Chengxuan Li - 'Sleepwalkers, Public Interior at a Standstill' by AA School

Architectural Association 3rd Year History and Theory Studies - Future Anterior: History as Project

1 Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London: Harvard University Press, 2002): 4. 2 See Johann Friedrich Geist, Arcades: The History of a Building Type, trans. Jane O. Newman and John H. Smith (London: The MIT Press, 1989): 32-34. Fourier came upon the idea of the Phalanstère [Phalanstery] from a simple consideration of a self-sustained town or village that hosts 300 people, with a shared kitchen, a shared shop, and a shared canopy / attic / cellar. The Phalanstère is a utopian model of a communist society, and is the content of Fourier’s dreaming about the epoch next to the one where he is situated. 3 See Benjamin, Arcades, 4-5.

Figure 1. View of a phalanstery.

Michelet noted somewhere, that each great epoch dreams of the one that follows.1 This is an essential device where thoughts take stage and elaborate themselves: in this way thoughts take on their visual countenance and reveal themselves to the very few of their time that are truly aware of their existence as a hidden clue that immaterially marks their position of being in history. For the rest of their contemporaries, such clues remain tacit, clouded and unrecognizable until some posterior junctures where their knowings could be acquired retrospectively, in the forms of traces of the dreams of their predecessors and the ruins of their thought processes. Dreaming is not only the device with which each epoch prepares itself for the revelation to the very few, but also the ur-forms or primal forms of incubating the retrospective knowings by the ones that are to come afterwards. In so manner, the Paris arcades could be interpreted as the ruins of the Phalanstère, envisioned by Charles Fourier originally as an Utopian-socialist model of communal living.2 Walter Benjamin, years afterwards, manages to catch their phantasmagorical landscape which has been historically and geographically situated in the arcades in Paris, as the remnants of the dreams that came beforehand. The content of this dream are the wish images in which new means of production takes on form, while still being dominated and ruled by the idea of the old.3 Fourier’s model seeks, as he concludes, to overcome and transfigure the drawbacks and the apparent immaturities the burgeoning, new social organizations for production, yet, in exactly the way that could be described as immature and experimental: the underlying effort that resolutely distances all antiquated elements regardlessly, including the recent, newborn ones that constitute the burgeoning social organization per se, thus deflecting the impetus of the wishful images by tying them to the “good old” rather than the “bad new.” Benjamin’s analysis of the history of the 18th century Europe certainly shows his ambition characterized by his unique position where he addresses the nature of these wish images

Sleepwalkers: Public Interior at a Standstill

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not only as dreaming moments, but also as historical organs of awakening. It forms a basic dialectical method which clearly shows, perhaps not too much, but at least some affinity of his thoughts with Hegelian and Marxist traditions. As he is dialectically situated inside the remnants of Fourier’s wishful image of the Phalanstère, effectively the Utopian city of arcades, his materialist engagement with an physical device finally unveils the role of the arcades as an archetypal architectural form that predicates all the epoch-defining shifts of the 19th century. Or instead, it could be summarized as the repertoire of these historical moments which later on reveals themselves, through the organ, or the spatial device of the arcades — here the material substructure and the whole edifice of the superstructure interpenetrate, illuminating each other, contributing to the awakening from the wish images by the predecessors and dissipation of the dreaming elements of the former. This fluid threshold historically situated between dreaming and awakening is inspiring of the thought process and is believed as the means in which the world-spirit4 — the leading gist behind all immaterial and material manifestation of the world history dialectically collated — proceeds.

its destinations in an eternal roundabout or as if for too long has it destined for a stasis to remain perceptible this motif which appeared once as so conspicuous and unanimous. History is that laborious dream which Michelet depicts7, yet we never rise de la nuit au jour [from night to day], de la mort à la vie [from death to life]. It appears trapped in a permanent impasse, faces of Janus, an eternal return, a standstill.

Benjamin, in the incessant recalls of these apparitions hovering on the Paris arcades and the ruins of the thoughts of the preceding ones, witnesses their messianic termini retrospectively. Thus, extending Michelet, he comments on Fourier that, not only do epochs dream of the next, in these processes awakenings are also precipitated.5 Surely this also applies for Benjamin himself, in his viewing of the Paris arcades as the organ of the thriving bourgeoisie, he also foretells the demise and ruins of this thought long before the eventual crumbling of the arcade and the social organization sustained by it.

4 The word world-spirit takes from Georg W. F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, ed. & trans. Terry Pinkard (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018). Spirit takes from the word Geist, of which the closest 3 translations into English are gist, ghost, and spirit (mind). 5 Benjamin, Arcades, 1-26. 6 Mark Pimlott, The Public Interior as Idea and Project (Heijningen: Jap Sam Books, 2016). 7 L’histoire est cet effet de songe [dream] laborieux par lequel nous nous soulevons de la nuit au jour, de la mort à la vie [History is the laborious dream effect by which we wake up from night to day, from death to life]. See Jules Michelet, “Avenir? Avenir?” 1842, quoted in Benjamin, Arcades, 33.

From the knowledge of Benjamin, from this epoch derives the public interior in the physical form arcades and its subtypes: indoor marketplaces, glass-canopied exhibition halls, panoramas, museums. From the wisdom of hindsight, what people of our contemporaries could conclude retrospectively is that these 19th century architectural forms of the arcade and their sub-types incubate conditions for the uprise of the department stores, which lay grounds for the advent of the supermarket6 and all similar publicly-accessible, conditioned interior spaces. We now see the implications and if we take on the dialectic position of the progression of the world-spirit or thought through the cyclic experience of the threshold historically situated between dreaming and awakening we could take on the following metaphor: as if waking up from dreams for several times at night only to find that it were always a fixed hour, prior to sunrise, it is in this repetitious unrest of premature dreams and the opinionated wakefulness during the endless night of nightmares that the world-spirit appears to cycle back and forth, as if it has lost Sleepwalkers: Public Interior at a Standstill

Sleepwalkers: Public Interior at a Standstill

Architectural Association 3rd Year History and Theory Studies - Future Anterior: History as Project

Figure 2. Section of the Paris interior.

Sleepwalkers: Public Interior at a Standstill

Architectural Association 3rd Year History and Theory Studies - Future Anterior: History as Project

8 Benjamin, Arcades, 494. 9 Mark Pimlott, “Interiority and the Conditions of Interior,” Interiority vol. 1, no. 1 (2018): 5-20. 10 Ibid., 6-7. As a literature reference, it is advised to also refer to Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from the Underground, trans. Jesse Coulson (Penguin, 1972). The underground room, or the “dark cellar” where the underground man claims to be writing, is an ideal interior that isolates himself from the society and sustains the subjective illusions of him. It is arguable that various literature pieces of the age have alleged the private interior as the main stage, or theater of personal events and contemplations, hinting into the emerge of the private interior around the 19th century Europe. This essay here only draws reference to the Dostoevsky one which is regarded as both pertinent and provisional. 11 This essay hereby refers to the self-sustained illusions and phantasmagorias as dream states, and the realization of their being illusory therefore becomes the hour of awakening. In so, the threshold in between are the clues and the preparations to the awakening process. 12 Benjamin, Arcades, 19. 13 Ibid., 220-221, Convolute [I4, 4]. “The nineteenth century, like no other, was addicted to dwelling. It conceived the residence as receptacle for the person, and it encased him with all his appurtenances so deeply in the dwelling’s interior that one might be reminded of the inside of a compass case where the instrument with all its accessories lies embedded in deep, usually violet folds of velvet.” 14 Georges Teyssot, “Mapping the Threshold: ‘A Theory of Design and Interface,” AA Files, no. 57 (2008): 3-12. 15 Benjamin, Arcades, 406, Convolute [L1, 5]. “The domestic interior moves outside. It is as though the bourgeois were so sure of his prosperity that he is careless of façade, and can exclaim: My house, no matter where you choose to cut into it, is façade. Such facades, especially, on the Berlin houses dating back to the middle of the previous century: an alcove does not jut out, but, as niche, tucks in. The street becomes room and the room becomes street. The passerby who stops to look at the house stands, as it were, in the alcove.”

