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)
(Advanced Capitalistic) ‘Planned-Neglect’
The behavioural patterns of the rural and the city have now been reversed. Rural land is now meticulously organised, perpetually executed/exploited beyond what could have been imagined when the industrialisation of agricultural land began. Today, as Jameson (2004, pp.49) puts it, ‘it is the city and the urban that grows wild like the state of nature… whereas it is nature which has, in late capitalism and the green revolution--but perhaps all the way back to the original neolithic revolution itself--been subject to careful planning and engineering.’ Thus, it is not ironic that there increasingly exists places, at the centres of cities, that ‘appear’ as explicit cases of ‘non-design’, or deliberate dilapidation or as manifestations of what Lacaton & Vassal might say as spaces that are ‘better-left-alone’. It is strange though that this phenomena sometimes represents the pertinent sites on any tourists’ agenda, for example Berlin. Yet when you look at it closely, these contradictory territories make a mockery of places in which neglect of a central is the only answer to solve other real and pressing economic problems. I can’t help but see a link here between these (advanced capitalistic) spaces of ‘planned-neglect’ (see images below) and the way Hollywood stars ‘dress-down’ and don a pair of jeans like something miners would wear in Harlan County, USA, Come Back, Africa or from deep down the limitless caverns of Coober Pedy. Why then--even in cities where tourism represents a large portion of its own economic condition--do these sites remain as ‘non-designed’? Similarly what motives do the Hollywood mega-stars have to ‘dress-down’ to appear more say ‘of the working class’? Only in this highly commodified landscape/existence we live in, can the ‘non-designed’ be itself a commodity: it represents the frontier of the commodity spectrum which, after so much market/spatial diversification, can the mimetic spatial/bodily accoutrements of poor/decay become accepted (like the Beuysian quest for a Gesamtkunstwerk).
Fashion trend-setters, West Virginia’s Finest.
Stars in Miner’s Jeans. Incidently the jeans are put through a labour-intensive “enzyme wash process, giving them the authentic look and feel of the jeans”.
Advanced capitalistic space of planned-neglect 1: Forte Prenestino, Rome.
Advanced capitalistic space of planned-neglect 1: Forte Prenestino, Rome.
Advanced capitalistic space of planned-neglect 2: Kunsthaus Tacheles, Berlin. Left: Tacheles three years after the fall of European communism. Right: Now. Coincidently, this site is off Oranienburger Straße in Mitte (the bearer of Berlin’s tourism core).
Advanced capitalistic space of planned-neglect 3: Caledonian Lane, Melbourne. Left: This highly contradictory space at once appears as urban residue, a site of state/commercial neglect, however this area is directly abutting Melbourne’s ‘main street’ and serves as a cove for a muddle of those whom determine the covert embourgeoisement of the space itself. Right: The new renovation of Myer department store next to Caledonian Lane. The project promises a “state-of-the-art shopping environment, inspired by some of the world’s great retailers in London, New York and Paris”. This is the architectural moment Caledonian Lane seeks to resist but actively participates in as it struggles to ‘appear’ critical of its captialistic subsumption.
Bonus (irresistible) image:
Marxian-capitalism-space-vortex: circulation | money-as-engine-fluid (credit-as-nitrogen-oxide). The finiteness of space = maxed-out credit-card. An early artist’s impression of the renovation of Myer department store. A romantic Koolhaas (2004) on ‘Junkspace’--his self-exclusionary rationale for architecture’s defecations--“…enforced derives, we meekly submit to grotesque journeys past perfume, asylum seeker, building site, underwear, oysters, pornography, cell phone - incredible adventures for the brain, the eye, the nose, the tongue, the womb, the testicles…facism minus dictator…”
Jameson, F., 2004. “The Politics of Utopia” in New Left Review 25(272), pp.35–54 Koolhaas, Rem, 2004. “Junkspace” in Content. Köln: Taschen. pp. 162-171.
