Case Study Homes

[imomus]

Watching Voyage Big City Life Tokyo, a French documentary looking at six Tokyo interiors, I couldn't help remembering Robert Venturi's maxim "less is a bore". With the honourable exception of Audrey Fondecave's Nakameguro house, the Tokyo living spaces shown are cold, anal, expensive and depressingly 80s-minimalist, devoid of colour, decoration, flashes of imagination, even signs of habitation. For the most part, they look like pricey, uninspired furniture outlets; upmarket, uptight and bourgeois. "Everything in a line, and simple, I think that's the style of our time," says furniture designer Fumio Takashima.



He's wrong. "Everything in a line, and simple" -- with excessive fear of clutter, decoration, and irregularity -- is not the style of our time. It's Modernism, and it began roughly a hundred years ago and ended about fifty years ago. Venturi, in fact, was one of the first to end the style, hailing the haphazard clutter and irrational cheerfulness of Californian strip signage. His motto about less being a bore became one of the key statements of Postmodernism. If we're now in a new era that dares to re-invent Modernism, we're attracted to its provincial quirks (see yesterday's entry on Vladimir Ossipoff) and a certain peely-queasy historical patina it's acquired.



So what would I champion as "the style of our time", if this French documentary got it so wrong? Well, I think the style of our time -- certainly the thing that catches my eye and inspires me -- is a different form of clutter. Not Venturi's postwar American commercial clutter of donut stalls and cheap motels, but the developing world clutter of shanty towns and street food. These are the new global grassroots of style, and advanced designers like Mike Meiré are right to be taking cues from them, and to be utterly bored with the kind of anal minimalism on display in the french documentary on Tokyo.



A case study? Well, how about Peter Bialobrzeski's series Case Study Homes? Bialobrzeski took the pictures illustrating this entry early last year in the Philippines, at the Baseco compound, a shanty camp located at a shipyard on the Pasig River, near Manila's port. The pictures, taken with a 4x5 format camera and currently on show in an exhibition at L.A. Galerie Lothar Albrecht in Frankfurt, have a double function. They show the conditions of life for approximately 45% of the population of Manila, who live in substandard squat conditions. But they also inspire aesthetically, displaying amazing inventiveness and endless formal variation.



Now, from a certain perspective, to declare a shanty town beautiful, inspiring or "the style of our time" seems amoral, even immoral -- an endorsement of poverty. It's a bit like defending child cotton picking in Uzbekistan or wondering why we can't all live in an "optimal breeding tunnel" designed for cattle. Surely, runs this argument, we ought to be lifting everyone out of poverty, not taking tips from it? At the weekend one disgruntled Anon commented: "Why does Momus refuse to make and spend money? ...I've never quite worked out how cheap = "more noble" or even "left wing". And it sure isn't "trendy". There are as many cliches in the flea market bars as there are in wine bars."



My answer is that "Ferraris for all" just doesn't work in a world where we're already consuming too many resources. At some point we need to take a leaf from the book of the poor. That doesn't mean live in shanty towns, but it does mean live more modestly, and be more resourcefully resource-sparing. Shanty towns are exemplary recyclers, and have extremely modest environmental footprints. Then there are the aesthetic arguments. To me, this stuff looks very interesting, and I'd like to see it become (as Mike Meiré and others are helping it become) the style of our times. I'd also like it to be improved so that it, you know, keeps the rain out. Perhaps some ingenious Japanese architects (Shigeru Ban has been on the case for decades, so have Lacaton and Vassal) have some ideas about how to make better dwellings out of paper, card, beercrates and bamboo? Perhaps -- should this style really be embraced globally -- some of those ideas will trickle down to Manila, and help shanty town dwellers there keep the rain out?

What won't help them, for sure, is the argument that they should all aim to drive Ferraris. If the style of the global poor (which, Bialobrzeski's photos show, is not an impoverished style, aesthetically speaking) becomes the style of our times, a wider embrace of improved versions of these forms and techniques will, I think, end up helping the poor -- and the world -- a lot more than telling them the style of the rich can somehow become their style. I'm as sick of that particular lie as I'm bored with minimalism.

