The virtue of making a virtue of (someone else's) necessity

[imomus]

Browsing at Pro-QM yesterday I saw a trendy German architecture magazine had run a special edition on "Poor Architecture". Is the Disaster Relief look fashionable this year? Is one man's martyrdom another's matinee, one man's tragedy another's aesthetic? Wouldn't you feel rather differently about that if you were actually in the disaster? What about poverty -- is it simply the absence of wealth, or is there something inherently good about it, as religious leaders from Christ to Buddha (via Gandhi) have told us?



I personally love the cheap look. I love shabby Indian stores on the Karl Marx Strasse. I love building sites more than what they turn into when they're finished. I love exhibition design, garden sheds and nissen huts. People at the top and people at the bottom are more likely to share values than people in the middle. I've noticed this time and again. There are links between a slumming liberal bourgeois class (that's me!) and second generation immigrants, for instance. The immigrant lifestyle becomes a look for these influential bourgeois -- weirdly aspirational -- and cheapness becomes an ecological and aesthetic virtue.

"The digerati use the same unvarnished plywood in their galleries, studios and workshops that the Chinese use to rack their vegetables. It has the same look. A simple plywood box may house a G4 Mac or a lobster," I noted in The Post-Bit Atom, sat in the exact place where New York's Lower East Side turns into Chinatown.

Going Tribal in Neubeca and Cosmopolitanism of the Poor are both articles in which I find lifestyle parallels between hipster creatives and immigrants, and Geodemographics put me in my place noted that people who cherish "encounters with the other" and seek out immigrant areas to live in can be very precisely pinned:

"E33s (Town Gown Transition) are post-materialists with links to academia. They don't really differentiate work from leisure." In the Neubeca article I expressed that same idea as "live-work spaces where the boundaries blur between personal and corporate, shop and living space... trestle tables... something medieval, some return to cottage industry, families working together, a certain amateurism" which "also resembles the extended family businesses the Turks run".



The only straw bale house in London (as far as I know) is in Islington. It's at 9 Stock Orchard Street, and it's designed by Sarah Wigglesworth and Jeremy Till. "Considered the first modern building to use straw in England," says Sara Navrady, "the building combines new and old materials with new and old techniques to produce an eco-friendly urban creation... it incorporates several elements of sustainable architecture into its
design: passive solar heating, solar water heating, natural ventilation, a recycled water system as well as the use of vernacular, low-energy and recycled materials, not to mention a green roof and a composting toilet. The combination of work and home eliminates the energy consumed by commuting."

Sustainable architecture is also, paradoxically, cheap and temporary architecture.

In I love Lacaton and Vassal I quoted the architects of the Palais de Tokyo's "space of encounter" and "home of relational aesthetics" saying: “It is really incredible to see how African people can use a lot of different materials, the materials they have around themselves. They can find the simplest way to make the minimum essential things fit for a purpose... 90% of what you need to make a building is already present on the site". In Africa Lacaton and Vassal learned from people’s resourcefulness and how existing materials are endlessly used, reused and hybridised with very little waste. It's what Koolhaas learned from Lagos too.

"E33s like contemporary, experimental art," I continued in the geodemographics piece. "They don't have much money, and spend what they have on eating out, buying magazines, and foreign travel. E31s are progressives, tolerant of diversity -- but paradoxically intolerant of people they see as intolerant. They're into "being" rather than "having", eat vegetarian or organic food, and read The Independent or The Guardian."

London may have only one straw bale house, but it has lots of exhibitions in which you might well see a Shigeru Ban structure, or places like the Architectural Association on Bedford Square, where, at any given point, someone is sure to be doing a thesis on cheap'n'cheerful "transitional architecture", or Sambo Mockbee's Rural Studio, or the aesthetics of Disaster Relief Housing. It has any number of contemporary art spaces in which you'll find a painstakingly-reconstructed Simon Starling barn or something similar. Even the super-elite Comme des Garcons at the Dover Street Market is full of shabby-chic huts.