Passive Consumerism to Counter-Intelligence
The explanation of the nature of speculation and the bogus decision-making that governs prices/values clearly forms a logical argument for rejecting such powers of subjectivity. The worst we can do is be passive consumers. If the system can form a presiding subjective ‘intelligence’, we have to form a ‘counter-intelligence’. The sellers may have (we can call it) ‘speculative powers’ but, lest we forget, we too, the consumers, have ‘purchasing powers’. Classically this term is meant similarly as ‘bang-for-your-buck’, but it also contains our basic right of what to buy, value for money is an added extra. To buy (without a counter-intelligence) is to agree and submit. If one is armed with such a ‘counter-intelligence’ they need not be told of destructive forces of Laissez-faire capitalism--the two go hand-in-hand. Harvey outlines that (2000, pp.76) ‘much of the extraordinary transformation of the earth’s surface these last two hundred years reflects precisely the putting into practice of the free market utopianism of process and its restless and perpetual reorganisations of spatial forms.’ Our decisions of what to buy, we can therefore extrapolate, directly influence these transformations and as we are a collective of consumers, changes to the decisions of what to buy will affect (but not necessarily reverse) these transformations powerfully--more so than what industry transforms. Perhaps it is this compliance to buying that is one of the great tragedies of the industrialised masses, that we have fallen to the fallacies of these speculations: we too have taken part in it all. If we imagine capitalism had never grown up, never gone global, it might give us an idea of an achievable future--one that accommodates nature also. The problem is that consumers have released it from its cage (governments have had a hand in too), and now slowly a ‘counter-intelligence’ (through a technological easing of communication) is not merely imposing a stricture, but putting it back where it came from. We are not alone using platforms like these to communicate ideas like this, and yet I don’t believe that a social-networking platform that truly encompasses the masses has been developed (in a generation or so we will begin to see the fruits of the internet). Just imagine the poor had ‘true’ access to on-line social platforms? It could be an amazing thing, but it might just mirror the injustices of the ‘real-world’. As with with what occurs with capitalism/crises, we must not suffer from a case of amnesia. When the internet is attainable from all corners of the globe we must be careful about how it is managed. It we must not reproduce what happened in the promising early days of the internet, as danah boyd (in Penelope, 2007) recalls, ‘the unbelievable frustration with me about the online world is that there is that 1990s utopian dream about how the internet was going to save us because on the internet no one would know you were a dog, race wouldn’t matter, class wouldn’t matter, you could talk to anyone around the world, we would get rid of all the language barriers, get rid of the cultural barriers, great,’ she says. ‘Well that’s not what happened. What happened is that we have projected the same segregated culture into the internet.’
Palace, 2009. Passive-Consumerism-Counter-Intelligence.
I know this is a profound ideal to suggest the dismantling of Capitalism through the our future of far-reaching social platforms (albeit well articulated platforms), we can use these spaces (as we are doing now) to start to dissect and recalibrate our realities (you only have to see Ushahidi, a mobile phone-based [as mobile phones are still the most ubiquitious communication technology] service that maps reports from citizens regarding poignant political, social events ie. swine flu). Notate Bene The history of Capitalism is a history of crises. ‘Compulsive buyers’, ‘passive consumerism’, ‘Material Girl’, ‘retail therapy’ are some of the saddest terms we can utter. How can architecture fit into this?
Penelope, D., 2007. A space of her own. The Age. [Online] 4 August. Available at: http://www.theage.com.au/news/in-depth/a-space-of-her-own/2007/08/03/1185648141385.html [Accessed 27 May 2009].
Harvey, D., 2000. Possible Urban Worlds. Amersfoort: Twynstra Gudde Management Consultants
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Interview by Valle Medina and Ben Reynolds with Junya Ishigami
Recorded at the Japan Institute of Architects, Tokyo on 23rd of October 2008 (07:46 mins)
Junya Ishigami. Sourced from In Interest.
