Opinion: fiction is essential reading for architects because it explores ideas about homes and buildings that are “normally repressed,” argues Sam Jacob in this latest column.
I’m working my way through three stories put together by Will Wiles for a Book Club at the Architectural Association. Titled Malign Interiors, the series looks at fiction and architecture, specifically stories whose protagonists are variously assailed and tormented by architecture. Wiles is author of the novels Care of Wooden Floors and The Way Inn (to be published this June) as well as an architecture and design critic – so positioned between the very real world of designed things and the imaginative world of fiction.
Wiles’ list is short and the stories are pretty short themselves – short enough even for notoriously bibliophobe architects and designers – and I’d recommend all three stories as texts that talk directly to architectural issues, as well as damn fine books on their own. First is The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1899), then H.P. Lovecraft’s The Dreams in the Witch House (1933) and finally Wiles’s own Care of Wooden Floors (2012).
Literature and design don’t often cross paths. For reasons buried deep in the mists of time, we conceive of and use these forms of cultural product for entirely different ends. In broad strokes (and in Anglo Saxon culture at least) architecture and design deal with the exterior world, while fiction deals with our interiority.
Architecture and design – the realm of physical stuff – is conceived as a matter of either practicality or taste. That is to say it’s underwritten by the deep cultural bedrock of either engineering or class.
Objects and things – spaces even more so – are described as though they have little or no psychological depth. Think of the language used as evidence of a kind of impenetrable surface presentation. Words like elegant, vibrant or iconic give a hint of design’s limited awareness of its own psychological hinterland, or perhaps its ability to repress more troubling sensations.
In fiction however, things, places and buildings often act not only as settings but as metaphors, narratives and character. Think of Manderley in Rebecca or Satis House, Miss Havisham’s dilapidated home in Great Expectations. Or, as Wiles has asked us to do, about the role of the interior in The Yellow Wallpaper, Dreams In The Witch House, and his own novel Care of Wooden Floors.
In all these examples and many more, architecture takes on a psychic interiority absent from its professional incarnation. It becomes a place we construct of multiple and simultaneous meanings, possibilities, effects and roles. As Wiles’ selection explicitly notes, these meanings and roles are often disquieting, unsettling and horrific. Especially when they deal with the idea of home.
Home is the one place that should be safe and secure. It’s a place bound up with our own status, identity and sense of belonging, but domestic space also contains the flip side of these ideals. Darker things, more mysterious. Things that creep up on you, things that torment you, things that won’t let you escape. Alongside every dream home is its nightmare twin.
Fiction gives us the space and words to describe these sensations that the real world denies us. It provides a way to safely explore feelings and ideas connected to home that are normally repressed. Forces of economics, the media or the social pressure to conform all discipline our psychological relationship to our homes. Daily Mail “dream cottage giveaways”, Grand Designs‘ individualist fantasies, the status envy of Keeping Up Appearances, the responsibility of mortgage repayments and the fluctuations in house prices that turn our homes into financial instruments are all ways our own private individual ideas of home are repressed and controlled. Under these kinds of pressure, it’s no wonder that our homes can also become places of tremendous psychological disturbance.
Haunted houses may be entirely fictional but they describe something very real. That’s because for all the ghosts and ghouls they imagine, they are actually stories about the very real spectres of our own hopes and fears wailing in the night. That’s why stories like the ones Wiles has put together should be on every architect’s bookcase, somewhere between the Metric Handbook and the Building Regulations.
Opinion:Justin McGuirk argues that despite the furniture industry’s decline in Italy, it’s still the best place to buy a sofa until the digital manufacturing revolution delivers on its promises.
Back in the days when I used to edit a design magazine, we rarely published the price of a product. It wasn’t that we were embarrassed, or that we thought it was vulgar, we just weren’t particularly interested. The magazine was about creativity and innovation, not shopping. There are times though, when talking about money can be clarifying.
I encountered one of those moments watching a video on the Guardian’s website recently about an “open source” furniture initiative. The designers, from a collaborative group called OpenDesk, demonstrated how you could download their design for a child’s stool and have it CNC milled out of plywood. It was a tight little production and everyone said their lines on cue: the journalist claimed it heralded a potential “revolution”, and the designers used the words “customised”, “disruptive” and “social process”. We’ll come to those terms in a minute but, first, how much would it cost you to make that child’s stool?
To find out, I downloaded the drawings and sent them to a CNC milling company for a quote. In return, I received a professional breakdown covering the cost of a standard sheet of 18mm birch plywood (£54), the CNC cutting (£98) and delivery (£18). That comes to a grand total of £170. But ideally you would use a better, furniture-grade plywood of the kind less likely to leave splinters in the infant’s backside, which would easily take the cost over £200. For a child’s stool. Made of plywood.
Price is always relative, but most readers would probably agree that that is a pretty hefty bill just so you can say that your tiny stool is a piece of “open” design. For that money, you could buy 25 Frosta stools from Ikea (£8 a piece for what is essentially a knockoff Aalto number) or you could take your pick from one of the fancy design shops on, say, London’s Upper Street.
Now, I appreciate that the first of those options is anathema to the very notion of open-source design: to boost the profits of a global corporation mass-producing disposable products reliant on cheap labour in the developing world, then shipping them thousands of miles and hawking them out of big-box, gas-guzzling suburbia? Come on, man, join the digital era – those days are over!
All right, then what about the second option? With £200 in my pocket I might prefer to go to a design store and pick out a stool made of hand-turned wood, with a rounded profile and a hand-polished finish – something that doesn’t look like a paper cut-out. Because that is what all open-source furniture resembles, unavoidably, since it is designed to be computer-cut out of flat sheets of plywood and slotted together. The economic argument aside, open-source furniture will not be truly “disruptive” until it produces its first compelling object.
Lest I sound like some kind of reactionary, I do believe that open-source design heralds a potential revolution. And I stand behind many of its principles. You want to replace globalised mass production with local, distributed production? I’m with you. You want to make your designs accessible to all? I applaud you. But for the time being the economics don’t make sense. And it’s hardly OpenDesk’s fault. I’ve played this game before. I once had a wardrobe made to a design by arguably the godfather of open-source furniture, Enzo Mari – one of the famous Autopregettazione series of 1974. I know, I know, I was supposed to nail those planks together myself but, anyway, the materials alone cost a small fortune. That is the problem with not having the economies of scale on your side. Even Artek, which put one of his Autopregettazione chairs into production – going against the very principle of Mari’s concept – couldn’t get the price below £250.
I also get that, in theory, we have crossed some invisible line beyond which we are supposed to have superseded the individual genius, the alluring object and the consumer, replacing them with the network, the system and the participant. But of this I’m less certain. I still find Mari’s planks more assertive than almost any open-source, CNC-cut plywood. And what’s more, despite the talk of “customisation” and “social process”, even I, who am ready, willing and (fairly) able wouldn’t know how to begin customising that stool – I don’t even have the software. And even if I wanted to take the train to that CNC cutter in Essex, there’s nothing particularly “social” about watching a machine drill through plywood to some algorithmic configuration.