II Rites de passage – this is the designation in folklore for the ceremonies that attach to death and birth, to marriage, puberty, and so forth. In modern life, these transitions are becoming ever more unrecognizable and impossible to experience … we have grown very poor in threshold experiences. Falling asleep is perhaps the only such experience that remains to us. But together with this, there is also waking up … “How mankind loves to remain transfixed,” says Aragon, “at the very doors of imagination!” … It is not only from the thresholds of these gates of imagination that lovers and friends like to draw their energies; it is from thresholds in general … The thresholds must be carefully distinguished from the boundary. A Schwelle, “threshold,” is a zone. Transformation, passage, wave action are in the word schwellen, swell, and etymology ought not to overlook these senses.8 In the English language, “interiority” denotes “inner character” that involves an inward condition, engendering individual contemplation.9 It has been further argued that in such realm of a personal refuge or retreat, the interior serves as the organ of privacy, subjectivity, projections, imaginations, and eventually allusions, illusions,10 dream states.11 The physicalized space of one ’s interiority, namely a room of one ’s own, did not thrive until the middle of the 19th century when private rooms appeared whose characteristics were considerably distinct from the public space. This was the time when private individuals made their entry into history, “whose places of dwelling are for the first time opposed to places of work,”12 as constituting the first true interior. Thus, in the private interior the individual is secured from the daily realities one faces at work and is able to sustain the illusions about oneself in one ’s personalized room of dwelling, as if enclosed in a compass casing.13 Yet, the content in the casing is also displayed and projected outwards, into the exterior, as if in showcases or artefacts at exhibition,14 rendering a dialectic relationship between the interior and the exterior. In so relation, the private interior steps out and reversely situates itself in an illusory exterior setting, an imagined façade: the bourgeois who were then sure about their state of prosperity disdains the enclosure of his house in order to declare that, “no matter where you open it and cut a section through it, my house remains a Sleepwalkers: Public Interior at a Standstill

Architectural Association 3rd Year History and Theory Studies - Future Anterior: History as Project

16 It is mentionable that there have been various alternative approaches to the public interior as an idea and a condition, for example, the Pimlott definition, that a public interior should be defined as a space formed and shaped not by merely a physical installation but by a set of conditions and ideas that form an agreement (Pimlott, Public Interior, 9-14). 17 This term will be introduced and defined in subsequent chapters IIX and IX. 18 Karl Marx, Grundrisse, trans. Martin Nicolaus (Penguin, 2015): “Introduction.” “The intimations of higher development among the subordinate animal species, however can be understood only after the higher development is already known.” In similar manner, although the private interior precedes the public interior, the private interior remains clouded and hardly reachable directly before the thrive of the public interior. The knowledge of a public interior may serve as a key to understanding the private interior, not because the public interior is a more sophisticated and developed version of the private interior, but due to the illusory qualities the public interior inherits from the private interior. The public interior is not the logically-succeeding version of the private interior but a type that grows out of one of the heirs of the private interior. It thrives inside the conditions of the private interior (the one of a type that existed only under pre-modern conditions, for example, a work-live interior of the 17th century Europe). If we could ever say the private individual enters history alongside the rise of a certain class, the private interior separates itself into different parts and one of these parts becomes publicly accessible a social organization just in similar manner. Also, as stated here, the private interior discussed here specifically refers to the primal forms and thus does not equal to the ones which we access everyday as a private retreat or refuge i.e. our contemporary homes. For the former, see Teysott, “Mapping the Threshold,” 10: “as with panoramas, theatres, panopticons, and arcades, ‘what finds itself in the windowless house is what is true.” Here the window denotes the threshold that disestablishes the position and the continuation of the dreamlike illusion of the interior. 19 This opposition suggests the antagonizing, hostile relation-

façade.”15 It has been argued by many that the public interior16 regardless of its scale, is an interior that sustains its illusions in an identical way in which a private room sustains the illusions of its owner; in the public interior these illusions are spectacles and fetishism17 just as the content of the illusions of the private interior, except the public interior presents these illusions with a more refined system of language and more personalized experience. However, this intimation of the public interior in the private interior should be treated tentatively. As Marx notes, “human anatomy contains a key to the anatomy of the ape.”18 Due to the nature of the private interior being enclosing and concealing, knowledge about the private interior has not been directly accessible before the uprise of the public interior which logically succeeds the private interior and extends it. The presence of elements familiar to the public interior is only accessible on the theoretical substrate of the knowledge about the public interior, and is only revealed at a mature stage of the understandings and developments of the public interior. Ultimately, such recognition of similarities would, through the disenchantment of the private interior, contribute to a terminus of the mythical conceptions in the public interior, to an awakening from these illusions. Thus, the private interior is indeed a theoretical entry to understanding the public interior. Therefore, this essay effectively focuses on the omens and clues to the illusory elements of the public interior. Since the idea of a boundary describes conditions only of hard edges while the threshold is a fluid delimiter of flows and soft fields, it is then not improper to analogously refer to the in-between status, the juncture of precipitating wakefulness as somehow a temporal threshold, the threshold between consciousness and unconsciousness of dreaming experiences, the threshold between dreaming and awakening, between the the illusory interior and the awakening. It is even further argued that the opposition19 to dreaming is not awakening but rather the conditions of awakening, namely the thresholds, the clues, since the latter are the totally non-dreamlike elements, the ones that opposes the dream state and disestablishes it. Awakening, however, is a synthesis, a transcendence, a state that bears within it both the mostly dream elements and the mostly non-dream elements and thus contributing to a stage dialectically sublimated from this pair of oppositions. Should there be any intentionality for dreams, it would be argued that awakening is the only, and the inevitable terminus. The public interior thrived in the 19th century where private individuals entered history, in the forms of a commercial internal space: marketplaces and arcades, where illusions and apparitions regarding that age are situated. Later, this interiority engendered in the private rooms and arcades seemed Sleepwalkers: Public Interior at a Standstill

Architectural Association 3rd Year History and Theory Studies - Future Anterior: History as Project

ship between the dream state and thresholds. The dream state undermines the thresholds and tries to eradicate them; the thresholds are conditions of awakening, thus impinging the continuation of dreaming. 20 Georg Simmel, “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” in The Sociology of Georg Simmel, adapted by D. Weinstein, trans. Kurt Wolff (New York: Free Press, 1950): 409-424.

21 Although this essay will not elaborate this aspect, it is worth noting that for the contemporary age the illusions of the private interior are fueled and empowered not only by the individual self-imagination, but also by the widespread public interior which the individual passes through in everyday life. He carries forward the phantasmagorias from the public interior into the private interior, and if the public interior engenders homogeneity and repetition, his private interior would result in a boring setting, identical between bedrooms and bedrooms. 22 See Mark Pimlott, “Without and Within: Territory, the Interior and the Triumph of System over Place” (Lecture, Architectural Association, London, Filmed 9 Oct 2007, Video of Lecture, 1:28:34). https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=3Rfd-jOU3cXg. 23 See Stan Allen, Points + Lines: Diagrams and Projects for the City (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1999). Essentially Allen is theorizing the logos in the term of “field conditions” which guides the urban development of America from the ulterior. He refers to the American city as an enormous “deterritorialized plane,” a “field condition” where the type and intensity of activity on the surface is always regulated by the sameness of a kind of “rheostatic apparatus below that also senses changes on the surface it now charges.” The apparatus below is the planning applications (“we need more cable here, another tunnel there”) while the bodies on the surface are the sea of neighborhoods, in the forms of flocks or swarms. 24 See Peter Sloterdijk, In the World Interior of Capital, trans. Wieland Hoban (Cambridge, England: Polity Press, 2013): 33-35. The westward journey of Columbus forced a change in the notion of space this marked the entry into the specifically modern mode of consciousness. In the westward period “induced the geometricization of European behavior in a globalized locational space … even the famous white spots on maps marked as terrae incognitae acted as points that would have to be made known in the future.” All recently discovered lands, not yet explored, but were bound to be explored in near future, and the modern age is based on such promises. 25 Ibid., 120.

