Hospital Hostel Hospice
Image on the front cover: The author with a paper model of his childhood home (first of many architecture models to come). Hat and shirt also made by the author (at this point in my life I wanted to design womenswear).
Acknowledgments
I would first like to thank Dr. Lauren Fournier who supervised the 2021 edition of this piece, and whose lectures on autotheory continue to fuel my work. I would also like to thank Dr. Doreen Bernath for her guidance and
insight. I hope that this essay in some way captures the profound impact the teachings of both of these mentors have had on me.
Editor’s Note
All images gathered in this document belong to the author unless stated otherwise. Images that have been collected from third parties have been cited, and comply under Fair Use for educational purposes.
Table of Contents
Preface Abstract
Some estimates say we live 90% of our life indoors. Despite their importance, the annals of architectural history and theory have largely neglected the mundane spaces where we play out our lives. This essay suggests a different architectural history, one characterized by the affective architectures of our lives. Not the buildings that have shaped history, but those that have subtly shaped us. By engaging auto-theory, this text explores the author’s personal theory of architecture in the hopes the reader might be able to recognize and validate their own.
Introduction
There are three types of architecture. They cradle us from birth to ash. They are crucial but featureless. Somehow memorable, but with no lasting significance to the discipline. No one will speak of how they restructured post-war Europe. Staged photos of them will not be run in AD or AJ or Dwell. They will not be nominated for the Pritzker. They aren’t great because we don’t need them to be. They just are. As unremarkable as the everyday. They may not last forever in the physical world, but they endure in the psyche because they are often the sites of profound meaning. Of exaltation and devastation. Joy and woe. Invisible spaces where the transcendent occurs. Hospital. Hostel. Hospice Where you are born, where you reside, and where you die.
Any legitimate theory requires two basic devices: scholarly references and a memorable name with a Latin root relevant to the discipline of study. In our case, hospital, hostel, and hospice share the Latin root hospes, meaning host or guest. Crucially, hospes explicates the dual nature of architecture and dwelling: without a host, there can be no guest; without a guest, there is no host. Within this definition, we can position architecture as a host, or a guest within nature. Further, the host-guest dialectic implies the human experience as both
Hospital Hostel Hospice was first written in April of 2021. The revised edition is re-written with fewer cliches, less ambivalence, and hopefully more authorship than the first. It borrows the same core ideas but has been written from the vantage of an author freed from the confines of a two-bedroom apartment on the periphery of downtown Toronto and the angst it engendered. This will not be the last rewrite.
forming and formative: without an occupant does architecture exist? By implicating experience, or affect, we can begin to shape an autotheory of architecture.
Hosting is also contingent upon the reception of the other by making a part of yourself available. By implicating the desires or expectations of the guest, there is a possibility for reciprocity between the host and the hosted. This is to say the architecture might re-project the desires of the occupant back into the space. This reciprocity has largely disappeared from these places, which today operate as transactional domains. This shift is marked by the evolution of the motive of the modern subject: consuming has accelerated to include the desire to be consumed.
Architecturally, this implies a complete externalization of agency and the death of subjectivity. By recognizing and analyzing affect in our most formative architectures, this essay hopes to extend or dissolve the physical domain of the hospes dialectic. By examining the author’s 2019 performance “The Infinite Bedroom” we might begin to salvage the complete depletion of the personal, and reintroduce meaning in spaces of consumption through reciprocity.
1 In Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety, Freud argues being born is our first experience of anxiety. Of this experience, in this essay’s first edition, I wrote: “It’s no surprise I came into the world crying. Oh, how simple things were before I opened my eyes. No sadness, no death, only beginning. He’s coming out! No, I’m pretty sure it went: I can’t hold him in anymore! I’d remain in embryonic bliss for eternity if I could. The light at the end of the tunnel never blinded so.”
