Critical Reflection on Architecture and the Public Realm
The video was first produced during my Master Thesis and later refined for publication in Uselessness: Humankind’s most valuable tool published by De Gruyter in 2020.
Below is an excerpt.
Full PDF here.
Useless Architecture
text by Ryan Stec
drawings by Ryan Stec and Véronique Couillard
from:
Howard, Michelle and Parodi, Luciano. Uselessness: Humankind’s most valuable tool?, Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter, 2020.
Lewis Carroll
The Hunting of the Snark, 1876.
[From: Fit the Second. The Bellman’s Speech.]
“Other maps are such shapes,
with their islands and capes!
But we’ve got our brave Captain to thank,”
(so the crew would protest)
“that he’s bought us the best –
a perfect and absolute blank!”
I’m not going to give you a map for where we are headed.
If I do offer something that looks like a map, it is best not to trust it as it is likely a useless map.
We are not going to try and get somewhere specific.
Our goal is to get lost.
Let’s start with early Medieval Churches and their elegant order juxtaposed against the chaos of the city. Surrounding the original constructions was, what one might call – zones of sanctuary. This void was a manifestation of the separation between the godly nature of the church and the chaos of our world, but it was also where the beggar and the sick would come and where abandoned children would be left. In many ways the zone was a resting place for those considered useless to humanity.i
Useless space for the useless, and so I ask where do the useless take shelter now in our cities?
The empty spaces of the city, the square, the sidewalk and street, the park, contain some of its greatest potential.
A space of appearance where we come together in our best (and also darkest) moments, together for the sake of being together, to declare our presence to each other.i This is perhaps why the empty spaces of the city are targeted, narrowed in on, closed off, controlled.
Geographer Steven Flusty’s has categorized these spatial tactics of fear and control under the title “Interdictory Spaces” of a “post-public” world.ii
The list is as follows:
SLIPPERY SPACE is space that cannot be reached…
STEALTHY SPACE is space that cannot be found…
CRUSTY SPACE is space that cannot be accessed…
PRICKLY SPACE is space that cannot be comfortable occupied…
JITTERY SPACE is space that cannot be utilized unobserved… iii
One might be bamboozled into thinking that this is a list of how to make space useless, but I think the opposite is true. It seems that this is a categorization of the complete instrumentalization of space for control.iv
A narrowing of purpose that should weigh heavy on us.
Is the useless body one of the ways we resist this hyperbolic utility?
A body that sits and rest in the flow of a city that is oriented elsewhere.
This functional city.
This productive city.v
Or a body that protests and disrupts the functional city.
Or one that we understand the least, one which has moved beyond disruption and thinks only of destruction. Senseless and without purpose.
This however, is not the purposelessness we are searching for.
We are searching for the one which transforms the user of the building to the being in the architecture, the one that opens up to the idea of dwelling in the city.
i Richard Sennett, The Conscience of the Eye: The Design and Social Life of Cities (W. W. Norton, 1992).
i Hannah Arendt’s concept of the ‘space of appearance’, elaborated on in the Human Condition, continues to play an important role in how we understand the shared spaces of the city. Noted scholars such as George Baird (The Space of Appearance (MIT Press, 1995)) and Kenneth Frampton (“The Status of Man and the Status of His Objects: A Reading of ‘The Human Condition,’” in Hannah Arendt : The Recovery of the Public World, ed. Melvin A. Hill (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1979), 362.) brought her political theory into architectural discourse in the later part of the 20th century, and her ideas continue to play an influential role. The space of appearance along with the common world are essential components of the public realm for Arendt. Where the space of appearance is the conceptual space arising between us through speech and action, the common world is the constructed world of human artifice, both of things and apparatuses. There is a spatial component to the public sphere, but it is not entirely material; the space of appearance is not a physical condition, but it is connected to our togetherness, and although the common world is not exclusively a world of things, “To live together in the world means essentially a world of things is between those who have it in common, as a table is located between those who sit around it; the world, like every in-between, relates and separates men at the same time.” Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, Second Edi (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), pp. 52. Arendt builds her argument for the intrinsic value of speech and action on a clear opposition to utility and instrumentality in the early part of her text. Her description of homo faber, the maker of the world of things, is a being that must be driven by utility in order to make this world of things. What this text attempts to do is provide ground for an argument against the utility of making by questioning how problematic it is to allow the making of things to be the exclusive domain of Arendt’s homo faber.
ii Steven Flusty, Building Paranoia: The Proliferation of Interdictory Space and the Erosion of Spatial Justice (Los Angeles: Los Angeles Forum for Architecture and Urban Design, 1994), pp. 15.
iii Flusty, pp. 16-18.
iv The provocation for a useless architecture is partially set upon the philosophical foundations of Martin Heidegger’s text, The Question Concerning Technology, and Other Essays (HarperCollins, 1977).This remains one of the most important critiques of our relationship to technology, asserting that its essence lies outside the machine itself and in the ‘enframing’ of reality as a standing reserve. He gives us the example of how a dam on a river changes the running water from river to resource, and reasons that the essence of technology is how it transforms the earth around us into utility. In the context of this text, it would be said that it defines the world by its use, by its capacity to be employed for a purpose. Heidegger’s reasoning in the essay pushes beyond the view of technology as a collection of tools and machines that are simply means to ends, suggesting instead that it is a way of thinking that instrumentalizes the world itself. If we wish to resist this thinking, to re-balance our perspective and shift away from the ‘enframing’ of the world as standing reserve, what relationship do we have to the material products of technological thinking? For instance, in the case offered by Heidegger of the dam and the river, is there a site of this reframing? Is it within the dam? Does it begin in the plans for the dam? The components? Its history? As architects, almost everything begins with site and so we must inquire as to where we locate this ‘enframing’? And if we want to ‘deinstrumentalize’ the river, how and where do we begin?
v The ‘functional city’ is used here as more than shorthand for the reductive functional ideas driving the CIAM Anthens Charter of 1933 (Charles Edouard Jeannneret-Gris, Athens Charter (New York, Grossman, 1973). While these ideas seem like a legitimate source for many urban planning problems of the 21st century, I would surmise that this is giving architects and planners too much credit and power. The notion of the ‘functional city’ is more indicative of our tendency to try to reduce the city into a theoretical framework, and while many have sought to challenge the early modernist principals driving ‘the functional city’, often with an adjective of their own, the city itself resists. This resistance, with its dynamic and contradictory energy is what makes the city such a wonderful terrain to grow and develop theory. Each spatial theory of the city is a map with which to navigate and discover elements and dimensions of the city, sometimes, however, problems arise when the makers of the maps confuse them with the territory of the city itself.