The official architecture of paranoia

[imomus]

Hisae and I took a couple of our favourite magazines to lunch yesterday -- 032c and the excellent new interiors magazine Apartamento. Right after a little feature by me about a Sister Corita art show, 032c runs a very interesting article by Niklas Maak (arts writer for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung) giving the ugly new American Embassy in Berlin a slamming ahead of its official July 4th opening by President Bush.

Apartamento (read Shift's interview with its creators here) is "an everyday life interiors magazine", which means it consists of colour photos, printed on matt paper, of the spaces people live in. Not styled, not filled with shiny new products, just quietly and carefully observed, patina, scratches and all. Short texts interview people like Elein Fleiss and Mike Mills about their habitats. It's a great read, and the reason why brings us back to Niklas Maak's article about the American Embassy in 032c. Rooted in aesthetics, these articles inevitably go beyond into the realm of ethical and political values.



Just as a person's apartment expresses how he or she feels about life, an embassy building projects the beliefs and values of the nation it represents. That's part of its function, along with diplomacy and the administration of entry and exit. But, for Maak, the new Berlin embassy shares with the new US embassy in Baghdad a bunker mentality and a horror at the very idea of public space and the other. In negotiations with the German government, the Americans failed to get permission to turn Pariser Platz into a restricted zone filled with 30 metre security fences, but succeeded in getting Berlin to move Behrenstrasse some way to the south, to increase the gap between the embassy building and passing traffic.



"There are few modern buildings -- apart from military bunkers and pesticide testing centers -- that present such a hysterically buttoned-up image to the public as this embassy," says Maak, echoing Martin Kemp's view in The Guardian that the Baghdad embassy is "a monster" which can hardly be dignified with the name of architecture. Both writers, however, see the embassies as sadly successful visual metaphors for what the US has become.

"In retrospect," writes Kemp, "we should have seen the signs in the fortified villas of Hollywood and the gated communities that insulate growing numbers of the American rich from the majority of citizens in their country. The failure of a nation even to live in tense comfort with itself provides not the slightest encouragement that its values can be exported to societies with very different cultures."



Maak's reading of the Berlin building draws a similar message: "Public spaces, which once seemed to promise so much, are now seen as a threat. The unknown and the stranger, formerly considered as a projection screen for the most beautiful collective and private fantasies, could be a terrorist, or have AIDS, or be carrying the menaces of globalization: factory closures, floods of immigrants, bird flu."

The opening of this peculiarly closed American embassy in Europe hits newspapers at pretty much the same time as the announcement by Homeland Security honcho Michael Chertoff that Europeans -- even those exercising their right to visit the US under the visa waiver scheme -- will henceforth have to register details about their health, criminal records and the purposes of their proposed visit to the US over the internet 48 hours before traveling. This is added to recent additional fingerprinting and photography requirements.

According to Maak, this policy is already encoded in the Berlin building: "The American Embassy does not present the image of a country that used to be a melting pot of peoples from all around the world, a place for new beginnings and promising futures. This embassy instead presents the image of a country traumatized by 9/11 and the consequences of globalization, a nation so heavily armoured that it can no longer perceive the world outside."

To German eyes, the embassy's projection of American values is a negative one. "In all its details," says Maak, "the new embassy displays a shoddiness of materials and workmanship that is symptomatic of the United States in almost all product groups. Anyone who has ever seen the interior of a normal American car has trouble believing that something like that could seriously be produced by one of the world's leading industrialized nations... with the exception of Apple computers, Nike shoes and the iPod, there is hardly a modern American industrial product out there that is setting new visual standards today."



The embassy windows "look as if they were purchased by a bankrupt shack owner at a Home Depot store somewhere in the Midwest to fix up his home for winter". But there's a kind of honesty in this determined American failure to impress or charm. According to Maak, "the country has taken a piece of its own center, a provincial government office from New Jersey, and plonked it onto Pariser Platz to show Germans what America really looks like: fearful, stale, and nostalgic."

Meanwhile, BBC Radio 4's psychology magazine programme All In The Mind has an interesting feature this week on the relationship between paranoia and public space. Presenter Claudia Hammond examines "the unfounded fear that people are deliberately trying to harm you". Such symptoms, she says, can signal serious mental health problems like schizophrenia. But new research conducted at the Institute of Psychiatry in London suggests that up to a third of all Britons have paranoid suspicions about other people, making such thoughts, if not correct, at least "normal".

Dr Daniel Freeman from the Institute put together a virtual subway carriage full of avatars showing neutral expressions, then asked experimental subjects -- after four minutes with these projections -- to describe their impressions of the "attitudes" of these silent virtual strangers towards them. The questionnaire found that about one in three thought someone was staring at them in order to upset them, or trying to isolate them.

Dr Freeman was understanding; this wasn't always irrational. "Paranoia probably stems from our normal judgements about whether to trust or mistrust," he told the BBC. "Paranoia only becomes a problem when it becomes exaggerated."

Comments

[nedofbaker.livejournal.com]

Momus, I enjoy reading your thoughtful posts on your blog, but this one is quite a stretch.

"Just as a person's apartment expresses how he or she feels about life, an embassy building projects the beliefs and values of the nation it represents."

