Hasta La Ideas

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.

For more information about the Book Club, see the AA Night School website.

Sam Jacob is a director of architecture practice FAT, professor of architecture at University of Illinois Chicago and director of Night School at the Architectural Association School of Architecture, as well as editing www.strangeharvest.com.

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is its nightmare twin” appeared first on Dezeen.

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.

Sam Jacob is a director of architecture practice FAT, professor of architecture at University of Illinois Chicago and director of Night School at the Architectural Association School of Architecture, as well as editing www.strangeharvest.com.

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less architectural” appeared first on Dezeen.

Opinion: as a sixth cyclist dies in London in two weeks, Sam Jacob argues that roads should be designed “in a way that incorporates intelligence as well as brute engineering” and asks:” “Who is the city for?”

Roads are super complex landscapes. All those speed bumps, arrows, double yellows, zig zags, kerbs, red men, green men, zebra, pelican, puffin and pegasus crossings are both the surface over which we travel and codes that modify and instruct how we travel. They are simultaneously map and territory, abstract markings on the surface of the city that become the city.

They may often be imperfect and in a constant state of revision but roads are the fundamental product of civilisation. Roads even, it might be argued, civilise us, as infrastructure that connects both places and us one to another into a collective society. Roads are where all our multi-faceted desires and demands (literally) intersect, where they are negotiated in real time, turn by turn. Of course, sometimes these negotiations tragically fail.

After six cyclist deaths in London over the last 13 days, there is understandably a sense of panic on the streets – certainly amongst the cycling community. A friend late back to the office after cycling back from a meeting found her phone flashing with a series of panicked messages checking that she hadn’t become another cyclist casualty. Over the top, for sure, but also indicative of the heightened tensions surrounding the capital’s carriageways – a tension revealed in the aggression that often characterises our behaviour on the road too.

After this spate of accidents there are, understandably, calls to do something. I don’t doubt either that there is a real desire on behalf of the authorities to do something too, but what that thing might be is much harder to identify.

The problem is first practical. How can the variety of road users – pedestrians, bikes, cars, trucks – co-exist in a safe and civilised way? But it’s also a philosophical and political issue: who the is city for?

Though we might think of them as natural, streets and roads are as much concepts as things. In Britain, pre-Roman roads formed as tracks across a landscape between settlements. More desire lines than infrastructure, we could think of these as routes worn into the surface of the earth by habit, formed by the subjective behaviour of travellers. Roads here are produced by the act of travelling itself. As such they are less defined, their edges blurred. Roman roads on the other hand brought a very different conception – an abstract, as-the-crow-flies, objective inscription of intent. The Roman road organised and controlled how we crossed the landscape.

After the fall of the empire, Roman roads fell back into disrepair, their engineered surfaces collapsing back into the soil. By 1555 the country’s roads were so poor that an act of parliament was passed requiring parishes to maintain their roads. Men of the parish were required to work for six days each year to maintain and repair the roads, but unpaid and under-resourced, little improved. As the industrial revolution gathered pace, parliament passed what was known as the Turnpike Act, which allowed the creation of private toll roads. Given the potential for profit, investment in the provision and maintenance of roads accelerated the quality and network of roads.

Roads are now (on the whole) public in the sense that they are owned by public bodies, but the ownership, management and maintenance of roads is shared between local authorities, Transport for London, and the Highways Agency. Perhaps this fragmented ownership is reflected in the confusions and conflicts on the roads.

The point of this historical diversion is to underline the point that roads are not static entities – they evolve in relation to the society that creates them – and that roads then alter the society they ostensibly serve. Turnpikes, for example, benefited those who invested (often members of parliament themselves), were often unpopular (the defensive pikes added to as protection and penalty of execution for anyone destroying a toll booth). The increased costs associated with transporting livestock into the city pushed up the price of meat and inevitably affected the urban poor most directly.

Back to the present moment; back to the issue of cycling in London. The problem of traffic and highways is usually thought of as an engineering project rather than a function of holistic urban design. Which is, I’d argue, itself part of the problem.

The engineering-first approach to cycle infrastructure produces a range of solutions:

First there’s the half-hearted standard bike paths. These might demarcate a route that seems sensible for a cyclist to follow, but be forewarned: you’re as likely to find one leading you into a dead-end, straight into a lamppost, or into a pile of bin bags dumped in its track. More often than not, they seem like elaborate devices dreamt up by Wile E. Coyote. They would be funny if they weren’t so laughable.

Next up there’s the Barclays Cycle Superhighway. These are semi-infrastructural licks of paint whose gestural wide strips of blue attempt to form zones within the road surface dedicated to cyclists.