I know the moment will come when everything written here will look churlish and shortsighted. But the problem is that we are not in the midst of a revolution, we are in between revolutions. Open-source design is still far from delivering on its promise, and yet the traditional furniture industry is in decline. Having spent years critiquing, even lampooning, Italian design and “Made in Italy” – a world of octogenarian maestri, protectionism and lizard-lounge styling – I now feel some nostalgia for it.
“It’s hard to find a good lamp,” Donald Judd once complained. Well, let me tell you Donald, it’s even harder to find a good sofa. And when we needed one last year, where did we find one that was not too ugly (despite sofas’ inherent ugliness) or too expensive (despite their inherent expense)? That’s right, Italy. Somehow, that bastion of post-war design values – of craftsmanship combined with industry – still seemed to be the place offering a few options that were well made and comfortable without looking too ridiculous or costing the same as a BMW. True, we probably could have downloaded a design and had it cut out of plywood, but our behinds prefer something less… disruptive.
Opinion: in this week’s column, Sam Jacob investigates how flip flops from a street market have taken their place alongside placards and banners as objects of protest in the recent Bangkok election demonstrations.
On a Bangkok street corner late on a Sunday night, there’s a guy with a stall catering to a very particular market. Spread over a section of pavement and hung from the front of a roller shutter are exclusively Bob Marley branded goods. It’s good to know that even late on the sabbath evening, even on the night of the Thai elections, there’s somewhere catering for such a specific demand: Bob Marley beach towels, hats, shorts, even toothbrushes. A whole universe of Marley-ware. All your essential products striped red, gold and green, splattered with the silhouette of marijuana leaves or a high contrast three-quarter portrait of Bob himself.
In these images, Bob’s head is always thrown back, a real-life gesture captured at its most expressive but now mechanically transferred through God-knows-how-many mechanical processes into a stylised frozen image.
The aesthetic is pure cartoon Rastafarianism, like that episode of the Simpsons where, in an effort to boost The Itchy & Scratchy Show’s ratings, the network introduces a new focus-grouped dog-with-attitude character (“a dog who gets ‘biz-ay!’. Consistently and thoroughly… a totally outrageous paradigm”).
Cartooned like this, Bob’s gesture becomes at once purer and more debased. It’s shorn of all its contextual political and ideological meaning, but at the same time becomes a direct shorthand for what that all stood for: emancipation.
Emancipation from what, exactly? Here, on a Thai street corner not far from the epicentre of backpacking-gap-year-opolis, Marley’s ghost is all shape and no fleshy body. His image and the colourways and symbols that accessorise it have become just another figure in the Pantheon of global pop culture.
Of which, down the road in a night market, there’s plenty of other evidence. There’s a stall selling Beatles gear for example, which includes a Hawaiian shirt with cartoon Fab Fours interspersed with Linda and Yoko as if it were a rockumentary transcribed into leisurewear. Lives, bodies of work, principles and ideologies are frozen into instantly recognisable, instantly consumable global symbols which are then in turn tumbled with other references, chronologies, contexts and media, forming an international pidgin language.
This is nothing new, of course. French philosopher Jean Francois Lyotard told us this was the fundamentally postmodern condition of modern life:
“Eclecticism is the degree zero of contemporary general culture: one listens to reggae, watches a western, eats McDonald’s food for lunch and local cuisine for dinner, wears Paris perfume in Tokyo and retro clothes in Hong Kong.”
But like that other French connoisseur of postmodernity, Baudrillard, there’s a haughtiness to this kind of cultural analysis that means – despite its sharpness – it doesn’t quite cut like it should. Baudrillard, for God’s sake, went all the way to Disneyland to encounter the dark heart of the simulacrum and never even went on Space Mountain. No wonder he thought nothing was real!
That Italian backpacker pulling on his brand new Rasta hat might be an idiot, but he’s at least a real idiot with a 24 carat, bona fide, 100 percent, really idiotic hat.
One of the reasons why people like to think that these kinds of things aren’t real is because of the relationship of the applied image to the object. Of course, all those Bob Marley products most likely come from a factory producing the very same items branded with other perennial naive youth culture favourites: the same beach towel with John Lennon’s face reminding us to imagine no possessions. It’s all appliqué, surface not depth, image not authenticity. Just like the factory I once visited in Shenzhen that produced souvenirs: souvenirs of anywhere, any place on the planet, all sculpted by their master craftsman. Who, of course, had never left Shenzhen himself. There’s something completely magical – a modern day fairy story – about a master souvenir maker who had never traveled anywhere. I could see Tom Hanks being Oscar-nominated for his sympathetic portrayal of this bittersweet character-of-our-time.
In another market, a hop, skip and two-hour traffic jam across town, in one of the gatherings of anti-government protestors trying to shut down Bangkok and force electoral and governmental reform, something broke through this supposedly flat veneer of shallow culture. Not because it was any more real, but because it was equally inauthentic, just in a different way.
Like anywhere in Thailand where two or three have gathered, a market has sprung up. Amongst the street food, opposition-branded whistles and T-shirts was a stall set out with flip flops. The upper side of the soles are printed with portraits of the opposition’s main targets in the kind of high-contrast graphics we associate with hip young ideological politics (think Che T-shirts, think Banksy, think that godawful graphic hack Shepard Fairey of Obama Hope fame).
On your left foot is an image of the current Thai prime minister, Yingluck Shinawatra, with the legend “Get Out”. On the right is her brother and ex-prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra, with “Wanted” in a wild western font in reference to his conviction in absentia for corruption while in office.
Here was something churned no doubt out of the very same production lines as Bob Marley beach balls and Joe Strummer strimmers in the light industrial units where generic objects are batch-laminated with cultural symbolism. But here was something that flipped (and flopped) all that poststructuralist ennui on its head. Here, in the shape of a dumb generic product was something that split the night with its sharpness and intelligence. Not least in its own ironic self-awareness, given the protest’s reputation for producing as many selfies as proclamations.
These flip flops are politics disguised as leisurewear, a way to seriously yet nonchalantly register your opposition in a city declared a state of emergency. Every step you take disrespects the image of government with the sole of your foot. And if that wasn’t enough, it enacts the old Situationist International slogan from Paris ’68 with a new life. If the beach really is beneath the pavement, then here’s the perfect footwear!
Even more than this, the flip flop as political symbol embodies a far more positive idea of politics, footwear and the future than Orwell imagined. Instead of the jackboot stamping on the face of humanity here we have a flip flop, flapping on the face of government.
The Thai protests partially brand themselves as Occupy Bangkok and there’s something entirely appropriate in the street market flip flop ascending to the status of political tool, along side the placard and banner. Occupy itself is a product of the very same rag-bag eclectic urge, an assemblage of fragments of ideology. It’s a politics of sensation perhaps, too, rather than of argument.
Occupy might even wear a Rasta hat, possibly has white dreadlocks, maybe bangs a drum and blows a whistle, five parts Lennon to one part Lenin, a quart of Marley and a dash of Marx. In other words, it imagines no possessions in a government yard in Trench Town. Its aesthetics, its ideology even, might be a half-formed shape in the cultural surf but that’s exactly what makes it the politics of now. Yours for just 100 Bhat outside the MBK shopping centre now.