Hospital
I don’t remember my birth. We seldom do. Any firsthand record of the incident has long sunk deep in the trauma well that constitutes my most nascent being1. My sister Audrey, lovely as she is, was too old and too strong for me for most of my upbringing. She pushed the outer edge of what I could endure, presumably accounting for the many post-pubescent years in which I might wield a competitive physical advantage. At the age of seven or eight, I recall making a pillow fort in our basement. A structure of four single-mattresses, closed off to one end with large pillows you might call throws had they not been eighty centimetres square, and open on the other, except for a few towels clothes-pinned to the fitted sheet of the “roof mattress,” creating a tented doorway. Upset it hadn’t been built for two (or for having failed to utter the secret password) she jumped on the “roof” as I lay inside, gently crushing me. I was nice for the first few seconds, like the comforting immobilization of an anxiety-relief blanket. When she wouldn’t move, I began to panic. I don’t like tight spaces. I don’t like being restricted. I fear the dark, especially being trapped in it. My useless upper body could barely budge the combined weight of my sister and the spring-foam mattress, so I had to crawl. Less crawl than haul. Using any bit of grip, gasping, I clawed towards a small crack between the huge purple corduroy throws. Sweaty, and out of breath I finally pulled my head through the small gap, felt the cold dry air and began to sob. My closest first-hand experience of my own birth. Less wet, but no less traumatic.
The other records I have of my birth are of course my parent’s experiences, and the few four-by-six photo prints tucked away neatly in cellophane slips on a shelf of photo albums somewhere in my childhood home. These hardly see light anymore, but I can tell you exactly what they show. A tiny pink baby wrapped in a white and blue striped blanket with a tiny white cap. My mom, short-haired with a smile that spelt relief, holding me to the camera. My father, peering down at me. His first, and only son. A soft, stubbled smile and eyes that seemed caught between new life and the memory of his own baby brother who passed at the age of sixteen (fig. 2).
I was born at home on June 16th, 1999. On the third floor of 18 Wroxeter Avenue. A house that sits two streets north of the place I call home today. There was no hospital room. No white, faux-razzo linoleum floor tiles. No white walls with four-foottall plastic baseboards painted in various pastel colours. No blue sliding curtains and no fissured ceiling tiles; none stained and swollen by water damage. The room I was born in was not a sterile place. Yes, it was unremarkable. But it was home. My first experience of place.
I don’t need to remember the room in which I was born to tell you how important it is to me. I, like you, have no memory of this place because I had not yet developed the mechanisms for conscious thought2. Without this, memory cannot form. However, this is not to say the experience has been discarded from our systems. Neural circuits are already being formed in the baby’s brain during early pregnancy.3 These pathways transmit information from the mother to the baby; information that is mostly cultural, such as the rhythms of language.4 Once born, information that already conforms to this cultural rhythm can be understood more readily by the baby.5 In this way, the cultural implications of a hospital birth as a rite of passage are also transmitted to the baby.6 In “Reinscribing the Birthing Body” Melissa Cheyney offers this critique of U.S. hospital deliveries:
By exploiting the inherently transformative properties of the birthing process, a society can guarantee that its basic values will be transmitted to [its] participants...The final result is a woman who ‘believes in science, relies on technology, recognizes her inferiority (either consciously or unconsciously), and so, at some level, accepts the principles of the patriarchy.”’7
When I asked my mother why she decided to have her children born at home, she told me:
I wanted all my kids at home...I didn’t want a hospital. Sterile. Patriarchal. I chose a midwife as soon as I was pregnant with Lindsay (my eldest sister)...I knew I could do it aligned with my body. My wisdom, the feminine energy, Mother Earth.
2 According to Sid Kouider et al, the threshold for conscious thought is reached after around 5 months of brain development. Until then, the underlying mechanisms of conscious perception are slowly developing.
3 Robbie Davis-Floyd, “Ways of Knowing. Open and Closed Systems,” Midwifery Today with International Midwife, February 1, 2004, pp. 9-13, 9.