The tendency of the bien-pensant bourgeois to identify with developing world-style eco-cheapness infuriates some right wingers. A call for information on Disaster Relief Housing on the ArchNet forum was met by lots of helpful links -- and some peevish whining from someone called Frank John Snelling, who told anyone who'd listen that "There is no such thing as society because it does not exist in real life... Rethink your use of the word social" and that the true pioneers of disaster relief housing were the Seabees -- the engineers of the US Marine Corps. "Architecture is not a social tool," says Snelling, who elsewhere spells out his belief that architecture is war because its main purpose is to defend us from hostile elements and people.

Another peevish right winger is British National Party chairman Nick Griffin, whose Humanised Cities manifesto wonders "how London would have benefited if the £1 billion pounds 'wasted' on the Millennium dome had been invested in a building as majestic as the Notre dame cathedral, the Crystal palace, the houses of parliament, or the Pantheon of Rome. A building of that nature would have stood for over a thousand years and would have permanently enhanced the city. Instead, we now have a hideous commercialist tent-like structure, which was never intended to survive beyond the millennium exhibition. Modern architectural styles have the appearance of being plain, cheap and temporary."



Shigeru Ban broke through internationally with his emergency house for survivors of the Kobe earthquake (it used cardboard tubes and sat on beer crates) in the Cities on the Move exhibition. He's now building the new Pompidou Centre in Metz, working out of a temporary office on the fifth floor of the Paris Pompidou (on condition that he give them the "temporary" structure when he finishes). Ban told curator Hans Ulrich Obrist his discovery of cardboard tubes as a building material had been a question of making a virtue out of necessity:

"I designed an exhibition for Alvar Aalto, one of my favorite architects. I wanted to design an Aalto-like interior for the exhibition, but I didn't have a large budget; I couldn't use a lot of wood like Aalto used. So I looked for other materials and I found the papertube in my studio; its brown color is very much like wood. I went to the factory and found out it's very inexpensive and they can make various sizes, lengths, thicknesses and diameters. I used it and it was very successful."

"When I started using papertube nobody was talking about "ecology" or "environmentally friendly" or "recycling", especially in Japan as we were heading into the "bubble period" , an economically crazy period. Everyone wondered why I was using such cheap materials. Now everybody is interested in the environment, so it's easier to discuss the idea."



The ethics of disaster relief are pretty solid, but the aesthetics aren't always recylable. The buildings being erected at Chinnangudi by the South Indian Federation of Fishermen Societies -- to replace communities washed away by the tsunami of 2005 -- will never feature in urbanism exhibits or trendy design courses. But they get the job done.

What happens when you recycle values created by (sometimes tragic) necessity and make them into an "aesthetic of virtue" for a monied but guilty affluent elite? Do these values contain virtue or just guilt? Do they become weapons on the battleground of a less-than-noble struggle between the high and low bourgeoisie (or between the left and right), mere means to internecine distinction? And what's achieved by inverting traditional models of architectural virtue -- by saying that cheap and flimsy are the new solid, that low quality is the new high quality, that temporariness is sustainability, and that you should preserve things by constantly remaking them? Surely we're going to hit some recursive circles pretty quickly -- cheapness will end up being justified by the logic of luxury, temporariness by the logic of permanence, and bad taste by the logic of good taste.

And just how many generations of upward mobility does it take for people to come full circle back to the lifestyles and looks of their ancestors?

One of the most beautiful examples of high-low empathy I know comes in the documentary For All Mankind, when Neil Armstrong remembers looking down from Apollo 11 at the Sahara and seeing nomads. "In Africa there are a lot of nomads out in the desert. On clear desert nights you see... these little yellow dots that represent fires from all these nomads camping out. And you realize the broad area that you've over here. And each of these little yellow dots represent people -- all humans in an environment which I would consider more strange than the environment they might think about... me."

The awesomeness of the memory makes the astronaut tangle his syntax, but we know what he means. Those nomads bounce him back a flattering image of who he is and how far he's come.