Ishigami, Junya. Japanese Pavillion, Venice, 2008. Sourced from flickr.
The Garden in the Machine
Topographical contours. The body belongs to the earth as the building belongs to the earth..
Reinsertion of local landscapes into the city:
Looking to different neighbouhoods in any city, mean activities could be mapped and linked to open plazas, skeleton infrastructures and aerial gardens (forests). The idea is to generate new identities inside the city, between the citizens, the traditional natural species and cultivations, and the education that the local knowlegde and the global media can bring. In each neigbourhood, could be implemented new structures with the funtion of becoming a body (building-garden) inside of a body (city-machine).
From left clockwise: 1.The new catalysts are bodies with tubes. 2. With skin wrinkles. 3. They belong to the earth, incrementing the earth surface.
The idea of the multifuntional garden: Ecological Niches (Gills Clement)
Utopia is linked with ecology: If there is one only specie of any plant in your garden, the opportunnity of growing a bean is impossible. Diversity is linked not only in the diversity of species, but too in their behaviours. Mixture. A tree is not an individual, it is a linked community. One tree alone is a gardens that doesn’t need maintenance, without watering. In abandoned places is where diversity is, not in the mono-cultivations. These are the genetic pools where life is generated. “The horse is generating a mint garden, because he doesnt like the mint” (Gilles Clement: From the Garden in Motion to the Third Landscape, AAIR, February 20, 2007). Diversity is surprise.
We should liberate as much space as we consume through the material construction of the project, making compatible the program with the preservation and multiplication of the landscape (social and/or natural landscapes). We should abandon the romantic relationship between looking, nature and space, and realise that the landscape is not what is in front of us, but what is around us.
Nature Restauration: Permaculture (Bill Mollison)
To let the building be a part of the machine, we inject new natural elements that fertilise the soil of some plots in the city, generating valleys. We re-source the energy from above: electricity from the roof and facades (solar energy), and water from rain that is collected through the valley. Never again do we have to re-source our elements from under the cities, but rather from the sky.
Palace, 2008. Funnel collectiors and pot cultivations (non-digging): When the plants have grown to their point-of-sale size, they can be removed in their pots and sold immediately. The larger pots remain in the field to be reused. This system allows growers to offset labour costs associated with planting and re-planting in the field with a significant initial investment..
Palace, 2008. Fertilising valleys: Filtrations of water excess, pots on ground, hanging pots and funnels. Pilars from the sky to the ground.
Another solution for cultivating:
“A growroom: A growroom, or grow room, is a room of any size where plants are grown under controlled conditions. The reasons for utilizing a growroom are countless. Some seek to avoid the criminal repercussions of growing illicit cultivars, others simply have no alternative to indoor growing. They can be grown with the use of artificial light, sunlight, or a combination of the two. A grow room will often become excessively hot (relative to temperature range ideals for plant growth), due to the heat generated by the high power lamps; the use of supplemental ventilation fan is often necessitated.” (Sourced from Wikipedia).
Hydroponics: Hydroponics or agricultural hydroponics is a method used to cultivate plants using mineral solutions instead of agricultural land. Plants can grow with only the mineral solution or in a neutral medium such as sand, gravel or tissues.
Occupying Voids
Urbanity asks us to add function to void space. A space which superficially might need little design concentration - by natural selection it is the body and chance that are the vessels to perform this request. Why is it that voids occur? In some cases they seem to be architectural devices paying homage to the built, or dead-space for alternate foci, or purely for transience - similar to the relationship of a catalogued search-engine and the exclusive web. Being the chance-relationship spaces they are, they might be better left alone.
Sourced from Tepper Takayama Fine Arts.