to have expanded to the outdoor street.20 Metropolitan citizens appear themselves in the street, exposed to others. This exposure is considered as interior in that it renders feelings, thoughts, and subjectivity. While these interiors, namely “public interiors,” physicalized through the metropolitan street front, and later the interior of modern shopping malls and department stores, have inherited the self-sustained illusions and dreamlike phantasmagorias from their precedents. However, the public interior as a ramification of the private not only extends and promulgates the private interior, but also reversely influences the interior.21 Just as the inhabitation of the godly landscape of the America during the ages of colonization,22 contested vicinities, antagonistic neighborhoods, and subsequent ideas of infrastructural-urbanism plans,23 all served as contemporary public interiors, if not as pre-conditions to them. The historical evolvement of the public interiors throughout metric time and space might be regarded as continuous, sharing a common thread of characteristics. This is simply because the devices through which laissez-faire capitalism operated, and the devices that allowed for the dispersed urban environment were both essential extensions and consequences of the colonization that precedes them, not only the one of the American continent but also the ones of the Roman empire, limited by the Roman law system. Terra australis nuper inventa nondum cognita [newly discovered land, not yet known]24 – as all physical territories on the globe became discovered by a centralized world system, public interiors not only followed such pace to spread its illusory reminiscences of a homeland [European] sky around the distant colonies,25 but also to engender in this not-yet ethos a generalized global interior of illusions, about the promises of the nondum [not yet] spirit. The modern age is in such manner emancipated from the previous stasis of eternity in the cycle of mythical narratives by the creation of such illusory conceptions, which unexpectedly traps itself in exactly a same system of eternal standstill and cyclic myths, of which the only change is the title into discovery and progress. These are the dreaming elements of the modern age. Their illusions that public interiors have carried forward from the traditional, private interiors, are the projective operations and expressions of a global capitalism and neoliberalism, which in similar manner produce a world interior of commodity fetishism with capitalist language, the ultimate interior condition that permeates the contemporary globe through both space and time.

Sleepwalkers: Public Interior at a Standstill

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Figure 3. Gustave Caillebotte, Young Man at His Window, 1875.

Sleepwalkers: Public Interior at a Standstill

Architectural Association 3rd Year History and Theory Studies - Future Anterior: History as Project

26 Charles Baudelaire, Paris Spleen, trans. Keith Waldrop (Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 2009): “Windows.” 27 For example, the conceptual section of the bourgeois to demonstrate prosperity to others, and the role of the window that creates imagined private interiors. See the prose Ibid. 28 In this sense, the biggest public interior might be the world interior, the smallest: one’s living room. A space could also be qualified as public interiors or not at different times, by different people. The street front could be a public interior when some fairs are in place, and probably not a public interior for a careless individual passing through without any attention to the surroundings, and essentially not for the ones whose jobs are physically situated in the streets (to an extent): cleaners, drivers, etc. 29 Benjamin, Arcades, 1-26. 30 Firstly the phantasmagoric placeness of arcades resides in the physical space of the arcades and commercial interiors which could be recognized as a unique place delimited from the other, that allows for the coexistence of the most superfluous objects and the most shadowy character, namely the aimless wanderers, only to whom these objects reveal themselves, relieved of their illusory coatings. Then the placeness resides in the position where arcades stand with relevant to the chronological time, firstly as the organ for an archetypical history of the 19th century, then as the predecessor of contemporary commercial public interiors as discussed on the pages passim.

III Who stares into an open window never sees as many things as someone looking at a closed window. There is no object more profound, more mysterious, more fecund, more sinister, more dazzling, than a window candle lit. What can be seen by sunlight is always less interesting than what occurs behind a windowpane. In this dark or illumined gap life lives, life dreams, life suffers.26 Regarding the public interior, to categorize them into types and genres would immediately render chains of contradictory statements and tangible overlaps. The public interior was originally a type, extended from the private interior around the 19th century. However, as it seemed to have surpassed being a type of space, to being as an ever-inclusive condition that fosters types, a condition on which types are based. It subverts its position by evolving into essentially a meta-type, or a condition of many types of spaces and architecture, a condition that defines types and legitimates them. This role of the interior is even present as a rudiment in the private interior where the façade has transcended from the physical one to the conceptual one.27 Public interiors not solely include spaces and enclose physical buildings, but also some of the spaces in between them, spaces that surround them, spaces that delimit them.28 This eliminates the public interior as a single type of space while canceling the public interior as a delimiter or classifier of space simultaneously. Only from a recognition at the finale of a meticulous, documentary collection of the fragments precipitated in the sedimentation from these public interiors, in the content of the dreamy postulations of them, could one picture the constellation of a shared commonality, not of the character of the illusions but the conditions for the illusions, the conditions that remind the sleepwalker of the dream, the thresholds. This brings us back to the arcades, to their phantasmagoric placeness,29 first in space, then in time30 – if such placeness were actually pointful and traceable – where visual, propagational presentations of characters and types of which that society of figures belonging to this interior collection of the arcades have desperately attempted to reduce themselves to exemplars, emerge as apparitions at the interfaces of the public interior: the canopied streetfront, the marketplace. So would ideas of the public interior, throughSleepwalkers: Public Interior at a Standstill

Architectural Association 3rd Year History and Theory Studies - Future Anterior: History as Project

out the chronological history, be collected and collated at the shared interior of concepts where they wishfully and autonomously reduce themselves as illusory types. The duty is therefore to approach the revelation of the conditions that foster types and their traceback into the countenance and complexions of the conditions; similar is it for the constellations of ideas which appears autonomously as clusters and congregations only recognizable if traced back to the substrates and postulations that delimits emergences and debacles of the fleeting ideas. The former is the fortune and preoccupation of the flâneur; the latter is the task and burden the historian. This is the process of awakening from the dream and requires the identification of the thresholds.

Narratives are there that links the connection between archetypal interior spaces, contributing to a whole picture of the uprise and hegemony of the fetishist spectacle of contemporary capitalism, an eternal return to, and a persistence of the same quality and mode of operation of contemporary interiors.31 From different perspectives, on different subjects, in different tongues, holding a mixed range of attitudes, such stasis situation has been allegedly referred to for numerous times:32 Blanqui, his final resignation when imprisoned in the fortress of Taureau;33 Benjamin, reflections on history, reflections on his life;34 Nietzsche, on the man that has character;35 Marx, on historical events as tragedy and farce,36 etc. What a standstill calls forth is not defeatist resignation and extreme escapism but further contemplations. This essay is the perfect place of these deliberations. Thus, a special quest requires this essay to tentatively approach from a distance these moments of standstill and examine it through the unexpected details of daily events that constitutes the experiences and impressions of the modern metropolis. Then it is considered critical to examine them through a analytical lens to possibly breach the standstill. In fact, a successful breach would only squash the phantoms of the permanence of a standstill on the sleepwalker and bring about the dawn of the real state of exigency. Taking from the Michelet terms and the Hegel-Benjaminian interpretation and additions to it, if the dream state about past dreams and awakenings represents the historical standstill, then this breach is the precipitated awakening of the dream, or, more precisely the means to precipitate awakening.