4 Ibid.
5 Ibid
6 Cheyney describes a rite of passage as: “a series of rituals that move individuals from one state or status to another.”
7 Melissa Cheyney, “Reinscribing the Birthing Body: Homebirth as Ritual Performance,” Medical Anthropology Quarterly 25, no. 4 (2011): pp. 519-542, https://doi. org/10.1111/j.1548-1387.2011.01183.x, 521.
8 Melissa Cheyney, “Reinscribing the Birthing Body: Homebirth as Ritual Performance,” 520.
9 You are the product rings painfully true when considering the cost of healthcare in a free market system. According to the Health Care Cost Institute (HCCI), if you were born in the USA between 2016 & 2017, you would have cost $13,811. For the same price, your parents could have bought a pre-owned Birkin or driven home in a new subcompact.
10 Faith is a primary operator in both of these systems, too. If you show me faith, I will show you salvation.
11 Standardization helps us to trust an institution because we assume its systems have been optimized. Part of exorcising the trauma of care is compartmentalizing the experience into a sanitized ideal. I don’t remember individual visits to the hospital, but I can tell you exactly what a hospital room looks like. All my visits to the hospital blur into one image: a standard outcome (a cure) sought out in a standard room. A memorable experience would only stand out if it was unfavourable.
12 To this squeamish artist, the thought of cold human flesh elicits what I can only describe as sublime mortal reckoning; something too difficult to confront daily.
Cheyney describes homebirth as a way to “reterritorialize childbirth spaces (home) and authorities (midwives and mothers).”8 I was born at home and named after the midwife who delivered me. Her name is Jay (fig. 4). I can only assume this profound grounding has allowed me to develop into the man I am today.
The place in which you are born establishes an origin. A datum that underpins, to varying degrees, identity. At the very least, your place of birth and to whom you are born determines your cultural and socio-economic context. The hospital brings you from the gooey womb world into the gleaning world of waxed floors and stainless steel, where you emerge at once a product and a patient. A patient because of you emerge as a subject within the care system—a system beholden to the supremacy of technology. A product because your “owners” are obsessively re-projecting themselves onto you and they will leave the transactional space of the hospital bearing more hand luggage than when they came in9. Like a church, a hospital runs on the repair of broken people. To serve faithfully, they must cure as many people as possible. In this way, cures become commodities and the hospital becomes the trading floor.10
Where a home might accumulate traces of personal history, the hospital seeks to erase any vestige of its former occupants. Erasure allows the reformulation of an optimal condition: the sanitized ideal11. This allows a multiplicity of patients with different ailments to access the same standard of care, which means sharing the same room, the same robe, and the same bedpan. Since the architecture facilitates erasure, its aim must be to disappear. To be effective, it must be without affect (fig. 3). In this way, the principle affect of the hospital is apathy. This presents an inherent contradiction: how can a space dealing in care be principally care-less? This is a question I have asked Audrey, who is now a licensed MD. When I confronted her about working with cadavers in medical school, I asked how she remained unaffected by it.12 I will poorly sum up her answer as: “because we have to be.” In surgery, at least, optimal performance relies on rational, not emotional, decision-making. A surgeon cannot treat their patient as a complex,
sentient organism, but instead as a confluence of discrete biological mechanisms oscillating between function and dysfunction. They are not fixing the human but fixing the problem that afflicts the patient13 .
This distinction is not intended to diminish the work of caregivers. Of course, a doctor is not soullessly administering solutions. I want my doctors to care about my well-being. And as far as I know, they do, or else they wouldn’t be in the business of helping. What I am trying to say is that a system that aims to help relies on the depletion of the personal. This means providing full access for the system to gaze into the private realm. When I enter the hospital, I enter into a contract. The architecture clearly distinguishes between who is administering care, and who is receiving it. To fulfil their role, the doctor must assume control of my well-being. To fulfil my role as a patient, I must give up control. When I give up this control, I expect objectivity. I expect the doctor to act in favour of my well-being. This involves, of course, considering emotional wellbeing. Above all, however, the duty to care means trusting the medical system, which is built on the study of cause and effect, not hunches. Thus, belief in this system is contingent upon trusting the word of expert authority figures; on empiricist knowledge and its implicit power structures.