The Smithson’s (Peter (Brutus) and Alison) use their architecture as a means to charge the void. Their works appear as kind of egalitarian additions to what is already the homogeneous conobation of the city. These additions allow for new “movement patterns” different to those made on the same domain - giving the city new circumstances and possibilities. Within their ‘charge’ an occupant invents and experiences new ways about his or her own city. The works are forever successful because their prescribed and conscious aim is not to make the best arrangement of the site, however they recognise that they are but one of many built re-incarnations - a part of a long line of uses where the only difference is in the contemporary state that they built.
Smithson, Alison and Peter, The Economist Building, 1959-64. Sourced from Flickr.
Smithson, Alison and Peter, The Economist Building, 1959-64. Sourced from Hugh Pearman.
The work of the prematurely felled Yves Klein saw the void as a commodity, likened to that of a canvas. If Klein was the creator of the void (Le Vide), it was a space he owned. His capitalistic approach to his art contemplates this idea of ownership - from his signature in the sky, frivolously defying real-world constraints (Leap Into the Void, 1960), legally patenting IKB and leasing his voids - ‘his’ inhabitants were “literally impregnated by the sensible pictorial state that was specialized and stabilized by (Klein) before hand in the given space” (Sidra Stitch, Yves Klein. Stuttgart: Cantz Verlag, 1994, 133). Klein’s zen-like understanding of the void forced users to be “feel” and “understand” such a state.,%201960.jpg)
Klein, Yves, Saut Dans le Vide (Leap Into the Void), 1960. Sourced from Shane Lavalette.
Claude Lorrain (1600-82) inventively sewed neo-classic spatial improbabilities to counter horizons of reality into the mythic. Voids were filled with false brilliancy rendering utopic landscapes - a firey Ivan Chtcheglov wrote in 1953: “Many of the latters admirers are not quite sure to what to attribute the charm of (Lorrain’s) canvases. They talk about his portrayal of light. It does indeed have a rather mysterious quality, but that does not suffice to explain these paintings ambience of perpetual invitation to voyage. This ambience is provoked by an unaccustomed architectural space. The palaces are situated right on the edge of the sea, and they have “pointless” hanging gardens whose vegetation appears in the most unexpected places. The incitement to drifting is provoked by the palace doors proximity to the ships.” (Ivan Chtcheglov, Formulary for a New Urbanism, Paris: Allia, 2006)
Lorrain, Claude, The Embarkation of the Queen of Sheba, 1648. Sourced from Wikimedia.
The planning of occupancy of a void deals only with positive possibilities, its context and sustainability are the determinants of its success.
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Interview by Valle Medina and Ben Reynolds with Tezuka Architects (Takaharu Tezuka)
Recorded in Todoroki Setagaya, Tokyo on 21st of October 2008 (35:39 mins).
Fuji Kindergarten. Sourced from Business Week.
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Interview by Valle Medina and Ben Reynolds with Atelier Bow-Wow (Yoshiharu Tsukamoto)
Recorded in Shinjuku-ku, Tokyo on the 22nd October 2008 (30:54 mins).
Atelier Bow-Wow. Sourced from Atelier Bow-wow.
Suburban Survival
The plight of the traditional American way of life will lead to a reassessment of one’s way of being, the regulation of consuming, a new urban infrastructure and a civil war. The genesis of the suburb was a by-product of the Industrial Revolution of 1850s America. In it’s original form, the suburb was considered relief from the industrialised city, complete with it’s factories and production plants. It offered a rural setting with access to the city as a place of work - the city, the machine, the suburb, the relief. This was the suburb without the sub-division we know today: it comprised of farm-style living, manor houses, light-rail (streetcar) connection to the city - this was the American Dream. It took nearly 100 years for the rest of the population to realise that this was indeed the form of living most comfortable. This comparison between what the suburb was to suburb-dwellers of the 1850s and the failed attempt to recreate this ideology today is laughable perhaps pitiful, on many levels. This way of life is now an outdated infrastructure.
