Chairs III: What's Your Favorite Band?

 

Re Junkspace: Damn! Remember when Downton Abby was a thing and people were enamored with the articulate sass of the Dowager Countess of Grantham? Maybe? Well, you didn’t miss much if you don’t, and if you ever intend on watching it then your enjoyment of that part of it will surely be diminished after reading Junkspace, because not even the most satisfying of Violet Crawley’s austere jabs comes close to basically anything in Koolhaas’s 15-page-long-single-spaced-all-one-paragagraph (surely an allusion to the very spaces he was excoriating, no?) collection of sick burns concerning the general condition of architecture, an “overripe and undernourishing […] sponsor [of the] collective of brooding consumers in surly anticipation of their next spend, a mass of refractory periods caught in a Thousand Year Reign of Razzmatazz, a paroxysm of prosperity”. Ouch! Barkeep, oblivion, please. 

But as Koolhaas points out, “we have built more than did all previous generations put together, but somehow we do not register on the same scales. We do not leave pyramids.” 

Our pyramid is garbage, a trillion tiny pieces of plastic that will outlast all of us, a sort of anti-treasure that’s buried in the sand of every beach, floating in every ocean, and blown into every nook and cranny where the wind can carry it. 

 Bummer! But if architecture is humanistic and the primary concerns of humanity are comfort and entertainment, then given our (and by “our” I’m talking about “us”, the demographic of the people participating in this blog) current collective lifestyle and its trajectory, isn’t junkspace as we know it inevitable? If we’re wired to engage with the latest distraction, if our dopamine receptors fire with each tiny morsel of insubstantial entertainment and if we’ve become accustomed to living like this, are we just going to build spaces that work in the same way? Physical manifestations of the sort of low-quality all-you-can-eat content that we’ve come to expect from our self-populating Instagram feeds and streaming services? Aren’t the spaces described in Junkspace the same as all modern large-scale entertainment and communication platforms? Although it’s hard (for me) to defend a lot of Eisenman’s built work, it’s a lot easier to defend the concept of autonomous architecture in the context of junkspace; the idea that we, as designers, have the option to consider convention and the popular demands of architecture and take a hard pass is tantalizing. 

On the flip side, because junkspaces are temporary and are often driven by the forces of commerce, they’re often full of spectacle spaces. Sure, a lot of them are just kind of inhabitable advertisements, but the constant demand for new and exciting content creates a market for spaces and experiences whose primary objective is the generation of interest/excitement; absent the burdens of practicality or durability, designers are free to experiment with and produce spaces that couldn’t exist in the wild without the financial backing of their corporate sponsors. That’s the great thing about high-end retail establishments in first-world countries: many of them are actually very nice and you, a member of the general public, can just walk in and experience them without any obligation. Sure, this is just a brand trying to project its values and, yes, they’re trying to get you to buy stuff so that you, too, can engage in this same act of value signaling and taste having, but where else can I go, for free, if I want to engage with objects of high design?

Hey, just a thought: maybe if we’re honest from the get-go about the fact that we’re designing disposable spaces then we can design recyclable ones instead.  Maybe we should mandate it, or at least incentivize it, and maybe we'll end up with building technologies that'll make architecture less wasteful.  And while we're at it, if we're going to need a parade of endlessly changing art installations and other visual content, use it as a way to showcase local artists (Anthropologie already does the latter in some instances).

Speaking of flip sides, flippity flips, and flippy floppies, you know the Talking Heads? I don’t have a favorite band, but if I did they’d be in the running for it. Anyway, David Byrne (the lead singer) did a movie back in the ‘80s that I really like called True Stories, which I bring up because Mallrats was the recommended viewing this week. 

"Shopping is a feeling!"

There’s a great (well, I think it’s great) bit that’s a surrealist salute to the shopping mall. Here’s a link (2 links -- we’re at the mercy of the editing of the video pirates): 

First 3 mins: David Byrne introduces us to the modern shopping mall https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T2vpvT11fjs 

Last 4 mins: Surrealist fashion show 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yQ-ZOVJXMes

Or maybe COVID will just be end of junkspaces.  Maybe we'll just give up on brick-and-mortar retail and offices, and our junkspaces will just fall into ruin and be reclaimed by nature.

Nothing But Flowers: that's my favorite Talking Heads Song.