Opinion:Kieran Long responds to the recent closure of ten London fire stations, arguing that architecture built for a specific purpose and location is far more valuable to a city’s sense of place than generic, pragmatic solutions.
Last week in London, ten fire stations serving the city closed for good. The buildings will be sold to the highest bidder and most likely turned into apartments. It felt like a tragedy. These civic places that housed some of the bravest of our citizens were suddenly surplus to requirements and, at a stroke, the men and women who served there had no representation on these high streets.
One striking consequence was the sight of beefcake guys openly weeping on the streets of London. It was as moving as it was unsettling. What kind of a society reduces its strongest and bravest to crying on each others’ mountainous shoulders? As the last watch ended at Clerkenwell, Westminster and Belsize stations, emotions ran high. Some anger, yes, which the trade unions stoked as best they could, but mainly resignation and powerlessness: a sense of the inevitable carelessness of contemporary cities.
Architecturally, many of these stations provided a curious setting for this human drama. Take Belsize station in north London, designed by an architect with the unlikely name of Charles Canning Windmill. With its pitched roof and tall dormer windows it has the villagey idiom of the suburban Arts and Crafts. It must have been terribly retro even in 1915 when it was opened, with the gleaming, noisy engines it accommodated seeming jarringly modern against this romantic cottage of a building.
At Clerkenwell station, the built fabric was more urban and assured. Clerkenwell fire station is the oldest in the country (it opened in 1872) and was part of a dense urban fabric even then. Piled on top of and behind the functional, fire engine-related accommodation are flats intended for firefighters and their families. On the roof of this six-storey building is a platform that was used during the war to spot fires as they broke out. There’s even a small football pitch for exercise.
To what degree does the architectural character of these fire stations contribute to the guileless sadness expressed by the people who used to work there? Profoundly, I would say. Good architecture marks out our territory; it gives us a place in the world in both literal and metaphorical senses. When that building is built specifically to a purpose that benefits all of us, the sense of loss at its demise is all the greater.
Can we say that the firemen of Clerkenwell felt more sad than those at Kingsland Road, whose building is a fairly banal Modernist box of beige brick and red concertina doors? I’m not sure what kind of quantitative research would be possible on this question, but it’s an intriguing problem. When a building articulates its location and purpose so clearly it can be a powerful thing, one that has its own momentum, and some are more powerful than others. Battersea Power Station feels like the most strident example of a building so perfectly suited to its time, place and function, that many have failed to transform it into anything useful since it closed down.
Something happens to the city when you replace the specific with the generic. I’ve been thinking about this a lot in the last couple of weeks, especially in view of MoMA New York’s decision to demolish the Folk Art Museum by Tod Williams and Billie Tsien, which is an egregious example of the sacrifice of the precisely tuned, specific environment with a purposefully generic one.
It is here where the vandalism of that proposal really becomes clear. The Folk Art Museum was intended for a collection of folk art: small, unheroic things that needed low light levels. The galleries helped you concentrate on these objects, but the building also provided a sense of relief through its vertical connections.
MoMA‘s architect Diller & Scofidio proposes to use the same site for what they call the Art Bay, a large, abstract glass box. In its banal simplicity, it’s supposed to enable access for the public and give freedom to artists. In fact, it’s a classic misunderstanding of what a public place really is. Taking our place in society is not about being free from constraints, it’s about being free enough to commit ourselves to something: understanding our place in relation to others. It’s not about flattening or denying our differences by pretending they don’t exist, but instead about expressing ourselves clearly and tolerating and enjoying wildly differing approaches to life, culture, art and work.
In her Opinion piece about the MoMA plan on Dezeen, Mimi Zeiger argued that it is somehow sentimental of us to wish for architecture to endure, that it has a sell by date and we should all just accept obsolescence as a fact of contemporary life. In this regard, I think she’s wrong. Perhaps bad architecture or arcane, outmoded institutions become obsolete. But good ones adapt, become influenced by their surroundings and renew their commitment to their place in the world. The fire fighters of Clerkenwell were torn away from their place in violent, pragmatic fashion, and it caused pain.
MoMA and institutions like it should be the last to cause such a sense of loss because of pragmatic considerations. Without a sense of institutional and architectural character, our cities would not give us a place in the world. We would all be fire fighters, exiled to a modern, strategically located facility, out of the sight of our fellow citizens: mere service providers.
Kieran Long is senior curator of contemporary architecture, design and digital at the Victoria & Albert Museum. He presents Restoration Home and the series The £100,000 House for the BBC, and is currently the architecture critic for the Evening Standard newspaper.
Opinion:in his latest column, Sam Jacob argues that architects “might have to learn from communications agencies, advertising and design” in order to regain the social significance they once enjoyed.
It’s a familiar refrain in the whitewashed bars frequented by architects: the despair at the reduced role of architects in contemporary public life, either as public intellectuals or engaged in the formulation of policy and agendas that shape the contemporary built environment.
As architect and theorist Alejandro Zaera Polo argues, the act of architecture has been reduced to a zone comprising the few hundred millimetres of a building’s envelope, the building itself – mass, floor plate, programme and so on – having been defined long before in the formulas of developers’ spreadsheets.
The traditional role of an architect has, over recent time, been eroded. Undermined and usurped by a cocktail of processes and practices, by new kinds of contract, by the rise of other building specialists, and by forms of procurement, which have all taken chunks out of the tweedy old professional body of architecture.
The argument goes that if only we could re-engage in a dialogue with the public and politicians, if only we could get architecture back on the agenda – just like it used to be at some point fast dissolving into the mists of time – then everything would work out again.
I don’t buy this. It’s not that those arguments have simply been forgotten. It’s more fundamental: the terms of architecture’s engagement with the world have entirely changed.
For a period between the end of the Second World War and the 1980s, architecture was a central activity in the construction of civil society. It was both a way of building for society, and a means of conceiving visions of what society could be and how it might work. Architecture was public in many senses: who it was built for and who it was funded by. Architects themselves were likely to be public servants.
Architecture, development and construction are now conceived and implemented as almost wholly private enterprises. There are, for example, very few publicly employed architects now. Architectural services are provided by the multitudes of private firms: good/bad, big/small, young/old, corporate/community. Even at its most social ends, development is now determined by market conditions.
We remain nostalgic for the old days (and why, given the respect once accorded to the architect, wouldn’t we?) but the route to regaining a more central significance can’t come from looking back. The old arguments just don’t make sense because the terms of engagement themselves have drastically altered. Instead we need to figure out new ways for architecture to regain a central social significance. How, in other words, can architecture regain significance beyond the production of envelopes?
In many other disciplines, design has evolved from the production of stuff into a wider, more diffuse set of activities. The focus on the object as the thing that design produces has been pulled so that a whole other range of activities come into view.
In part this is due to the rise of digital products, but it’s also the design of information, systems, forms of innovation and the power of ideas like “design thinking”, which applies a design approach to all manner of things that once were well beyond the scope of design. Almost anything from money to healthcare to the functioning of democracy can be now be framed as a design problem.
The real motivations for design’s contemporary mutations are not rhetorical, but neither are they venal. They come from changes in design’s habitat – the way the world works. Perhaps, as more youthful forms of creative practice, these forms of design have adapted faster to their circumstances; faster at least than architecture and property, two industries with the turning circle of a supertanker.
