No house is a hero to its cleaner
Jul. 15th, 2009 12:01 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
imomusDuring the cultural revolution, Chairman Mao pretended to "let a hundred flowers bloom" -- only to use the resultant openness to find out exactly who his enemies were. I won't say yesterday's Flipwhack Metaloop poll was anything like that, but LiveJournal's extremely detailed feedback on who'd said what did tempt me to investigate the blogs of the critical minority who thought I was, for instance, relentlessly self-promoting. Would someone who thought I was self-promoting be promoting themselves on their blog? What kind of self-effacing culture would they be talking about?
I received a deliciously appropriate answer to that question from one Click Dissenter's blog -- a ringing endorsement of a documentary called Koolhaas Houselife, which looks at the Dutch architect's 1998 Bordeaux house not from the perspective of the owner (a disabled writer whose wheelchair necessitates the house's centrepiece, a vast hydraulic floor that rises and falls across acres of bookshelves like a cherry-picker) but of the housemaid, a plump and fussy cleaner who's far from impressed by the grey, cerebral minimalist slab. I rushed to download the film from my favourite clandestine server.
Now, I love films about architecture -- the kind featured on 0300TV, for instance, or the structuralist kind made by Heinz Emigholz. But Houselife is a step beyond -- or do I mean below? -- other films about architecture, because it concentrates not on the intellectual or utopian blah that characterises much architecture-talk, but on the daily task of vacuuming and dusting the house, catching the drips when it rains, and fixing the broken entry system. This is history written not by the winners but by the cleaners. As such, it's the perfect film for someone who wants to burst an intellectual's self-justifying bubble.
Houselife sees Koolhaas' building from the perspective of Guadalupe Acedo, the frank, no-nonsense maid, as she dusts and vacuums. We see not only the public areas, designed to impress with their originality, but also the maid's own quarters, a humdrum, cramped little flat in a hidden corner of the house, stuffed with depressingly standard equipment and fittings bought, no doubt, from a local branch of Darty. We also hear the maid's opinion of the house she looks after: she wouldn't have any house of her own that grey and that stark, she says. Just as no man is a hero to his wife, so no house is a hero to its cleaner.
The Houselife trailer contains nods to the utopian-dystopian tension in two famous films about architecture and technology, Tati's Mon Oncle and Kubrick's 2001. But the Bordeaux house can't help reminding us, also, of the writer's house in A Clockwork Orange, scene of a terrible rape. The writer in that film is, like the invisible owner of the Bordeaux house, confined to a wheelchair after one too many visits from Alex and his droogs. This misfortune somehow throws his utopian-modern house into much darker relief, giving the enviable setting a heavy dramatic irony. There are also shades of Dr Steven Hawking in the way technology here is an impressive -- but finally inadequate -- substitute for an able-bodiedness most of us take for granted.
Of course, theory trickles back into a film admirably void of it the way rain trickles into a dream house through cracks. It's easy, for instance, to see Houselife as an example of what Koolhaas himself has called post-occupancy design, which I've defined as "the stuff that happens to design after it’s left the designer’s workshop (and architecture after it’s left the studio)... the real test of its quality and character. Occupancy and use shouldn’t see the designer and the architect melting away. They should stick around, take notes, and take photos. The processes of time and decay can be beautiful. The way people use stuff and adapt it can be instructive."
In an interview on the Houselife DVD, Koolhaas himself tries to combat the maid's acerbic disrespect. Far from representing reality, Koolhaas says in this clip, the maid is a sort of ideologue, a Schweikian demagogue: "You see two systems colliding, the systems of the platonic conception of cleaning with the platonic conception of architecture. It's not necessarily daily life confronting an exceptional structure, it's two ideologies confronting each other."
I think he's right, but I can't help finding it satisfying to see an extraordinary building mopped down to size by a waddling, polka-dotted housemaid -- its nemesis, apotheosis, and household goddess. If Koolhaas represents the power of architecture, Acedo is a force of nature; you might as well try to resist the weather.
I received a deliciously appropriate answer to that question from one Click Dissenter's blog -- a ringing endorsement of a documentary called Koolhaas Houselife, which looks at the Dutch architect's 1998 Bordeaux house not from the perspective of the owner (a disabled writer whose wheelchair necessitates the house's centrepiece, a vast hydraulic floor that rises and falls across acres of bookshelves like a cherry-picker) but of the housemaid, a plump and fussy cleaner who's far from impressed by the grey, cerebral minimalist slab. I rushed to download the film from my favourite clandestine server.
Now, I love films about architecture -- the kind featured on 0300TV, for instance, or the structuralist kind made by Heinz Emigholz. But Houselife is a step beyond -- or do I mean below? -- other films about architecture, because it concentrates not on the intellectual or utopian blah that characterises much architecture-talk, but on the daily task of vacuuming and dusting the house, catching the drips when it rains, and fixing the broken entry system. This is history written not by the winners but by the cleaners. As such, it's the perfect film for someone who wants to burst an intellectual's self-justifying bubble.
Houselife sees Koolhaas' building from the perspective of Guadalupe Acedo, the frank, no-nonsense maid, as she dusts and vacuums. We see not only the public areas, designed to impress with their originality, but also the maid's own quarters, a humdrum, cramped little flat in a hidden corner of the house, stuffed with depressingly standard equipment and fittings bought, no doubt, from a local branch of Darty. We also hear the maid's opinion of the house she looks after: she wouldn't have any house of her own that grey and that stark, she says. Just as no man is a hero to his wife, so no house is a hero to its cleaner.The Houselife trailer contains nods to the utopian-dystopian tension in two famous films about architecture and technology, Tati's Mon Oncle and Kubrick's 2001. But the Bordeaux house can't help reminding us, also, of the writer's house in A Clockwork Orange, scene of a terrible rape. The writer in that film is, like the invisible owner of the Bordeaux house, confined to a wheelchair after one too many visits from Alex and his droogs. This misfortune somehow throws his utopian-modern house into much darker relief, giving the enviable setting a heavy dramatic irony. There are also shades of Dr Steven Hawking in the way technology here is an impressive -- but finally inadequate -- substitute for an able-bodiedness most of us take for granted.