Comments

Re: Architecture, Authority and Exploitation

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I think people are slightly misunderstanding my argument here. My point is that shanty towns -- which are quite literally ghetto-ised -- can come in from the cold if we admit that they may have something to teach us, and if they can become, in a sense, models or "case study houses". That can happen for environmental-sustainability reasons, or for aesthetic reasons. But even admitting that shanty towns exist can help to put these invisible places on the map, which leads to local and national governments and aid organisations formulating policies which allow them some de facto legitimacy, zone them, hook them up to water and garbage systems, improve their infrastructure, and so on. An interest from top-level architects and designers will also lead, inevitably, to design ideas which can be applied in these conditions, like Shigeru Ban's makeshift "earthquake huts" designed to house people displaced by the Kobe earthquake. We're already seeing these benefits in things like the Design Indaba: Freedom Park (http://imomus.livejournal.com/434548.html) project, in which international architects made low-cost structures for a shanty town outside Cape Town.

Sure, shanty towns are a product of capitalism, but paying them no attention helps no-one. There are both good and bad things about them; they can be improved by our attention, and our own homes can be improved by paying them attention too.

Re: Architecture, Authority and Exploitation

[krskrft.livejournal.com]

And then, of course, the question becomes: if all of these structural/infrastructural improvements are granted, at what point is a shanty no longer a shanty, a shantytown no longer a shantytown?

I mean, is it really so bad to argue that there are objectively "better" places where shanty dwellers could be living? I would consider myself solidly relativist in my beliefs and tendencies, but I find it hard to square with the notion that it's either "shanty" or "Ferrari aspiration," with absolutely no space in between.

Re: Architecture, Authority and Exploitation

[grzeg.livejournal.com]

No one is denying that shanty towns cannot teach us; okay, another case study:

Approximately 25% of Rio’s population lives in favelas. In the 90’s, government programs were established to provide basic infrastructure and hygiene (electricity, potable water, garbage disposal, skill-training centers, kindergartens, sport facilities, community centers…). They sought to erase the dividing line between the unpaved hillside shanty towns and the paved walkways of the middle and upper class neighborhoods. The programs also sought to understand the communal and aesthetic value of the bairros (neighborhoods) and rid them of the stigma of ghetto-hood. With a number of highly esteemed local architects and firms to find solutions in conjunction with community input, instead of seeking to eliminate favelas, they studied the complexities, informalities, spatial logics and structures of the existing neighborhoods. Along with on-going dialogue, the programs were designed and adapted to the communities’ topographic, ecological, local cultural and symbolic systems.

However, to set up shantytowns as poster-children of ways of living, for the developed world or otherwise, is really an indirect and nominal way of improving anyone’s lives. Bialobrzeski's photos show, though brings attention to the problem, represents it in such a way that the aesthetics of the Manila-poor’s architecture and lifestyle becomes fetishized; even to the extreme as something that if adopted, can be a show of solidarity or a model of post-materialist reason. The only way this could be a “style of our times” is that today so much of the world’s population lives in those conditions.

No one is denying the developed world should be more frugal and mindful of their ecological footprint. Global warming and the financial crisis are proof enough. But, being modest by using inexpensive material or sustainable by recycling our garbage is not the same type of modesty and sustainability as using found material discarded by the excessively rich. It’s ingenuous to say “we should be more like them” when we are the cause of the condition they are in. Design Indaba doesn’t romanticize or aestheticize the poor, and neither should we.

Re: Architecture, Authority and Exploitation

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I'm mostly with you here, but I think you understate the extent to which self-building a cheap but effective structure on land "nobody owns" has been the condition of mankind for millennia. Our incredibly complex ownership and zoning regulations and our ridiculously inflated house prices may pose as much of a problem for basic human existence (ie years of pointless toil to pay for basic, but overpriced, shelter and amenities) as the substandard dwellings of the favela.

Re: Architecture, Authority and Exploitation

[grzeg.livejournal.com]

It may have been a condition for millennia, but land ownership has historically also been a means of legitimizing one’s citizenship and existence/representation in the state, be it feudal Europe, homestead United States, or modern South Africa. Land and the houses on them are still ridiculously precious commodities and to transcend that by not having to worry about land ownership today signifies the sort of post-materialist lifestyle made possible only in the developed world, through a process of modernization, plus economical and political stabilization.

Since South Africa was mentioned, many of the slum dwellers have rights to their land, which was fought so hard for in the Apartheid era. In places like Kliptown, Soweto, and Alexandra, slums of or near Johannesburg, there are programs where they would relocate people from the slums to different areas so that the government and/or NGOs can upgrade the on-ground infrastructure and housing. Trouble is people do not want to relocate: family’s can subdivide there already small bit of land to rent to other relocants, so it’s hard to get rid of informal housing when extra money can be made. Self-building a cheap but effective structure means only so much when the material of the roofs are made of asbestos, which they are still trying to replace for zinc or steel corrugated ones.

At the other end of the spectrum, our Western world developed suburban track housing isn’t the solution either…