They represent a particularly abstract form of planning as though the fluorescent highlighter, beloved of planning officers as they mark out zones and routes on the black and white expanses of OS plans, had reached down out of the sky and simply started sketching its intention directly onto the surface of the city. This is infrastructure as intention rather than reality. Cycle Superhighways might assume the appearance of infrastructural authority but the reality is that they are often little more than a trompe-l’œil. They have an indistinct status: a name that suggests real hard wired traffic infrastructure but a reality that is little more than wayfinding. In spite of their good intentions, you can’t paint the city you want into existence.

At the most extreme end, Transport For London is testing out Dutch-style roundabouts. Frankly though, in most of London there’s no way that the crooked, winding streets could be tamed into anything bearing more logic. London, born out of a singular lack of planning, seems to have a resistance to any logical planning set within its grain. Which is, of course, part of its charm: a city that’s evolved out of the lives lived within it rather than been envisioned by the mind of a Haussmann. That’s not to say that hard-wired segregated solutions aren’t either possible or desirable, but that the possibilities of their implementation are limited.

The problem of our roads seems a problem that we can’t build our way out of. That is to say, it’s not a problem of things but of space. Or rather, of things in space in motion.

Nowhere is this more visible than watching a giant hinged articulated lorry swinging itself expansively out at a junction, only to switch back round as though it were a particularly languorous, overweight uncle attempting a drunken hokey cokey. Even a large van has trouble making it around the corner without riding up over a curb.

The view from my saddle is this: it’s the incompatible co-existence of the biggest and the smallest, the heaviest and the lightest, the most armour-plated and the softest flesh between lorry and cyclist that’s the issue. There’s nothing you can engineer to mitigate this situation.

The cyclist/lorry conflict is the most extreme of examples. In extremis, it exemplifies a crisis in the nature of our city’s streets. Currently we imagine roads as a universal resource, a system that makes little differentiation between its users, or the nature of their use. Those interests, I’d argue, are not all public. Commercial deliveries might put food on the shelves of our supermarkets, materials on construction sites that we may one day work or live in, or deliver tourists to historic landmarks, but the form of these deliveries are mainly unrestricted and in volumes that suit logistics managers.

Surely in an age of smart city rhetoric, big data, and the impending possibilities that GPS and digital mapping bring to transportation (as Dan Hill discussed in his last Dezeen column) it’s time to refigure the design problem of the London street. That is to say, to conceive of transport design in a way that incorporates intelligence as well as brute engineering. The kinds of data available on even consumer-end apps like City Mapper show how joining up available datasets provides new ways of configuring movement through the city.

What if, for example, deliveries were timed not to coincide with rush hours. What if large loads were the exception and goods were distributed from out-of-town depots in smaller electric vehicles. Indeed, wouldn’t Heathrow, vacated after the construction of the Boris Island Airport, provide a suitable interchange of this sort?

We focus tremendous amounts of time, money and expertise on the design of so many other forms of transport, but roads seem to be far less of a design question. Perhaps they seem too ordinary, lacking the glamour associated with cars or airports. Yet we should recognise the necessity of roads as a design project – and the huge significance that roads represent.

Just as ancient Rome could conceive of the kinds of networks that supported its imperial ambitions, we need to find ways to imagine the kind of streets that our public, accessible city of the twenty-first century demands.

The design of London’s roads is not just about the tragic deaths of cyclists. It’s about how we make sure our city becomes public and how roads continue to force us to negotiate a contemporary urban civility.

Sam Jacob is a director of architecture practice FAT, professor of architecture at University of Illinois Chicago and director of Night School at the Architectural Association School of Architecture, as well as editing www.strangeharvest.com.

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of the London street” appeared first on Dezeen.

Opinion: after returning from a two-week break, Sam Jacob reflects on the phenomenon of the modern beach holiday and argues that it is just as artificial as everyday working life in the city. 

The summer is almost out of reach, the sun setting over vacation idylls and planes pulling their wheels up over the bleached industrial outskirts of a Mediterranean city. They accelerate into the sky, contrails arcing northwards, to deliver their payload of over-ripened northern Europeans back to their slate-grey natural habitats. They emerge from the airport still incongruously clad in espadrilles, shorts and straw hats.

Ah, holidays. The ten-ish days off from the normal pattern of life where we can kick back, get back to nature, soak up the sun and otherwise encounter the world in a different way to our usual nine-to-five. But although we often describe them as a “break”, holidays are actually a product of organised labour, products of the industrial revolution as much as the production line.

These bubbles of paradise, where the wind blows through your hair and you feel the prickle of the sun’s heat on your bare skin, are as artificial as the suspended-ceilinged, contract-carpeted and air-conditioned environments you spend the rest of the year holed up in.

