AArchitecture 40

AArchitecture 40

Heart of the Angel

AArchitecture 40 aims to explore ‘maintenance’, primarily through forms of time-based media. The act of maintenance is performed through repetition and movement. It is gestural, often marking territory or obliging societal etiquettes. Maintenance is an ongoing and essential part of a built environment, however, it is usually left out of architectural discourse.

This issue moves through scale, from the intimacy of dirt traces to scratches etched into walls for hundreds of years. It explores processes and byproducts from the scale of a fibre to the acts of legislation and planning which instigate routines in the public realm.

We take as our starting point a film by Molly Dineen. Heart of the Angel portrays routines of maintenance performed by a group of London Underground employees working in Angel station in 1989. Dineen personifies the station through a number of individuals and their daily rituals. In particular, Dineen pays close attention to the role of the fluffer in maintaining a clean and operable railway track for daytime service. Nowadays, the fluffers have been replaced by vacuum trains which run through the tube lines sucking up all debris collected over the course of the week. Until recently, the automated task of “sucking up” the tubes in London was performed by individuals bending down, picking and placing matter into large plastic bags. For decades, in the early hours of the morning the Underground was lined with a group, often of women, who would brush, clean and remove all dust, litter and waste to prevent fires, sparks and explosions.

Hands and bodies move repeatedly, miming the surfaces of the hollowed out underground.

AArchitecture is a magazine edited by students of the Architectural Association, published three times a year.

AArchitecture 40 Term 3, 2019– 20 www.aaschool.ac.uk

Student Editorial Team: Gabrielle Eglen Georgia HablÜtzel Amy Glover

Editorial Board: Eva Franch i Gilabert, Director Alex Lorente, Membership Design: AA Print Studio

Printed by Blackmore, England Published by the Architectural Association 36 Bedford Square, London WC1B 3ES

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Transcription from Heart of the Angel Molly Dineen

—

b ackg r o u nd That’s it, that’s it. (laughs)

mo lly

Why isn’t there anywhere for you to change?

sylvia

Pardon?

mo lly

Where are you supposed to change?

sylvia

On the platform. Or wherever we can find a little nook or cranny to hide. But on this one, there’s nothing. So… Nevermind. I’ve been here too long to worry about that! (laughs)

—

b ackg r o u nd Look at her! (laughing)

mo lly

Sylvia, will you introduce me to the family?

sylvia

Oh, what, daughter Sue. Jeannie’s daughter-in-law. Maggie, future -

mo lly

Mother-in-law -

sylvia

Well, not our mother-in-law!

mo lly

No!

sylvia

But future relation. I had an auntie that done 33 years on it.

mo lly

On this job?

sylvia

On this job, yeah. She retired, then I came on the job.

jeannie

I still can’t get used to it.

sylvia

It will take you a while, but you will get used to it.

mo lly

What’s that?

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jeannie

The night-time. Working nights. I can’t get into a routine. Still can’t get into a routine.

mo lly

I can’t. (shakes head) At all.

jeannie

So.. My days are nights and my nights are days.

(metal tools clatter) —

backgr o u nd (singing) That’s the sound of the men, working on the chain ga-a-ang. That’s the sound of the men, working on the chain… gang.

(brushing, clanging, scraping) sylvia

It’s… a lot to do with it is human hair. You’re standing on the platform and all the hair gets blown out. That’s where all the fluff and that comes from.

mo lly

Why can’t they just let it accumulate though? Why does it have to be cleared out?

sylvia

Well, a fire hazard. I mean, the sparks from the trains will set that alight in no time.

Look, you can see! See the hair!

mo lly

Oh yeah.

sylvia

Yeah? That’s all hairs. It’s just matted with the dirt and the dust that gets blown up.

fluffer Would you do this job? Honestly? mo lly

I’d rather not, if I had a choice.

fluffer No. You see? We eat so much dust. You know? No fresh air, nothing. And we don’t have any conveniences. None whatsoever. Have you been to the loo since you been down here? mo lly

No.

fluffer No? mo lly

We keep our legs crossed…

fluffer Yeah? Go in the bothole if you want to go to the toilet. (laughs) (scraping) fluffer If I’m the last person working down here and everybody, and everybody gone, gone up and left me down there, you think, “Oh God, what you going to do” you know, suppose somebody coming or anything and you hurry up and try and meet up with the rest. They leave you one day in the tunnel, it’s you and God, isn’t it? mo lly

Do you ever get scared in the tunnel?

fluffer I used to - at first - I used to. You know, I used to think I hear footsteps, but not anymore.

You get used to it.

AArchitecture 40 2

When the City Waits Dor Schindler

The following photographs were taken on the 24th January 2019 in Regents Park Estate SW1

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Under Cable Street Miraj Ahmed

Mysterious markings often appear in our streets like strange hieroglyphic signs that are directed towards some secret initiated group. I came upon a set of these signs in Cable Street not long ago.

Spray paint markings that have enough legibility to suggest that they have a technical language – as opposed to graffiti or tagging which might have a more individual aesthetic appeal – although these particular ground markings, with their fluorescent colours, have a rather cheerful quality. These signs are in fact indicators of the services and utilities that lie beneath our streets.

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Lines, numbers, text, arrows and squiggles are codes understood by utility workers. Symbols that denote pipes for water and gas, cables for electricity, telecommunications and cctv are colour coded and convey information such as depth and location – often near manhole covers, drains and other service access points. They might also be a set of instructions for where to dig for work to be done. I like to think of them as drawings or circuit diagrams that reveal the hidden workings of the street network. Seems particularly apt in Cable street.

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Home Essentials Emily Priest

1. WORKING FROM HOME

2. MOVING HOME

This seems to be what everyone is doing now, and no one really knows how long it will go on. It goes without saying that this is by no means a dramatic situation to find oneself in during a global pandemic: we quietly sit on the side lines, in a highly fortunate position, on the mundane outskirts of urgency. So far, we seem to have determined the basic shifts necessary to keep our lives running normally – or as normal as possible - from home. In only two weeks the adjustments we have made, however relative or absolute, have raised fundamental questions about how we live and work and what is required as a basis in sustaining those two things.

Working from home generally became increasingly common during 1990-2000, providing that being physically away from the workplace would not disrupt the production of work. For someone commuting from afar or for young families, the option of staying at home and being digitally present in the office provided an amount of flexibility and convenience from the 5-day working week. In the wake of the pandemic, offices discussed the option of working from home for about a week, most of them decided on a strategy for the move within a few days and a lot of us were set up at home and working within two days. Personally, moving home took less than two hours. In the space of 20 minutes I unplugged the office computer, wrapped some bubble wrap around the screen and packed a bag of essentials (glue, ruler, scalpel, two scalpel blades, tape, some foamboard and my notebooks). Unsure of whether I was packing for three days or three weeks, as well as being aware that I would need to carry everything myself, I decided to take the bare minimum - the basic instruments used every day.

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images: Scenarios of working at home / living at work. Drawing series by: Paol Kemp, Aram Mooradian, Emily Priest, Alexandra Savtchenko-Belskaia & Louise Underhill

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3. HOME– OFFICES In making a home-office, pieces of furniture were enlivened to become workstations. Kitchen tables became desks, bedrooms became phone booths and bookcases became video backdrops. Some people solely used their personal devices, others took entire computers home, but most controlled their office machines remotely. Such that, whilst their offices sat empty, the machines within them proceeded to buzz away following commands being channelled from afar. Regardless of the system at hand, most of us decided that they required a desk of some kind, a computer and a phone. A remote and independent working environment that enabled them to be removed from the feeling of ‘being home’ (without actually moving), towards a place that could capacitate the production of work.