Society has become increasingly networked, increasingly information- and media-based. As it has, design’s relationship with the world has changed too: the physical stuff of things now exists within contexts of the mediated and the digital.
That’s why we see close relationships between digital, technological, information and communication design. It’s why advertising agencies and design consultancies are increasingly converging. It’s because the distance between thing, service and communication has shrunk – often occurring within the same space, within different components of the same design project. In these worlds, too, the space between investment, innovation, production and distribution has also shrunk, as has the distance between traditional roles of designer, manufacturer and consumer.
In other words, in parts of what we might loosely describe as the design world, the very idea of what design is and what a designer might do is evolving at a rapid pace. This is in marked contrast to architecture, whose declining position within the design team and flatlining fee rates tell a very different story. Architects – and of course creatives in many other areas of design – remain hung up on what they perceive to be their rightful role and their moral purpose.
Rather than despair or rail against architecture’s prevailing conditions, we need to find new positions for the profession; new arguments for a new terrain. We need to recognise that the context within which we produce architecture has changed and from this form persuasive arguments for its place at the centre of society.
A modern product is now much more than a thing. It’s also packaging, the environment in which you encounter it, the media and conversations around it, the service that supports it, the qualities of the brand that produces it, the embodiment of ethics and integrity within all of these disparate elements and, most likely, much more than this. The task of the contemporary designer is to corral all of these aspects, all these diverse forms of media, operations, and systems into something coherent, something appealing, something we want. Design, in other words, becomes a kind of glue between a huge range of scales and services and substances.
A similar argument can be made for architecture. It too may well be a physical thing, but it’s also the place where investment, communications, marketing and media all come together, where these issues congeal into built form.
For example, the distance between a developer, the investment they need, the architecture they commission, the public permissions and partnerships they require, the vision they create, the publicity they generate, the buy-in of a community, and the market they seek are intrinsically linked – one is nested within the the other. Trying to separate “architecture” out of these processes, as a traditional definition of architecture might do, is to defuse architecture’s potential to engage in the very real politics, vision and social possibility embedded in these relationships. It’s in the interweaving of these concerns where value – social as well as economic – is created, where architecture really happens.
Just as design has expanded its role, we need to argue that contemporary architecture is much more than simply the production of buildings. Or, to put it another way, buildings are just one of many outcomes of architectural production, part of an activity that might also include the construction of collective vision that brings together investors, planners, the public and users. As a form of practice embeds ideas and ethics within the built environment, a practice that can develop the services, processes and programmes alongside physical things. It could position itself as the place where design, engineering, planning, sales and marketing come together.
Perhaps architecture should step back from the act of building as its ultimate fulfilment in order to provide a deeper, more significant vision of how we are going to live, work and play and how places can become economically and socially meaningful and sustainable in the long term for the people who live in them.
In other words, we might have found ourselves in an ironic situation where in order to fulfil architecture’s core ambitions it might have to become less architectural. It might have to model itself on more youthful and vigorous forms of creative practice. It might have to (or better, want to) learn from communications agencies, from advertising, from digital and interaction design and from research and innovation experts. Rather than selling out, we need to see this wider definition of architecture as a way of really fulfilling the core disciplinary remit of making the world a better place.
This, I would argue, is one way architecture can regain a centrality within contemporary life and escape from the shrinking limitations of its professional remit. By immersing ourselves in the realities of our contemporary circumstance we might find ways to forcefully argue for the absolute necessity of architecture to clients, to the public and to society at large.
The recent flurry of critical missives and tweets over MoMA’s decision to demolish the next-door American Folk Art Museum (AFAM), designed by Tod Williams and Billie Tsien, has got me thinking about Harley Earl. The square-shouldered vice president and head of design at General Motors introduced stylised curves, chrome, and sex appeal into an industry driven by function. His most significant contribution to American culture, however, may be not the tail fin but planned obsolescence.
The idea that a manufacturer builds the death (by uselessness or tastelessness) into the birth of an object was once radical. It transferred the decision about when a product reaches the end of its life from the producer to the consumer. Could your sense of self-worth – your Cadillac, your iPhone – weather one more season before becoming démodé? Today, upgrading is a function of Moore’s law, the observation that technology gets exponentially smaller and more powerful every two years. It’s like breathing: one inhale, one exhale.
Architecture — or really I should say buildings, excusing for the moment the theoretical or speculative options — has largely been spared the frequency of model changes. This slower epochal cycle owes less to a belief in Vitruvius’ firmitas, utilitas, venustas than to the economic fact that buildings cost more than a Chevy. Then there’s the social contract that buildings, even not exactly great buildings, should stick around awhile.
Yet MoMA‘s decision to follow Diller Scofidio + Renfro‘s recommendation to start fresh on 53rd Street, just thirteen years after the AFAM‘s celebrated opening, leads us to reconsider architecture’s obsolescence. Perhaps we need to steel ourselves for more rapid architectural cycle. Harvey Earl introduced new auto body models every three to five years. Too slow. Our era trades on the pop-up, the art-fair tent and the pavilion. The breathless pace of the internet only underscores design as a temporary, consumable product to be traded over mobile devices. To know the American Folk Art Museum is to Instagram the American Folk Art Museum.
Yet in all this churning through history, we have to remind ourselves that Williams and Tsien’s museum is considered the first new significant piece of architecture built after 9/11. You could even say that its facade of alloyed bronze panels, pockmarked from pouring hot metal onto bare concrete in the casting process, represented New York City’s toughness, resiliency, and belief in art, folk art, and art of the people in the face of adversity.
In his 14 December 2001 review, New York Times architecture critic Herbert Muschamp lauded the building, writing:
“We can stop waiting for state officials to produce plans for redeveloping the city’s financial district. The rebuilding of New York has already begun. The new American Folk Art Museum in Midtown, designed by Tod Williams and Billie Tsien, is a bighearted building. And its heart is in the right time as well as the right place. The design delves deeply into the meaning of continuity: the regeneration of streets and cities; the persistence and mingling of multiple memories in the changing polyglot metropolis; and the capacity of art to transcend cultural categories even as it helps define them.”
In retrospect, Muschamp’s effusive wordsmithing borders on hyperbole. Yet in focussing on the cultural context in which the building was born, it captures much of what is missing from current discussion (which tends to be markedly concentrated on functionality and new square footage). If we practice the rules of obsolescence, the death of this signature piece of architecture was designed in at the beginning.
As much as I would want to praise the American Folk Art Museum for pointing a way forward out of that dark time, the structure is no phoenix. From the beginning it was anachronistic. This is its downfall.
Although completed in the new millennium, it is an artefact from the 1990s, or to crib from Portlandia, an artefact from the 1890s. Muschamp’s title suggests as much: Fireside Intimacy for Folk Art Museum. “Our builders have largely dedicated themselves to turning back the clock,” he writes of Williams and Tsien’s obsessive attention to materiality.
The museum is a little too West Coast for midtown – too much like somethign from the Southern California Institute of Architecture, before computation took command. Its design values everything the current art and real estate markets reject: hominess, idiosyncrasy, craft. By contrast, Diller Scofidio + Renfro’s scheme emphasises visibility and publicness. The same could be said for an Apple store.
