Wacquant, L., 2009. “The Body, The Ghetto and the Penal State” in Qualitative Sociology, Vol.32 (1). Heidelberg: Springer, pp.101-129.
Notes
1Boyd (1963, pp.141)
2Ibid. (pp.110)
3Ibid. (pp.75)
4Ibid. (pp.16)
5Ibid. (pp.77)
6Wacquant (2009, pp.114)
Suburbs as a Representation of Diversity (and a Consumption Inducive Machine): The Australian Ugliness at 50
This post is selected from a forthcoming article tentatively entitled Consumption, Immobilisation, Aspiration: The Australian Ugliness at 50 celebrating 50 years since the publication of Robin Boyd’s The Australian Ugliness. The article challenges Boyd’s argument about “featurism”—meaningless and “non-intellectual” decorative misdemeanours—as a product of Australia’s lack of “design education” and suggests, rather, that a series of suburban traps have coordinated its proliferation.
As both the common mode of living and the physical indicator of Australia’s cultural diversity, living in suburbia means one is obliged to participate in consumption. They are spatial paradigms: obscured versions of their original promise of farm-style living1, bearer of rubik’s-cube demographics and Avon Lady territory. They now smell like Calcutta, Hanoi or Khartoum.
The outbreak of prewar depression meant postwar domestic architecture emancipated the individual. Enlightenment came with a backyard, a frontyard, a stud frame, a carport, and a can of paint. A choice. So ‘[featurism] involves the strange sort of possessive love with which people have regarded their shelters’2.
Aboraphobiaville
But Boyd speaks very little of Australia’s love-affair with consuming, only that it is a product of the late 1950s ‘“the do-it-yourself” era, chemical advances, and the keen competition of the largely British-owned paint companies’3. And yet it could be argued that featurism is a byproduct of an anxious free-market liberalism, lubricated by fervent consumerism bound between the Old Country and America. It is now more global. Capitalism has been let out of the bag.
But before suggesting remedies to our exorbitant consumption, something of which eluded Boyd, we should ask why it still persists. The sustainability of consumption owes its thanks to three revelations: one is a reason derived from the individual, another is a construction of the social sphere, and the other promotes consumption through an urban manifestation.
Dematerialisation forms the first of the reasons. It is a phenomena that exists in the domain of our conscience, tightly linked with desire and wholeheartedly irrational. It occurs at that fateful time when we have fantasy invested in desired material objects, but the actual ownership of the object causes the fantasy to die and renew itself in other objects. Dematerialisation leads to the consumer on a winding path, while the material destination remains perpetually intangible. Left in its wake are undesirable objects not representative of rational choices nor necessity.
Boyd paints a picture we know all too well where ‘buildings disappear beneath the combined burden of a thousand ornamental alphabets, coloured drawings, and cut-outs’4. But it is not just the means to incite consumption, but also the ubiquity of production which involves the participation of a buyer. This brings us to the second revelation in the sustainability of consumption: Thorstein Veblen’s notion of conspicuous consumption, a claim that buying is linked with social status. Because we relate to each other through the products we own, this entices people to buy so as to reflect a certain persona, often exceeding their true reflection and forming as it were, the last battleground for capitalism.
Consumption persists, thirdly, because we all live in the suburban homes that are an extension of the template site that is the bourgeois home, the original site of fervent consumption5. The Australian Government understood how vital suburbia is to the development of consumption and that urbanisation is key in the absorption of surplus production. Coupled with both how Karl Marx showed that capitalism’s perpetual increase in productivity, brought about a reduction in the value of wage goods and fordism’s triumphant revelation to give these ephemeral “savings”6 to the working class—to make them the market—makes suburbs the epicentre of a growing home economy through the promotion of consumption with a vengeance.
A most eloquent Marx also proved that the rate of exploitation increased alongside productivity and while the suburbs became the home of the working class where ‘fresh young lovers [plan] the shape of their togetherness’7, they also became containers of lives, where the public have the misfortune of being relatively economically stable but trapped in a consumer black hole, forced into relating to their neighbours and friends through their home and its contents.
Consequently, the home, while occupying a central part of our cultural consciousness, becomes the bearer of unnecessary featurist trappings, container of the totality of consumer products and suburbia becomes a carnival for the “you’ve-never-had-it-so-good” credit-affluent and regrettably, the only accessible way the working class can realise this. The emergence of featurism is then correlated with a populist struggle for bourgeois-style living, and a heartfelt quest for identity which only ends in imitation.
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Bunning, W., 1945. Homes in the Sun - The Past, Present and Future of Australian Housing. Sydney: W.J.Nesbit
Featurism’s role is reaching viability, however. In a death-defying feat it has landed on two feet and is now a means of identifying oneself. It nestles, in synchrony, with the industrial conditions that try their darnedest to create individuality out of mass-production. According to Boyd ‘Australian design…is not a fundamental original quality’8 so featurists try to find their own identity in the sea of products, fighting against the generic. Commodification has molested everything: culture, nature, the body and social relations. In some hauntological farce, featurism has become the spectre of identity and culture.
Plastic colonial decoration of doomed but noble indigenous (savage) Australians returns as a spectre of culture and identity.
Bibliography
Boyd, R., 1963 [1960]. The Australian Ugliness. Sydney: Penguin Books Australia.
Walker, R., Buck, D., 2007. “The Chinese Road” in New Left Review. (46) July/Aug, pp.39-66.
Notes
1See Riverside (outside Chicago). The prototypical suburb.
2Boyd (1963, pp.251)
3Boyd (1963, pp.)
4Boyd (1963, pp.46)
5Walker & Buck (2007, pp.50)
6However much can be extracted in the midst of the coercive laws of competition.
7Boyd (1963, pp.110)
8Boyd (1963, pp.10)