4. THE WORKDAY I’m not sure I had fully seen the home or area I live in during the week prior to working at home. Being confined at home, even for only a few days, brought about an awareness of its orientation. How it sits with the sun. The time that the post arrives. The movements and habits of the neighbour above. The hour of the day that the sun spills into the kitchen and warms the tiled floor. The same hour that the basement level becomes cold and slightly dark. The economy of each room throughout the day feels increasingly clear, as each corner of each room is ranked according to their best and worst qualities, according to desk real estate. Such thoughts reminded me of Xavier de Maistre’s 42-day retreat to his room in A Journey Around my Room.1 I, too, felt relieved not to be spending so much money every day, and my bedroom felt like chilly England whilst the kitchen felt like the south coast of France.

5. NET WORKS In a 1973 study on the potential of telecommuting 2, one of the major drawbacks for what we today call working from home, was the lack of data networks: “One of the major technological and economic barriers to ultimate diffusion is the requirement for the widespread availability of switched data networks rather than the relatively small number of private dedicated networks” 3.

It seems we share a similar reliance today. The physical confines of an office had to be replaced with an immaterial and infinite circuit of v p ns, chatrooms, messenger boards and video calls: a fibre optic replica of the workplace. Files needed to be transferred quickly; remote meetings could then start almost instantly, and emails could zoom between each other endlessly. So far it is much the same as before, but with an even further reliance on digital systems. If nothing else, the situation has proven either our strength in communication and groupwork, or our strength in working alone and independently.

6. FACING FACES On-screen, forward facing faces are now normal. In life before working from home, we rarely talked to each other (particularly work colleagues) less than half a metre apart and head on. Now we seem to talk more.

Suddenly, Instagram is full of video call screenshots of socially distanced meetings, presentations, conversations, drinking and eating, all of us with and away from each other. Everyone we previously knew in real terms, is now a full-frontal front facing face, closer to you than ever.

During a meeting, one person jokily said that “what we’re doing is not working from home but living at work!” This was either referencing that we find it harder to mentally switch off with our computers in our living rooms, or that everyone we work with is now in our living rooms. Either way, it is clear that this time of confinement has altered our previous understanding or perhaps expectations, of domesticity and its private and social parameters. One might then question - when exactly does working at home become living at work? Perhaps when working, one may no longer feel like they are at home and vice versa: your head and shoulders transfigure to form an extension to the workstation in front, you are somehow displaced from the room and part of an outer network of others also staring into their screens.

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7. ROUTINE

9. STRUCTURE

Starting and ending the workday can become blurry.

The number of things one is able to do in a given day decreases and there is nothing to actively break up the day. Shifts and changes within daily life have to happen mentally and actions should be precise and calculated.

One can afford to wake up later and still be on time for work. It all becomes a bit weird if you don’t go outside at all for an entire day. Falling asleep might become difficult, maybe because the body has become so used to digesting so many more kilometres, districts, rooms, smells, conversations, sounds and surfaces than it is doing currently. Daily office meetings start at 9am with a video call. For lunch, one should move to another area of the house if they can, or even better, go out into their garden if they have one. Office meetings again at 2pm. Yet all things considered, it is perfectly conceivable to go for a run at 4pm and do an hour or work after dinner. Once finished, turn off the computer and try really hard not to look at a screen until the next morning.

For a site-specific profession that relies heavily on the negotiation of space and people (client, council, developer, consultants, etc.) it is somewhat uncomfortable to realise that we may be able to maintain architectural practice from underneath our duvet and within the confines of our own home. The latter part of that sentence is an exaggeration of course, but there would have been a time when off-site working for an architect was unimaginable. That said, it is still to be seen if what we are doing right now is sustainable.

Nevertheless, perhaps this shift will symptomatically alter or at the very least question, the ways in which we previously practiced. We might soon begin to question what we previously understood as essential structures: the 5-day working week, the office, the uniform, the desk, the working day, the meeting room, even entire office structures. For the reason that if nothing else, our current situation has made clear how much the structure of professional practice is of our own construct, and how far such structures are representations of wider socio-cultural shifts.

8. CIRCLES 10. UNKNOWN Since working at home, the act of going outside has to be much more considered. The physical space we each occupy within the city has significantly scaled down to within a few streets of our homes. At the same time, it is infinitely extended by what is being shown digitally on the news and video calls. Our travel distances have massively reduced. From what might have been overlapping journeys of anywhere up to 45 miles, moving in and out of the city centre, are now either very small circles barely touching or incredibly large data circles stretching around the world. Circles that are limited by how far we can walk and our internet speed. The shops we use are local, the friends we see (albeit 2m apart) are just as easily those living close by or those across the world (through a screen). The walking routes we take exhaust our local areas. Computers aside, everyone lives and circulates within their own physical means and each of our networks have been scaled down to the limits of our own bodies.

Where we go from here is not really known. For all of the discomfort and anxiety that such ambiguity may bring to us, the past two weeks have fenced us into the same grounds of uncertainty. In so much that our daily formats have been rewritten, plans have been altered, the prospect of coming events have been temporarily removed and most significantly, loved ones have been lost. Most people are struggling to keep up. We do not know how long this new way of life will last, how severe it will become or how much more it will change.

The only solace to be found then, in a time of such trouble and ambiguity, is knowing that even for a brief moment, some of us are in the same place.

1 In his 42-day account, De Maistre embarks on an imaginative journey through the objects found within his room: ‘For our journey is really going: and, while my soul, falling back on her own resources, was in the last chapter threading the mazy paths of metaphysics, I had so placed myself in my arm-chair…’.

2 The document, The Telecommunications-Transportation Tradeoff: Options for Tomorrow, published in the 1970s, was considered the founding document of telecommuting. The study analysed how shifting our work to home would affect the city and urban landscapes for the better.

3 Nilles, Jack M., and F. Roy. Carlson. The Telecommunications-Transportation Tradeoff: Options for Tomorrow. Booksurge Publishing, 2007, pg.16.

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Nightlier Light Buster Rรถnngren

In total, some 1500 gas lamps remain in use in London. The lamps are looked after by the last five remaining lamplighters in London, who are employed by British Gas. A so-called gas destructor lamp, sited on top of a sewer outside the Savoy, burns the methane gas produced by the hotel guests. The lamp is the only surviving example of its kind, designed as a low cost, low maintenance way to keep London lit up at night.

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8pm Snack Yoav Carmon

8pm, a Venice canal – a plate, a fan, metal chains, a component of an air conditioning unit and an old toilet brush holder are only some of the illegally dumped matter that clandestinely loads the invisible side of the city. In a single act of revelation, the canal has successfully assumed the position of misfortunate victim or criminal - an optimal destination for past, present, and future fly-tippers.

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A Saintly Scratch Moad Musbahi

Arborio, S. Sebastiano’s chapel, view of small apse on south wall, with frescoes of Crucifixion, enthroned Virgin, and saints.

Photograph by Véronique Plesch.

‘The body is the inscribed surface of events.’ 1 What connects the different categories of mark making is the piercing process itself. The act breaks with the surface’s flatness and creates a series of reliefs in a legible form. The puncturing of skin, as a tattoo, is charged with a consequence of permanence. Marks on bodies, tattoos and birthmarks, can be used to read a

certain person’s identity, they are used to identify an individual for the unique arrangement betrays them in its inalterability. Other piercing marks accrue different values. As in the marking of the body of Christ upon his followers. Transferal through the condition of stigmata.