A message from MoMA director Glenn D. Lowry posted on the museum’s website touts that the new design will “transform the current lobby and ground-floor areas into an expansive public gathering space.” Indeed, the much talked-about Art Bay, the 15,500-square-foot, double-height hall in the scheme, walks a fine line between public space and gallery. Fronted with a retractable glass wall and designed for flexibility, the Art Bay is so perfectly attuned to the performance zeitgeist, that it makes Marina Abramović want to twerk.
When the plans to demolish AFAM first surfaced in the spring of 2013 and the efficacy of its galleries to support MoMA collections came into question, I rebutted the suggestion that the cramped layout was flawed, suggesting instead that we see it within the legacy of the house museum, akin to Sir John Soane’s Museum in London, where the architect spent his later years arranging and rearranging his antiquities. Or even a sibling of 101 Spring Street, Donald Judd’s SoHo studio and residence now preserved as an artefact of contemporary art history and an exemplary piece of cast iron architecture. Fiscally rescued from obsolescence, these are zombie edifices: institutions frozen in time and largely immune from market ebbs and flows.
The sad fate of the American Folk Art Museum comes on the heels of a rough year. Cries of #saveprentice, although loud in the Twittersphere, ultimately fell on deaf ears so Bertrand Goldberg’s Prentice Women’s Hospital (1970) in Chicago fell to the wreaking crews this past autumn. Richard Neutra’s Cyclorama Building (1962) in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, was also deemed defunct and unfashionable. Michael Graves’ Portland Building (1982) might be next, given reports of the cost to maintain the postmodern icon.
Past preservation movements grew out of grassroots efforts such as the Miami Design Preservation League, which formed in 1976 to save what would become the city’s Art Deco district, or the Los Angeles Conservancy, galvanising two years later to save the Los Angeles Central Library. Is the future of preservation advocacy or apathy?
The Tumblr #FolkMoMA, initiated and curated by Ana María León and Quilian Riano, dragged the fate of AFAM – a pre-internet building – into the age of social media. The hashtag set the stage for a robust dialogue on the subject and a much-needed commons for debate, but failed to save architecture from capital forces.
In weighing in to protest or eulogise the passing of the American Folk Art Museum, perhaps what we mourn is not the building per se, but a lingering sentimental belief that architecture is an exception to the rules of obsolescence. This building strived to represent so many intimacies, but ultimately its finely crafted meaning was deemed disposable.
Fingers may point at the ethics of Diller Scofidio + Renfo’s decision to take on the project or wag fingers at MoMA’s expansionist vision, but the lesson here cuts deeper into our psyche. Architecture, as written in long form, exceeds our own life spans and operates in a time frame of historical continuity. Architecture writ short reminds us of our own mortality, coloured by mercurial taste.
Opinion: now we buy everything from Amazon, where does that leave the counterculture? A new attempt to revive the spirit of the Whole Earth Catalog is “about as counter-cultural as a Happy Meal,” argues Justin McGuirk.
In 1973, man’s relationship with his tools was the subject of some anxiety and much hope. In January of that year, the cream of Italy’s Radical Design movement convened in the Milan office of Casabella magazine to launch a manifesto. It was called Global Tools. The objective was “to stimulate the free development of individual creativity”. Renouncing for a moment the industrial rationalism of design, the group – including Ettore Sottsass, Archizoom, Superstudio and Grupo 9999 – embraced primitive tools and traditional craft skills. Flush with confidence, they even published a curriculum for a new type of craft school. But it never materialised. Within a matter of months, the Global Tools project had dissipated.
The same year, the Viennese-born priest turned polymath Ivan Illich published the influential book Tools for Conviviality. For Illich, much as for the Global Tools group, industrialisation was stifling man’s innate creativity. It wasn’t just the fact that mankind had been reduced to mundane labour and consumerism: even social mechanisms such as education and healthcare had assumed a mechanic feed-them-in-spit-them-out quality. “Convivial tools,” Illich wrote, “are those which give each person who uses them the greatest opportunity to enrich the environment with the fruits of his or her vision.” He wanted less technocratic control, and more self-empowerment and participation. In essence, he advocated a creative socialism.
Forty years later, it was with these two antecedents in mind that I opened a copy of Cool Tools by Kevin Kelly. If Illich were alive today, he might find some solace in Kelly’s introduction, in which he writes: “A third industrial revolution is stirring – the Maker era.” The line “these are tools to make us better humans” might jump out as particularly heartening, but by the time he’d flicked through 460-odd pages of sushi knives, lawnmowers and cargo pants, he would no doubt be bemused by the sheer quantity of stuff we can buy to make us better humans.
One of the founders of Wired magazine, and the author of popular technology books such as Out of Control and What Technology Wants, Kelly is both a chronicler and a card-carrying member of the Californian school of techno-utopianism. But this is not a catalogue of apps and digital devices, which become “obsolete within minutes”. These tools are sturdier and earthier. Here are chainsaws and vermicompost kits. Contrary to popular lore, when it comes to getting worms to munch through your rubbish, there is no app for that.
With its feet firmly planted on the ground, Cool Tools has a slightly different lineage than Kelly’s other books. He is candid about intending this to be the reincarnation of, or at least a homage to, that bible of 1960s counterculture the Whole Earth Catalog. Indeed, in the 1980s Kelly worked as an editor of the Catalog and its various supplements. The question is, does Cool Tools retain that counterculture spirit?
When the impresario Stewart Brand published the first Whole Earth Catalog in 1968, it became an instant hit with the hippies. Drawing heavily on the ideas of Buckminster Fuller, it featured anything you might need for a sustainable, self-sufficient lifestyle, from geodesic domes to LL Bean hunting boots, electronic calculators and kibbutz manuals. Its subtitle was “access to tools”.
In a sense, Brand’s offering was itself a reincarnation of the mail-order catalogue published by Sears, Roebuck & Co in the late 19th century. The Sears catalogue was instrumental in the settling of the American West, so much so that the British critic Reyner Banham called it “one of the great and basic documents of US civilisation”. But the Whole Earth Catalogue was a more political document if only because instead of spreading the American way of life it essentially rejected it – in the 1960s, one way to be political was to drop out.
Of course, in the internet age “access to tools” is no longer provided through printed catalogues. Indeed, for the last ten years Cool Tools has existed as a website where potentially anyone can review a tool they think is “cool”. So why make a book? After all, this one really does look like a blog printed out. Virtually no image is of print quality, resulting in a great sea of pixellated gizmos, their edges dissolving into digital noise. I know all of this is self-conscious – this is Kelly evoking the scrapbook ethos of the Catalog but in the digital age (it’s even self-published). Yet it’s a move that contradicts itself. If Kelly made this volume to revive the spirit of its predecessor – because, let’s face it, we still venerate books as cultural milestones – then why not treat it accordingly?