It can also be implied that the annual celebration of your “birthday” is its own institutional reassertion of these power structures.14 After enough birthdays, the image of your birth will become abstracted into a total vision of generic emergence: a reproduction of the past that is neither true nor false. In other words, your birth-myth begins transposing the actual event through what Lacan calls “hypnotic remembering.”15 If you were born in the hospital, the image of your birth might grow more vivid over time, in large part due to its incessant portrayal in Western media. This dramatized version, pitchperfect and skillfully cut to spare the messy bits from daytime audiences represents a false hope; an illusion so intense it becomes sacred.16 This illusion is then passed down generationally, endlessly reaffirming a disembodied belief in capitalist institutions.17
13 I do not profess to know anything about the psychology of a surgeon, which is no doubt a complex topic. My reductive analysis is solely meant to explain why the operating room must remain invisible so the surgeon can focus at the task on hand. If, for instance, the floor was adorned in mosaic tiles, it might hinder performance.
14 At least in Westernised society, it is most definitely an institution. A birthday celebration is a highly ritualized occasion, reinforced by the necessary practice of gift giving/receiving. Nothing says celebration like “here’s a product to help reinforce the cultural importance of consumerism and your subjection to it.”
15 Jacques Lacan and Bruce Fink, Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English, New York: Norton, 2006, p. 256.
16 Guy Debord and Donald Nicholson-Smith, The Society of the Spectacle (New York: Zone Books, 2017), 11.
17 A classic trope is a baby emerging totally dry, which psychologically reinforces the promise of capitalism: the consumption of convenient, non-intrusive products.
18 Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000, p. 20.
19 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Quintin Hoare, and Christopher Bertram, Of the Social Contract and Other Political Writings (London: Penguin Books, 2012), 32. Choices that operate really as rules.
20 With the exception of maybe a library, each building in a city expects something of its occupants. This often comes in the form of a transaction. The “price of admission” varies from a cup of coffee to use the Starbucks washroom to hundreds of dollars for an event that’s livestreamed for free.
Hostel
The depersonalization of an institutionalized ritual also means that the hospital tends to be a battleground for regaining agency. We populate these sterile spaces with tokens of home; a picture, a blanket, maybe a chair. Objects that mimic the personal, just as the hospital does. Being dependent has its comforts, but without a choice to leave, the console it affords soon turns sour. Eventually, you leave the hospital. A little less frail, a little less gooey. Then, the real world introduces itself. However horrible and frightening it may be, we can’t stay in our incubators forever.
If Hospital marks the first architectural experience, Hostel is the first architectural choice. It comes at a different time for anyone, but eventually, you will seek architecture of your own volition. This might be affected by personal taste (or lack thereof), limited choice, social pressures, or necessity. When thrust into this new world of choice, you’ll quickly confront its limitations. “The individual submits to society and this submission is the condition of [their] liberation.”18 Freedom is a set of choices bound to the social contract.19 Architecturally, this contract is often made explicit: Do Not Enter! Beware Of Dog! No Loitering! No Smoking! No Laughing! No Crying! In this way, the Hostel can be quite hostile (fig. 5).
Growing up and testing the limits of my newfound agency, a locked door pasted in bold signage became the ultimate object of my curiosity. I puzzled at each new door, mystified by the Narnian reverie that awaited me on the other side. My mind would wander to the strange specimens locked in jars behind the service counter at the pharmacy. I wondered if they had any of that truth serum I had heard so much about. At the butcher, I would try to catch glimpses behind the plastic curtain to see how they managed to shrink down a whole farm into a tiny shop. Most of all, I dreamed of the scenes that would erupt in the storage bay of the toy store by nightfall. The fantasy died when I pushed open an Employees Only door into a dingy washroom.
