- Introduction
"Architecture becomes a closed, immobile object that
leads nowhere but to itself and to the use of reason"
(Superstudio: 122). Such solipsistic tendencies prove Tafuri's
dictum that there is no revolutionary architecture; the
politicised architect must look to social process for his
expressive liberties. A nihilist critique of the built
environment must refuse any morality of discourse yet also deny a
hegemony imposed by the limits of remnant C19 structures,
patterns of land ownership and an institutional craving for
order.
The SSDAAP is founded on a contradiction between its
vision statement, which expresses a desire for "architecture
of
the highest quality", and suggests that the area toward the
City
of London could become an "architectural showcase for
quality and
innovation", and the detail of policy statements on
conservation
and design which bedevil the Shoreditch triangle. Conservation
policies expressed in the document are unduly restrictive and
serve to crush the possibility of any but the most subtle
expression. The SSDAAP holds up a legacy of plot patterns,
cornice lines and redundant shop fronts as a fetish, serving as
development constraint. A more dynamic conception is needed, one
that acknowledges conflict and contradiction as integral to urban
process. Design constraints should be revoked and each case
considered in relation to cityscape but on its own
merits.
- Place and alienation, strategic
options
SSDAAP 1.3.1 Extension of the South Shoreditch and Sun
Street Conservation Areas (15).
SSDAAP 1.3.2 Detailed planning applications and design
statements. Applications for outline planning permission will not
be accepted within the SSDAAP area. Applications for development
that have the potential to affect the character or appearance of
the above conservation areas, or for significant new development
outside these boundaries, will not be accepted without a
statement setting out the design rationale for the scheme. The
statement should indicate how the proposals have been informed by
an understanding of local context, paying particular attention to
the character or appearance of conservation areas and significant
buildings within them. A views analysis should be included in
this statement (15-16).
SSDAAP 1.3.4 Development. Permission for development
within the
SSDAAP area may be granted provided that the proposals: Are of
the highest architectural quality, and by their
design and relationship to setting create or contribute to a
sense of place (16).
- 'Place' is a highly contested indicator,
and 'quality'
a one-dimensional term. These clauses would have prohibited, for
instance, the building of Frank Gehry's house (1978) in Santa
Monica, California, and his other housing commissions (Davis
House in Malibu, 1970-2, the De Mesnil Residence in New York, and
the Spiller Residence in Venice, California, both 1978-9).
"His
house, in principle only the renovation of an existing complex,
breaks out of the existing tight structures and spatial
boundaries in order to restructure them in multi-layered,
overlapping and antithetical ways" (Lampugnani: 120).
Worried
about slipshod construction, in the 1970s Gehry pioneered a
'low-craft' aesthetic, using "cheap materials: nailed wood
studs,
chain-link fences, corrugated-steel siding, and gypsum board. He
left stud walls exposed, tilted them at odd angles, joining and
interpenetrating them" with all the precision of a barriada
(squatter) settlement in Peru. The reader will note the abrupt
shift in ambition and technique over the following 30 years:
Gehry is the architect behind the sinuous Guggenheim Museum in
Bilbao.
The concept of 'place', along with the organicist moral
categories 'family', 'community' and 'nation', are all
affirmations of a closed society and, like the spectres of public
nuisance and moral hazard, constitute something of the premodern
lingering in the hegemonic (via communitarian politics and
governance,
and as metaphoric rationale of 'iconic' architecture) in C21
discourse.
Postmodernism, by way of contrast, privileges "heterogeneity
and
difference as liberative
forces in the redefinition of cultural discourse".
Fragmentation,
indeterminacy, and intense distrust of all universal or
'totalising' discourses, [...] are the hallmarks of postmodern
thought (Harvey, 1989: 9).
Notions of place are in the hands of the social engineer. In
contrast to the normative assertions of Jane Jacobs one should
not forget Alison and Peter Smithson's (i) scheme for Berlin
Hauptstadt (1958) dominated by the principle of the inverted
profile, (a wall of thirty-storey office blocks surrounding the
centre, a derivative of the Team Ten manifesto of 1954), an
elevated pedestrian net and cluster blocks, described as
providing a 'significant 'image' of the emerging patterns of
human association which would give 'identity' to a 'changing'
area'; (ii) the dispersed intensities of 1950s 'cluster city'
proposals; and
(iii) the Smithson's Soho Route Building and Road Net (1959)
where attention to a hierarchy of roads, complemented by 'route
buildings' (blocks with internal moving sidewalks) would provide
for the "structure of a scattered city", on a
monumental scale
alone enough to lend a definitive image.
More sympathetic to the organicist conception, structuralist
architect Aldo Van Eyck, no stranger to concrete, had this to say
to Team Ten in 1959:
Whatever space and time mean, place and occasion mean more.
For space in the image of man is place, and time in the
image of man is occasion [...] Provide that place,
articulate the inbetween [...] make a welcome of each door
and a countenance of each window [...] Get closer to the
shifting centre of human reality and build its counterform
-- for each man and all men (sic), since they no longer do
it themselves (quoted by Jencks: 311; my italics).
- Project Mimique is wary of proposing a
'better
urbanism' in response to the rigid containments of your own
proposal and refuses the organicist construct of Van Eyck. We
note further that any policy formulation should refuse to impose
artificial constraints "unless absolutely necessary".
Opposed to
preservationist clauses and regulation of human conduct by
land-use criteria, we hold that an ideal infrastructure should
wither away like Marx's post-communist state. However, we suggest
that the strategies below might enhance any new
development.
Option 1: Developments could foreground cooperative
facilities
and be informed by a multiplicity of communication and networking
processes; the conceptualisation of 'immateriality' by autonomist
theorists was declared by Hardt and Negri to be 'almost angelic'.
Ambient construction might centre its
articulation on spaces of human association and movement, on
several different, contrasting, spatial levels. This would
permit, for example, a network of narrow causeways
(or pedestrian bridges), at or above current roof levels;
tighter, and more multi-nodal than the Barbican development.
Option 2: Man's relation with nature is at the heart of
Marx's
dialectic and a counterform of alienation risks getting trapped
within the hegemonic signifier 'sustainable development'. More
decoratively, integration of interior planting (fragrant shrubs,
roses, trees), or wildlife habitat close to (or in) the spaces
where people live and work, pleasant though this might be, risks
being considered as merely an innovation of burolandschaft and
thus a cunning ploy to get media professionals to work harder.