Of course, theory trickles back into a film admirably void of it the way rain trickles into a dream house through cracks. It's easy, for instance, to see Houselife as an example of what Koolhaas himself has called post-occupancy design, which I've defined as "the stuff that happens to design after it’s left the designer’s workshop (and architecture after it’s left the studio)... the real test of its quality and character. Occupancy and use shouldn’t see the designer and the architect melting away. They should stick around, take notes, and take photos. The processes of time and decay can be beautiful. The way people use stuff and adapt it can be instructive."
In an interview on the Houselife DVD, Koolhaas himself tries to combat the maid's acerbic disrespect. Far from representing reality, Koolhaas says in this clip, the maid is a sort of ideologue, a Schweikian demagogue: "You see two systems colliding, the systems of the platonic conception of cleaning with the platonic conception of architecture. It's not necessarily daily life confronting an exceptional structure, it's two ideologies confronting each other."I think he's right, but I can't help finding it satisfying to see an extraordinary building mopped down to size by a waddling, polka-dotted housemaid -- its nemesis, apotheosis, and household goddess. If Koolhaas represents the power of architecture, Acedo is a force of nature; you might as well try to resist the weather.
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(no subject)
Date: 2009-07-15 11:16 am (UTC)(And after this entry, I had to go back and answer your poll. Occasionally my answers might sound "negative", but you shoehorned me into those small categories of answers. Which was probably your point ... but that's what happened.)
so last year dude
Date: 2009-07-15 11:23 am (UTC)Re: so last year dude
Date: 2009-07-15 11:55 am (UTC)But that's the sum total of my thoughts on Dash: "He stuck a needle in his arm and lives and breathes no more". I need to have more thoughts about something before I want to write about it. And the Koolhaas film -- which I wasn't privileged to see at the Venice Architecture Biennial, as perhaps you were -- gave me more thoughts.
Re: dude's last year...
Date: 2009-07-15 12:12 pm (UTC)Re: dude's last year...
Date: 2009-07-15 12:14 pm (UTC)*high five*
Re: dude's last year...
Date: 2009-07-15 02:06 pm (UTC)Re: dude's last year...
Date: 2009-07-15 02:22 pm (UTC)Re: dude's last year...
Date: 2009-07-15 03:27 pm (UTC)Re: dude's last year...
Date: 2009-07-15 03:58 pm (UTC)Re: dude's last year...
Date: 2009-07-15 04:19 pm (UTC)The tattooed, beardy New York based artist described as as one of "Warhol’s Children" who went into rehab but eventually died of an overdose.
Maybe there's some decent art and an interesting person behind the hackneyed frontispiece of his trendy life.
Re: dude's last year...
Date: 2009-07-15 05:58 pm (UTC)"how avoid a cliched death"
i want it on my desk tomorrow morning! I MEAN...YESTERDAY!
Snowfall
Date: 2009-07-15 12:24 pm (UTC)Re: so last year dude
Date: 2009-07-15 02:59 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-07-15 02:33 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-07-15 02:52 pm (UTC)Everyone here needs to read "The Design of Everyday Things" by Donald Norman and "How Buildings Learn" by Stewart Brand.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-07-15 02:51 pm (UTC)Basically, they've put an ordinary cleaner inside a designer house. She doesn't get it, the expert accuses her of demagoguery -- the divide between elite and plebeian is obvious and a little boring.
If I were to involve a cleaner in a film about architecture and interior design I would want to observe how she cleaned and the obstacles that environment presented. Based on those observations I would go about designing a space from a cleaners perspective, completely utilitarian in its approach. You might be thinking that Minimalism is the obvious choice for the cleaner who wants an easy life, but what I'd be interested in is a design where absolutely no regard would be given to aesthetics. Completely black floors that don't show dirt; storage attached to the walls for easier cleaning underneath; Windows that open in a particular way that makes them easier to wipe; water sources in every room; etc. It would be a curious house, one were cleanliness was more important than habitation.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-07-15 04:00 pm (UTC)CBGBs
Date: 2009-07-15 05:30 pm (UTC)The video trailer has an interesting concept where the rubber meets the road. Not sure the sound track can justify it's comedic appearance as a wee Pythonesque.
Sorry to read about Dash that way. It would have been better if you reviewed one of his shows instead of posting an OD.
Curious about how cultural attitudes
exhibit themselves through labour.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-07-15 03:41 pm (UTC)Another worthy architecture film: MY ARCHITECT - A sons journey - About Louis Kahn
Okay enough of me bullshitting.. I need the film... where can I download it...
(no subject)
Date: 2009-07-15 04:03 pm (UTC)I've be sworn to masonic secrecy over my film source, sorry. Even if I could tell you its name, you wouldn't be able to join, I think they aren't accepting new members.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-07-15 04:14 pm (UTC)Its alright then... I'm considering buying the DVD too...
(no subject)
Date: 2009-07-18 10:00 am (UTC)Becoming the devil
Date: 2009-07-15 05:45 pm (UTC)http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/5835529/Guard-swindled-cash-for-operations-to-turn-himself-into-the-devil.html
Have you ever considered a swindle to fund an operation to make yourself look like the devil?
Re: Becoming the devil
Date: 2009-07-15 08:41 pm (UTC)cheap wow gold
Date: 2009-07-24 02:58 am (UTC)