Unless you’re working, praying, buying, or have committed a crime, you won’t see the inside of most places.20 In High School, being denied entry spurred brazen action. “Roof-topping” was a
trend popularized by young Eastern Europeans21 with body-mounted action cameras. It became quite common among my group of friends to hop fences and climb fire escapes and billboards to see the city from the vantage of the architect. That is the city in plan. Accessing this “total view” was not just to search for thrills, it also allowed us to secretly subvert the exclusionary politics of city-dwelling. We found that while the entrances to these pathways were often surveilled, what lay beyond was completely excluded from the gaze of the city. Once we gained access to these spaces, what we did within them was up to us. At the time, this was our first taste of spatial agency. Once we turned eighteen and trespassing became a serious offence, this pastime largely disappeared.22 It was, however, replaced shortly thereafter by more legal, acceptable means. Living away from home took away most of my angst: I no longer had to push so hard to get the independence I needed.
Perhaps the most profound architectural choice is when you choose to leave home. Rather, where you are able to go once you leave home.23 Growing up with privilege, I was able to attend university. This was my first time living away from home. Mind you, it was only about thirty minutes away by public transport. My ground-floor dorm room had about eight square metres of floor area. A dresser on the north wall, a single bed in the northwest corner and a desk facing south. Linoleum flooring, single-pane windows, shared kitchenette, shared bathrooms, and shared laundry. A bedroom shared with one hundred students over the last one hundred years. I didn’t exactly choose it, but I made it my own. I loved it. It was mine.
However gross, cold, and shabby your first apartment was or will be, you will always cherish it. Getting your own space means entering a new era of self-reliance and with it; self-actualization. The title of this chapter is Hostel not Hotel for this reason. While the hotel engenders a contrived sense of hospitality through paid goodwill, the hostel is largely devoid of such affordances. The bare provisions are provided, the rest is up to you. After I moved out of my dorm room, I found a twobedroom basement apartment with my best friend in Toronto’s west end (fig. 6). We were sold largely
21 The majority of whom are young men (no surprise there).
22 Aside from a few transgressions later on.
23 Sometimes it is not up to you when you leave. I was fortunate enough to have made that choice, but I recognize for some that choice is made for them.
24 Arthur Schopenhauer and R. J. Hollingdale, On the Suffering of the World (London: Penguin Books, 2004), 36.
25 Schopenhauer describes this condition as “restlessly striving.”
26 https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/ data/1018724/000119312518121161/d456916dex991.htm
27 Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, London: Verso, 1989, p. 34.
28 Philip Morris (Marlboro) has a portfolio of businesses manufacturing and selling products to help smokers quit. In 2021, they purchased Fertin Pharma, a nicotine gum maker: https://www.reuters.com/business/ healthcare-pharmaceuticals/philip-morris-buy-nicotine-gum-maker-fertin-pharma-push-smoke-free-products-2021-07-01/
29 Trends, demand participation even if they matter little to the participants. When relevance is king, it’s better to be in than out, and the decision to adhere is effectively meaningless. This is scarily true for young people growing up with social media: individuality has been supplanted by the desire to appear commercial.
on the cheap rent and heated concrete floors. And because our friends managed to swing the upstairs flat. This was a truly blissful time. A place with people so dear to my heart I bear the house number permanently etched in my skin (fig. 7). An unremarkable flat and yet the most prosperous era of my early adulthood. We lived here for two years and moved only when we fully grasped the challenge of subterranean dwelling for extended periods of mandatory lockdown.