A second approach addresses the question of transcendence: the
process of contradiction and the rendering of the non-sensuous
sensuous into the plan. This requires (i) a relaxing of criteria
on use of materials ('sympathetic', 'contradictory', or
'tensioning' rather than 'already existing') and a removal of
directives toward conformity; (ii) perhaps a play or
confrontation between the tensions inside/outside, here/there,
public/private, external/internal (architecture as resolution and
drama; complexity; "an effective challenge to prevailing
exclusivist arguments for purity and restriction", Jencks on
Venturi: 220); (iii) the productivity of bodies and value
of affect must guide resolutions of form and articulated mass.
One is thinking here of the sensuality of glances of light,
material and texture, subtle mass or curvature, sheer space and
moments (terror) of the sublime; and (iv) an invocation of the
process of exchange and the empty seductions/innovations of the
commodity form. Animus of conception could spotlight a process of
creative negativity: the destruction of value lends itself to
deconstructivist interpretations.
Option 3: While the Smithsons called for streets in the
air,
Project Mimique demands flexible spatial arrangements within an
empty skeleton. "A horizontal extension increases the range
of
spatial layouts and use patterns. Any imaginable configuration of
future occupants can find its spatial expression [...] This
infrastructure is the fixed part of the city; the mobile part
consists of walls, floors and partitions. These allow the
individual occupant to determine his (sic) own spatial layout
[...] All elements with which the occupant is in direct contact
-- those he sees and touches -- are mobile, as opposed to the
infrastructure which serves for collective use" (Lebesque
and
Fentener van Vlissingen: 29-30). We touch on other questions of
an urban megastructure for South Shoreditch below.
- Contradiction, forms of
disappearance
SSDAAP 1.3.4 Development. Permission for development
within
the SSDAAP area may be granted provided that the proposals:
Relate appropriately to the surrounding townscape and any
buildings of note (16).
SSDAAP 1.3.7 Alterations and extensions to buildings of
intrinsic
merit. Permission will normally only be granted for schemes that
reinstate lost or missing features of historic or architectural
interest on such buildings, including doors, shop or showroom
fronts, decorative details and cornices. Permission will not
normally be granted for schemes which involve the loss of
historic or architectural features or the introduction of glazing
to upper floors that is not consistent with the character of the
building. Extensions to buildings of merit are acceptable
provided that they (i) are of the highest possible quality (ii)
have regard for the architectural form, scale, massing, height
and materials of the principal building and any surrounding
buildings of merit. Roof extensions are considered in a separate
policy below. The borough will resist the closure and relocation
of principal entrances to buildings where the position of the
original entrances is reflected in the overall architectural
composition or positioned on a corner site (18).
- A few definitions:
- Roget's Thesaurus lists only positive and textual
inflections of the word 'relate' (rapport, respect, concern,
citation, quotation, liken etc). Lacan stated: "Everything
in
repetition which is varied and modulated is only an alienation of
its meaning" (Tavor Bannet: 247). The word 'relate'
describes
also (alternately) an agonism (Foucault), a masculine
suppression, eternal deference, the organicist morality of
'knowing one's place'.
- 'Appropriate', belonging or peculiar, suitable or proper;
'appropriate', a longer 'a', to take possession of, take to
oneself (esp. without authority), devote to special purposes.
Proudhon wrote: "All property is theft", interpreted
here as
"morality, seducing". The transgression suspends
meaning, but
implies (from a left idealist position), "a first flicker of
consciousness,
a proto-revolutionary event which challenges property relations,
reappropriates value, or counterposes a violent defiance against
the power of the state" (Young: 15).
The 'relation' can then infact be critical: a juxtaposition,
contradiction, plagiarism, tension or negation.
- In the architectural context, 'meaning' is
coexistent
with its intrinsic morality, expressed through the use
of materials, the play of affects (deployment of light, mass,
enclosure/exposure), inflection of detail (Cullen), and a
hierarchy of functions in the design plan. When architecture is
paired down to this abstraction, it becomes an equivalence, value
cannot operate here without recourse to ideology (though
architectural form itself is pregnant with sensory associations;
and the 'urban' resonant with projections of infantile libidinal
development). Conservation of historic detail affects a liberal
tracing via symptoms of property, something mirrored in the
gleeful pronouncement of the Vision statement that "an
extremely
active landowner community" is ready to invest. Likewise,
the
'urban' reveals itself as based on the fallacy of 'collective'
consumption (Castells); Bauman notes the consumer is never more
isolated than in the consumption of basic utilities. Functional
process exists as a mask of strategic forms of
domination.
- The more hegemonic the system, states
Baudrillard, the
more the imagination is struck by the smallest of reversals.
A preservationist dogma might allow the subtleties of formal
statement and dissonance to shine, but the homogeneity of a
surface congealing seems an equally likely prospect. Such
repetition (and pastiche) of historical detail that you propose
negate the last vestiges of the real, as simulation detaches
itself from the process of representation. Taken to its logical
conclusion, the built environment becomes flat (pure surface),
yet out of time (the Portmeirion experience), and thus
fragmentary.
Postmodernity strides forth as a "precession of the neutral,
of indifference" (Baudrillard, 1994: 160) -- even in its
more eclectic forms. The seeker after novelty now looks in vain:
"All that remains is a fascination for desert-like and
indifferent forms". In the sphere of indifference that
masquerades as 'the urban', conservation and deconstruction
polarise each other as negative inversions.
"Melancholic and fascinated", says Baudrillard,
"such is our general situation in an era of involuntary
transparency" (1994: 160).
- Articulations, materials and
morality
SSDAAP 1.3.4 Development. Permission for development
within
the SSDAAP area may be granted provided that the proposals:
- Have regard to the scale and character of adjacent streets.
This may entail development that changes character or materials
in response to local circumstances (16).
SSDAAP 1.3.6 Development and demolitions. Permission will
not be
granted for proposals that fail to preserve or enhance the
character of the conservation area in the South Shoreditch Policy
Area or their settings. Permission will not usually be granted
for proposals that involve the total or substantial demolition of
the buildings identified in this guidance as being of intrinsic
interest for the positive contribution they make to the character
and appearance of the conservation area. Permission for the total
or substantial demolition of such buildings will only be granted
where it can be shown that the structure is beyond feasible or
viable repair (17).
SSDAAP 1.3.9 Character of new development. In general the
Borough
seeks to encourage the highest standard of contemporary design in
the SSDAAP area. Permissions for such developments will be
granted provided that the proposals have regard to local
materials and design precedents where appropriate. The Borough
also expects proposals to be responsive to context and to have
regard to good urban design practice. In certain locations, for
example, gap sites flanked by buildings of interest, scholarly
facsimiles of Victorian warehouse buildings may be acceptable
provided that they are correctly detailed (19).