The original act of Stigmata was the wounds upon Christ, of his passion, transposed onto the

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ibid. Small apse, figure of St. Anthony.

human body of Francis of Assisi (d. 1226), whose very skin acted as the support for this transferal, the identical nature of the marks was the saintly product of St. Francis’ perfect imitation of Christ. The stigmata becomes an evidentiary tactic, a rite of passage, in which the body assimilated that of Christ’s, or taken further, it was the very surface for the scripture of Christianity. A bodily writing support, the memory of the ultimate sacrifice as an imprint upon Francis’ body through flesh. Stigmata thus is an archival process, a repository from which the story of the redemption can be read through the incision of the saint. It was achieved through the continual inscription, the repetition of that original suffering, until the wounds became a permanent sign. A reward that also served the purpose of memory, a combined devotional and mnemonic process. By combining the act of reverence, with that of an aggression against the skin, it creates a form of writing that draws on the double meaning of the tattoo, to both mark and to strike.

This split nature has a seemingly paradoxical history within Christianity, as it inaugurated a common practice of adopting slaves and criminals into the new faith through the performative act of tattooing, a ritual that looked to express their voluntary servitude for their newly taken prophet. It inverts with the original sacrifice, death as redemption, a reverse value proposition. A state in which violence as a divine act becomes a glorious event upon the martyr’s surface. The fluid category of marking upon holy bodies finds an example in the case of the Oratorio di San Sebastiano at Arborio. A town some kilometres west of Milan, in which the small chapel was a site of a particular writerly form.

The Romanesque building houses a nave and upon its walls is a fresco, attributed to a series of unknown painters and the studio of the Novarese Tommaso Cagnola from around the 1500s, that depict a passion cycle. The main apse holds the Christ Pantocrater and a group of apostles, while in the smaller apse is the scene of the Crucifixion surrounded by various saints and the enthroned Virgin. Painted over a long duration, there are a composite of pictorial layers.

And upon these layers there is a plethora of cuts and scratches.

The images depict lines and lines of text against the pigmented plaster. In Arborio, the graffiti is also the record of the history of the city. As a collective act it becomes a communal mnemonic process of recording important events upon the frescoes of the chapel.2 Yet this interplay is not epidermal, for the graffiti is a scratch, a mark with enough depth. This depth is what breaches the world of the fresco, the incision being an

opening into the depicted sacred scene. Performed with a nail or any sharp tool, without the need for ink or other traditional writing implements, not for the sake of convenience, but as a technique loaded with symbolic determination. Breaking through the superficial layer, these incisive words cut deep into the saintly pictorial flesh. In a fashion that echoes the stigmata of St. Francis, the wounding of the hands, feet and chest, so does the text mutilate the plastered skin. A third apse tells the story of St. Sebastian, another punctured saint, a body riddled with arrows, who survived to produce a sacred body with marks to witness his divine devotion.

Writing on the body is a means to seal and achieve the ascension of words, to be heard and received by the ever after. A oneness of text and body, in life and what lies beyond. Through the set viscosity of the plaster, the individual letters are guided by the implement used, the form is defined by the material properties of the medium. This interaction is physical, while it carries an excess, a certain belief that the act of marking by the visitors will connect them to the holy figures in the world of the representation who are capable of answering and addressing their needs. The letters, shaped by the resistance and crudeness of the writing tool’s point, are compelled by the force of the author’s redemptive desires.

Writing as an act of appropriation of the sacred, yet all the marks in Arborio are secular in nature.

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ibid. Smaller apse, figure of St. Sebastian.

None are copies from the scripture, or prayers without context. In a practice similar to the writing of important events and familial histories in bibles and other sacred texts,3 the text upon the chapel’s walls contains episodes of current and public affairs of the city. An appropriation, through writing, in which the object, which is subject to reverence and devotion, the fresco, becomes a container. A vessel, to be filled with the records of past actions, for a future reading. It is an interlocution between the inhabitants of the present and the mythical figures of the past. They are given credit and grace for the good things that have transpired, and their help and support is requested in the moments of doubt and crisis. The reverence scribed to devotional artworks, and their ability to cause an emotional response so strong that it transcends the boundaries of the holy figures and the physical world of the devoted, are a form of immersion. They capture the gaze to hold and provoke the viewer into a contemplative state. The act of inscribing these images, works with the dimension of faith, to dive into the body of the depiction creating a material entanglement that breaks down the distance between the real and its representation. The depth in the carved text, blends with the image, to create the possibility of access and an environment of spiritual and communal cohesion. A traumatic memory is one that affirms a certain memorialisation,

the pain and violence of the cut replicating events that the meanings describe, through the permanence of the method. Yet the same act is what determines that transmission, a certain control over the events they describe. A fear of what might come, in this chapel the words are used as a keeping together of the readership, as congregation.

Between the lines and the dry plaster flesh is a certain form of history writing, a reinterpretation of lived experience. A co-opting of time, through establishing a continuity, community and a channel of communication. Writing as a ritualised act, in which many of the inscriptions at San Sebastiano, through their repetition, attempt to “make the future predictable by making it conform to the past”.4 A means to fashion an oracle through the subtly sharp pointedness of the text.

1 Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, 148.

2 Raguin, Virginia Chieffo. Art, piety and destruction in the Christian West, 1500–1700. Farnham, Surrey, England: Ashgate, 2010. 167–97.

3 Such books are usually referred to as livres de raison in French and libri di famiglia or ricordanze in Italian (the second term being reserved for Florentine instances). See Kathleen Ashley, “Creating Family Identity in Books of Hours,” JMEMS 32 (2002): 145–65.

4 Clyde Kluckhohn, “Myths and Rituals: A General Theory,” Harvard Theological Review 35 (1942): 71.

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ibid. Figure of St. Sebastian pierced by arrows at centre of main apse.

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Wuhan Punk Chris Zhongtian Yuan

Through a body of research and conversations with writers, curators and musicians, the film Wuhan Punks documents and re-imagines a short-lived music movement. Here is a short summary of the project:

“Today, spaces for Wuhan Punk are gone. But perhaps it is one of those clichés – punk is dead; on the contrary, Wuhan Punk has become impossible to maintain within that very small gap where they used to exist; from that moment on, Punk culture has made its way out in the context of Wuhan, in a way that is unpredictable and unmeasurable”.

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In the early 1990s, Wuhan was the epicentre of the Chinese punk movement. It is generally considered to be the birthplace of Chinese punk music. However, Beijing Punk supporters might disagree – people have favoured Beijing Punk’s complex musical arrangement over Wuhan’s raw energy. Wuhan Punk, on the other hand, weaves urban legends and coarse humour through tempered tunes. Between the mid 1990s and mid 2000s, the routined performances of Wuhan Punk largely existed in underground spaces from basements to bomb shelters, from abandoned rural houses to empty real estate developments. Wuhan Punk maintains the city’s growing youth culture, loud yet invisible.

In retrospect, it all looks like a reincarnation of Andy Warhol’s Factory, 30 years later, staged in a post-industrial Chinese mega-city.

Unlike many artists, writers and poets from the previous generation, Wuhan Punks are not interested in big ideas. They are indifferent towards politics, philosophy or anything serious. Their performances are often improvised and sometimes comedic. They play pranks and break rules. They have established longterm relationships with Hubei Pop artists who are equally promiscuous. Hubei Pop artists would appear in Wuhan Punks’ music videos and in exchange, Wuhan Punks became icons painted by Hubei Pop artists.

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A Pilgrimage of the Mundane Nena Aru

Some have dreamt, prayed and meditated on Jerusalem.

Some have known it, sang to it, read into it, worshipped it, knowing it every bend and every turn. Now they are walking and singing those familiar hymns in an unfamiliar Jerusalem. 1

Five times per day, the chanting sounds, the call first from one tower, then from two, three, four each one has its own pace, intonation slowly surrounding you. The quietness of Shabbat makes space for songs.

