"Shopping"

based on the essay "Shopping", in the book, Mutations by Rem Koolhaas and Harvard Project on the City

This essay seeks to make it blaringly apparent that economy, and specifically shopping drives our world. It starts with the quote, “Shopping is arguably the last remaining form of public activity.” This is a strong statement. As the normative public parks of cities are shrinking in favor of density, shopping centers are becoming more important for the urban dweller. Malls are the new public arenas. No one meets in the park anymore, the mall is the default meeting place.

It is interesting to trace the lineage of the shopping mall. It started as a simple store, then developed in a marketplace, then an arcade, and then finally a modern mall. Each one of these steps comes with a new technological innovation. The example most discussed in the essay is air conditioning. AC allowed people to enter an alienated interior space, completely separate themselves from the outside and shop. And this could happen for multiple hours at a time. Before the advent of AC there was no sense of getting lost in time when shopping, now you could spend a whole day in a mall and not realize it (and more importantly spend more money).

There is an interesting turn in the article when it goes from shopping=malls to everything=shopping. This outlines how shopping has taken over our world and forced a new design of cities. No longer are there just malls for shopping. Airports, museums, theme parks, libraries, schools and hospitals are all becoming almost indistinguishable from malls in a lot of ways. Shopping is the lifeblood of the 21^st century city.

Finally the article drops a depressing hammer. After fifty pages of making the case that shopping is transforming our society, it brings the reader to a halt with the statement that shopping is always almost obsolete. As much as the mall is important to American society, it is not a necessity meaning it could disappear tomorrow with any number of devastating events. This would be catastrophic to cities that have embraced shopping (aka almost every major and mid-level city in the world). I am not speaking of being catastrophic in the sense of economy (although it certainly would be) but in the sense of public space. In the last 60 years, there has been a transformation of the public space (and public domain) from the street to the mall. If the malls were to suddenly become obsolete the public would be homeless because the street has been handed over to the car.

Where will the evolution of public space take us next?

Why do we rely so much on a transient process for public interaction?

"Perverse Space"

based on the essay "Perverse Space" by Victor Burgin, in the book, Sexuality and Space

The essay, “Perverse Space” begins by discussing the photograph by Helmut Newton called, Self-portrait with wife June and models, shown here. The importance of this photograph is two-fold. First it allows Burgin to critique how modern critics speak of the “objectification” of this photo whereas in the past it was only the casual “masculine gaze” that was important. The shift from a mild gaze to intense objectification has led to censorship and exclusion (i.e. political correctness) in contemporary society. Secondly, the author brings up this piece of art to segway into the discussion of denotation vs. connotation. Denotation is the explicit or direct meaning of something. In this photo we see the female nude figure, both from the front and back, the photographer, a clothed female figure sitting on the right, etc. Connotation is the underlying meaning behind the things you immediately see. For example, the clothes on the floor implies that the female undressed hurriedly suggesting a feeling of being naked (as opposed to nude) and thus making the image about not the figure as form, but as something much deeper. Denoting can be done by anyone. It’s a matter of pointing out what is going on around you. Connoting takes intelligence and knowledge. This is where photographing nudes becomes a problem. To some (and often way too many), they see a naked woman or man and are “offended” by the stark nudity. They don’t get beyond this. For the intellectual the first question should be “why is this figure nude and what does it signify?”

Buildings work on a connotation/denotation level as well. Far to often though a building is designed by the unintelligent. These people don’t see what they are doing as a way to implicating something much deeper. Connotation is a way to reference history, society, contemporary thought and so much more, but all this is lost when you only think of a window as something you pick out of an Anderson or Pella catalog.

What do you gain from objectifying a building?

Can a building support a connotation on level of an inside joke, with an apparent second meaning (similar to someone like Georgia O’Keefe)?

Manifesto (First Draft)

ANTI-COMMUNITY

Architecture has a problem, an overabundance of  “community spaces.” It seems that every building that is designed these days has some area marked off as public or community space when in reality, most of the time it is no more than a lobby into the building. Architects have this utopian idea that if a space is labeled “community” on a drawing, somehow this will open it up to all sorts of users. This does not work.

The next two topics help define anti-community. The question that I raise is:

Can a building with a morally questionable program (in terms of a “prude” society) support or survive within the public realm?

PUBLIC AND PRIVATE SPACE

The end of public versus private space is close at hand. That is if you define public space as a space open to everyone and space that can’t be owned. What is taking its place is called collective space.

Collective Space: Previously called public space. Nowadays, the relation between property and use has disappeared. Private property is used publicly (shopping centers, airports, etc.) and vice versa. Public space is absorbed by private space. A new reality is created in which the collective, an ample group of individuals, is the only constant characteristic.[1]

This mixing of public and private space is creating a new breed of architecture, one that is simultaneously private and public.

Will this make places like the public square extinct?

What happens at the intersection on the public and private?

VICES, SPECIFICALLY SEX

One of my more recent interests that developed has been sex in terms of a vice and in relation to society. This started as I gained interest in fine art nude photography. As I dove deeper into the subject, I saw how nudity (and the association with sex) made a lot of people uncomfortable. This is intriguing. Here is something that everyone is familiar with and sees on a regular basis (a nude figure) and it offends some people.  This was compounded when for our semester ending exhibit on campus we were told we couldn’t show any nudity. After this I began researching sex in terms of society and saw that this idea of prude-ness and censorship is prevalent in the U.S. especially.

This made me start to think about buildings (programs) that evoke these same emotions. Places like brothels, casinos, strip clubs and even bars are morally wrong to groups of people.

How do these buildings respond to these issues architecturally? 

How can these buildings progress the good aspects of vices?

What happens when these spaces “intrude” on the public?

Architectural Themes:

·       Privatization of Public Space

·       Publicization of Private Space

·       Ambiguity between public and private space

·       Building censorship

Theoretical Position:

·       Can a building that historically hides its program, act as a promoter in the public realm?

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[1] “The Metopolis Dictionary of Advanced Architecture” pg. 563