Sleepwalkers: Public Interior at a Standstill

Architectural Association 3rd Year History and Theory Studies - Future Anterior: History as Project

31 Pimlott, “Public Interior;” Allen, op. cit. 32 It is notable that this repetitious array of arguments addressing the similar, if not identical issue would possibly be interpretated as some manifestation of the eternal return in the form of endless recurrence behind phantasmic progression. However, it is important to discern the nuanced differences in any of these sources provided, although this essay will not elaborate on the development of ideas and context distilled in them. It is also notable that a higher level of abstraction of concepts and reappropriation of context intended for the exploration of commonalities (by seeing commonalities one notices differences, thus contributing to the possibility of forming types, groups, clusters, and disassembling them) also presets commonalities before the formulation of idea clusters. This abstraction and summarization are both deductively and chronologically prior to the enunciation of the clustered, collated ideas. Do pay attention to this point and beware of this postulation, not as a challengeable part of the deduction but as essential constituent of the essay piece and related thinking processes. 33 Benjamin, Arcades, 25-26. 34 This includes his experience as a child growing up in Berlin around 1900s, starting from where he reflected on a folksong character of its image representing horror and nervousness which turned out to be influential, if not destructive on his lifetime: the status of being overwatched and thus being affected by it, and the eternal return to this status albeit his attempts of breaching it. This also includes his Theses on the Philosophy of History, where calls for a real state of emergency that breaks a stasis and the idea of a historical norm. See, Benjamin, Illuminations, intro., and ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken Books, 2007): 253-264. 35 See Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Helen Zimmern (Penguin, 2016): chap. IV. It writes, “if a man has character, he has also his typical experience, which always recurs.” 36 See Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, trans. Daniel de Leon, (New York: New York Labor Views, 2003): 7.

Figure 4. Paris at a standstill.

Sleepwalkers: Public Interior at a Standstill

Architectural Association 3rd Year History and Theory Studies - Future Anterior: History as Project

Figure 5. Notice board at embankment station, November 2021, London.

Figure 6. South bank underpass fair near Hungerford Bridge, London.

Sleepwalkers: Public Interior at a Standstill

Architectural Association 3rd Year History and Theory Studies - Future Anterior: History as Project

37 The scope of inquiry is in London due to the geographical location of the author, and in so limitation the conditions that foster this essay are also represented. 38 The basic methodology of keeping a distance, is to repetitively meander: passing through a space from different entries, in different imaginative roles; paying attention to objects and details equally; photographing meticulously the space; thinking about the fixated and temporal elements and countenances of the space etc. Some of the methods of observations are literal, some are not. The process of analysis and the process of observation are also combined, in a sense that the method of analysis both pre-dictates and gets pre-dictated by the observation, and this relation is implied in the following sections. 39 There are seemingly heterotopic (of otherness, for definition, see Michel Foucault and Jay Miskowiec, “Of Other Spaces,” Diacritics vol. 16, no. 1. (Spring 1986): 2227) places such as the fairgrounds. These places, although featuring a mostly exterior environment, are considered a public interior, since they have similar qualities: they are delimited by agreement (leases, appointments, applications); they offer a conceptually enclosed street front, purely commercial, which separates themselves from the normal street fronts that are not public interiors. Although this essay will not elaborate in detail on the fairgrounds, the case study encountered, i. e. the Christmas fair at Trafalgar sq., are in fact not heterotopic spaces. These conceptions are also illusory when one comes to awareness that these events are held on an annual basis. In fact, if the public square could be considered a space of otherness, of contingency of events (say, protests), then the temporal occupation of the public square space by the Christmas fairs actually eliminates the possibility of such contingent event. One may now argue that they are anti-heterotopic, coated in illusions of being of otherness. For the fair, this is the key to the awakening of such fact, thus being a threshold.

IV This essay situates its scope of inquiry in London and focuses on the public interiors of this metropolis specifically.37 During this term, several self-motivated tours and intuitive wanderings have taken place to explore the roles of the public interior and reflect the spirit or gist that hides in the ulterior. This method has intentionally kept a distance with the places that has been encountered38 while being immersed into these places. Although not all of these sites might be included in this analysis, the chain of places visited include the Hay’s Galleria, Christmas fair at Trafalgar Sq.,39 Southbank marketplaces, Tube stations and underpasses,40 Borough Market, national railway underpasses, privately-owned bankside passages, Tate Modern, etc. Choices of sites are contingent, and most sites are encountered during the aimless wandering around Southwark. This method resembles the psychogeography of Guy Debord, but even more significantly echoes the image of the flâneur and activates the perceptual field of a contemporary figure of it. It is the flâneur who roves at an aimless pace through the hurrying metropolitan crowds, to whom things reveal themselves, relinquished of their illusory coatings, for whom the true mage of the past rushes by and who assembles it through history. The figure of the flâneur could be the best explained if compared with the sleepwalker. Their similarities are obvious, while their differences need elaboration. A sleepwalker is in its countenance most sober and visually similar to an awaken person from the outside. But he is actually most distant from the threshold to wakefulness. Dominations of the illusory elements are most prominent in the sleepwalker, who is utterly unaware of them. The domination of the illusory dreamlike elements is so overwhelming and determining on the sleepwalkers, that people in the lucid world (relatively lucid and less possessed compared to the sleepwalker) could easily discern the oddity. Sleepwalkers are uncommon, but their traits and activities are general and widespread: unsober moments are just important and indispensable to sustain a modern lifestyle in the cities. Sleepwalkers are the best emblem of the illusion, while flâneurs reside in the realm of the threshold. Sleepwalkers: Public Interior at a Standstill

40 Arguably tube stations and passages that connect them to the ground are public interiors. It is also obvious that the agreements might be some transactional activity implied by the touching-in-and-out at the ticket gates, and relevant regulatory framework that sets limit on activities allowed and behaviors suggested. Further agreement might involve the necessity of such spaces that provide ways of quickly maneuvering inside the metropolitan fabric, perhaps related to a need of efficiency or time regarded as universally the most significant economic factor. Apart from the agreement that allows for this public interior, there are also interesting oddities regarding the illusory elements that it sustains. Here only the most spatio-temporally specific (specific of the London tube system, and specific of the time in chronological history being autumn 2021) oddities, of which there are two, will be discussed. Firstly, the ongoing strike by train operators in the RMT union (see photographic evidence) squashes the illusory character of the tube that conceals the relationship between human labor and objects, and questions the necessary services modern metropolitans take for granted. But it would also be defended that, similar to the fairs, strikes require applications, plans, and are in the long run, periodical (nor referring to a chronologically periodical feature but rather focusing on the inevitability of such events and the possibility that one might predict these events). The second threshold is the absurdly prominent figures of the advertisements. See also Christian Fuchs, Rereading Marx in the Age of Digital Capitalism (London: Pluto Press, 2019).

Architectural Association 3rd Year History and Theory Studies - Future Anterior: History as Project

V Then – this is all what you say – new economic relations will be established, all ready-made and worked out with mathematical exactitude, so that every possible question will vanish in the twinkling of an eye, simply because every possible answer to it will be provided. Then the “Palace of Crystal” will be built. Then … In fact, those will be halcyon days … everything will be extraordinarily rational … boredom.41

41 Dostoevsky, op. cit., 32-33. 42 TATE, "Exhibition Guide: Hyundai Commission: Anicka Yi, In Love With The World," 2021, https://www.tate.org.uk/whatson/tate-modern/exhibition/ hyundai-commission-anicka-yi/ exhibition-guide. 43 Benjamin, Illuminations, 253-264. 44 Benjamin, Reflections, trans. Edmund Jephcott, intro., and ed. Peter Demetz (Boston: Mariner Books, 2019): 84.

Figure 7. Interior of Tate Modern, London.