- Lines of force and demarcation (Cullen:
111) described
here by the main arteries, serve to compartmentalise the area of
the SSDAAP and describe a paradox: pedestrianised and other lanes
comprise the daytime economy, which is ironic as narrow streets
deprive workers of light, and large windows banish
privacy.
Consequently, instead of a shapeless environment based on
principles of flow, we have an articulated environment resulting
from the breaking-up of flow into action and rest, into corridor
street and [consumption artery], alley and private courtyard (and
all their minor devolutions). The practical result of so
articulating the town into identifiable parts is that no sooner
do we create a HERE than we admit a THERE, and it is precisely in
the manipulation of these two spatial concepts that a large part
of urban drama arises (Cullen: 182).
Cullen had an acute sensitivity to the
inflections of
class implicit in the subtleties of urban form. Changes of level
of the tiniest infraction inferred the psychological securities
of class privilege and wealth. Reading the small town, Cullen
interpreted relations of authority from a blend of inches, step
and nuances of movement. Material differentiations between venues
in the SSDAAP area appear to be based on a hierarchy of decor
and street space; the enclave of Hoxton Square, and
the tiny side streets linking it with Old Street, command that
extra price.
A cursory glance at the Shoreditch entertainment economy suggests
a displacement of class conflict into the abstract realm of
exchange, the remediation of relative poverty through the
consumer standard of 'choice' -- the difference being merely that
between dining out and eating at home. Restaurants both sides of
Old Street proved too expensive to investigate, but had a
distinctly older clientele. A THERE is notably absent, and
despite the presence of facilities for single homeless young
people, (the Botolph Project on Hoxton Street),
the ambience of this undergraduate consumption hub is closed,
contained and purely superficial.
- Simulation envelops the whole edifice of
representation as
simulacrum. The principle stems from that of equivalence, from
the radical negation of the sign as value. God is definitively
dead in this abstract space, reduced to mere residue of 'faith'
in consumer process, a gestural abstraction of temporary
fixation. Bar owners might be
termed the C21 equivalent of Jesuit architects in central Europe,
a vanguard of 'imperial' domination, their 'success' founded on
the spectacular manipulation of conscience. A distinct edge of
conservatism is evident in the detail of venues: from the
decadent mix of hard metal industrial and leather neo-baroque of
Zigfrid on Hoxton Square, to the menu of the Home Bar on Leonard
Street offering "stilton and stinking bishop with oatcakes
and
quince jelly", an item reminiscent of the gentleman's
club.
Flux, and a collapse (or implosion) of meaning, are the aesthetic
vortex of contemporary production. Drinking coffee in one Hoxton
venue produced a feeling of mild hallucinatory unease (the
'weightlessness' of simulacra). Both objects (decor) and
clientele seemed out of place, and patrons appeared to be trying
to live in rather than up to the moment; an incursion of
spectators into the set. The youth of patrons in Hoxton Square
suggested that they were in fact learning to consume, location
itself providing a first mark of social competence for a
self-appointed elite; something once provided by a reading of
Lukacs, Debord, Althusser, Adorno, Foucault, Lacan, Baudrillard,
Barthes, Jameson or Gramsci (an 'effluence of simulacra' [1] all
on their own).
- Writing on the use of materials describes
a morality of
construction, whether of vernacular mythology (Alberti), proper
relation of material to proportion (Eiermann), or importance of
material to durability or obsolescence (Antoniades). When
architecture ceases to be representational, its content rests on
the materials from which it is made, their interrelationships and
their interaction with the immediate spatial environment.
Materials have not only dimensions and thickness, but strength
and sound.
Materials express a morality which is obviously fabricated.
Considering the effect of conservation regulation, one might say
that: "the imitation becomes real and the real takes on
qualities
of an imitation" (Harvey: 289-90).
In a situation where excessively restrictive regulations have
been imposed, a strategy of hollowness, (striking a note of
unreality in a fake present), saccharine (for example, the use of
pastel-tinted concrete)
or potemkin facade (see for example, the effect of current
demolition work on Gray's Inn Buildings, Rosebery Avenue EC1),
might be regarded as valid comment.
- Planning consideration should also take
into account
that many technical innovations in building begin with
artist-architect exploration of materials.
- In Shoreditch, chromatic typography in
fashion
magazines gives way to muzak composers who work next door to the
YBA (Young British Artists). The plan might exploit further the
creative context to enhance the experience of locality. Here we
refer to the transformation of cityscape by the forces of
contemporary production. Project Mimique proposes an
encouragement of contemporary or abstract signage (including
neon), cinematic projections, public art of a challenging nature,
and installations of ambient sound. Artists and designers might
be commissioned to
address questions of floorscape texture and patterning. Art
installations could be placed as temporary constructions,
providing for an element of surprise. We suggest that such
activity be coordinated by a professional art organisation (such
as Artangel) to avoid the normative banalities that afflict, for
instance, Hoxton Market as a result of the Shoreditch Festival,
and to allow a greater space for contradiction than might be
allowed by the local state.
- For an air-rights
extension
SSDAAP 1.3.4 Development. Permission for development
within
the SSDAAP area may be granted provided that the proposals:
Have regard to local views, prevailing heights and cornice
lines (16).
SSDAAP 1.3.8 Roof extensions and structures on roofs.
Permissions
will not be granted where a roof extension would: (i) harm the
architectural integrity, proportions or uniformity of a building
or significant group of buildings (ii) harm a significant or
sensitive view (iii) reduce the visual interest generated by a
varied skyline, or where the building has features that were
designed to be silhouetted against the sky; or (iv) result in the
loss of historic roof forms. Permission will be granted where (i)
the scale of the proposed addition is appropriate to the scale of
the existing property or is unobtrusive (ii) the proposed
addition is of a high standard of contemporary design if visible
and (iii) steps have been taken to prevent the build up of visual
clutter apparent from the street at high level. Permission will
not be granted for other roof-top structures where these intrude
into significant or sensitive views, harm the character of a
building or an area, or adversely affect the amenity of adjoining
properties (18-19).
- Along with the stipulation for observance
of existing
plot boundaries, a wide restriction on roof extensions could
provide for a restraint on property speculation, and thus hinder
land inflation in the area. As such it might be welcomed.