To be more accurate, the embassy reflects the beliefs and values of just those tasked with building the embassy. The embassy reflects the values of the nation as a whole only to the extent to which that group represents the entire nation. The concerns of Department of State employees in the course of their work certainly differ from whatever the standard set of American values typically are.

It is probably true that some Americans suffer from a bunker mentality these days, especially those in government responsible for defending the country (and thus their own careers -- sometimes this is just Cover Your Ass security (http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2007/02/cya_security_1.html)), but drawing this conclusion based on the architecture of the embassy buildings is stretching it pretty thin. Your quotes from Martin Kemp push the boundaries of logic even further. Do you really think it is reasonable to characterize all Americans as so neurotic?

I haven't had a chance to watch the BBC video yet, but the "study" done by Dr Daniel Freeman sounds entirely unscientific. How closely do our feelings toward avatars represent our feelings toward real human beings? I wonder if the paranoia of the subjects can simply be explained by the Uncanny Valley? (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny_valley)

[imomus.livejournal.com]

To be more accurate, the embassy reflects the beliefs and values of just those tasked with building the embassy.

This takes literalism and individualism and empiricism to absolutely stubborn lengths. It also denies the possibility of metonymy -- that a part could ever represent a whole. And of course, given this kind of atomist logic, everything falls apart -- culture, science.

Naturally you suspect Dr Daniel Freeman's experiment, because for you it cannot say anything more than how an experimental subject feels about avatars in the lab. Nothing can ever be anything more than what it literally is. Nothing can represent. Language, for you, must be one big lie! And politics!

[imomus.livejournal.com]

To clarify: you seem to be rejecting metonymic relationships -- the relationships that make representation possible -- based on the understanding that they're saying x = y, where x is just one thing and y is many. You mistrust that because you see -- correctly -- that x is not y.

But the metonymic relationship is much better represented by the formula Let x = y. In other words, the parties involved agree, contractually, to suspend their disbelief, and let one thing stand for another. That's why Dr Freeman's experiment works. The parties involved agree to act as if his lab decor is a real subway carriage and his video projections real passengers. Having suspended their disbelief, they can relate their feelings -- their projections onto the projections -- usefully to the psychologist.

[desant012.livejournal.com]

That's the difference with science, though ... what is, is. Results must be replicated in experiments, etc--suggestions, implicity, etc., are just vague hypotheses. Psychology isn't considered a real science for that reason, it can almost never get past the hypothesis stage of the scientific method; neuroscientists and poets offer better glimpses into the human mind than psychologists today.

You can't apply humanities style elasticity to science, because then it would no longer be science. Post-modernism + science is what gave us creationism, global warming denial, and neo-conservatism.

[nedofbaker.livejournal.com]

Don't be silly. I don't doubt that a part can represent a whole -- I just don't assume that every part represents the whole!

[nedofbaker.livejournal.com]

I said that Dr. Freeman's experiment was unscientific because no matter how much the subjects think they believe "Let X = Y" (in this case "Let avatars = real human beings"), the subjects will naturally be affected differently by X than by Y.

However, I think I'm belaboring the point here. I found your original post meaningful and thought-provoking, so there is value in pondering these relationships. But just as we should be open-minded in tracing this path from architecture to cultural values, we must also be willing to identify and reject those parts of the analysis that don't hold up to scrutiny.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Well, I certainly don't think that embassy architecture inevitably succeeds in summing up the cultural values of the nation it represents -- "Dutch openness" or whatever. It's more of an aspiration to represent aspirations. And there's no scientific method that I know of to measure cultural aspiration. Not even in the so-called "social sciences". I think you're using the wrong set of tools here.

I'm glad you found it an interesting topic, though.

[microworlds.livejournal.com]

Your tone sounds like religious/Republican fanaticism, seriously, it's boggling my mind. My boss had an email open today that I quickly glanced at, it was from his father, that had the same exact tone as this and it was about the Vietnam War. Except you didn't write in huge, bold, red and blue font with billions of exclamation points!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Why do you get so worked up about America? It's understandable that there are some aspects of America that you despise, but come on, you clearly accused me of being part of those that skipped over Just as a person's apartment expresses how he or she feels about life, an embassy building projects the beliefs and values of the nation it represents. and it really bugs me when you lump a part as a whole as nedofbaker said. Remember that whole tirade I had a few months ago? That was spurned on by your ignorance and your immense generalizations to make a point in your mind that doesn't make any sense outside of it. I realize that you are a fortress yourself; you'll never change, no matter how much the outside tries to convince you that your points are flawed.

GOD, tl;dr version: I hate it when you make generalizations and jump to conclusions like this and I just hate you sometimes and wish you would admit that you make mistakes

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Michelle, that was being said -- across your comment -- to Whimsy. You misunderstood it as being directed to you because your comment stood in between.

[microworlds.livejournal.com]

What was being said in the rest of the comment still stands.

[(Anonymous)]

as a faithful, yet anonymous, reader of this blog, i'm quite amazed by how momus never ever seems to be "wrong" about anything. for every single opposing comment, momus never admits even the possibility of him being a bit far out.

which is intriguing! momus, how come you are always so sure of being "right"?

[(Anonymous)]

Oh Jesus, purrlese don't start him off again!