Sleepwalkers: Public Interior at a Standstill

Even for free exhibitions, Tate Modern still requires a ticket to control the density of people; however, it is not too hard for an individual to slip through the checks of the safeguards. Whichever the case, the permitted entry, or an ambiguous trespass, is an acknowledgement of the delimited idea of the public interior: the former often requires booking in advance, a plan, organization of activities and schedule, while the latter relates closely to contingency and unexpectedness, categories of a weekend Flânerie. Real phantasmagorias – jellyfish-like creatures hover the gigantic atrium of the former power station, a temporal installation of Anicka Yi – populate the dull interior and decorates it with a hallucination of exotic flavor. Exhibitions are places of pilgrimage to the commodity fetish – by pilgrimaging it evokes criticisms on and reflections of it which immediately get caught, absorbed, and internalized, which is believed to be another basic mechanism which sustains the universality of the globally prevalent public interior. This converted museum bears with it the hull, material substrates, and countenances of its premise: fragments of a power station. Memories might have for long settled on the concrete finishes and metallic monochromes of the cast-iron trusses which incessantly recalls a world, in the very form of the remnants, in the aesthetics of the ruin, a world of grandness and of progression. The jellyfish installation, as its introduction notes,42 depicts the reminiscences of London bankside history heading towards such progression yet eventually [with contingency and inevitability] betraying it. In so wishful facing-towards-past, would it not for arrays of cute jellyfishes made out of mechanical ventilators, circuit-controlled fans, and airtight membranes, be blown away by an unexpected gust of wind?43 Unsober narrations of dreams bring probably calamity,44 and if the converted interior of the Tate stands as the testimony of this betrayal of dream elements Sleepwalkers: Public Interior at a Standstill

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and in fact the ruins of their revenge, this clumsy manifesto of the wishful dreams of contemporaries could just as well be victims of their dreaming.

45 This ambivalence makes the architectural way of viewing space the least hampered by the illusory images, and grants architects a position closer to awakening. This is doubtless, but architects also contribute to the physical apparatus that sustains the dreams of others and self, and this contribution is either wishful or unwilling. Their knowledge of creating spaces (that sustains illusions, if metaphorically spoken; that best suits programs and functions declared as useful by the society) results in their duty of creating spaces. Also, and most importantly, their duty of creating such spaces (and the need of this) generates a system that carries forward and maintains their knowledge (namely university education, degrees, registration boards). 46 See Sloterdijk, op. cit., 169; Dostoevsky, op. cit., 32. 47 Benjamin, Arcades, 1-26. 48 Sloterdijk, op. cit., 173-4.

Architects and to-be-architects often see exhibitions in a distinctive way. Apparently, the conditions of the outset of these exhibitions were the spaces, the architectural ones that allow for the visually manifest presentation of the things, the exhibits. They see not only exhibitions themselves but have developed a way of seeing these conditions, examining the architectural qualities that allow for exhibitions. In their viewing of a museum interior, the space matters just as much as the exhibits. This grants them an ambivalent position: they are better trained to experience these conditions behind the illusory dreamlike elements, while their duty remains in designing a fixed space that sustains the ever-changing illusions.45 Gigantic exhibition interiors draw reference to the crystal palace, predecessor of almost all exhibition architecture of the modern age. Albeit the fleeting time and the everchanging materials of exhibition, the conditions of happening, the architectural spaces of exhibitions remain a certain formal commonality and logical continuity. The gigantic original, the crystal palace, designed by Joseph Paxton, was erected in the Hyde Park in 1850. Its fabrication and construction were considered a technological world wonder, featuring serial production and mathematical exactitude.46 The crystal palace introduced a new aesthetics into the modernist tradition: a climatically controlled public interior. For progressive thinkers then, the crystal palace represented nothing other than a prototype of an ideal living space, a utopia based on the promises of omnipotent control of natural laws, for instance, Fourier’s Phalanstère, which, as mentioned earlier, is the way in which he dreams of the illusory public interior of his age.47 Thus simply recognizing the spatial diagrams that enabled the illusions would not suffice. Regarding the illusory interiors of exhibition spaces and museums that superseded, attentions ought to be drawn to two writers: Dostoevsky, in Notes from the Underground, and Benjamin, in The Arcades Project. Sloterdijk sheds light on the similarities and differences between the two, both of whom regard an architectural form as the key to the understandings of and awakenings to the worldwide capitalist condition: for Dostoevsky, the crystal palace[s]; for Benjamin, Paris arcades.48 Albeit the difference in their modus operandi,49 both of them have seen the illusory representations of an architectural interior: the shiny surfaces and delicate interiors of the commodity world conceal in these phantasmagoric countenances of an unpleasant world. With dark allusions, the beautifully presented world under the glass canopies and the artificially controlled public interior of the arcades were nothing other than a standstill image of “a metamorphosis of Dante’s inferno.”50

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49 Ibid. The difference of modus operandi is first and foremost clear when we compare their lifetime in an chronological history and their medium of research, in a banal sense. However, this comparison still deserves further explanations. As properly accepted by many, Benjamin remained fixated on “an architecturally, economically, urbanistically and aesthetically obsolete type of building, which was then meant to carry the full burden of a hermeneutics of capital.” His attempt of writing a “prehistory of the 19th century,” or regarding the 19th century as archetypical history, through the documentation of the Paris arcades: “he thought this was possible, because the collapse of tradition had exposed the archetypal moments in all of history which was no longer obscured by ties to church and family., the old prehistory shrouds the environment of our parents. We are no longer bound to them by tradition.” See Hannah Arendt, “On Walter Benjamin,” Lecture, Goethe House, New York. Filmed 1968, Video of Lecture, 1:05:00, https://www.amazon.co.uk/Hannah-Arendt-Walter-Benjamin/ dp/B082YMGTHG; see also the preface to Benjamin, Illuminations, 1-55, by Hannah Arendt. While for Dostoevsky, a person who lived closer to that era obviously should have had clearer visions of the objects and phenomenon of that period of time, at the sacrifice of a summative knowledge, from a critical distance. However, it is notable that Dostoevsky shared some of his illusory envisions with Fourier, namely the dreaming of the epoch about itself, as cited by Benjamin. Dostoevsky too envisioned a utopian palace of crystal and crystallization, while in so dreaming he squashed the self-indulgence and phantasmagorias of the dreamlike spectacle and returned from this spiritual excursion to the physical reality. This evolvement of thinking could be understood and discussed, but hardly experience in self, by researchers living in times that succeeded chronologically, as Benjamin who stood already at a critical distance from the apparitions of tradition, aiming only to find the timeless from the outdated. To this regard, one might say that Benjamin falls behind him. 50 Skiterdijk, op. cit., 174.

Figure 8. Illustration of the transept of the Crystal Palace, designed by Sir Joseph Paxton, at the Great Exhibition of 1851, Hyde Park, London.

Sleepwalkers: Public Interior at a Standstill

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VI One ought to speak of events that reach us like an echo awakened by a call, a sound that seems to have been heard somewhere in the darkness of past life.51

51 Benjamin, Reflections, 81. 52 Co-operative Group Limited. It is based in UK whose focuses include retail businesses including food retail and wholesale.

Figure 9. An exhibit at Tate Modern, London.

This section, however, aims to describe in detail a notable object of the public interior, how it sustains illusions which have been taken for granted, and the clues to the awakening from these illusions, the thresholds. At one venue of the Tate, an exhibit caught the attention: it was a COOP52 receipt. This receipt claims to operate with the politics of color, its whole purpose of representing a transactional activity that took place somewhere in a COOP store that is limited by the artist its object of purchasing to the products colored white. This essay would not comment on this exhibit as it is but would like to draw the attention to a similar experience: this receipt brings about remembrance of another COOP receipt that has been intentionally preserved by the author, as the tacit testimony of the acquisition of a plastic shopping bag. The receipt serves as an indictment of the taking place of the transactional activity it represents. Or, one shall say that the receipt has the bifold character of being critical about this activity of supermarket shopping, regulating it, and, justifying it and sheltering it officially. On the day 25 Sep 2021, a shopping bag was purchased from the COOP strand store, alongside a series of products of daily use. The bag served as the carrier and the container of the latter. It was typically a reflective blue/azure-colored, medium sized (approximate maximum volume: 20 L) handbag, branded with COOP logo; the bag was made from plastic no. 4 LDPE / low-density polyethylene, recyclable according to instructional information printed on various locations of the bag: rear, bottom. Dramatically, not far from the date of purchase, the bag, as documented on the day 20 Oct, is already in a status with various abrasions, scratches, and partial deformations. On retrospection the bag was, after the event of purchase, situated in conditions of sequential and repetitive usage at the frequency of 4 to 6 times per week, as the temporary container of the manual shipment of fresh-purchased goods from the retailer store to the location of personal residence,