Not only is it not anything comparable to the genuine intention of the original suburb, but today’s quest for one’s own piece of land is not sustainable. The inception of the automobile in the early 20th century formed the first demanded change to the suburb in the form of designated access and expressways. At a time when oil and land was aplenty, there weren’t foreseeable problems to confining the city and solving expansion or growth issues. The possibility of owning your own land, customising your own home, having a family car was something of a democratised ‘luxury’. James Howard Kunstler is a straight-talker who is adamant about the downfall of the contemporary suburban life, “…the fabric of our daily life, the suburban cul-de-sacs, the strip malls, the parking lagoons, the commercial highway strips…all the stuff that Americans are familiar with as the daily setting of their lives, really does not lend itself to retro-fitting, for a different kind of future, for a more energy-efficient future.” He catagorises it as a mis-investment of resources. One could extrapolate that it is going to remain as that and require a more resource and labour-intensive future if it is going be improved.
The automobile is the all-American lifeblood of the suburb and is the instrument that it has become dependant on, it is also the major cause of the oil crisis that we are embarking on. Up until now there has been a constant, accessible level of crude oil distributable for requiring nations (the crisis of ‘73 was a controlled situation whereby oil was not distributed to the U.S as it was affiliated with Israel in its conflict with Syria, Egypt, and Iraq), …
Oilfields, California, 1938
Oil refineries and petrochemical factories, Texas City, 2008
… now however it is the latent demand of the resource to keep afloat the suburban lifestyle. Two important determining diagrams that outline what is demanded and what we ‘might’ have, paint a grim picture of our future. Fig. 1 is the diagram that represents all nations and their rate of oil imports by the billions of barrels per day.
Fig. 1: Global oil imports in bbl/day: The digram reveals that the top oil consumer is the United States (@ 20,680 bbls/day).
Fig. 2 is Marion King Hubbert’s diagram of peak oil. Basically, the peak oil diagram represents the global production level of oil against the year. The poignant information that this diagram illustrates is that at certain level the production level hits a peak and begins to decline because the rate the maximum oil being extracted is reached. It outlines that we are in this peak oil moment.
Fig. 2: Hubbert’s Peak Oil diagram of 1956.
Hubbert’s diagram is evidence for adopting a new suburban lifestyle - no longer living an existence mediated by the car. As well as the general population, it is the developers of these pastiche, new communities that elect not to recognise the crisis we are in. The crime lies in expanding on green space, and building stylised so as to recreate a lifestyle that existed in Victorian England.
Queen Victoria in 1887.
All is not lost on the Andalusian coast of Spain as the rate ruthless construction, considered a large contributor to the economic growth of the region, exhibits a paradigm that is becoming all to familiar to coastal regions globally (a comparable situation is in Abidjan, Ivory Coast where the population has gone from 400,000 in 1968 to over 1,500,000 in 1981). The southern coast of Malaga, the region that garners an international airport, consistently triplicates its off-season population. The remaining sections of the coast also tell a similar story: a homogeneous, hard-scape of housing, each attaining a view of the ocean, staining the coastline. The geological arrangement provides a barrier as it is mainly mountainous region, however it flattens just before it reaches sea-level - which explains the latitudinal expansion. The residents of these localities are well-off retired Spaniards, a large population of English expatriates and Russian mafioso. The land is now non-desirable.
The rectification of problems of oil, consuming levels and expansion is ubiquitous, the answer lies in the centres of large cities, particularly in Europe. This model is stacked apartments, shared cores, densely located, satellite commercial nodes and a lesser reliance on the automobile as everything is neatly connected with public transport or accessible by bike or foot. There is no sure-fire way of converting the American dream into this sustainable response. It will be a process of taking away the life that has been common to generations and blindingly easy to live in. It might just generate a civil uprising if running politicians promise the un-promise-able: that one can keep their SUV, and their double-story house, and the luxuries that come with it.
The lives of ordinary Americans will have to be re-evaluated and every measure to implement alternative energies will have to be considered following the reduction of oil extraction from the earth.