Each group trying to overtake the other. Men in pious clothes jumping and stamping their feet. 2

1 “Everyone has two cities. Their own city and Jerusalem” Teddy Kollek, Jerusalem’s mayor for 28 years.

2 When a city is this mystical, it’s stories told and told, it’s image ready-made. It seems hard to deny, we can only feel betrayed. For how could a city, even one so grand, live up to a dream we dreamt about for years.

Young girls and older ones, dressed modestly in skirts and militarily in pants all holding hands and making the circle bigger and bigger and bigger. 3

3 Both Jerusalem’s religious realm as its conflicted one, suffer from preconceptions leading to misdirections. I had to see with new eyes, to un-maintain, to cleanse the palate in my brain.

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A selection of stills depict a trip to Jerusalem in February 2020, alongside excerpts of transcribed interviews:

In so many ways, you could say that we placed ourselves inside our little bubble. Completely detached from the outside world. This bubble of ours was blown up to millions of pieces. 4

4 It was crucial that my audience would undergo the same. By stealing the image, by making a movie of only sound. I am cleaning the image you maintained.

5 The city is one of persistence and coexistence of a silent majority asking for loud changes. Of peace-makers, care-takers, walkers and performers, of resilient hopers and believers, of reformers. For every flag, for every shawl, for every swearword or racial call. I found people pious and unbiased, tolerant and kind, on both sides of the wall. Jerusalem’s true beauty isn’t what’s expected, rather its resilient mundanity – despite it all.

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The Home of all Angels The Cloud Human Bodies and the 24/7 Data Economy

Bas Princen, Cooling Plant, Dubai, 2009.

Daryan Knoblauch

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“Did it surprise you how manual this job is?”

“I thought it would be a bit more modern than a peak and a shovel, it’s like the 18th century.” 1

THE BODY AS A TECHNO -BIOLOGICAL ASSEMBLAGE If becoming modern meant acting according to scientific principles and making a ‘purifying’ separation between nature and culture, technology and society, man and thing, then we have never succeeded in maintaining this purity. Instead, we became chimera, Mischwesen, hyper-subjects.2 In 1993 Latour wrote the following, “…when we find ourselves invaded by frozen embryos, expert systems, digital machines, sensor equipped robots, hybrid corn, data banks, psychotropic drugs, whales outfitted with radar sounding devices, gene synthesisers, audience analysers, and so on, when our daily newspapers display all these monsters on page after page, and when none of these chimera can be properly on the object side or on the subject side, or even in between, something has to be done.” 3

The techno-biological assemblage evoked by Latour resembles on the one hand, daily-embodiments of physical infrastructural devices and on the other, immaterial information produced through telecommunicational systems. Both escape the public eye in a deliberately paradoxical way.

In Heart of the Angel, inner-city movement (traffic) manifests itself through the protocol of moving bodies from ‘a’ to ‘b’.‘The Home of all Angels: the Cloud’ materialises that bodily movement as blind-boxes in the periphery, far from its suggested oh-so-heavenly smoothness. Here, daily incarnations between man and its mediums of flux do not only connect space and time, bodies and machines, living and the dead, viruses and bacteria, the digital multiverse and its production chains, but smoothly burst the bubble of the relentless machine operation.

This occurs despite human occupation in the moment of its generated surplus.

At Angel the price of the entry ticket, manually purchased or automated via a tab, contains a temporary membership to the commuting society.

In 1989 this access was supervised by a controller (an embodied gate) reacting to a visual signal (a ticket), approving it with an oral (or gestural) response. Since 2014, access has been regulated by a physical gate reacting to a digital signal given by a physical card.

In, In. Out, Out. The monetary value is estimated by the means that make the journey smooth. One pays for smoothness.

More precisely, one pays for invisibility. Approaching the ticket machine, the gate, the elevator, the tube, the opening doors, a place to sit down and a moment of reversal on arriving at the destination. On the contrary, “this is not what I paid for”, is the logical consequence of any kind of disturbance within the trajectory of smoothness. This is visibility. Queueing in front of the gate, card denial due to digital bugs, taking the staircase, over modulated announcements, over crowded tubes, litter or the smell of puke.

HUMANS PERVERTED DREAMS OF AUTOMATION Within the Cloud, daily behaviours are translated into high energy consumption buildings, known as data centres. These 21st century factories contain the electrifying essence of immaterial repetition. Rituals of knowledge production are converted into electric patterns: four billion Google searches, 500 million tweets, 254 million Alibaba orders, 250 million new photo uploads to Facebook, 235 million QQ messages a day. 4

The breeding ground for all these flows is the internet, often perceived as a magical, distant place where things are simply beamed down onto screens. In many respects the internet is something quite physical.

The chora between its user and its interaction is connected via countless cables laid out, as far from clouds as possible, namely on the seabeds of the ocean. 5 Here, the amount of steps one takes from the tube to the elevator is translated into electromagnetic waves, using the phone as a bodily prosthetic. It is here that the queue for the elevator, figuratively speaking, translates itself into a buffering signal when opening a keynote presentation made in London but stored in Maiden, North Carolina.

If one pays attention to the worldwide distribution of fibreglass cables that connect London, Maiden, or any other geographical point, one sees that most of these routes follow the same pathways as former imperial tracks. All fibre cables within Africa lead back to their earlier European colonial powers.

Many cables lead from South America to Spain.

Imperialism did not stop with decolonisation, but translated itself to a level of global infrastructure.6

But are data centres infrastructural buildings and do they really host mankind’s perverted dreams of automated labour? Firstly, the data centres’ structural

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32

Data centre, Shutterstock, location unknown, 2009.

The physical internet, underwater sea cable diver, author unknown.

rationality often resembles that of large warehouses – flat, with a lot of surface area and windowless facades.

Located in peripheral areas where connection to fibre optic networks is guaranteed, these generic architectures offer optimal conditions for storing large amounts of data. The agglomeration of these large structures into a campus creates urban landscapes whose abstract primary forms and deserted outdoor spaces are reminiscent of the surreal urban scenes of Giorgio de Chirico – not to mention those of spring 2020.

Secondly, architecture and the human body were inseparably linked up until the 19th century: basic parameters rooted in hygiene determined architecture and urban planning, such as the supply of shelter, light and air as well as sensible routing. Due to the technical advancements of the 20th century, this connection was cut and the automated terrain started to constitute the nexus of labor transformations.

executed by “try and buy” engineers, which have to work according to the local time zone of the server parts that they are taking care of. They fly in, work between 8-14 hours and fly out again. The byproduct of the data centre is heat. Most of one’s bodily interaction materialises itself in the end as hot air, therefore the storage of data creates its own climate.

Artificial cooling is essential to mediate working conditions between the hot and cold server isles, with climatic differences of up to 35C°. 7

Despite its beautiful crudeness, the Cloud reveals that humans are no longer at the ultimate centre of the operation. As caretakers and supervisors, humans maintain the spaces in which the digital economy creates a new time zone. One where day and night no longer exist. Here, the human body adjusts itself to the uptime cycles of automation, 24/7, while wandering through a chimera-climate, produced by humans, processed by machines.

MAINTAINING MACHINES, A PHYSICAL THING Both ingredients that produce the Cloud, ergo the internet and the data centre, are physical.

The internet is laid out by real women and men.

Up to 200 km of submarine cable are slowly embedded into the water using ships commonly referred to as cable-layers or cable-ships. Depending on the equipment on board – the cable vessel, the type of plough, the sea conditions and the seabed on which the cable is laid – size, duration and the method may alternate. Working protocols resolve into 10 hours of manual labour with switch-shifts that supervise and assist an up to 24-hour operation, executed by cable-plough robots, a crew of up to 15 workers on a boat and roughly the same amount of people along the coast testing the signals of the cable.