Comments

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Relevant link -- TABlog on the Atelier Bow Wow exhibtiion Practice of Lively Space (http://www.tokyoartbeat.com/tablog/entries.en/2007/04/the_glocal_detached_house_and.html):

"This exhibition is separated in two parts. The first half shows mobile and ‘portable’ architectural models such as a puppet-show theater, origami-folding archways, an outdoor inflatable room, a rickshaw-based classroom, a limousine-café and a small manga library you can easily fold up. The common thread that runs all through these projects is the re-definability of these structures: ‘users’ of these spaces can reconfigure them according to their own needs. In the second half, visitors can take a close look at the project models for roughly a dozen houses that the Atelier has realized in and out of Japan. Each of these meticulous crafts is modular and open, in the sense that they contain many spaces without presupposed functions assigned. Unlike the work of most contemporary post-modernist architect groups, these models are not built to impress with the marvel of their form – instead, they are meant to be built – beyond the completion of construction – around each user’s needs and creativity. Mobile, portable, reusable, reconfigurable: Atelier Bow Wow succeeds in showing that such ideas are keys to realize real liveliness and openness."

[grzeg.livejournal.com]

While sustainable architecture can be cheap and temporary architecture, Rural Studio’s approach seems borderline dis-genuine; when Mockbee was around, he wasn’t designing the same stuff for his bourgeois clients as he was for the poor. Though architecturally sound, his work for the wealthy did not make cheapness an ecological and aesthetic virtue (I am making this judgment from his interview on ABC’s “Nightline” in 2002). In this case, “fashion[able] aesthetic” and “sustainability” seemed a bit off-kilter…

[(Anonymous)]

People at the top and people at the bottom are more likely to share values than people in the middle. I've noticed this time and again. There are links between a slumming liberal bourgeois class (that's me!) and second generation immigrants, for instance.

I'm dubious. The liberal boho class may indeed exoticise second-generation immigrants, but I doubt that it works the other way around. You live in Neukolln and wear shabby clothes for wildly different reasons from the immigrants you're exoticising. How many of those immigrants wouldn't jump at the chance of a nice bungalow in some leafy suburb, working in some steady, well-paying job that would strike the boho as dullsville? There's a difference between choice and necessity. A superficial aesthetic may be (unwillingly) shared, but not values.

[grzeg.livejournal.com]

I will go on to suggest why the conservative right wingers are peevish: it becomes no longer an architecture of “fairness” but that of “equality”. What they are really suggesting is that when the bourgeois class adopts an aesthetic of the poor, they are forwarding an ideal of classless architecture – an architecture for everybody, even the poor. To the right, this sounds too much like communism. Instead, they would like the “fairness” of capitalism (those with the means and capital) to reflect in the very tectonics of the buildings, reinforcing the underlying structure of society, whether it’s with the Houses of Parliament or Notre Dame (signifiers of power, will, ego, and authority).

[lord-whimsy.livejournal.com]

Here's a "problematic" take on the subject from a doubtlessly extreme right-wing publication. (http://www.slate.com/id/2163969) An excerpt:

"Americans are hardly alone in favoring free-standing houses; indeed, they could be said to be typical. The first African town I visited, in 1982, was Makurdi, in south-central Nigeria. This sprawling city on the Benue River had about 100,000 inhabitants. I spent a lot of time walking the unpaved streets, blocked with uncollected garbage, which was the reason I was there—our team of Canadian consultants was advising the government on municipal sanitation. The residential neighborhoods consisted of low, free-standing houses on large lots. Although the houses were surrounded not by lawns and flower gardens but by vegetable plots and chicken coops, the meandering streets were shaded by huge trees.