However, the policy leans towards protecting the mediocre and the
status quo. One is reminded of Sander Rubin's (1998) SMERSH
clause in his proposals for roulette voting along Open Society
principles which deliberately ruled out extremist opinion [2].
Worries about land inflation pushing smaller creative operators
out, and of fulfilling LDA housing targets for the area, could be
addressed by relaxing this concern with height and existing top
edge.
- We draw your attention to the various
air-rights
projects (megastructure developments) devised between the years
1958 and 1970, where infrastructure is proposed above existing
buildings and city streets as an autonomous and evolving
intervention.
Conceptions of megastructural development moved from a thoughtful
DIY and commitment to self-defined living environment
(L'Architecture Mobile) of Yona Friedman's La Ville Spatiale
(1958/1962) to the glacial perfection of the Continuous Monument
(Superstudio, 1969) the flip side of La Dolce Vita, a
"static
perfection mov[ing] the world by the love that it creates".
More
technicist variants include the City Superstructure, Dusseldorf,
(Wimmenauer, Szabo, Kasper and Meyer, model 1969) and Kisho
Kurokawa's Takara Beautilion (built for the Osaka Expo 1970).
The emphasis on cycles of growth, change and decay is the basic
idea of the Japanese Metabolists and finally, with Kisho
Kurokawa's Takara Beautilion the philosophy can be said to have
reached a level of lyrical expression. Basically Kurokawa's
structure consists of a single unit, repeated 200 times, which is
made up of twelve steel tubes bent to a common radius. These have
end joints which can accept new units in any direction of desired
growth. In the unit structure are slung various capsules,
mechanical equipment and circulation systems. The whole metabolic
building was assembled in a week -- presumably also the time of
disassembly (Jencks: 69-70).
While Kurokawa's pronouncements had a technocratic, managerialist
aspect, Friedman's conception
(La Ville Spatiale) has a more spatially complex, libertarian
swing. A horizontal extension increases the range of spatial
layouts and use patterns; any imaginable configuration of future
occupants can find its spatial expression. The infrastructure, a
multi-level space-frame grid ten metres above ground level, is
supported by columns at intervals of between 40 and 60 metres.
The grid is based on a six-metre module that can accommodate all
desired functions. Small volumes such as rooms, which add minimal
structural loading, can be supported by this grid. Large spaces,
such as halls, streets and courtyards, are situated between the
columns at ground level because of their heavier structural
loads. The infrastructure is the fixed part of the city; the
mobile part consists of the walls, floors and partitions. These
allow the individual occupant to determine her own spatial
layout. "The infrastructure of La Ville Spatiale admits an
enormous repertoire of use patterns. The new structure can be
superimposed on the existing city without impinging upon it; it
thus respects the authenticity of the existing built fabric"
(Lebesque and Fentener van Vlissingen, 1999). Yona Friedman
produced proposals for construction of La Ville Spatiale in
Paris, southern Italy, Monaco, Tunis, Manhattan, the docks of the
Hudson River, and Strasbourg.
Hackney Planning Department might also consider as inspiration
theoretical projects exploring the mutation of the polygon, or
Chaneac's Cellules parasite (1968), to provide
cheaper studio, office space, cooperative or novelty living
accommodation.
- Project Mimique denies the possibility of
a shift in
social relations without the abolition of property or market
exchange. We demand that air-rights are held as common property,
that space is managed on a not-for-profit basis and without the
'philanthropic' morality of social housing.
- An autocritique
- You say that Project Mimique attempts a
nihilist
enterprise, but your response to the SSDAAP makes several
suggestions for constructive interventions into the 'urban'
fabric.
It was a mistake to embark on a negative project, one predicated
on the destruction of value, without addressing the work of
Roland Barthes, most notably his analysis of a sparse semantics
towards an ideal of neutralisation, the cynical disengagement of
Albert Camus' narration, a critique articulated in Barthes'
Writing Degree Zero, originally published in 1973. This validates
architectural strategies of exposure and minimal detailing
evident in contemporary renovations in the Shoreditch
triangle.
Project
Mimique also aspires to an anti-functionalism and (these days)
only popular culture can functionalise in 'anomie' (literally,
without law) and get away
with it. The south Shoreditch area, especially towards Old
Street, is so littered with signs of 'disintegration' that one
witnesses the recuperation of the subversive tactics of sticker
and stencil activism as 'guerilla' marketing and also within the
institution of art. For Durkheim, who resurrected the term,
industrial class conflict was a symptom of anomie; in the 1950s
and 60s, the term was used as a concept akin to alienation, and
to describe a condition where an individual was prone to
disorientation or psychic disorder. The cultural and advertising
industries thrive on anomie in its more schizophrenic forms and
exploit it commercially; and cultural industries produce class
antagonism via subcontracting volatilities, overwork, the
institutionalisation of unwaged work in more creative production,
and in relation to folk memories of professional enclosures such
as the guild. Lawlessness periodically powers a social movement,
or inspires a sociologist, but it is invariably latent as cynical
tactic and has been exploited to exhaustion by media and music
industries in their restless process of symbolic recuperation.
We contend as critique of our own suggestions that
in the early C21, any 'social' environment will evidence a
process of neutralisation (as order is reimposed) and the
desecrations of spontaneous violence. The nihilist must push
towards this 'zero point', but also work to multiply the points
of contradiction, to tactically negotiate the disequilibrium of
the 'system'. The urbanist meanwhile seeking to describe
sociality in the poetics of space will find her abstraction
undermined by the superficial formalisms of masculine and
bureaucratic cultures, a generalised lack of cooperation in
competitive environments, and unplanned-for (and more explosive)
encounters outside of the spaces designed to facilitate
them.
Henri Lefebvre notes in his paper Terrorism and Everyday Life
(1971/2002), the manifestations of the zero point of space: (i)
space shown as display (shop fronts, 'iconic' constructions,
landscaping); (ii) space taken over by traffic circulation (we
have asserted already the explorations of 'place' by the
Smithsons and Team Ten); (iii) deserted spaces even in the heart
of the city. We concede that our response would have benefited
from a gesture towards erasure, but arson, temporary car parking
and other unmanaged pockets of land are already evident in the
area and critical to the dynamism of urban development. There is
no need to programme these effects, as property speculation
demands them.
Zero point is a neutral state (not an act nor a situation)
characterised by a pseudo-presence, that of a simple witness, and
therefore a pseudo absence. (Lefebvre: 184).