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as a supermarket shopping bag. After the sequential usage as explained the bag reached the condition that reduced it into a damaged, worn form, unsuitable for future usages. If the worn bag served as the clearly enunciable evidence of this unexpected situation, then the receipt would preferably be a tacit indictment of this somewhat undesired event. The presence of this receipt also draws the attention into the relation of this event to an inevitable pre-condition: a transactional activity that took place inside a highly commercial space, a public interior. Its physical existence of its spatio-temporal specificity allows for this transactional activity to take place regularly: expectations of a bag are only possible based on postulation regarding this condition that supplies bags for regular purchase, immediately after a shopping. Only through the conscious awareness of this transactional origin where the bag was acquired, could one valorize the durability of the bag accordingly. Such expectations also presume the end-of-use of the bag as a container of shopped products as the inability of doing so, which supports the previous argument from a slightly different perspective. This brings forward the discussion: the bag as a container53 – the notion of a bag in the form of an emptiness that presumes the eventual fill-up, is based on nothing but the use of it being a container of things, an illusory axiom that isolates it from its context. 20

Even not filled up with things, for example, in stock or for sale, the only simple and achievable reference to it, a “bag,” regardless of contextual specificity, remains descriptive of its pragmatic function and use value. Or one could also argue from the opposite. Whichever the case, the use-value as a container of things subverts and takes the position of the conception of this object that totally dominates the way one approaches it. The only condition of envisioning it becomes inseparable for the temporal emptiness, if not the direct in-use situation, as if a bag is something with its only cognizance achievable if attached to an underdetermined, transient infill of goods, freshly purchased, blatantly attached, and instantly removed. Even when conceptualizing the demise of it, one would still be imaging the situation that incorporates the former: a waste disposal bag that permanently departs from the owner’s possession as a container, or carrier still, of unwanted and undesired materials and residues. It is in this way quite perceptible how one conceives this object, and such thoughts are quite natural. In these conceptions, modern lifestyles have developed the way one approaches objects as means and ends.54 The most prominent example is the overly pragmatic thinking that treats every commodity from the scope of values.55 Previous discussions outline the use values, which limits the conception of the lifecycle of the bag. Any unawaken comparisons, or unconscious references, from the use value to the Sleepwalkers: Public Interior at a Standstill

53 There is no need of clarifying the following in the main text, but it is regarded as sufficiently important to include as a side note that: in some cases, bags function as a container not for the shift of goods in terms of their geographic location, but for the storage of goods. This usage is also considered somehow a container that allows for a shift which essentially is the continuation of qualities of goods across the chronologically defined time. Typically, materials are stored in bags, wrapped up to some extent, in packages, to protect the materials that are vulnerable to light, heat, moisture, or sometimes, children. Notably, as most geographic shifts of goods in bags are considered two-way, some of the chronological shifts of goods in bags could be reciprocal as well. In this case, the term “chronological” should be replaced by some other term, with higher precision in describing this situation, since being “chronological” already presupposes an order in time, a one-way continuation of time. The reciprocal shifts are, for example, a conscious recapture of previously unnoticed elements, which might perhaps contribute to the development of present knowledge and personal experience. The quote at the start of this section serves as an example, as Benjamin recalls his childhood Berlin while writing the piece, “A Berlin Chronicle.” (See Benjamin, Reflections.) The famous “petites madeleines” of Proust might serve as another. 54 Ends refer to objects as a constituent part that sustains one’s physical and conceptual (about the creation of illusions inside the private interior, about the makeup of one’s traits and characters, about the expression of subjectivity, etc.) well-being. Means are loosely defined as the tools that contributes to the appearance, availability, accessibility, etc. of the ends. 55 This value is general and could refer to either of the economic (exchange), the subjective, the cultural, the symbolic, etc. For the bag, it is specific in the use value – exchange value comparison.

Figure 10.

Photographic evidence of the bag. 21

56 For example, the most commonly seen complaint, such as “this bag is totally not valuable, it breaks so easily.” Talking in such manner resembles the acts of the sleepwalker.

exchange value naively,56 are part of the symptoms. In such conceptions, the lifecycle of the bag seemingly leaves the realm of perception and thus appears as an ultimate termination the moment the bag departs from one’s disposal. This is another layer of illusion, apart from the hysteric addiction to valorization of it. A bag conceals itself in the reproduction phase, bearing within it the seemingly apocalyptic demise in the rubbish bin, while in fact getting recycled to re-enter the cycle of production and consumption. It possesses some immortal quality, determined not by the plausible potential of being recycled that enables the material resurrection, but its position of being situated in the field of relationships of materials and production. The latter are the conditions that encourages the possibilities, as well as the necessities of its proliferation and reoccurrence. Then the supermarket becomes the possible site for a reunion: will one end up buying the same shopping bag again?

Sleepwalkers: Public Interior at a Standstill

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VII Shops in the Passage des Panoramas: Restaurant Veron, reacting room, music shop, Marquis, wine merchants, hosier, haberdashers, tailors, bootmakers, hosiers, bookshops, caricaturist, Theatre des Varietes. Compared with this, the Passage Vivienne was the “solid” arcade. There, one found no luxury shops.57 57 Benjamin, Arcades, 37. 58 The Galleria is believed to be the Italian term for describing arcades. In architectural history, the arcade primarily refers to a pedestrian thoroughfare, bordered or covered by a building which serves its own function. This function varies throughout different cultural backgrounds and thus this type is referred to in different terms among languages, although they all designate a similar type. See Geist, op. cit., 3. 59 Ibid. This paragraph imitates the way the previously cited Convolute of the Arcades Project has been laid out. 60 The usage of overarching here draws the reader to be attentive about both the derived meaning, referring to the importance, and the fact that the railways mentioned were once (if not still are) elevated by arches and vaults.

Figure 11.

Interior of the Hay's Galleria, Southwark, London.

Sleepwalkers: Public Interior at a Standstill

Shops in the Hay’s Galleria58, fashion and retail: Riverside bookshop, Charles Tyrwhitt, Hay’s news, Boots, Flight centre, Accessorize, Next, Carducci shoes; cafés and restaurants: Absolutely starving, Starbucks, Café rouge, Côte, Bagel factory, The Horniman at Hay’s, Balls brothers, Costa, Café piazza, Cinq sandwiches.59 The process of encountering the meticulously decorated interior of this 20th century arcade was purely contingent, or even mysterious and magical: if one were to arrive through the National Rail Services at London Bridge Station, very little exterior air except for the squeezed Tooley St. seems to offer an effective mediation between bumping into the sheltered atrium of this modern galleria. The portal to this galleria sits right opposite the railway station, offering an intriguing juxtaposition. If one were to wander among the zigzagging alley walks of the south bank where ruins, developments, re-developments, monuments, etc., various types of plots of lands intertwine and weave out a net of peculiarity, before finally arrive, intentionally or not, at the Galleria, then it would surely offer some degree of visual recession from this radical confrontation of seemingly incongruent lands and spaces. Three overarching60 railway lines tear into pieces this bankside hinterland which remain concealed from the visually distinctive riverbank façade, forming a chessboard on which, however, land plots are interlaced almost randomly. Terraced houses to the left seem a retreat from the flow of tourists and cargos on the Thames and from the absurdity of the new urban center recognizable with the Shard; derelict sites to the north have mostly been renovated, the majority of which dock renovations, except for the monumental ruin of the Winchester Palace; the Southwark Cathedral leads the way to the Borough Market in the middle ground of the crossroad, an island, an rail-circumscribed enclave, of which the entry is only recognizable under the overground railways, echoing the arches and vaulted underSleepwalkers: Public Interior at a Standstill

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passes.