"Cities composed largely of houses are common in sub-Saharan Africa, where, as in America, land is plentiful and population density is low. That is not the case in South Asia. But even there, given a choice, people have opted for houses. In New Delhi and Madras, well-to-do Indians occupy neighborhoods of free-standing villas; the poor live in slums—but in row houses. The same pattern is visible in Manila and Bangkok. In 1986 I visited a recently built housing development in Hong Kong's New Territories. The developer proudly showed me around Fairview Park, 5,000 small, semidetached "garden houses." Hong Kong itself is a city of apartments, but Fairview Park had many of the attributes of an Anglo-American garden suburb: landscaped streets lined by individual homes with garages and private gardens.
During the same trip I visited mainland China. In Shanghai, I was taken around extremely bleak apartment blocks belonging to the university. I asked my host, a professor, if he could show me any privately built housing. We drove to a residential neighborhood at the edge of the city. The owners were prosperous farmers who had invested their earnings in their homes—all free-standing houses. The spacious interiors were much larger than the two-room apartment that my host shared with his family. The economic revolution that would sweep the country was only just beginning. I doubt that the homes of university professors have changed much today, but for the growing entrepreneurial class, housing choices have expanded dramatically and now include American-style suburbs with single-family houses.

"Even in countries such as France, Germany, and Russia, where many people still live in apartments, the number of single-family houses is growing. "Polls consistently confirm that most Europeans, like most Americans, and indeed most people worldwide, would prefer to live in single-family houses on their own piece of land rather than in apartment buildings," writes University of Illinois professor Robert Bruegmann. It is the global nature of this desire, as much as the Anglo-Dutch tradition, that explains the popularity of single-family housing in the United States. Fast food, Hollywood movies, and American professional sports are a matter of taste, but most immigrants don't have to be sold on the idea of the individual house. It's a universal preference."

(Did he just say "Universal"? Uh oh!)

mini house

[(Anonymous)]

check out this article in sfgate today, funny how it applies. look at the mini wood stove, it is so cute!
http://sfgate.com/columnists/lloyd/

[imomus.livejournal.com]

The problem with this "universal preference" is that -- even if it were universally desired, which it isn't, and even if it were American in origin, which it isn't (bungalow is an Indian word) -- it simply isn't sustainable for the kind of population we have in the world. If everyone is going to live in one style, it needs to be the style of modesty, high density, efficiency and poverty; the style of the poor, not the style of the rich. This is why we can all learn something from the way the poor live.

And there must be something in the message of all these spiritual leaders (Christ, Buddha, Gandhi etc) about living austerely being good for you! It's not just good for the planet, it's (apparently) good for the soul!

Re: mini house

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Most building codes across the nation maintain a minimum-size requirement that prohibits the building of very small houses like Shafer's. Some homeowners associations and towns maintain this high standard in order to maintain high property values -- as well as keep out the affordable-housing riffraff.... Indeed, Shafer knows that some people might even see his house as a threat to their property values

I didn't know there were minimum size requirements in the US! Shocking! You could build a sort of conspiracy theory around it. Middle-class-as-conspiracy. Keep up house prices, keep out the poor and the immigrants. Keep up house sizes and prices, keep up the ludicrously over-inflated house prices, keep everyone working to pay off the lifelong mortgage.

Affordable and sustainable lifestyles, ironically, become utterly ruinous for a society organized like this.

[(Anonymous)]

The problem historically has been how this potentially pernicious message has been appropriated.
For example the Catholic church was only too willing to expound this ideal of self-denial whilst it extracted money from the poor by indulgences, church tithes etcetera.

Choosing to live frugally - valuing time over money - is commendable but the exoticisation of impecunity is not.
Such romanticisation invariably emanates from a self-assuming-liberal bourgeois who enjoy donning the vestments whilst being comfortably removed from the reality.
Genuine poverty is crap as anyone who has been there will tell you.
Regards - Thomas.

disaster relief

[zzberlin.livejournal.com]

Momus, how dare you write about the same things I've been thinking about? I THOUGHT OF IT FIRST

I've just been noticing that all the cool kids in the Bay Area are talking about getting off the grid. I go to cocktail parties, and the best conversations are about getting off the grid

So now I am looking for a husband who will get me off the grid!

http://zzberlin.livejournal.com/49705.html

[lord-whimsy.livejournal.com]

Whether or not it is the preference of choice may or may not be debatable (although my Korean and Turkish neighbors might have a thing or two to say about it), but of course no one is making an argument that it is sustainable--at our current alarmingly high populations, no living style truly is. At the moment I see no safe means of descent.