Where some see the Whole Earth Catalog as having prefigured the web, Cool Tools takes the behaviour and form of the web and returns them to paper. An impressive compendium it is, but that does not make it the inheritor of the Catalog’s mantle. Brand’s bible spawned various successors, including the “solutions” website/book Worldchanging, but arguably his true inheritors are the Maker movement itself. This is where Brand’s self-sufficiency overlaps with Silicon Valley hacker culture. It is where craft nostalgia meets digital optimism. Surprisingly, there is very little of that in Cool Tools. There is no mention of “hacking” (although, frankly, I’m inclined to find that refreshing). I couldn’t even find a 3D printer.
Cool Tools is clearly aimed at the Maker movement, or at least the renewed DIY zeitgeist in general, but it is ideologically adrift. The clue is in that word “cool”. This is the language of blog comments and Facebook “likes”. It bespeaks a breezy Californian positivity. As Kelly makes clear, this is a book made up entirely of positive reviews – of tools that are “ingenious”, “nifty” and of course “awesome”. But without an ideological backbone, what we have here is a Sears catalogue for the twenty-first century with no Wild West left to tame.
Brand at least had Buckminster Fuller, the I Ching and drugs – not exactly an ideology but a constructive meeting of science and New Age escapism. Kelly just has Amazon. Every product comes with a QR code, most of which link to an Amazon page. On one level, this is just practical – I mean, Amazon does sell literally everything – but it’s about as counter-cultural as a Happy Meal. As if to stick it to The Man, first you have to let him trouser your money. Perhaps this is simply an irony that someone immersed in dot-com entrepreneurialism can’t appreciate. Or perhaps the Maker revolution really is chained to the corporate hegemony.
Either way, it seems that when industrial capitalism is in crisis we fall back in love with our tools. There is something steadying about the feel of the screwdriver in our hand. It makes us feel in control again. The difference between the 1970s and today is that an alternative, creative lifestyle is both easier and more illusory. “Access to tools” is no longer the issue. We have infinite access, because Amazon and Google have made us an offer we can’t refuse.
Opinion: in her first column for Dezeen, critic Alexandra Lange argues that architects are misusing platforms like Twitter and Tumblr. “Architects need to start thinking of social media as the first draft of history,” she writes.
It’s easy to make fun of Bjarke Ingels on Instagram. Selfie, LEGO selfie, girlfriend (I hope), Gaga, monograph, fog, fox socks. His Instagram has a lot to do with the architecture of self-promotion, but little to do with actual building. The same goes for many architects’ Twitter feeds: lecture, lecture, award, positive review, lecture. You could say that’s just business today. But social media can do more for architecture than showcase pretty faces and soundbites. Architects need to start thinking of social media as the first draft of history.
There’s an unofficial rule of thumb that you should only tweet about yourself 30 percent of the time. That’s a rule many architects break over and over again. They treat Twitter and Instagram as extensions of their marketing strategy, another way to let people know where their partners are speaking, that their projects are being built, and that the critics like them. Happy happy happy. Busy busy busy. Me me me. In real life, most architects aren’t quite as monomaniacal as their feeds. (There are exceptions.) They read reviews written about others. They look at buildings built by others. Heck, they even spend some time not making architecture. That balance, between the high and the low, the specific and the general, the obvious and the obscure makes life, not to mention design, much more interesting.
That unselfish reading, writing, seeing and drawing form part of the larger cloud of association that, one day, critics will use to assess and locate the architecture of today. A more flexible, critical and conversational use of social media could suggest interpretations before the concrete is dry. As an example, consider Philip Johnson, perhaps the most networked architect of his day. Philip Johnson would have been really good at social media. He understood, better than most, that interest is created by association. That was the principle of his salons, drawing the latest and greatest from a variety of cultural realms. Those young artists and architects helped him stay young and current, he helped them by offering literal or metaphorical institutional support.
Isn’t that how these platforms work too? I look better when I spread the word about everyone’s good work, not just my own. And seeing others’ projects gives me new ideas. Johnson was a curator at the Museum of Modern Art, but he was also a “curator” in contemporary parlance, collecting and distributing people and objects and styles.
That’s why his physical library at his Glass House in New Canaan, CT remains of interest: the shelves reveal what he thought worth reading and keeping. Outside, its form reveals the same: the work of architect Michael Graves, promoted and digested. Even earlier, in the September 1950 issue of Architectural Review, Johnson set out the inspirations – possibly decoys – for that same Glass House. There’s Mies, of course, but there are also the less expected references to Suprematist painter Kasimir Malevich and eighteenth century architect Claude Nicolas Ledoux. There’s an image showing the Brick House, the almost windowless box set behind the Glass House where he actually slept, a building often eliminated from later photography of the site. There are many readings of this combination of text and images, few of them straightforward. But I’ll take false fronts and red herrings over pure self-promotion any day. Trails of breadcrumbs like this are catnip for critics then and now. Johnson used a prestigious journal to try out his version of the Glass House genealogy. You architects could be doing this every day.
Instagram is popularly characterised as a more perfect version of everyday life: the artfully mismatched tablescape, the colour-balanced Christmas tree, the accessorised child. But it doesn’t have to be that way. We get enough better-than-reality images of buildings on sites like Dezeen. I’ve started Instagramming my visits to exhibitions and buildings, as a way of sharing the first cut, taking visual notes, and focusing on details and moments that didn’t make the press packet. We so often see the same images of a building, over and over. What about the rest of it? My unprofessional photographs pick up on different things. At Herzog & de Meuron’s Parrish Art Museum, for example, I snapped the sign required to point you to the “Main Entrance.” And the ten-foot, blackened, windowless doors that could flatten a five-year-old. These images can be critical in a different way – fleeter, funnier, like popcorn – from the endangered building review. Could architects point out their own mistakes? Or – with love, of course – those of their colleagues? Of their heroes?
At a higher artistic level, there’s the example of the Instagram of architectural photographer Iwan Baan. His Instagram reveals that he has seen more contemporary architecture (and more of it from helicopters) than anyone. I find something aggrandising, even aggressive, about the relentlessness of his travel and the harsh aerial views. There’s also something humanising about his Instagram as a series of outtakes, capturing the surround for the more perfect images that end up on the websites of the architects. We see the faces of people, the buildings imperfectly lit or weathered. The heroic and the ordinary combine in this extra work, and will ultimately contribute to the way we look at the official pictures too. It would be even better if the architects were right there beside him, taking pictures of what else they see. I know architects make design pilgrimages. Why not take us there?
It isn’t just stolen moments that social media can capture. Tumblr is an ideal platform for context, before, during and after the run of construction. On a campus project, your building may be in dialogue not only with its neighbours and a predecessor, but with the whole history of development and style across campus. A project-specific Tumblr could allow an architect to show a wider audience that they recognise that legacy. That they are able to see a site as more than a blank slate or frame for their contribution. Client and community engagement doesn’t need to be limited to a specific forum. Why not share images of favourite or inspirational details? Moments of conflict? The materials palette of the campus? On a new building at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, I started snapping pictures of all the adjacent modern and postmodern buildings’ backsides, newly prominent now that a plaza has replaced a parking lot. Who but an architect would document those?