Nowhere is this strange version of artificial nature more apparent than the beach. A beach might be a product of coast line geology, of sea levels and tides, of the forces exerted by the sea on the perimeter of the land, of rocks and shells worn down into grains of sand. But really the place we go isn’t this; it’s rather a highly-wrought cultural phenomenon that just happens to look (sometimes) completely natural.

The idea of the holiday is derived from holy days, still ghostly present in the word itself. Secularised and industrialised, the holiday remains a symbolic event, an act full of ritual. The beach is the ground on which we conduct this performance, aided by outfits and props. All those things we identify with beachiness – from the traditional British seaside fare of kiss-me-quick hats, donkey rides and Punch and Judy shows to the exotic cocktail-in-a-pineapple from a thatched beach bar, even the virgin, unspoiled sands of ultimate luxury beachiness – all of these are props and scenarios that allow us to commune with an idea. Walking down the promenade, in other words, or pulling on your Speedos, blowing up a deranged-looking inflatable sea monster… whatever you might find yourself doing is a way of participating in collective ideas about nature and society.

Think of all those highly specific items we drag down there: the special towels, buckets in the shape of miniature candy-coloured castles, lilos, umbrellas, tiny cricket bats, balls that catch the wind as though they thought they belonged to the sky. Think of the clothes we wear, think even of that June magazine favourite, the beach body (and how to get one). All of these point to the beach as a place that holds a very special meaning.

The very idea of a beach holiday is relatively recent. It is essentially an eighteenth-century invention, a combination of science (the beach as sanitarium) and changing attitudes to the landscape after urbanisation (which might fall under the catch-all term of romanticism). These ideas of health and romance still run through our contemporary notions of the beach like the words through a stick of rock. These combine with modern notions of leisure, with money, with images of family and/or relationships. All baking under an ozone-depleted sky, doused in gallons of SPF.

“Ha,” you might say. “Put down your cultural studies notepad, throw off your tweeds and join us frolicking in the shallows. You’re taking this far too seriously; it’s all just a little fun!” But that’s the point: the beach’s syntheticity is so absolutely absorbed into its landscape that it’s almost impossible to distinguish it from nature, even when it really is manufactured.

Beyond the vast infrastructures that holidays command – the engineering, logistics, complex finance and construction that enable travel, highways, hotels – to name but a few items necessary to enable us to go somewhere – beaches are themselves unstable places that shift with wind and tide. These erosions are often held at bay by civil engineering such as groins and breaks. Sand is rearranged in acts of “beach nourishment”: sometimes as simple as scooping it up from one end of a bay and putting it back at the other; other times as extreme as replenishing a beach with sand from somewhere else entirely. These acts of great geological shuffling mean that beaches stay in the same place against their natural inclination.

The slogan “Sous les paves, la plage” rang out in Paris in 1968. It imagined that beneath the concrete veneer of the city was something as apparently liberated as the beach. But far from being something opposite, the beach is part of the very same landscape as the city.

Sam Jacob is a director of architecture practice FAT, professor of architecture at University of Illinois Chicago and director of Night School at the Architectural Association School of Architecture, as well as editing www.strangeharvest.com.

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landscape as the city” appeared first on Dezeen.

Opinion: in this week’s column Sam Jacob argues against what he calls PRotest, proposing that new forms of outcry through marketing and the media are confusing and “only make us more alienated”.

An episode of television show Father Ted called The Passion of Saint Tibulus sees priests Ted and Dougal protesting outside a cinema holding placards that read “Down With This Sort Of Thing” and “Careful Now”. They’re there, reluctantly, protesting at the showing of a film banned by the Vatican but through some loophole shown in their parish on Craggy Island.

It’s funny partly because of its satirical jibe and partly because of the perplexed and hangdog expressions of the priestly pair. But I think its real comedy, the thing that makes that synaptic spark pleasurably jump across the tracks of your neural network, is how it plays with protest as a form. It’s the gap between the form (protest) and the content (vague, unspecific colloquialisms) that generates the joke. The form of the placard against the un-slogans they contain, the rhetorical high of “Down With” finished by the pathetic “This Sort Of Thing”.

Traditionally, the form and content of protest were one and the same thing. You could march on Aldermaston to ban the bomb, you could camp outside Greenham Common in protest of American nuclear missiles being based on UK soil. You could sit down in the path of a bulldozer about to demolish whatever it was you didn’t want it to demolish. You could stop trucks transporting whatever it was you didn’t want transported. You could march against a war, a policy or an ideological position. You could protest about a thing you disagreed with. You could say what was wrong with it. Sometimes you might even say what you would rather happen. The message was communicated by the action. The action was dictated by message. And of course, these forms of protest still happen.