Perhaps our conditioning to remain perennially dissatisfied is to blame for the transience that defines the hostel. I loved my first apartment, but I always felt it could be better. I’m in a better flat now, but that feeling persists. This is true of most things; as soon as you attain your object of desire, the mark moves further away.24 Plato’s ‘continual becoming and never being,’ which Schopenhauer attributes to the suffering and will to life of all organisms,25 seems to only scratch at the surface of modern restlessness. In a 2018 letter to shareholders, Jeff Bezos wrote: “One thing I love about customers is that they are divinely discontent.”26 In a society of abundance, selling “lack” is the only way to keep people buying. In this way, lack itself becomes the object of desire, or rather, “it is the surplus of the Real over every symbolization that functions as the object-cause of desire.”27 In turn, businesses have taken to manufacturing problems to sell solutions.28 Because of this, it becomes nearly impossible to distinguish between intrinsic and extrinsic desires, and thus between real and manufactured modes of being. Striving is no longer in service of will or desire, but a matter of social obligation.29 Culture is consumer culture and striving is for the sake of itself. This cyclical nature confuses the subject, creating more lack that is maintained by consuming more meaninglessness.
Modes of consuming and modes of dwelling are correlated; easy to digest and easy to spit up. When we grow bored or tired of the turnover, we settle. We cast our foundations, hoard our rations and wait out impending oblivion. The hostel takes on a new sensibility in hindsight. Taken for granted, it becomes a mausoleum of time lost. Of things not said and done. A shimmering tide swelling out. You never know where you’ve been until you’re gone.
Hospice
A live-audience Christmas special from three decades past filtered in through the grill of a small wood-cased radio sat on the kitchenette counter like a bizarre toaster oven. The afternoon sunlight cast blazing murals through the floor-length westward windows. The floor screeched with the tiny shuffling of kindergartners. From the eighth floor of the nursing home at Pape and Danforth, I peered over Riverdale Park deep into the heart of the Don Valley. My heart fluttered. My saliva thick. I’d never seen old people this old. They seemed a different species. Toothless smiles waved at me and my cohort parading around the white-lit halls. I felt like a pet or some other service creature. It was nearly lunch but my appetite had spoiled from the smell of dust, rubbing alcohol and floor wax. I remembered my flu shot. The twelve stitches on the top of my head. I began to squirm. The stained and scrubbed surfaces all seemed too close. The story was all too vivid. These people would die here.30
By age five, I’d seen my mother fall incredibly ill. I’d lost my 13-year-old cousin Jason. I’d seen the inside of hospitals and felt my stomach drop as stretchers wheeled past the hallway waiting room. I knew sickness. I knew dying. But I didn’t know growing old. The inside of that old-age home was the inside of a heterotopia. It was hard to tell if anyone in there wanted to be there. Whether they had the choice to leave. A space somewhere in between a home and a prison. I knew I didn’t belong and yet there I was. I wanted to leave but I couldn’t. A young human at the beginning of his life, wandering into a space filled with other humans at their lives’ ends. I didn’t know who was watching who. Who was the stranger in this strange place?
More confusing was the dynamic of the whole excursion. The chance to visit the home was advertised as a matter of privileged. For an afternoon, we could leave our own little play prison and venture across the street to the real world. We would be shown around the morbid halls like Tarkovsky’s Stalker infiltrating a zone we weren’t supposed to enter. When you’re young and everything is off-limits, this seems like an enticing offer. But when you smell death, you want to leave. I remember walking home with my dad later that
31 From David Eagleman’s Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives.
32 Northrop Frye, Fearful Symmetry, a Study of William Blake (Princeton University Press, 1974), 43.
33 Ibid
34 Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth, The Affect Theory Reader (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 320.
35 Frye, Fearful Symmetry, 43.
36 Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, 23.
37 Frye, Fearful Symmetry, 44.
day. We stopped at Ella’s Meat Market to grab a roast for dinner. At the checkout was a small makea-wish tin with a picture of a little girl, smiling, and bald. Young and somehow so old. The smell of meat overwhelmed me. I wanted to cry. I wanted to vomit.
It is generally accepted that we die three times. Once when your body stops functioning. Next when you’re buried. And the last time is when someone speaks your name for the last time.31 However, hospice care shows us that death is not an instance. It is a process. I would say instead that dying happens first when you lose your innocence. Next is when you settle. And finally, when your body begins deteriorating.