Lefebvre also includes in the process of neutralisation the
disappearance of symbols, attenuation of pertinence (contrast)
and the prevalence of associations (as evidence of 'what goes
without saying'). We feel ambivalent here. Project Mimique has
not stinted in its undermining of conservation/preservation
dictat, but wonders what arbitrary metaphor or ambiguity the
preservation of C19 shop fronts, warehousing and showrooms might
bring forth other than a latent analogy of death. Such
'coherence'
is one of the negative aspects of the plan.
Neutralisation is a ubiquitous trademark of neo-functionalist
design, situating
development as without conflict, exempt from criticism,
particularly in its more (formal and ordering) platonic moments
(the purist 'glass box'). Neo-functionalist architecture renders
the critic ineffective by force of its apparently absent
contradictions. While Lacan might state that modulations on a
theme provoke a negation of signifying content, (something that
afflicts the pastiche of preservationist detail as much as the
spiritual translucency of the contemporary obsession with glass),
any resistance to the production of meaning predicated on
aesthetic criteria is manifestly futile. Meaning generates from
the relationships and transformations of diverse elements
(Levi-Strauss), or the tensions and fractures of contradiction,
as textualities give way to the formal subversions of the
critical reader's sub/conscious processes (Barthes).
Neutralisation -- a negation of the signifying process -- is
intrinsic to the contemporary moment whether one pursues a
conservationist policy or an encouragement of the 'avant-garde';
as intrinsic to the built environment as the process of
decomposition or decay.
Lefebvre continues:
Zero point is the lowest point of social experience, a point
that can only be approached but never reached, the point of
total cold; it is made up of partial zero points -- space,
time, objects, speech, needs. A kind of intellectual and
social ascetism can be discerned at zero point under all the
apparent affluence, the squandering and ostentation as well
as under their opposites, economic rationality, resistance.
[...] In fact zero point defines everyday life -- except for
desire that lives and survives in the quotidian (Lefebvre,
1971/2002: 185).
Project Mimique holds out for the prospect of subtle increments
of personal refusal, the ruptures of desire, infused throughout
social life. Playwright Peter Handke suggests "the impulse
of the
individual to break rules is itself unbreakable; this will not
only lead to the ruin of all our utopias, but contribute to the
collapse of our most oppressive regimes" (Whitechapel flyer,
2005).
- The notion of 'immateriality' is a
critique of
contemporary (postmodern) forms of domination.
How can you use the concept as a basis for material
transformation, resolutions of form and circulation?
Again you have caught us out, but a process of satirical
exaggeration is itself not inappropriate; the 1960s and early
1970s exploded with satire, powering the careers of such
performers as Peter Cook and Mike Webb of Archigram[3] (an
anti-urban, pop-cultural antagonism) and the rhetorically-formal
cinematic story boards and Continuous Monument montage series of
Italian architects Superstudio (Lang and Menking, 2003). It's a
shame such a moment has passed, as Project Mimique might indeed
choose to reach for stardom. However, the 'urban' is constituted
by ourselves as social process (in the best Regulation School
tradition); extremities of parody would find it hard to meet
(never mind supersede) the degree of violence encountered from
the fringes of the sector we have found simply in trying to get a
job.
Humanity is in a sad state when the counterform of alienation is
itself an instrument of domination. Maurizio Lazzarato
extrapolates:
Manual labour incorporates increasing numbers of
'intellectual' procedures, and the new technologies of
communication involve increasingly subjectivities that are
rich in knowledge. Not only has intellectual labour been
subjected to the norms of capitalist production, but a new
'mass intellectuality' has been constituted between the
demands of production and the forms of 'self-valorisation'
that the struggle against work produced. The opposition
between manual labour and intellectual labour, or between
material labour and immaterial labour, risks failing to
grasp the new nature of the productive activity which
integrates and transforms this separation. The division
between conception and execution, between labour and
creation, between author and public, is at the same time
overcome within the 'labour process' and reimposed as
political command within the 'process of valorisation'
(published online).
Immateriality is linked to the 'affective'
labour of cooperation, the compliance of the speaking subject in
the manufacture of yet more cooperation in the labour process.
Affective labour produces social networks, forms of community and
biopower. "Production has been enriched to the level of
complexity of human interaction" (Hardt and Negri: 293). We
find this definition critical to understanding the extent to
which planning and regeneration workers have been co-opted into
the restructuring of the biopolitical state, to the point of
staff barely noticing the colonisation of their own critical
consciousness.
Immateriality is also critical to architectural labour and design
and one feels the violence of 'political command' in the
hierarchies and divisions of labour in even a small architectural
office where corporate ethos might deny the right of designer to
be credited or speak on behalf of their work. That an architect
might seek to strategise around a process of forced anonymity or
denial of a right to aesthetic inflection,
or profile what is most generally regarded as degrading labour
(latterly Richard Rogers' Lloyds Building springs to mind) is to
be applauded as resistance to a fundamentally oppressive
process.
A suggestion that "[d]evelopments could foreground
cooperative
facilities and be informed by a multiplicity of communication and
networking processes" is one step on from the priorities of
what
Charles Jencks terms the 'idealist' and 'activist' traditions [4]
in
architecture, points to the more extensive projects that
developed out of Team Ten, and only appears contradictory if one
envisages all communication and social interaction to be
digital.
- You say, now, that you seek to move
towards a zero
point (totally cold), yet this describes the repressive formalism
of corporate culture, the environment (social and material) of
the City of London. Has neo-functionalism absorbed your
consciousness as well?
Project Mimique has gone out of its way to criticise
neo-functionalism. That this ideology has appropriated certain
sans-serif fonts, a refusal of ornament, and a deployment of
clean lines, bright and subtle lights, playful texture and
well-articulated space, is testimony to the sum of its
perfections: an appropriation of the approach to the sublime, and
an assault on our subconscious, as intrinsic to its mode of
domination. The effect of neutrality in more contemporary
('penthouse' or
'glass box') architecture exerts, invariably,
a certain lightness of being or sympathy with the construction,
regardless of content; 'penthouse' developments effect also a
sensation of flatness, an encounter with the image, here not in a
'lifestyle' magazine, but in 'everyday life'. Ubiquitous
weatherboarding on these latter developments, contrived
neutrality effecting an air of obsolescence even before
extinction, screams for premature removal. And one should not
forget that in Hackney, some of the most offensive
transformations of older development have been completed under
the aegis of 'community' architecture -- a way of buying off
sitting tenants, and a mediation also of neo-functionalism.