But staring at an image on the Daily Mail website, it struck me that contemporary forms of protest have developed an altogether different relationship between form and content. It was an image of a child’s passport picture with the word “Help” etched in blue biro stuck onto Constable’s The Hay Wain. The image of the child had been pixillated by the Mail and the background of Willy Lott’s cottage was a blurred blow-up of a jpeg, which only made the whole thing weirder. The story reported a statement from Fathers 4 Justice saying that the act was a protest, a “final act of desperation” after a man lost a final appeal in the High Court over custody rights to his son.

Here the action and the cause are entirely divergent. It is essentially a garbled succession of signs and symbols. The Hay Wain is the apparent site of the protest but the protest is nothing to do with the art, nothing to do with the painting’s role as an icon of Englishness, nothing to do with what Constable’s picture shows, nothing to do with the landscape of Dedham Vale that it depicts. Its only role in this protest is the celebrity status of the painting, perhaps its insurance value too.

The child’s image isn’t placed into the picture as part of the picture plane if as by a collagist (like, say, a moustache on the face of the Mona Lisa – despite the potential for a bobbing child in unexpected depths of the River Stour). It’s stuck onto the surface of the picture as though Constable’s canvas were as undifferentiated as a pinboard. There is absolutely no reason why the head of a real-life, modern child is set adrift in a nineteenth-century pastoral landscape.

There are a myriad of potential political meanings inherent in the act of defacing a national treasure. Which one? How? One might consider the way the “which” and the “how” connect to the matter in hand, but here this is all ignored for the simple fact that the act would be mediated, that it would feature on the Mail (and many other places). Its site wasn’t really The Hay Wain or the National Gallery, but the media. Some might describe this as savvy. I think it’s something else: a meaningless semiotic jumble of symbols with all their meaning sucked out of them, an unintelligible babble of references that are as unreadable as they are recognisable. In other words, its a form of postmodern protest: floating signifiers with a cause.

Talking of protest and floating signifiers, take the case of Trenton Oldfield. Half of the duo behind This Is Not A Gateway (who create “platforms for critical projects and ideas related to cities”), Trenton infamously swam into the midst of last year’s Oxford and Cambridge Boat Race. The act was clear. A perfect disruption of a media event guaranteed to get coverage. But his motivation was a murky as the river itself.

Was it about the boat race itself? Was it about elitism in sport? The elitism of universities as centres of excellence? The education system as a whole? The use of the river for a corporately sponsored sporting event?

At times it seems to have been about all of these things. The rambling, unfocused justification posted on the internet seems to have vanished. Now, post-incarceration and with an application for a visa turned down, it seems the act has multiplied its potential meanings, both for Trenton and for those who keep one listless eye on Twitter for things to get momentarily excited about. The act of jumping in the river now holds fleeting meanings about the establishment in general, judiciary, prison, the state of television or colonisation, depending on which interview you read. The original act gathers meanings like a snowball, only for them to melt as fast.

I’d argue that the fact that there seems to be no single point is the point. The act and the subject of these protests have become delaminated. It’s as though any subject can be attributed to any act, and the interchangeable relationship between the sign and signified makes it a postmodern form of protest. Doubly so, because the shifting arrangements of form and content take place within the media – in the representation of the act, not the act in and of itself. It’s protest by way of marketing, PRotest, to coin a phrase. The worry is that by operating as a form of marketing, this kind of protest only serves to reinforce the mechanisms of contemporary society, only makes us more alienated, further from a position where we might be able to achieve anything.

Perhaps this kind of non-specific protest is a function of our own era. Maybe it’s just harder to pinpoint what exactly is wrong because, quite frankly, everything is kind of wrong and there’s nothing anyone can do about it. Think of the Occupy movement, whose lack of demands and proposals were coupled with a raggle-taggle, multifarious collection of disassociated issues. Its real statement was just in being there, occupying space and column inches, and not really doing anything.

We live in an age where political engagement is increasingly reduced to likes and re-tweets. Meanwhile, mainstream culture continues to appropriate the form and aesthetic of protest for its own ends (what else is Banksy, for example, than the ultimate fulfilment of the Clash’s lyric “turning rebellion into money”). This de-politicised addiction to form and sensation – rather than content – gives us the protests we deserve. As Dougal says, “Careful Now”.

Sam Jacob is a director of architecture practice FAT, professor of architecture at University of Illinois Chicago and director of Night School at the Architectural Association School of Architecture, as well as editing www.strangeharvest.com.

The post “Protest by way of marketing
prevents us achieving anything” appeared first on Dezeen.