This galleria was originally a brewhouse, which later on turned into a wharf before its closure around the 1970s. Around 1987 it was converted by the London Docklands Development Corporation into what remains now, with a metal canopy erected to create a secured public interior.61 The canopy resembles the figure of the 19th century metal domes, visible in arcades and the crystal palace, just as the architectural techniques of the arcades which create an enclosed “exterior” (in that the internal façade of arcades looks so similar to the external street scape). An arcade in itself represents a threshold, a transition: arcades derive from passages – the movement of passing through space.62 They are in history some kind of pedestrian thoroughfare, a public interior that bridges two or several public “exteriors.” In so description, one enters the arcade from a public exterior for which he would eventually depart from the public interior of the arcade. Interesting coincidence of terms is here that these physical thresholds are the conceptual thresholds to the awakening from the illusory elements: the imaginary exterior space is pulled inward, while remaining almost the same visual quality of the exterior façades.63 Particular materials, e. g. the paving that continues a complexion of the exterior streets, help to sustain such illusion of being “outside.” Extensive glass roofing also provides with sufficient skylight that contributes to similar hallucinations of a visual exterior in an interior setting.

61 Nick Buck, Working Capital: Life and Labour in Contemporary London (London: Routledge, 2002): chap. 2. 62 Geist, op. cit., 3. 63 Till Boettger, Threshold Spaces: Transitions in Architecture, Analysis and Design Tools, trans. Helen Labies-Volz, ed. Julia Dawson (Basel: Birkhäuser, 2014): 30.

Figure 12.

Sleepwalkers: Public Interior at a Standstill

Paris arcades.

Sleepwalkers: Public Interior at a Standstill

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IIX There is zero loyalty – and zero tolerance – toward configuration, no “original” condition; architecture has turned into a time-lapse sequence to reveal a “permanent evolution” … the only certainty is conversion – continuous – followed, in rare cases, by “restoration,” the process that claims ever new section of history as extension of Junkspace… God is dead, the author is dead, history is dead, only the architect is left standing … an insulting evolutionary joke.64 64 Rem Koolhaas and Hal Foster, Junkspace with Running Room (Notting Hill Editions, 2013). 65 See Sloterdijk, op. cit. 66 Pimlott takes the metaphor of the umbilical cord while referring to the continuity and similarity of American infrastructural facilities that generates an interior from one’s kitchen to one’s office: identical experiences in this medium which technology would eventually reduce to zero. See Pimlott, “Without and Within.” 67 Koolhaas et al., op. cit.

Figure 13.

Paul Rudolph, Under Manhattan Expressway.

Sleepwalkers: Public Interior at a Standstill

Almost everything is available through some transactional activity at the commodified public interior. This applies for both the supermarket, and the arcade (galleria). The encounter with the bag and reflections regarding it, as well as the observations and the contemplations in a contemporary arcade both engender the dawn on the thresholds and clues to the illusory coatings, aiming at an awake. Such encounters are in fact shared experiences if not daily routines. The spread of the public interior and the extraordinary similarity pictures a panorama of a worldwide interior, a capital interior,65 which seem to be the ultimate terminus of the evolvement of public interiors, architecturally. Of the contemporary age, the standardized, artificially conditioned interior spaces, as referred to as the “umbilical cord” between office life and casual life, are the most prevalent public interiors and the ones most indifferent to differences.66 The possibly of a difference, or a change gets utterly resigned in Junkspace,67 which seems to bluntly signal an end to the architectural history of typologies, if not that of the human history as such: the omnipresent possibly and omnipotent construction have provided with humans a material substrate to work on grand projects, while in so offering they cancels the grandness all by eradicating and eliminating this idea through exactly the conditions of total dominance over space and the make of space, entirely and irreversibly.

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IX Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of spiritless conditions. It is the opium of the people. To abolish religion as the illusory happiness of the people is to demand their real happiness. The demand to give up illusions about the existing state of affairs is the demand to give up a state of affairs which needs illusions.68

68 Karl Marx, Critique of Hegel’s “Philosophy of Right,” trans. Annette Jolin & Joseph O’Malley (London: Cambridge University Press, 2009): 131. 69 See Fuchs, op. cit., ch. 4: “Rereading Marx as Critical Theorist of Communication.”

As if in a camera obscura, human and their relations are represented as upside-down illusions in all ideologies. In them, the true essence and state of affairs remain hidden, concealed in the illusory communications of the false appearances. Commodity fetishism is the most prominent instance, where power relations and phases of production remain concealed, the latter forming the basic diagram of the picture of the bag in its full life circle. Public interior facilitates the sales process and dehumanizes it, where one does not interact with human but commodities instead, isolating and concealing the production phase beneath the phantasmagorias of the public interior, the spaces of consumption, and human relations become invisible, their potential struggles mediated through the cover-up by commodity exchanges. This is the basic model of fetishism at work, where the real meaning of commodities gets emptied and replaced with hallucinations, powered by the effective means of communication, such as languages in the advertisements and the visually appealing modes of organizing commercial showcases. The fetishist character extends to these elements of communication which originally sustains the fetish of commodities per se, and in it, fetishism gets culminated by extending this false phantasma to the realms of politics and culture. It then comes to estrange the original, direct language by replacing them with an imposed language and discourse that constructs commonality and relations.69 History presents itself in likely manner as the encounter with the bag in the supermarket interior. In this encounter, history seems the protagonist whilst the bag remains futile and insignificant. As it could hardly be imagined the occasion of returning from supermarkets without a shopping bag, it is exactly in this manner to go into the department store of history and system of historical knowledge without the awareness of a postulation of a bag. Historic events, the

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mindless conception of a dead tradition is the dreamlike illusion – beneath its undercover, repetition lies in the ulterior. This structure formalizes the reproduction of events and people out from similar relations and personages, to produce seemingly new relations and figures. This is considered an essential way such structure sustains itself, the result of which is presented in the standstill that fixates the time in the middle of the dream state where people of the modern age are trapped like sleepwalkers. Skeptical historians would refer to this state as a permanent post-history condition.70 The cunning aspects of this halt of history also include the illusions about the past awakenings. This standstill would appear only from the acknowledgement of past illusory conceptions, from embracing the past attempts of awakening and their failure, their futility. It reduces the readings of historical analysis and reasoning to merely wishful revelations and interpretations of existing conditions wrapped in illusory, appealing labels, imposed on the sleepwalkers. Only by staying awake to the cyclic visuals of the false stasis and eternal sleepwalking status could one break out from the impasse and situate oneself historically within the context of the sublation of the world-spirit that lies otherwise in the ulterior.

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70 See Sloterdijk, op. cit., 165-8: on the post-history. See also, for reference, Francis Fukuyama, “The End of History?” The National Interest, no. 16 (1989): 3-18. Fukuyama sees the history ending at a period. The future will be filled only with tedious events that keep repeating. The history ends with the systematic, worldwide triumph of capitalism over communism, symbolized through the debacle of the Soviet Union which he has foretold somehow. This is the way he depicts the standstill condition of history and proposes the conception of an epilogue to history of ideological evolution.

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X Enlightenment is … rather the permanent reactivation of an attitude – that is, of a philosophical ethos that could be described as a permanent critique of our historical era.71

71 Michel Foucault, The Foucault Reader, ed. P. Rabinow (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), 42. 72 Karl Marx, Marx Engels Collected Works (New York: International Publishers, 1976): 144.