The diversity of purpose, the cloud of connections that work so well on Twitter is all wrong on Tumblr. There, you need to specialise, hone your theme to a single word. How else could Fuck Yeah Brutalism have 100,000 followers? Are you obsessed with the architecture of the past? With a particular designer? A place? An ingredient of whatever kind? How better to get that monkey off your back than by creating a trove of the best, most suggestive imagery. Who knew that many people liked Brutalism? As a side benefit, here’s a handy way to mobilise the opposition the next time someone talks about tearing down, say, Government Center.
Architects might also consider the archival angle. Graduate students start Tumblrs for their dissertation research, creating a daily log of their best discoveries. Museums and archives have launched Tumblrs to showcase their collections, or to do a deep dive into a particular archive that is in the process of being digitised. I’m fascinated by the Documenting Modern Living project at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, which shows the process of digitising the photographs, fabric samples, architectural drawings and order forms that went in to making Eero Saarinen and Alexander Girard’s Miller House, commissioned in 1953. Making such a house, and maintaining such a house, well documented. Designers of a certain age might think about doing something similar with their own files, again starting the wheels of interpretation and reflection.
A book like The Images of Architects, for which Valerio Olgiati asked famous architects to send him images important to their work, performs a similar task. But there’s something so static, so precious about this presentation. Don’t wait to be maestri or maestrae. Don’t wait to be asked. Start showing what you’re made of now.
“The premise is simple and elegant: Use the Internet to a) spread the word to a diverse, international art audience about what could be lost if any sale goes forward; b) suggest that readers expand the process by posting their own links and images to social media sites such as Twitter and Instagram; and c) generate support for the Detroit Institute of Arts by asking readers to click through and buy a museum membership (an individual membership starts at $65).”
#DayDetroit was quite beautiful, waking up a wide readership to the contents of the DIA, and generating conversation about the relationships of cities to their art. But it also got me thinking: It’s not only Detroit’s art assets that are being dispersed and destroyed, it’s the architecture too. There’s been a valuable discussion of “ruin porn”, and the aestheticising of structures only after they are too late to save. But what about Detroit’s incredible architecture that’s still standing? Why haven’t we had, over the past five years, any number of #DayDetroits for architecture, where a collective of architects point out the irreplaceable built assets that are also disappearing?
Social media can make criticism, interpretation, dialogue and history part of daily life. Don’t leave it to the critics.
Architects sometimes forget what other people don’t know – or forget to share the positive assets of the past before, during and after they are threatened. Social media collects in real time. You can hashtag your firm. You can collate your campus work. You can geolocate your project. You can tip your hat to a colleague. You can tell us what you’re reading. In doing so architects contribute to a broader dialogue about what makes a good experience. What social media can do for architects is make criticism, interpretation, dialogue and history part of daily life. Don’t leave it to the critics. Don’t farm it out to your communications staff. That’s boring. Surely you don’t want to be boring? I’d be surprised if one social media platform or another weren’t part of most designers’ daily practice (at least those under 50). Let the rest of us in, so it doesn’t take bankruptcy, demolition or obituary to get people talking about architecture.
Opinion: in this week’s Opinion column, Lucas Verweij argues that as the design field expands to encompass all creative activities and designers try to solve all the world’s problems, the discipline cannot possibly live up to expectations.
Design can no longer keep up with the promises it makes. Twenty-five years ago, nobody knew what design was or what purpose it served. The word was scarcely used on the European mainland, because back then we referred to the profession as vormgeving, which literally means “form-giving”. The word “design” appears nowhere on the diploma I received when I graduated, but the same school I graduated from is now called the Design Academy.
The word “design” previously denoted a position on style. Alessi produced “design” coffee pots and Dieter Rams created “designed” electrical appliances for Braun. The term was reserved for intensive and often Modernist-looking products that you bought in museum shops. Back then design was still an adjective, not a verb.
In the Anglo-Saxon world, by contrast, design was a container term for all sorts of creative disciplines. That definition has since gained in popularity and all creative professions are now grouped under the umbrella of design. Everything has become design, and design is everywhere.
Apart from that semantic victory, the popularity of the profession is such that it is now absorbing and assimilating other professions. No longer is its scope confined to interior, graphic or product design. Now it also encompasses social, interaction and food design. Then we have design thinking and service design, the end products of which can be a service, a mentality or a procedure. That widens the scope of design further to include process, distribution, retail and organisation. Nothing remains untouched. Discussions within the profession suddenly emphasise similarities more than differences, but up until a short time ago we could not agree on what was and was not designed.
Once a patchwork of disciplines, the professional field has been transformed into one vast and pleasant entity. Things will remain like that as long as design is doing well, which is precisely the case now. Books and magazines on design sell well. Most design products and services also sell well, and the economic crisis hit the design sector substantially less than the architecture sector.
Design is expanding into the field of innovative techniques and methods for production, and it is exploring new ways of working and insights. Design is closely connected to the growing internet economy. The startup scene maintains close links with the design world and forms part of it through interface and interaction design. Design is closely connected to the changing world and now finds itself right at the heart of it.
In addition, the public puts a lot of faith in designers, comparable to the faith once accorded to architects. In the past, architects were seen as people who could solve problems; they were creative and progressive visionaries and set the tone in questions of taste. Architecture shaped the post-war discourse. Architects provided the forms that expressed how power was distributed, how life was lived and how society was organized.
A comparison with design obviously presents itself. Many social questions are now asked of design and many tools of individualisation and globalisation now fall within the design domain. That is why many positive connotations about architecture have now transferred to design. Designers are now the ones who can solve problems, who can be visionary and creative, who take the lead in matters of taste.
An important cornerstone of design is creativity. Never before has creativity been such a positively charged term. When I was young it was considered nice if someone was creative, but nothing more than that. Creativity was not in itself a positive quality. For what purpose could it serve in an era that placed much more emphasis on efficiency, organisation and quantity than on quality, creation and recreation?
The very opposite is now the case. We think that problems cannot be solved without creative input. Creativity and innovation are the new key concepts for growth. In Europe, innovation receives a lot of subsidy because it is thought that our creative and innovative powers are our only genuinely distinctive qualities in a global economy. China can produce more cheaply, India can engineer more cheaply, but for the time being our creativity is irreplaceable. All hope is suddenly put on a quality that was previously deemed superfluous.
I think that expectations and promises are now far too unrealistic when it comes to design. Practically all design disciplines are unprotected professions. People are free to call themselves “design thinkers” or “social designers” whenever they want. Every year there are three new educational programmes starting. Design is growing in such an unbridled manner that the quality can no longer be guaranteed.
Meanwhile the expectations and the promises keep on growing: design can solve the smog problem in Beijing, the landmine problems in Afghanistan and huge social problems in poor parts of Western cities. The ever-growing expectations of design can no longer be met. We are in a design bubble; it’s a matter of time before it will burst.
Lucas Verweij is a Berlin-based writer, curator and initiator in the field of design. He is a guest professor of product design at Kunsthochschule Weißensee in Berlin and co-initiator of the Pruys-Bekaert Programme for design critical writing. He blogs under the name Lucas_Berlin.
Opinion: as protests continue against private shuttle buses for tech company workers in San Francisco, Mimi Zeiger asks how designers and architects should engage with the fight.