There is also a distinct polarisation of 'quality' which collides
with tenure status. Even recently-restored older social housing
seems a little shabby, as if lacking a final coat of paint; and
new window frames in brick developments are too heavy and seem
out of place. One notes the lack of conservation regulation
affecting working-class estates. Contemporary building design and
strategic rehabilitation exhibit acutely the social relations of
property, vigorously divisive, mediated by the image
(the flatness of simulation) that is its concrete product; the
construction itself, an inversion of the real,
a spectacular coherence given substance by the morality of the
division of rights.
As IKEA testifies, the neo-functionalist aesthetic operates
through a codified minimalisation of ornament (a move toward
uniformity), 'natural' veneers, sparse, distinctive forms and a
need for complementarity ("a functional link between use
values",
Aglietta: 161), a fabricated 'celebrity' lifestyle ('simulation'
to Baudrillard, 'everyday life' to Lefebvre), mass production and
higher prices. Capital expanding, as Lazzarato argued above, via
a "'mass intellectuality' [...] constituted between the
demands
of production and the forms of 'self-valorisation' that the
struggle against work produced". The cult of style,
coordination,
'taste' -- aestheticisation to Benjamin -- point to a
post-Fascist decorative order where the commodity (the object)
reigns and ascribes a notional (but hierarchical) social
equality. There is a certain piety in aesthetic neutralisation,
as if the neo-functionalist product was enacting its own
disappearance, not as an avant-garde but a side glance at
transnational capital, the 'conscience' of 'Empire' from which it
derived its aesthetic, even as 'Empire' restructures scapegoated
territories with its neo-liberal economic demands.
Neo-functionalism proceeds politically as an aesthetic (again,
one would argue, a post-Fascist phenomenon), that is via a
reduction of political and social life to the surface
construction of the image (from magazines, newspaper, billboard
or product catalogue). Much like its functionalist predecessor,
social life is degraded by assaults on civil liberties and
(liberal) human rights; there is an acute spatiality to its
pronouncements. As our analysis has demonstrated, the
neo-functionalist state manipulates by systematic exclusions and
segregations, the construction of moral scapegoats (racialised,
medical, income- and consumption-based, sexualised, and as here,
those stigmatised as 'disruptive') to the point of refusal of
asylum status to persecuted individuals and embarking on
'illegal' international wars. Superstructural projects effect a
reconstitution of social identity (a projection of a
self-responsible, 'national' citizenry) and a containment of mass
society through a manipulation of individual subjectivity and
agency. New Labour appears deeply inspired by Modell Deutschland
(the anti-communist 'ideological rearmament' of the Federal
Republic of Germany in the 1960s and 70s). Germany itself is now
an apartheid state, something acutely apparent in the regulation
of refugees to (and within) specific city perimeters and the
Black Forest, and
systematic repatriations of east European Roma.
We reject this charge of "absorption". But we note that
the
separation made by Henri Lefebvre (1971/2002) between everyday
life and the quotidian (or simulation and the ravages of desire)
is more psychoanalytical than Baudrillard's distinction between
simulacra and simulation, dissimulation and hyperreality. Desire
functions for Lefebvre as a rupture in corporate consciousness,
much as in Huxley's Brave New World or Orwell's 1984.
Baudrillard's vision is much more frightening: "In this new
situation, one's labour power, body, sexuality, unconscious, etc.
are not primarily productive forces but are [merely] 'operational
variables', [...] to be mobilised into social institutions and
practices" (Kellner). Project Mimique wonders: has a
neo-functionalist system imperative consumed us all?
- On praxis
With this response, Project Mimique sought to intervene into an
actual situation, the simulation of professional activity known
as 'planning', a regulative aspect to the discipline masquerading
as 'urbanism'. By chance we collide with the socio-analyses of
the Groupes de
Recherche Institutionelle, remarked by Lefebvre in Everyday Life
in the Modern World, performing a "socio-analytical
intervention"
which "dissociates into place and time the bearings of the
situation, combined as they are with false evidence;
it associates experiences that were previously foreign to it, and
then proceeds by induction or transduction" (Lefebvre,
1971/2002: 188-9).
There has been an element of play in the response with canonical
texts and proposals, but we reject the discipline of urbanism as
foil or shallow.
The generalisation and globalisation of the urban problematic is
at the root of the vertiginous development of the ideology of the
urban, which attributes to 'environment' a capacity to produce or
transform social relations. Such a tendency helps to reinforce
that strategic role of urbanism, as a political ideology and as a
professional practice. Basing itself on the objective
socialisation of the consumption process, on the structural
demand for the intervention of the state and on the ideological
spatialisation of new contradictions, urbanism (and therefore the
urbanist) becomes a discipline in the strict sense of the term,
that is to say, the political capacity to impose a certain model
of social relations under cover of an arrangement of space. This
explains the sudden proliferation of critical utopias, which
misconstrue the ideology of official urbanism by opposing it to
another, 'human' urbanism, which remains nevertheless on the
displaced ground on which class conflicts have been transformed
into conflicts of space (Castells: 463)
- The 'vitalities of disorder': plot
pattern and megastructure
SSDAAP 1.3.3 Retention of plot patterns of historic
development within the conservation areas (16).
SSDAAP 1.3.4 Development. Permission for development
within the
SSDAAP area may be granted provided that the proposals:
- Preserve the historic street layout and urban form (alleys,
courts and mews) (16).
SSDAAP Appendix A 4.1 Retention of building plot sizes
[...] Whilst many evening economies throughout the UK are
currently suffering from problems associated with price-led
competition, binge drinking and associated anti-social behaviour,
Shoreditch and Stoke Newington have managed to avoid many of
these issues and need to ensure that they preserve their current
position. The prevention of amalgamation of historic properties
into larger plots would prevent chain operators from achieving
the large floor space they desire. It is recommended that
building plot sizes are retained [...](AppA: 10).
- Project Mimique notes Section 1.3.3
Retention of plot
patterns of historic development within the conservation areas.
While we regard this as an artificial constraint engendered by a
materialist dialectic founding the discipline, and revile the
deployment of plot constraint in the maintenance of law and
order, we acknowledge here an effective barrier to speculative
capital. Adherence to historic plot patterns will
institutionalise an element of disorder into the rationalities of
new development, enabling a vitality of experience both in the
space of individual buildings and on the street. The irregularity
and tight nature of plot ratios will also promote the concept of
'splinter' development, successfully expressed in the conception
of the branch of Japanese chain Wagamama grafted in beside the
NatWest Tower.