When cables are damaged, divers or specialised small submersibles are sent to the seabed to detect where the cuts are. Then, either the diver or the robotic arms on the submersible bring the two ends of the cable to the surface where they are intertwined and joined again by humans.

Meanwhile, the data centre hosts an electrifying mixture of tenants which is just as random and diverse as that of a traditional city: personal emails, family photos and sensitive health-data are stored and processed indiscriminately alongside offers on viagra, sex toys and online black market trading. The 24/7 data economy is highly dependent on human bodies.

Installing and maintaining hardware are tasks

1 Molly Dineen, Heart of the Angel, 25:49min (1989).

2 Bruno Latour, We have never been Modern (1999).

3 Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects: Philosophy (1996) and Ecology After the End of the World.

4 Harvard Survey on Technical Studies (2016).

5 Derrida, Eisenman, Chora L Works (1985).

6 Submarine Cable Map (2018).

7 Insides gathered through surveys by Het-Nieuwe Institute and writings in online chatrooms. (2019)

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With Minimal Means Nicole Ng

During last October’s Extinction Rebellion march, a number of geodesic domes popped up at various traffic choke points in London to provide shelter for group sessions and play-structures for children. Has the geodesic dome re-emerged as a form of disobedience?

Of resistance? What about the design of the geodesic dome allows for it to be implemented at times of such immediate need? With the police circling areas ready to recite Section 14 of the Public Order Act, the domes popped up within less than a day of the march.

The political act here is to maintain a continuous presence. The instantaneous erection of structures and the continuous flow of people became an advantage against the riot authorities. Occupation was temporary and the flow of participants fluid. The spontaneity and immediacy of action is reflected in the architecture of its shelters – its minimal materiality, its speed of assembly and its lightness of movement. The erection of the temporary shelters occupied the slither of time between being seen by the police and being recited Section 14:

In tracing its history, the geodesic dome has constantly been a form of disobedience against something larger than itself; whether it is Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion House (his first iteration with the geodesic dome form), which received more than 30,000 orders after its official release, or experiments in self building geodesic domes at Black Mountain College where artists and architects like John Cage, Cy Twombly, Walter Gropius, Franz Kline were faculty or students; or Biosphere 2.0, a miniature model of Earth where 8 humans lived inside the closed system for 2 years to understand how we can better inhabit Biosphere 1 (our planet). In our contemporary time of crisis, the geodesic dome, a spherical shell form in the shape of our planet, is reviving itself as a symbol of minimal means, self-autonomy and cooperation. A ground up opportunity to reclaim the occupation, care and ownership of space.

In a situation where you need to occupy a space and/or make a shelter with minimal means, here is a catalogue for designs of geodesic dome connectors.

In Latin, ‘geodesic’ means ‘earth-dividing’, it denotes the shortest possible line between two points on a sphere or other curved surface. As a structure, it is doing more with less – it achieves a high structural strength and building footprint with a minimal amount of material. Design is reduced to its bare and practical lowest denominator – what materials can I easily obtain and transport? How fast can I erect this structure? Can I manage to erect this by myself?

Above Right

Students from Diploma 18 transporting at geodesic play-structure to Trafalgar Square Students using aluminium Venetian blinds to build a geodesic dome in Black Mountain College 1949.

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After the Party Shaha Raphael

AN AFTER PARTY AFTER THE PARTY Or, After the use After utilising, participating, appropriating, altering, the place (a room) into a space (a dream or a memory).

French philosopher, Michel De Certeau, speaks about the process according to which we all, continuously, instate our space. Places are capable of inducing in us a process of reappropriation, a reading of our own.

Maintenance and cleaning, which seems to be an obsession in the contemporary world, is an act of erasure of any past event or use. It is a reset that covers the past and only allows the near future to occur, to then cover it again, and again, and again. Therefore, the freedom of reappropriation and subjective reading is lost.

A DINNER PARTY 32 Bedford square, First Floor Front We were in a room in a Georgian House, with a pink glazed terracotta tiled chimney and a detailed ornamental plaster ceiling. It was perhaps once a dining room for a prestigious 18th century family.

Today, it is part of the Architectural Association School of Architecture where we have seminars, pinups, workshops and reviews. In this room, on the 16th of October 2019, we had a History and Theory seminar, or a Party; a break-of-format and a discussion around food and drink in a space that we so far knew only as a classroom. The first of a series of Dinner Parties started that day at 7.30pm.

Diploma Unit 1 had scheduled a jury in that very same room for the morning after, 10am, clueless about the fact that this exact space was a party venue the night before.

I was part of both these events. The memory of an intangible event lived on, the smell of bread and the wine stains on the otherwise pristine green carpet eased my way into the room and into my presentation, and allowed me to feel and appropriate the space in a different way. The ephemeral hints of an event of the night before allowed me to change my relationship with the room, through a shared, secret narrative.

As a leftover, the wear and residue remind us that other users have preceded us and others will follow.

Traces even provide the individual with a precious clue as to the nature of these past uses and allow one to formulate stories behind the hints. ‘In this sense, traces of wear play a vital part in our ability to read our environment and, by extension, appreciate it.’

(Rotor 17) Dust, remains and wear all contain something beyond themselves; a memory, an archive of something that once was.

Isn’t it worthwhile to take advantage of the inherent condition of entropy in ordered space?

The act of cleaning is a mirror of humanity’s desire to control and dominate nature. Today’s society is all about maintenance, cleaning, sweeping the dust away from the contemporary consciousness.1 But where does it really go? We can’t get rid of it, we can only move it out of our realm.2

We don’t think twice about cleaning buildings, that’s what we do, why not, it makes buildings look ‘better’. It makes buildings look like use never happened, as if that part of architecture really never existed.

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ANOTHER DINNER PARTY 36 Bedford Square, Front Members Room On the 27th of November, we met for the third instalment of the Dinner Party, a new use was integrated into a room of the school and new stories set in the place.

The Front Members Room, usually used as a daily meeting space between tutors and students for discussions; or between students for lunch or work, turned into the landscape of a party. Uncooked rice grains or confetti, sneaking off into the corners of the room, 'dust in-waiting’. Edible or inedible, all of the contributions from members of the Dinner Party entered a zone where conventions of sanitisation were gone.

It is worth mentioning that to me, the confetti wasn’t just inert matter, it felt alive. It grabbed the sole of your shoe in a swarm and clung on to you, as if you were walking on a mushy cloud, rather than a wooden Georgian floor.

Once everyone was there, the doors closed, we were in our own universe. Handmade bread plates were served to every guest, no cutlery, except for a salted caramel spoon for dessert. The main course, saucy mushroom bourguignon, was served straight into individually carved breads and savoured by biting straight into the mix. As an accompaniment, exquisite sticky rice balls with pickled ginger and seaweed were sitting on the rice landscape waiting to be devoured with our hands.

A distinction is to be made between the two states of rice: the rice balls were cooked, sticky, packaged individually in plastic, neat and ordered while the other, hard, loose, noisy, wanted to escape the table and make its way onto people’s laps.

Every person in the room was indulging in the ordered messiness and tastiness of the meal, having a bite of mushroom on bread, another bite of the caramel spoon, and some raw fish jelly, all eaten with the hands.

We were not only okay with the mess, we were loving the mess. We knew that it was an organised activity within an organised timeframe. But as soon as we stepped out from the timeframe, it became an intolerable state once more. As the party came to an end (determined by the cleaners kicking us out at 10pm), a mad rush began. The human hysteria towards mess started to come out in every individual in the room.

retour for the guests, a memory to be taken with them.