When did the war between technology and urbanism now battling on the streets of San Francisco begin? On December 10, protesters blocked a private bus from commuting from the city’s Mission District to Google headquarters in Mountain View, 34 miles away. Over the summer, emotions ran high when tech entrepreneur Peter Shih posted his screed 10 Things I Hate About You: San Francisco Edition.
Perhaps the first battle cries sounded in February when in the London Review of Books writer Rebecca Solnit singled out the wifi-enabled, luxury buses shuttling Silicon Valley workers as a symbol (The Google Bus) of the growing inequity between the coders and the code-nots. Then again, a dispatch from a skirmish in 2000 over displacement of low-income tenants due to tech expansion was reported in the Los Angeles Times with the headline: Dot-Com Boom Makes S.F. a War Zone.
Architects and designers caught in the battle for San Francisco’s civic soul face a critical decision: “Which side are you on?” The question posed by David Taylor – an activist and programmer also caught betwixt and between – is not only critical, but also complicated. Practitioners design for clients on both sides of the divide. They build headquarters and affordable housing, high-end retail and public spaces. As such, one might think their role is agnostic, a service provided to a client. Yet Bay Area architects, only just recovering from the recession, also represent a constituency struggling to keep a toehold in the city and to keep a practice going. In which case, Taylor’s considered answer applies to tech workers and designers alike. He writes, “It is also the responsibility of the tech workers to own their privilege and engage in their communities and not just reshape them to be comfortable.”
If the call is to engage, rather than get comfortable, then where should this engagement take place? The question applies to San Francisco and other cities with strong tech economies.
On the surface, the fight seems to be about transportation and urbanism, or rather, why are private companies creating parallel systems for their employees rather than engaging in the messiness of civic life by investing in regional infrastructures and urban public space. But much of the underlying issues around booming gentrification and cost of living in San Francisco stem from housing inequity and the rise of evictions. More specifically, the Ellis Act, a California state law that functions as a rent control work around by allowing landlords to evict tenants and take properties off the rental market for a given period. When these properties return for rental or sale they are priced at market rate.
Demand for housing in San Francisco is extreme. A real estate round up in the San Francisco Chronicle lists a half dozen new apartment buildings hitting the market with rents starting at more than $3000 for a one-bedroom unit. Deals are brokered: an eight-story, 114-unit condo development with a $70 million price tag was given city sign-off in exchange for 14 below market-rate units elsewhere in the neighbourhood. While there is little financial interest for developers to mess with the current model, housing as a topic in itself is an area ready for a total examination and real engagement by architects.
Contemporary housing investigations tend to focus solutions on formal and material propositions abroad, in cities and countries in crisis. However, a design such as Alejandro Aravena’s Elemental housing, which helps residents build equity in impoverished areas by asking owners to build out 50-percent of their house, not only reimagines the process of making housing, but confronts the issue from a social and political standpoint. I don’t suggest that Aravena’s design is one-to-one applicable in a place like San Francisco, but rather use it as an example of how the redesign of policy, processes, and protocols toward a socially just end is a key point of engagement if architects are ready to address the problem. This also means that architects should lobby civic leadership, and demand more than the placemaking jargon typical of mayoral summits.
On the tech sector side of the equation, the headquarters and offices of the established internet-based companies and startups offer ample opportunities for architects and designers to apply their skills in new ways. Granted, Norman Foster’s scheme for Apple HQ, the spaceship in an orchard, has been roundly thumped for its anti-social tendencies. But the isolated Silicon Valley campus is no longer fait accompli. Airbnb, Pinterest (co-founded by an architecture school dropout), and Twitter are all located in San Francisco. In fact, tech tenants are putting pressure on commercial leasing, filling nearly a quarter of the city’s available office square footage.
In her New York Times op-ed What Tech Hasn’t Learned from Urban Planning, Allison Arieff, editor and content strategist for San Francisco urbanism non-profit SPUR, critiqued Twitter. Arguing that despite the company’s high-profile move into a vintage high-rise on a rough and tumble part of Market Street and the city’s belief that ample tax breaks would bring revitalisation to the impoverished area, Twitter had made little effort to connect to the neighbourhood. So while surrounding commercial rents rose, the quality of street life remained unchanged.
Just days after the Times piece, and almost as if in direct response to the issues the story raised, Airbnb announced that its new office in San Francisco’s SoMA district will be open to the public. In keeping with the company’s couch-surfing, community-based roots, a classroom will be made available nights and weekends for use by locals residents and organisations, SPUR will host a series of talks and programming, and Arieff will curate Airbnb’s library of books on urbanism, design, hospitality, sustainability, and computer engineering—all of which “will be accessible to the public on a weekly basis during Airbnb Library Open Hours.”
Airbnb’s outreach to the neighbourhood through programming and semi-public space offerings seems sincere enough, in spite of opportunistic timing. Yet the effort recalls POPS, Privately Owned Public Spaces, the beleaguered bonus parks, plazas, and atriums provided by high-rise developers in exchange for extended floor area. Made famous by the Occupy Movement, Zuccotti Park is one example. San Francisco got its first official POPS in 1972, a redwood tree grove designed by architect Tom Galli in the shade of the Transamerica Building. The park is open during weekday business hours.
In 2007, the San Francisco-based interdisciplinary design group ReBar mapped and evaluated the city’s POPS and asked, “should a public space under the unblinking eye of private ownership be called ‘public’ at all?” Their query took the form of maps, web-based field reports, and a series of “paraformances”: performance actions inspired by the crowdsourced reports. Today, the question is just as potent at Airbnb’s headquarters where all access is governed by the pleasure of a private company. As with the Google buses, tech investment into parallel systems, like bonus parks or community spaces, mirror civic amenities without actually supporting the public life of the city. Can design, then, productively provoke a deeper engagement?
As a former strategic designer for the Helsinki Design Lab and co-founder of the architecture and design practice Dash Marshall, Bryan Boyer sees opportunities for designers at the very intersection currently provoking conflict, the point between what he calls the “secluded innovation” of internally-minded tech culture and the urban realm.
“We’re seeing the growing pains of an entire industry that shot to global prominence at light speed and is still struggling to make sense of its new existence outside the garage,” he says.
Boyer is on the board of Makeshift Society, a co-working space for creative entrepreneurs in San Francisco (and soon in Brooklyn). He stresses that technological innovation cannot happen in isolation. “Architects have a real contribution to add here, which is to spend the long hours with potential clients and collaborators in the tech community to help them see the shadows on the wall of their garage. That entails more than just helping people make better choices about their physical environment,” he explains.
Boyer cites technology’s lessons: iterative design, full-scale prototyping, and the integration of data into decision-making as ways to influence and strengthen architectural processes. Ultimately, on a battlefield strewn with buses, garages, and quasi-public spaces there is no single side for designers to take. And no easy way to bow out of the fight, either.
Mimi Zeiger is a Los Angeles-based journalist and critic. She covers art, architecture, urbanism and design for a number of publications including The New York Times, Domus, Dwell, and Architect, where she is a contributing editor. Zeiger is author of New Museums, Tiny Houses and Micro Green: Tiny Houses in Nature. She is currently adjunct faculty in the Media Design Practices MFA program at Art Center. Zeiger also is editor and publisher of loud paper, a zine and blog dedicated to increasing the volume of architectural discourse.
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