- Regarding plot patterns and existing
street flow,
Project Mimique has a concern for those occasional buildings
(particularly near Shoreditch High Street), crushed in against
the railway viaduct -- particularly on French Place, now in the
extended conservation area, where some residential conversion
lacks daylight severely -- a basic condition of the
Existenzminimum.
- A megastructure (see above) would require
few changes
to existing street layout and minor access areas as the bulk of
the framework would be sited above existing building heights. A
megastructure could be accommodated easily in the area using the
railway viaduct as a structural axis, and extending over other
built areas where possible (that is, towards Liverpool St.
station, over the Edge of City Sub-district). It is anticipated
that some existing open space can be incorporated into the
infrastructural arrangement and preserved as either public or
private courtyards and small parks. Commenting on architect Yona
Friedman's proposal for an air-rights extension, a 'bridge city',
above the medina (old centre) of Tunis, Lebesque and Fentener van
Vlissingen note:
Perforations in the new structure were distributed so that all
buildings, streets, and courtyards of the medina would enjoy the
same natural light conditions despite the structure overhead.
Instead of the demolition of the old town, the project could
ensure both its conservation and extension (1999: 38)
- Housing targets and land-use
compatibility
SSDAAP 1.3.4 Development. Permission for development
within
the SSDAAP area may be granted provided that the proposals:
- Are acceptable in land-use terms (16).
Possibilities for housing in the megastructure will
help accommodate targets for 800 residential units by 2016 set by
the London Mayor.
- Vehicular access
SSDAAP 1.3.4 Development. Permission for development
within
the SSDAAP area may be granted provided that the proposals:
- Encourage pedestrian movement or create new pedestrian
routes where appropriate (16).
SSDAAP 1.6.9 Parking requirements
The local authority will designate the SSDAAP area a special
parking zone, with standards distinct from the rest of Hackney.
The local authority will encourage car-free development except as
required for disabled parking. Within the Congestion Charge Zone,
open surface car parks will be designated for redevelopment. New
parking provision associated with new development should be
provided underground. There is scope to develop a car club
arrangement, which could use electric or Liquid Petroleum Gas
cars. Property with
existing parking provision above the stated maximum should be
encouraged to convert the space to other uses, in conjunction
with a phased reduction policy (24).
- Deliveries (by car or bike) are important
for creative
firms, and their associated industries. Access for traffic and
parking/delivery space must be assured 24 hours a day. The
megastructural proposals do not interfere with vehicular access
to the area, and provide for aerial networks of pedestrian
movement.
- You state a 'special parking zone' for the
deep south
of the borough and a curtailment of existing parking facilities.
Parking in southern Hackney is already a charter for wheel
clampers' piracy, and drivers live in fear of traffic wardens and
private operators, or carry chainsaws. We note the importance of
parking locally to tradesmen, courier and delivery people, other
visitors. You cannot abolish it.
- Edges, legibility and
taboo
SSDAAP 1.3.4 Development. Permission for development
within
the SSDAAP area may be granted provided that the proposals:
- Create clearly-defined edges or increase the legibility of
the public realm by their architectural design or by a suitable
landscape area in the setting of the proposed development
(16).
- "To establish the 'inbetween' is to
reconcile
conflicting polarities" (Van Eyck quoted by Jencks: 313).
This in
an area where dichotomous values are induced, and marginal, when
related to architectural content and "linear breaks in
continuity" (Lynch: 47). Difference in an urban context is
defined by the paradigmatic oppositions (or containments)
inside/outside, here/there, public/private, external/internal:
these rest fundamentally on a series of exclusions.
- The
(dys)functionality of designing-in barriers is a twisted
curvature of the fashionable concept of designing-out crime;
collaboration between police, planning and 'regeneration' staff
has become a norm of practice. What comes into view is not the
enhancement of spatial experience
through multiple and conflicting descriptors of human existence
and interaction (balcony, courtyard, archway, one way street) but
the materialisation of a repressive state mobilisation against
the threat of appropriation, contradiction or dissent. The 'edge'
described by CCTV cameras, anti-climb paint, shards of glass, and
local warden patrols are all designed to capture the dissident
subject during or after the event, or to maim them. They are
signs of a society with a deep-seated malice towards those who
transgress the boundaries of its affluence.
- So-called 'edges' are infact the material
realisation
of what Levi-Strauss might describe as social taboo; they
describe socio-spatial boundaries to the point of symbolisation.
It is somewhat ironic, but in keeping with Levi-Strauss' theory,
that individuals are reported to find these barriers or junctures
as points of reference for everyday navigation (for Levi-Strauss
a signifier of social membership, in Shoreditch the subject
inscribes herself in space and a socio-symbolic construct).
Legibility, the passive comforts of left to right reading,
deprives the subject of their cognitive functions, naturalises
authority via a hierarchy of information or space, and (in an
urban context) determines the limits of right.
- To get lost in a city is not an artform,
but a function
of a shift in frame of reference, for instance, as Lynch
identifies, moving from one grid system to another (perhaps at
angled variance). The challenge of navigating in an unfamiliar
setting can be an experience of delayed gratification, a novel
exploration or encounter, with an undertone of distress or
unease, or induced blind panic. Whether the experience is
stressful or leads to increased satisfaction is largely an
attitude of mind.
- Some would suggest that legibility in an
area such as Shoreditch
is impossible as contemporary architecture refuses to disclose
itself, and reuse of older industrial buildings and shop fronts
by media firms, nightclubs and bars, has effected a separation of
form from content.
- Contemporary architecture can be compared
to Lacan's
conception of the speaking subjectivity of the analysand: as a
self-referential discourse or diversion "coiled about an
absent
centre which it can neither conceal nor reveal" (Tavor
Bannet:
46). Like the language in which the analysand's discourse is
presented, building design and refurbishment is caught up in a
labyrinth of symbolic reference systems: it repeats established
models and 'narrative' methods familiar from other 'texts' and
speaks with a plurality of diverse and often conflicting voices
borrowed from extant ideologies and from the forms of vernacular
'speech'. Contemporary architecture does not reflect or represent
reality, but banishes its human inhabitants as it names them,
speaking for itself only, its formal resolutions and
techniques.
- Shop fronts and
overexposure
SSDAAP 1.3.4 Development. Permission for development
within
the SSDAAP area may be granted provided that the proposals:
- Present a lively active street frontage, with regular
entrances and windows facing onto the street (16).