I'd say the managability of modest living is without question life-enriching, and allows one greater latitude in one's work and leisure; however, my personal experience with 'austere' living while growing up--its cultural, educational and material privations--has innoculated me against such romantic notions. Nothing wrong with living like an aristocrat without the money, but in general I have very little sympathy for slumming. There's a condescension in it I find distasteful. Bourgeois aspiration and love of immediate comforts and modest pleasures is a bit more honest.

I have to say that I fail to see what is so right wing about the Humanized Cities (http://www.bnp.org.uk/articles/humanising_cities3.htm) manifesto, other than it wasn't proposed by a clever architect, critic or theorist, and takes into consideration the 99% of humanity who have concrete obligations to their work, their families, and their communities. Green space? Integration with natural environments? Clean Air? If this is 'right wing', then to hell with the left, which is often openly prejudiced and even hostile to the average working family, and seems to busy itself with arid theories and unworkable solutions:

"The most pleasant and treasured urban environments do not appear to be those that offer their inhabitants huge mansion houses, private swimming pools, cars, private jets, big supermarkets or any of the other 'junk' which modern economists insist that we cannot live happily without."

"urban environments would benefit from more green spaces and biodiversity. Most of us have a great fondness for plants, animals and biodiverse environments. Many of us despair at the fact that our living spaces are so grey and lifeless."

"a strong egalitarian community, mutual support and a surrounding group of people who are known and trusted. This is the 'small-village' social environment, which has been all but obliterated from modern society."

"Cosy, Human-Scale Streets and Areas that are free from Road Traffic."

"People are heartedly sick of characterless housing estates, smoggy traffic-filled tarmac roads and the ugly modernist and concrete architecture that emerged from cultural Marxism and commercialism. British cities are now full of bland, commercialist developments, which clog our living spaces and degrade the visual attractiveness of our urban environments."

"People long for an environment that brings them closer to nature and to meadows, woodlands, wildlife, natural flowing water and air that smells of life, rather than exhaust fumes."

"Japanese researchers have discovered that the Human mind and body is surprisingly sensitive to the chemical contents of the air.... Studies have revealed that exposure to woodland environments for as little as twenty minutes allows diabetic patients to achieve stable blood sugar levels for up to one hour afterward. Similarly positive effects can be observed amongst patients with high blood pressure."

"The city would be a living ecosystem, with human habitation built into it, instead of displacing it."

"bring the local community together for cultural events and engage local people in common, community-building projects."

What if this were the Japanese slow lifers saying all this? And frankly, does the theory behind all this need to be clever to be sensible? I have a hard time believing that the vast majority of hardworking people who prefer humane environments for themselves and their families are to be sneered at as bourgeois right-wing ideologues, simply because architects and city planners are too indoctrinated with arid theorizing and besotted with satisfying their own professional egos to heed the public's needs and desires. When people are prevented from improving their surroundings by arrogant technocrats, it's hardly any wonder that people get peevish.

[zzberlin.livejournal.com]

<< Such romanticisation invariably emanates from a self-assuming-liberal bourgeois who enjoy donning the vestments whilst being comfortably removed from the reality >>

Just because we romanticize it doesn't mean we cannot value it

I grew up comparatively poor in my neighborhood. When I outgrew my swimsuit, it was up to me to steal one that would fit me. But I was never hungry and was well-educated

Now I see that the less I have, the happier I am. I'm almost becoming compulsive about it, like that guy I read about in the New Yorker, Zell Kravinsky (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zell_Kravinsky), who wants to give his last kidney away. His loved ones hate him for being so selfish, for wanting to give his health away, and die sooner. But I kind of get where he's coming from. The more you give, the better it feels. You almost become greedy about giving it away (I think the Buddhists call this spiritual materialism)

One of my exes used to say, how come the people that emulate Jesus don't give all their stuff away, like he did? I think that's a pretty good question

your sarcasm is misplaced

[zzberlin.livejournal.com]

<< Keep up house prices, keep out the poor and the immigrants. Keep up house sizes and prices, keep up the ludicrously over-inflated house prices, keep everyone working to pay off the lifelong mortgage. >>

Momus, you're behind the curve on U.S. culture. We are much more progressive than you realize. I'm sorry to repeat myself, but as I said in another post here, a lot of people are looking at getting off the fucking grid over here. They're already using WVO to power their vehicles, in fact, Jim Mason is using waste coffee grounds to power his vehicles now. We are ahead of you, in Berlin, I think, because we've got smarter, more motivated people over here

Catch up on your reading, Momus, before you go disparaging us like this

http://whatiamupto.com/gasification/

Cardboard architecture.