My first death was the moment I realized that death was inevitable. Perhaps it was in the old age home, or maybe earlier when I saw my mom fall sick with cancer. It was the moment I knew I wouldn’t be young forever. In this way, the death of innocence is when the illusion of youth is superseded by the illusion of life itself. In Songs of Innocence and of Experience, William Blake explores the unfallen world of childhood “completely vitalized by imagination,” and the disillusionment that comes with maturation.32 The “imaginative recklessness” of childhood “penetrate[s] all the mysteries of the world” because in a way it is unfettered to time.33 In this way, enhancing your imagination means enhancing your understanding of the present.34 The recognition of time passing fractures the perception of eternity to which innocence is linked. This fracture leads to experience, which is also “the fall of man.”35
Experience is largely illusory because it references a society built on illusion. These illusions comprise the spectacle, an externalization of the individual’s experiences, which “are no longer his own, but rather those of someone else who represents them to him.”36 Experience in the modern world is effectively an indoctrination of modern devices. These devices detach us from the “eternal” realm of childhood innocence where we were indistinct from divine nature.37 Thus, the next death is the death of our desire to return to this state of innocence. It represents complacency; settling
for the spectacle and the false comforts it affords us. We kill the child within us when we decide that what we already know is all we want to know. That the world won’t change and so neither should we. To settle is to lose humanity. To give up. Spatially, this is to sit in the fluorescent wash of your cubicle and say: “this is fine.” It is an intensive closing-off. A rejection of the possibility of mystery and wonder, and of reciprocity.
In 2019, for an installation art class supervised by Karen Kraven, I produced a project called “The Infinite Bedroom” (fig. 9). The concept is simple; two videos, playing side-by-side, projected onto an old headboard. In one video, a clip of me making my bed in my room. In the next video, a clip of me making my bed in the middle of a park. For me, when intimate space becomes personal space, it acts as a physical extension of the body. The walls of my bedroom become my skin. The objects within it are idols of identity. When you invite someone into your bedroom, you invite them to dwell in your being. There, hospitality is replaced by vulnerability; the host bares everything and the guest holds space for it. The bedroom becomes a place of pure reciprocity. The infinite bedroom references that reciprocity without confining it to a room. It dematerializes and decontextualizes what constitutes a vulnerable space. It is a ritual, a reminder to stay open. It says: I will make myself available to reciprocity wherever I go.
The last death is oblivion. This is the point at which you stop existing. The cemetery. The mausoleum. Scattered among the pines at your family cabin. Beyond the momentary site of death, hospice is also the final resting place of your material existence. It’s where your body is eternally cradled by the soil, the waves, and the trees. In this way, hospice exists mostly as a concept. Those who have endured it cannot tell about it. It is an architecture unseen until it is all-consuming.
Conclusion
A total reexamination of the hospitality contract in spaces of institutionalized care is necessary. This contract standardizes a mode of providing care by using the illusion of the personal to access the vulnerable. This creates a problematic dynamic of “care as a transaction.” Or, “hospitality as a mode of production” lacking genuine reciprocity. To challenge this notion, I introduced the hospes dialectic; the simultaneous condition of being both guest and host. “The Infinite Bedroom” accesses this condition by dematerializing the distinction between personal and public space through a ritualized “openness.” A radical de-walling.
This decontextualization creates a portable state of being, allowing vulnerable space to be accessed anywhere and at anytime. This signifies a return to a state of innocence; a will divorced from the modes of hyper-consumption required by a society of the spectacle. In this way, de-walling becomes the divine architecture transgression. It is also a transcendent act since it operates without temporal and spatial limits. This means the capacity for reciprocity also becomes infinite. To Blake, infinity is the eternal here and now38. To dwell in the infinite is to dwell in the present. We might do so by allowing affect to totally wash over us. To feel everything and remain eternally open.
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