SSDAAP 1.3.11 Shop fronts. Permission will not normally be
given
for the removal of existing shop fronts that contribute to the
historic and architectural character and appearance of the SSDAAP
area. Permission will not normally be given for solid roller
shutters (19).
Project Mimique feels that a regulatory
demand for
retention of shop fronts is inappropriate when converting
existing premises or building for office development. Large shop
windows have the effect of putting workers in a glass goldfish
bowl with the attendant 'death wish' and aggressive sadism that
attend such spectacularised confinement. Needs of staff should
take priority over conservation aesthetic. The overexposure of
workers in these institutions is magnified by the need for
constant lighting as the narrow streets are rather dark.
Office premises in the Shoreditch triangle have developed various
strategies to negate, deflect or distract the gaze, which do no
favours for streetscape. A quick survey of the Charlotte Road,
Rivington Street area, found a range of plastic opaque surfaces
stuck onto glass, stained-wood blocking a view, cantilevered
metal grills, heavy rolling shutters behind full-length glass,
the building of a false wall (half height) a metre away from the
window, venetian blinds, heavy (dirty) net curtains, ribbed glass
affording glimpses of modern chandeliers, and slatted blinds
fronting a solicitors on Great Eastern Street.
Some offices have taken their visibility to heart, their need for
spatial innovation taken back inside the office, but we find
further strategies of negation towards the passerby. These
offices were often empty; those with staff had taken to seating
them well away from the window. Moving Brands (7-8 Charlotte
Road) was the exception here, but had installed a multimedia
screen as distraction. 57 Charlotte Road presented their office
as design installation with lava lamps and bold plastic windmill
fans, but there was no sign of life. Workhouse (31 Charlotte
Road) displayed a palm-fringed, white-walled office, (a moral
exposure?) staff seated well away from the idle gaze on a
mezzanine tier. Foxtons (corner of Curtain Road and Great Eastern
Street) is noteworthy as a banal gesture: a giant screen with
endless tennis and brightly-coloured 'coral' armchairs (the
message reads: "No air in here").
- Continuous building line
SSDAAP 1.3.4 Development. Permission for development
within
the SSDAAP area may be granted provided that the proposals:
- Have a continuous building line up to the back edge of
pavements (16).
- Space for al fresco dining could be
facilitated by
creating a space between building and pavement during
redevelopment. Hoxton Street to the north has an irregular
pavement edge where houses have been constructed facing onto the
market. While we appreciate that this is itself a remnant of an
earlier and evolving street pattern, we see no reason why the
Shoreditch triangle cannot be planned for new times.
Alternatively, outside eating could be taken above ground; the
SSDAAP should actively encourage this.
- Leaving the pavement edge with a spirited
undulation (facade elevation) might be condoned.
- A formal loss, a functional
necessity
SSDAAP 1.3.4 Applications for Tall Buildings (buildings
that
are significantly taller than surrounding development) will only
be acceptable in those opportunity areas as identified in the
Hackney Tall Buildings Strategy [...] and will be subject to
criteria for development as set out in the Strategy (16).
SSDAAP Car park site
The most prominent site is the triangular multi-storey car park
site between Great Eastern Street, Holywell Lane and Curtain
Road. This site requires an exceptional development, due to its
prominent position and pivotal role as a major node [...]
(34).
- View is one of the more striking
experiences in a
spatially-intense built environment; as you suggest, attention
must be paid to edges of sharper scale, and perspectives of
strategic axis, but we suggest also to aerial panoramas and
moments of anticipation, punctuation and incident (Cullen).
Expressionist exaggeration of sharp corners and intensity of
development at key nodes might be encouraged, rather than the
perspectival monument approach resonant of the Vatican -- a
spiritual closure, the prison of legibility and bondage of
literal metaphor -- that appears to inform your policy on the
location of tall buildings.
- Project Mimique objects to the demolition
of the car
park, although we acknowledge that it could do with
a coat of paint and a more spatially-flamboyant forecourt. Bare
neon and harsh white walls, the horror of overexposure and
disrepair. Only here is the world too bright
(perdition!).
Footnotes
1. "The Baudrillardian universe can therefore be read as an
effect
of the post-structuralist critique of meaning and reference taken
to an extreme limit where the effluence of simulacra replaces the
play of textualities or discourses. This free-floating vertigo of
simulacra in Baudrillard's theory projects the image of a
universe with no stable structures or finalities in which to
anchor theory or politics" (Kellner, online).
2. "Consider the chance, even a small one, of committing to
an
outrageous policy, starting a nuclear holocaust, for example.
There are, infact, people who favour outrageous actions, and they
cannot be denied their place in an open society. But the policies
they advocate cannot be allowed to prevail even by a remote
chance. The principle to apply here is not majority rule but 'the
majority must not be offended'. Along these lines, the method
called 'approval voting' has been employed by organisations such
as the Institute of Electronic Engineers. Members vote for all
acceptable candidates, not just one candidate". From: Sander
Rubin (1995/98) Social Choice and Chance in an Open Society,
published online.
3. "It was in this period, between 1963-5, that the
extraordinary
inventiveness and imagery of Archigram came to world attention.
Cities were designed that looked like computers and molehills,
that crawled on the shoots of a telescope like Paolozzi's
Bug-Eyed Monsters, that bobbed under the sea like so many
skewered balloons, that sprouted -- swock! -- out of the sea like
a Tom Wolfian hydraulic umbrella, that zoomed down from the
clouds flashing 'Destroy-Man! Kill-All-Humans' a
space-comic-robot-zaap, that clicked into place along pneumatic
tubes, a plug-in plastic layer cake, that gurgled and spluttered
over the old city like creeping, cancerous, testubular, friendly
Daleks. [...] [W]hat Archigram was essentially doing was
consciously borrowing (stealing) images from any and every
possible source and then turning them into urban forms: a method
of ad hoc addition where the theft remains clear for everyone to
admire" (Jencks: 289-291). Their more practical suggestions,
however, were irredeemably dull.
4. For instance, the work of Le Corbusier (Freehold Maisonettes
1922; Unite d'Habitation 1947-52), and Bauhaus-inspired
architects in Eastern Europe. Jencks cites Moses Ginzburg and I.
Milinis in Moscow, designers of the Narkomfim Communal House
"which included collective facilities such as a kitchen,
gymnasium, library, nursery, canteen and heating services. The
standard unit includes a double-height living room as in Le
Corbusier's Unite d'Habitation". It is remarkable the extent
to which contemporary luxury developments echo this socialist
model.
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