[ashleyandel.livejournal.com]

I have been seeing a lot of cardboard architecture lately, and it's especially exciting for the homeless, but one design that really made me take note was this one building (still in the conceptual stage, I believe) that is made up of about five swivelling floors with open ends that let the wind pass through, causing each floor to rotate in different ways. The building could change in shape as it went, and would be much more entertaining than any revolving restaurant, not to mention being almost as hard to live in as the Reversible Destiny lofts...

a'a

Re: disaster relief

[(Anonymous)]

Whatever, just don't get off your meds.

Re: mini house

[grzeg.livejournal.com]

"No man who owns his own house and lot can be a Communist. He has too much to do." - William Levitt

It’s not a theory, it’s the truth: both Neutra (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Neutra) and Levitt (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Levitt) felt that the duration for which they were designing for was thirty years – the duration of the average mortgage. Once your mortgage was paid off, guess what? Your house was at the end of its lifespan: time to buy another house!

We, arguably, don’t dwell in our homes anymore… we consume them…

[violet-hemlock.livejournal.com]

I just got home from helping de-install a Teddy Cruz piece...His work is all about the aesthetic and function of the shanty towns in Tijuana....I think that the new interests in these kind of (seemingly)cheap materials is a way to deal with all of the Global detritus washing up on the shores of the bourgeois.

[hello-mike.livejournal.com]

And what's achieved by inverting traditional models of architectural virtue -- by saying that cheap and flimsy are the new solid, that low quality is the new high quality, that temporariness is sustainability, and that you should preserve things by constantly remaking them?

I'm not sure what to search for to find it, but this reminds me of the post you once made discussing the fact that certain Japanese monasteries -- at least I think they were Japanese, and I think they were monasteries -- are eternally torn down and rebuilt. It is permanent, in that it is always there, but it is constantly renewed and redone and refreshed.

It struck me, at the time, as such a healthy and impressive thing to do, tradition without being stuck in the same thing, tying oneself to history without tying oneself to the oppressive weight of preservation and the thick mud of fighting change rather than embracing renewal.

It is beautiful that the fires of the nomads are visible in space. The sincerity of humanity and human existence that that represents. Purity of existence is hard to find. Maybe that constant process of temporary-yet-permanent renewal aids somewhat in that purity. By facing the temporal qualities of the things around you, you have to face the temporality of everything else, too. Your self, your clothes, your pretensions, your location, your friends, your knowledge.

Interesting way to end it, though. The flattery of the self. Moneyed guilt. I moved from E31 to E33 last year, and I definitely get it. But I'm with Thomas de Zengotita: we're mediated, and we can't go back now, because even the act of going back is too conscious. The blob has got us.

The most corporate, self-conscious, marketing- and brand-driven, aggressive industry I ever have worked in was a breast cancer research foundation. Maybe it's because there was no product to complicate it -- it's all in the idea. The brand. Mindshare. It was pretty disillusioning.

But I am consciously (and self-consciously) certain that the idea of renewal is good. If we could ever sell the idea of less, of simplicity and slowness, as a prized virtue, it would do a lot of good. But it is still selling. Perhaps capitalism really does affect the development of the mind, though, and so perhaps this is all we can do. Make it sexy and make it sell and make it self-conscious even if it is ultimately an objective good. Perhaps in a democratized world where it takes great groundswells of people to make real change, everything must necessarily be a fad. Like activating neurons, the idea sweeps through the network of human interaction, causes a change, and then equilibrium is re-established.

Though, when you activate neurons a certain way, enough times, they become connected. Wired. And you've learned something.