Suddenly, everything became stuff out of place.

The rice and confetti as particles became much more evident because of their scale. Tiny individual objects showed their magnitude as a whole. The cleaning and ordering of these tiny objects required Henry the hoover, to suck these particles from the ground in order to eliminate every bit of physical memory left from the party. Due to an incorrect nozzle diameter and an increasingly full belly, he worked slowly. Soon, Henry, the ultimate ordering tool, was dismantled and tampered with to try and make him perform better, in order to reach a cleanliness that suits the state of order that humans constantly seek.

Alas, the job couldn’t be done properly even after Henry’s disembowelment. At 10.37pm, we had to leave the room, but not without writing a polite apology note for the ‘mess’ to be found by the cleaners.

9am, the next morning, the Georgian wooden floor was shining and there was no trace of the party.

This is the grey zone, between the closing and opening of the school, of institutions and office buildings, when cleaning comes to life. Sweeping, spraying, wiping, vacuuming, polishing, waxing, reverberating germs, mould, dust and stains… However, at close inspection, in the Front Members Room in 36 Bedford Square, some particles had managed to save themselves in the corner of the room, or nestled themselves in between the floorboards - a space just small enough where the broom couldn’t reach.

We can say that the particles, in this situation, rice grains and confetti, extended the life-span of the party. In ten years time, someone will find a rice grain and start reconstructing the story of what happened here, using this story to understand the space based on the finding of a lost memory. Through the thought initiated by the objets trouvés, the space becomes connected to others and the marks can be interpreted as a richness rather than disorder.

I OVERHEARD;

And so it begins/ends.

What about the markings on the wall It’s ok it gives it character But it’s messing with the harmony of the space Look the candle wax is dripping all over the table What about the centrepiece with the candles It’s ok, leave it, I want to remember it.

We cleaned and tidied the room, took the bins out, slid almost everything into them. We filled small plastic bags with rice from the landscape - a small cadeau-de-

1 Douglas, Mary. Purity and Danger: an Analysis of Concept of Pollution and Taboo. Routledge, 2010.

2 Otero-Pailos, Jorge, et al. Jorge Otero-Pailos: the Ethics of Dust. Verlag Der Buchhandlung Walther Kèonig, 2009.

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Thousand Years of Non-solitude Fiction of the Forest Oratai Taechamahaphant

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leaf, fruits, stems, trunks, barks, sap, chlorophyll, roots, twigs, soil.

How has the state government come to own vast areas of biological living bodies sprung up from the undivided soil?

The silhouette of Southeast Asian forests is understood through the institutionalisation of their maintenance in the colonial era – what we now know as ‘forest’ is the residue of an imagined landscape, collaged and sculpted to ease security and control. To normalise the forest as a ‘natural’ and biological landcover requires great fiction, viewing nature as a still image, fixated in the lineage and solitude of time.

For thousands of years, particularly in Java, Siam and Borneo, the forest was inseparable from human activity. Since the 17th century, practices of swidden cultivation, land clearing through fire, hunting and gathering altered the bioscapes to extract resources like cinnamon, resins and lacquer for survival and trade. The relationship with the forest was an unresting cycle of cultivation, collection and protection.

In 19th century Java, Teak fuelled industrial development, being primarily used for shipbuilding and the construction of railways. The risk to its supply became a threat to the infrastructural development of the state. With the rise of the Dutch and British colonial powers, the customary practices of forest maintenance were superseded by the scientific procedures of administration. The rise in local Economies from “Fruits of the Forest” fostered the declaration of state sovereignty over all forest covered land.

Secondary to the allocation of resources, settlements were reshuffled to connect pieces of forest.

Under the disguise of ‘protection’; limits and borders were introduced as the forest was surveyed and demarcated. Quantification of land made possible the application of land laws upon vast landscapes. If the practices of land maintenance were recognisable by the state, customary rights of ‘natives’ were carved out of the demarcation. Ideas of protection became specific to a particular species of tree, bark and sap to secure and control access to these biological gems.

These colonial forest practices have disciplined the population by imagining and distorting the fluidity of nature. Today, the forest is a fictional construction executed through the legal framing of state property, species and race, shadowing past ideologies presumed in the colonial era.

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Enigma

Giorgio De Chirico, Italian Square, 1913.

Simonpietro Salini

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Recently we have all been stopped by an exceptional event, a world that seemed to perpetually run at an uncontrollable speed for the first time appears to slow down under the weight of a crisis. Defined as the most serious since the Second World War. The emergency created by the pandemic has already influenced a large part of the world population which has suddenly found itself thrown in front of a different reality, marked by a constant sense of waiting, suspension and insecurity.

A few months ago, the same world was waking up to a crisis of equal if not greater gravity, that of global warming, and this looming sense of insecurity was already present. But life would continue to flow undisturbed and the measures imposed by governments seemed words expanded in an infinite time, too distant to even be perceived as changes that would affect us immediately. It was a crisis placed away from our sight, so that we could allow ourselves to live another day in the illusion that the world that we have grown used to could continue its unbridled race for consumption forever.

The myth of the fall of Icarus seems to enclose a contemporary moral of how human nature seems to be eternally unsatisfied and constantly longing for unreachable goals, even at costs that often prove to be self-destructive. To escape from the island of Crete where King Minos held them prisoners, Icarus father, Daedalus built wings that he attached to their bodies with wax. Despite warnings not to fly too high, Icarus, taken by the thrill of flying, continued his rise towards the sun until the heat melted the wax, eventually causing his fall into the sea.1 Today, we are suddenly forced to slow down our ascent. Is the lock-down perhaps a moment of pause in the flight that allows us to overcome this euphoria, so we can adjust the trajectory before the wax irremediably dissolves?

Tourist flights were the first to be stopped, some while still in the air, as happened to the passengers of Jet2 departed from Leeds airport and directed to Alicante, who witnessed a U-turn that brought them straight back to their origin, with the closure of the Spanish border.2 This was followed by the emptying of cities and relocation of any non-essential activities to within domestic environments, radically removing any superfluous contact with the external world. It seems like the entire human existence is now compressed into the home, a space that not only continues to be synonymous with protection and self-isolation from the outside world, but that also becomes an epicenter of connections. This is made possible by technologies capable of replacing the city’s public spaces for the performance of social, intellectual, physical and work habits. But if on the one hand, technology has helped

to project the image of a possible life conducted remotely, on the other, this reality is still supported by a purely physical one, made up of essential workers, routines of maintenance and processes that until yesterday appeared invisible.

Within these essential functions that continue to mark the rhythm of our cities, the importance of workers that used to escape the perception of many is re-evaluated. Shelf stackers in supermarkets now appear as a new category of superheroes, indispensable for the support of communities during the prolonged isolation within the home. Within a week, individual food companies in the UK recruited up to 20,000 new workers, most of whom had lost jobs due to companies and offices forced to close because of the outbreak.3 The new task force of shelf stackers are currently hired on temporary four-week contracts, leaving their homes at night to help restock shelves that are panic-emptied during the day. They are paid an average of 9 pounds per hour.

In the absence of movement, nature is another overlooked process that ironically reawakens in the city during this forced period of social distancing. It explodes in a spring of blossoming trees and the unexpected return of animals that come to reinhabit spaces previously claimed by human activities.