Sleepwalkers: Public Interior at a Standstill

Modern life is itself a worldwide phantasmagoria, the dream-state produced by capitalism, their figures are essentially dreamers fascinated by illusions of a standstill. Extending Benjamin in his exposé, we could write, similarly: men of the 21st century, the hour of awakening is fixed forever and the loop of dreams and wakefulness always brings us back to the same time on which it never dawns. Here, the chronological history halts; architectural typologies halt, public interiors halt. Arcades and other public interiors in fact serve not as the organ of awakening but the threshold between dreaming and wakefulness, which is essential to the evolution and the sublation of the world-spirit. Modern life is itself a phantasmagoria, extending the phantasmagorias about plausible past awakenings which profoundly sustains the state of sleepwalking, the state of stasis. Luckily, public interiors grant the private individual the opportunity of no longer being static as sleepwalkers, but as the one situated upon the threshold, the flâneur among our contemporaries. In this way the individual takes on the unique historical position and comes into awareness of the seemingly cyclic process in which the world-spirit, evolves. The reform of consciousness consists only in making the world aware of its own consciousness, in awakening it out of its dream about itself, in explaining to it the meaning of its own actions.72

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Bibliography

Table of Figures

Allen, Stan. Points + Lines: Diagrams and Projects for the City. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1999. Arendt, Hannah. “On Walter Benjamin,” Lecture, Goethe House, New York. Filmed 1968, Video of Lecture, 1:05:00, https://www.amazon.co.uk/Hannah-Arendt-Walter-Benjamin/dp/B082YMGTHG. Baudelaire, Charles. Paris Spleen, trans. Keith Waldrop. Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 2009. Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London: Harvard University Press, 2002. ____. Illuminations, intro., and ed. Hannah Arendt. New York: Schocken Books, 2007. ____. Reflections, trans. Edmund Jephcott, intro., and ed. Peter Demetz. Boston: Mariner Books, 2019. Boettger, Till. Threshold Spaces: Transitions in Architecture, Analysis and Design Tools, trans. Helen Labies-Volz, ed. Julia Dawson. Basel: Birkhäuser, 2014. Buck, Nick, Ian Gordon, Peter Hall, Michael Harloe, and Mark Kleinman. Working Capital: Life and Labour in Contemporary London. London: Routledge, 2002. Dostoevsky, Fyodor. Notes from the Underground, trans. Jesse Coulson. London: Penguin, 1972. Foucault, Michel. The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow. New York: Pantheon Books, 1984. Foucault, Michel, and Jay Miskowiec. “Of Other Spaces.” Diacritics, vol. 16, no. 1. (Spring 1986): 22-27. Fukuyama, Francis. “The End of History?” The National Interest, no. 16 (1989): 3-18. Fuchs, Christian. Rereading Marx in the Age of Digital Capitalism. London: Pluto Press, 2019. 34 Geist, Johann Friedrich. Arcades: The History of a Building Type, trans. Jane O. Newman and John H. Smith. London: The MIT Press, 1989. Hegel, Georg W. F. The Phenomenology of Spirit, ed. & trans. Terry Pinkard, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. Kafka, Franz. The Burrow, trans. Michael Hofmann. London: Penguin, 2016. Koolhaas, Rem, and Hal Foster. Junkspace with Running Room. Notting Hill Editions, 2013. Marx, Karl. Marx Engels Collected Works. New York: International Publishers, 1976. ____. The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, trans. Daniel de Leon. New York: New York Labor Views, 2003. ____. Critique of Hegel’s “Philosophy of Right,” trans. Annette Jolin & Joseph O’Malley. London: Cambridge University Press, 2009. ____. Grundrisse, trans. Martin Nicolaus. London: Penguin, 2015. Nietzsche, Friedrich. Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Helen Zimmern. London: Penguin, 2016. Pimlott, Mark. “Without and Within: Territory, the Interior and the Triumph of System over Place,” Lecture, Architectural Association, London, Filmed 9 Oct 2007, Video of Lecture, 1:28:34, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3RfdjOU3cXg. ____. The Public Interior as Idea and Project. Heijningen: Jap Sam Books, 2016. ____. “Interiority and the Conditions of Interior,” Interiority vol. 1, no. 1 (2018): 5-20. Simmel, Georg. The Sociology of Georg Simmel, adapted by D. Weinstein, trans. Kurt Wolff. New York: Free Press, 1950. Sloterdijk, Peter. In the World Interior of Capital, trans. Wieland Hoban. Cambridge, England: Polity Press, 2013. TATE, “Exhibition Guide: Hyundai Commission: Anicka Yi, In Love With The World,” 2021, https://www.tate.org.uk/ whats-on/tate-modern/exhibition/hyundai-commission-anicka-yi/exhibition-guide. Teyssot, Georges. “The Disease of the Domicile.” Assemblage, no. 6 (Jun 1998): 72-97. ____. “Mapping the Threshold: ‘A Theory of Design and Interface.” AA Files, no. 57 (2008): 3-12. Sleepwalkers: Public Interior at a Standstill

Cover Interior of the Hay's Galleria, Southwark, London. Image courtesy of the author. Figure 1. View of the phalanstery. Charles-François Daubigny, Fugère, phalanstère, ca. 19th century, lithograph, Houghton Library, Harvard University. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Houghton_Soc_860.05_-_ Fug%C3%A8re,_phalanst%C3%A8re.jpg Figure 2. Section of the Paris interior. Printemps Department Store in Paris, 19th Century, engraving. https://www.agefotostock.com/age/en/details-photo/printemps-department-store-in-paris-france-19th-century-engraving/ DAE-10460951 Figure 3. Gustave Caillebotte, Young Man at His Window, 1875. See Teysott, “Mapping the Threshold.” Figure 4. Paris at a standstill. Rene Clair, Paris qui dort, 1925, film scene, Internet Archive. https://archive.org/details/ TheCrazyRay Figure 5. Notice board at embankment station, November 2021, London. Image courtesy of the author. Figure 6. South bank underpass fair near Hungerford Bridge, London. Image courtesy of the author. Figure 7. Interior of Tate Modern, London. Image courtesy of the author. Figure 8. Illustration of the transept of the Crystal Palace, designed by Sir Joseph Paxton, at the Great Exhibition of 1851, Hyde Park, London. https://www.britannica.com/topic/Crystal-Palace-building-London Figure 9. An exhibit at Tate Modern, London. Image courtesy of the author. Figure 10. Photographic evidence of the bag. Image courtesy of the author. Figure 11. Interior of the Hay’s Galleria, Southwark, London. Image courtesy of the author. Figure 12. Paris arcades. See Benjamin, Arcades. 35 Figure 13. Paul Rudolph, Under Manhattan Expressway. Paul Rudolph, Lower Manhattan Expressway Project, 1972, New York. https://www.moma.org/collection/works/909

Sleepwalkers: Public Interior at a Standstill

Architectural Association 3rd Year History and Theory Studies - Future Anterior: History as Project

A Final Note

I didn’t feel up to such an enormous task; yes, I felt too weak even to imagine the required labour, and somehow consoled myself with other feelings no less vague that what would ordinarily not be sufficient, would in my own exceptional case, by special grace, be so ...73

To great writers, finished works weigh lighter than those fragments on which they work throughout their lives. For only the more feeble and distracted take an inimitable pleasure in conclusions, feeling themselves thereby given back to life. For the genius each caesura, and the heavy blows of fate, fall like gentle sleep itself into his workshop labour. About it he draws a charmed circle of fragments.74

Sleepwalkers: Public Interior at a Standstill

73 Franz Kafka, The Burrow, trans. Michael Hofmann (London: Penguin, 2016). 74 Benjamin, “One-way Street,” in Reflections.

Standstills are also conditions where thoughts halt. By discerning the lineage of the illusory elements that sustains a personal life and the current system of personal knowledge, one would say that one is wishfully accumulating the power which would promisingly break this stasis eventually and contribute to the movement of the world-spirit. The application of the methods and the patterns in which the world-spirit evolves apply to the personal thinking processes just as well. As one ’s mind or spirit wanders in the convoluted labyrinth of personal knowledge, fragmented memories of one, and intertwined histories of one, this might be the only hope that might salvage the aimless wanderer from the intricate landscape of one ’s mind. After years of wandering in the palace of the convoluted interior of one ’s thoughts, even illusions of the reality seemed dim. One feels oneself no longer inside the interior of the labyrinth, but in a relic where his thoughts take on the form of the relic and reside in it. This relic is the monument to all struggles and ideas of previous convolutes. In dreams, one always returns to this scene. The relics are like the weird ruin of some medieval cottage, as seen frequently in Kafka’s novels. Out of the windows are an endless night without a star.

Sleepwalkers: Public Interior at a Standstill