Seemingly deserted urban spaces continue to function with their mechanisms immersed in a state of suspension, leaving an empty theatre that continues to be operated from its backstage. A scenery of squares and streets reminiscent of the views of De Chirico, whose cities appear motionless, enveloped in a spectral calm that imposes itself on the viewer as a condition of silence, contemplation and meditation. In their static nature, De Chirico’s urban landscapes conceal a deeper enigma that the artist compares to the “perfectly calm surface of the ocean” that “disturbs us, for all the unknown that is hidden in its depths”.4 In these silent cities the emptiness assists us, offering an essential space that enables us to observe the outside world from afar, a separation that might help us re-evaluate our priorities by the end of this crisis. Perhaps it will allow a new beginning; a new desire to restore balance, from internal relationships to the environment that surrounds us. The key to this enigma today is perhaps in knowing how to stop and welcome our thoughts.

1 Ovid, The Metamorphoses, Book VIII – vv. 183-235 2 Skopeliti, Clea. “Jet2 Planes Turn Around In Mid-Air As Firm Cancels Spain Flights”. The Guardian, 2020.

3 “Coronavirus: ‘I Applied And Got A Job Three Hours Later’” Sky News, 2020.

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Only Safe Inside Your Cell: Maintaining, in the time of global pandemics Theodora Giovanazzi

Our common understanding of domestic space is evasive. A global pandemic is abruptly forcing us to re-shape our understanding of time and activity within the limitations of the walls of our house. The spatial qualities of our programmed settings are becoming pliable to our desires and habits. New routines follow new circadian rhythms in the hope of maintaining a form of living which belonged to us before the outbreak of the virus.

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8.09am A living room before lockdown.

8.31am An unfolded mat is positioned according to sunshine. The mat is accompanied by a morning coffee, a book and sunglasses.

8.52am Laptop is positioned facing a white wall, next to a stack of paper and a pen, in preparation for a video call with colleagues. Camera and audio have been tested.

Roommates are asked to stay quiet.

2.29pm The dining room table and chairs are moved to the side, a carpet is replaced with an exercise mat and appropriate equipment. Join a live-stream workout class via Zoom. Start to sweat.

4.19pm Positioned next to an open window to observe the outside.

5.10pm A new cleaning routine has been put in place on entering the house from the outside. A variety of disinfectant sprays and gels are used to sanitise shoes and jackets.

Remove gloves and sanitise hands. Remove mask, spray with alcohol. Hang everything in an empty cupboard and wash hands.

5.55pm Bookshelves have turned into a makeshift food pantry.

Books relocated elsewhere. Unpack shopping bags and sanitise products one by one.

6.10pm Spring cleaning. Remove all items from cupboards, clean inside and place back.

8.05pm Place laptop close to a drink then click the link a friend shared. The Internet is slower than usual, so wait a moment for audio and video feed to be shared.

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Clean the Drains LAWuN

Rub a dub – puddle splish splash leaking shoes damp socks soaking trouser turn-ups diversions and re-routes…

It’s Friday, she sits down next to the puddle with a self made sign:

The rain had picked up again in the afternoon. From the upper-deck of a bus in a different part of the same borough she stares at jack hammer, deep trenches, old pipes out new pipes in, cable laid, paving and curbing replaced and relaid?

She sees the future.

But whose?

Next day she began her vigil again

CLEAN THE DRAINS! NW5 2AA She’s been doing it for over six months; even on cold dark damp winter Fridays. She arrives at school opening time, sits with her sign directly across from the Puddle until going home time. splish splash leaking shoes damp socks When every flood plain in the country is flooded, a sizeable city puddle will transform a simple lack of maintenance into something of apocalyptic proportion. A metaphor for (targeted) neglect?

The constant expansions and contractions of the puddle makes urban space unusable and pushes the flower stall, coffee vendor and general detritus from those living rough all closer and closer together into a competitive collective heap as a metaphor for a (selectively) neglected competitive modern city?

Splish Splash “I’ve written and complained to council maintenance countless times but nothing…”

Splish Splash The two silted up drains remain look closely, can you see the level of black runny sludge just sitting below the grate waiting on the next inviting rainfall to bring back the puddle? leaking shoes damp socks This drain becomes more than this neglected cast iron puddle maker it stands as a reminder a warning Splash Splish how a puddle can become a flood leaking shoes damp socks become waterlogged houses sewage in your shoes under your bed Rub a dub dub “I’ve written and complained to council maintenance countless times but nothing…”

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Dear Editor Javier Castañón

I wrote the same phrase, a year ago to the day, and today I find myself writing the same words again. I was in the process of writing something on how we should take care of our beloved Earth when you asked for some words on maintenance.

All beings on this planet, animate or inanimate, contribute to its maintenance in their own way by design. It is in their nature, in their instinct, to contribute to the preservation of their species and environment. Such that, when trees are threatened or nearing the end of their natural life they seed profusely, excessively, and they are designed to do so.

We can say that human beings have a duty to maintain the Earth. Some will say that we have to work with Nature. That is good, but not good enough. WITH Nature? We ARE Nature! In fact, we are the rational part of Nature, which means that we have the capability to disobey our instinct and reason instead; indeed, we can transcend instinct. We have the responsibility to monitor and care for this world. It follows, therefore, that we are answerable to the next generation. This, for me, is the ultimate meaning of maintenance: maintaining the Earth.

The Earth expects each individual to respond to this responsibility in his or her own way, according to his or her capability. Human beings have a dual responsibility: collective and personal. In our Western

democracies, we understand very well that we are collectively responsible for choosing leaders and removing them if duties are not performed.

As architects, every action of ours has a collective side and an individual one. In both cases we need to be rational and responsible. To be rational we must be discerning, meaning we must assess the effects of our actions over time. Of course, discernment is needed to inform all human actions, whether you are directing a school of architecture, or doing vital research on alcohol in the corner of Tottenham Court Road.

Maintenance is about designing in time rather than simply repairing or anticipating and avoiding failure. On these shores we have a saying that goes: “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it”. We need to practice discernment to know when to repair or adjust something. More importantly, we need discernment to know how our design is going to perform over time and what actions will be needed in the future.

Today, maintenance is largely a by-product of industrialisation and more specifically of mass production. Therefore, the relationship between the designer and the skill of the worker is more critical now than ever. If the designer cannot rely on the skill of the worker, design too becomes a by-product. If you open the bonnet of a modern car you will see a series of cassette-like components. If one of them fails, the

AArchitecture 40 46

whole cassette needs to be replaced. Efficiently, the replacement of a faulty cassette takes only a few minutes. But it is wasteful as the replaced part was designed to be thrown away. Buildings must be designed for repair without the disposal of material.

Do not let me get distracted. Maintenance is not about repair. Real maintenance is an integral part of design: true designers see their design in time. Present need is answered in a timeless manner through a real understanding of use value.

Maintenance is three-dimensional. It considers tools through life cycle; tools for assembly and disassembly. No demolition, just, dismantling. The afterlife of design has many implications. Why do we not dismantle ships in the shipyards that constructed them? Instead, we close the shipyards and we allow them to be dismantled on the beaches of Bangladesh at the cost of human lives and untouched Nature.

When we move house, why do we not dismantle pieces of flatpack furniture and take it with us?

Instead, we throw countless pieces unceremoniously into landfill sites.

We need to engage in the search for a new aesthetic which takes on board standard elements.

There is a wide spread prejudice that claims that standard items cannot be beautiful and therefore, a design composed of standard things cannot be beautiful. This prejudice leads to the presumption that for something to be beautiful, it has to be nonstandard and different. As a result, this prejudice fuels an attitude that beauty can only be found in the different, which soon degenerates into the spectacular, banal and wasteful. A new aesthetic in which beauty is shown through our designs is precise in the way it functions in harmony with Nature.

I find that Nature is constantly pointing the way.

Maintenance therefore leads us to a crucial concept for architects, engineers and designers which is to “borrow” from Nature, rather than “use and throw away”. This is key to unlocking the secret of not only working with Nature but fulfilling our role as a rational component within the cycle of Nature. The problem arises when human beings contaminate the Natural environment with substances that cannot be dealt with “naturally”.

For example, water is a vital element in the Earth’s designed system of maintenance. It is an element we all cherish. In order to care of its continued existence on our planet, we do not need to all become world experts in water management, but we need to identify our role and possible contribution in its diminishment. I have often asked some of you, do you know how Nature cleans water? Most of you answer,

“through filtration”. I always reply: “That is the engineer’s reply”. Architects should know better, Nature cleans water through feeding others. With this I want to point out that our actions as designers are not isolated. When we design buildings for living we influence the life of those living in them. Thus, we can raise the awareness of those living in communities by proposing a duty to maintain the Earth.

Buildings are able to talk to us. How often I have explained this in lectures and tutorials! In the past I have been able to explain that we can talk to the dweller as well as the visitor and take them through the building as an itinerant viewpoint. Lately, I have explained that our buildings can be an active reminder of the value of water: we can design water architecture, where water is not just an ornament but as a building material that engages in our way of life and is allowed to influence our lifestyle. Likewise with other materials. As architects and designers, our choice of materials is a shortcut to most effectively maintaining the place in which we live on a global scale.

We are reminded daily of the predictions regarding how long we have before the damage inflicted on the planet will be catastrophic. Personally, I would like to urge everyone to work hard on maintaining the Earth because, even if all these predictions are wrong, looking after Mother Earth is one of the most rewarding aspects of our work.

Once again, I find myself saying the same as I did a year ago. Enough! This is getting too long for a letter. I look forward to seeing it next Friday, even if it is only by Skype.

My very best wishes for you and your co-editors, Javier

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aarchitecture 40 – Biographies

CHRIS ZHONGTIAN YUAN Chris Zhongtian Yuan is a recent AA graduate. Guided by research and humour, his work stitches facts, rumours, sounds, and footages to construct new myths.

Wuhan Punk is the one of the films that he is working on, which explore art, music, nature, rumours and urban legends from his hometown Wuhan, China.

DARYAN KNOBLAUCH Daryan Knoblauch is a first year MPhil - Projective City student at the Architectural Association. He is an Architect and recent collaborator at 51N4E. DOR SCHINDLER Dor Schindler is a designer based in London. He is currently a 5th year student as well as an academic board member at the Architectural Association.

EMILY PRIEST Emily is a practicing architectural designer and writer based in London. She graduated from the Architectural Association in 2018, having received the Dennis Sharp writing prize for her thesis, Furnitures. She is editor of Versare Project.

MIRAJ AHMED Miraj Ahmed is a painter and architect. He tutors Diploma 1 (with Martin Jameson) at the Architectural Association, is an Associate Lecturer at Camberwell College of Art and was a Design Fellow at the University of Cambridge.

NENA ARU Nena Aru is a fourth year student at the Architectural Association.

Her current project on Jerusalem is part of the Diploma 16 research on the Homo Urbanus. Her interests lie in unraveling the marvel of the mundane.

NICOLE NG Nicole is a 5th year student at the Architectural Association, currently working on a project about architectural education.

She has previously worked as an architectural assistant at Serie Architects. She has collaboratively initiated several education programmes in Singapore, in the hope to nurture autonomy, ownership and care in/of the city.

ORATAI TAECHAMAHAPHANT Oratai Taechamahaphant is a 5th year student currently studying at the Architectural Association. She previously worked as an architectural assistant in London. She is also a co-founder of Seire, a clothing store inspired by local crafts.

SHAHA RAPHAEL Shaha Raphael is a 4th year student studying at the Architectural Association.

Previously, Shaha worked with Ciguë in Paris.

SIMONPIETRO SALINI Simonpietro Salini is currently a 5th year student at the Architectural Association. He has previously worked as an architectural assistant in David Chipperfield Architects, London.

THEODORA GIOVANAZZI Theodora Giovanazzi is a 4th year student of Diploma 4 at the Architectural Association. During her year out she worked for PHASE3 Architecture. She is currently based in London.

YOAV CARMON Yoav Carmon is a 2nd year student at the Architectural Association, currently studying in Experimental 10 (Tutors: Valentin Bonjtes van Beek and Winston Hampel).

JAVIER CASTANON Javier Castanon is the founder and directors of Castanon Associated London and Castanon Avocados Madrid. Javier also teached at the AA, where he is currently Head of Technical Studies.

BUSTER RÖNNGREN Buster Rönngren is in his fifth year at the Architectural Association studying in Diploma 11, a unit interested in photography as an urban sampling method and collage technique.

MOAD MUSBAHI Moad Musbahi is an artist based between London and Tripoli. He recently curated ‘In Pursuit of Images’ at the AA, (2020) and was part of the curatorial team for the Sharjah Architecture Triennial, (2019). His work has recently been featured in Jameel Art Center, Dubai (2020), Beirut Art Center, Beirut, (2019), and B7L9, Tunis (2019). Moad is currently completing his Part 2 with Diploma 14.

AArchitecture 40 48

Next issue

Susan Collins, Fenlandia, Sutton Gault, 1st July 2004

Fenlandia

The past two issues of AArchitecture have adopted the artist’s archive as a theme. From the scale of the object in Ernesto Oroza’s Technologies of Disobedience, to that of infrastructure in Molly Dineen’s film Heart of the Angel, we will now move onto landscape.

The last instalment of this series will focus on Accumulation, through the work of Susan Collins. Her series Fenlandia documents a landscape where each pixel captures a second in time and each still image documents a period of 21.33 hours.

“For 12 months from May 2004, a webcam was placed on the roof of the Anchor Inn, a 17th century coaching inn in the heart of rural England, part of an area known as Silicon Fen overlooking the Great Ouse and the New Bedford River at Sutton Gault in Cambridgeshire, an area where technology is literally embedded in the flat horizons of a reclaimed landscape of canals, sluices, dykes and ditches.” 1 The result is a sequence of horizontal lines which, through accumulation, construct a frame. The process forms a register of time and movement through fluctuations of light and unidentified moving objects – a person, a bird, a car – affecting the resolution of the composition of pixels. A physical expanse is compressed into a digital unit, which is then transferred onto a material plane through the projection on the wall of Babylon Gallery, Ely. 1 https://susan-collins.net/2000s/fenlandia/

Submit visual and written content by Monday 10 August 2020 to aarchitecture@aaschool.ac.uk

In this issue Dor Schindler’s images document maintenance on the ground floor of Regent’s Park Estate. Page 3 Miraj Ahmed discovers markings left behind by construction workers. Page 8 Emily Priest reveals the distinction between work and home collapsing, through networks, objects and behavior in space. Page 10 Buster Rönngren documents the maintenance of the last remaining gaslights in London. Page 14 The hands who clean the Venice Canals are revealed in Yoav Carmon’s photo series. Page 21 Moad Musbahi illustrates the physical act of transferring belief through time. Page 22 A music moment is relived by Chris Zhongtian Yuan. Page 26 The everyday is captured by Nena Aru. Page 14 Daryan Knoblaugh discloses the maintenance of the Cloud. Page 26 Nicole Ng looks at the geodesic dome as a method to reclaim public space in the city. Page 34 Shaha Raphael remembers a party. Page 36 The fictions of colonial era forests are revealed by Oratai Taechamahaphant. Page 38 Simonpietro Salini makes a case for a pause to unravel the Enigma of today. Page 40 Theodora Giovanazzi documents her daily routine during the current global pandemic. Page 42 NW5 2AA, LAWuN, a note on full drains. Page 44 Javier Castañón explores the role of maintenance in architecture. Page 46

Edited by students at the Architectural Association