Making the bed – sleep mode and power nap
Sofia Pia Belenky Architectural Association 2016
Layers of sheets, each with a name and specific role. Sold as a set. The bed accumulates water, sweat and hair particles. Making it the most human piece of furniture we own. That awkward exersion required in fitting the duvet into its cover. The labor of making the bed. The act which is regarding as that of making the home. In order to preserve the image the inhabitant becomes homemaker. 35% of Londoners now work from the bed. We are working longer hours than ever before. The bed as paradigm of the contemporary labor. One can no longer leave the office because the emails follow them home into the bed on their cellphones.The umbilical charging cord connects the phone as close as possible to the bed.
“If you own a smartphone there is a four in five chance that you check your email and social media accounts within 10 minutes of going to bed at night and waking up in the morning. As a global society, the hours of rest we get each night have fallen from more than nine in the 1950s to little more than seven this decade – the lowest known figure in human history. But we are not just sleeping less; we are barely sleeping and always working”(Self). And there is a comfort in working in bed. A cubical with cushions. Reliant on the smartphone alarm we have welcomed devices into the bed. We spend more time online than we do sleeping. Taking vacations to disconnect and recharge.
The language used shows how directly we personify our devices and in return attempt to reach their efficiency. “He’s a machine”, has become a compliment in the workplace. Last year, Apple announced a new feature for the Mac; Power Nap. Using Power Nap, the computer can continue to work even while asleep; receiving updates and backing up. Like a scam sold to us “you will make money even as you sleep”, we believe it to be possible. The power nap becomes a productive act. “The time of sleeping is the last biological frontier that resists the economic exploitation of every aspect of our lives, from our friendships, our work and leisure, our tastes and traces of our digital activity, in a constant vortex of productivity and connectivity. In its absolute uselessness and inherent passivity”(Crary). Sleep as protest to capitalism. Public benches with barriers to prevent sleep and pills are marketed to remove ones need of sleep. And we feel a certain responsibility not to sleep. Articles with bucket lists: 100 things to do before you die, remind us of our limited time, when onethird of our lives is spent sleeping, all our time is precious and should be productive. Even now from a young age, children are encouraged to have resumes; taking full advantage of breaks for extra curricular activities, internships, and volunteer work. 2
When I close my laptop, it goes to sleep, but really only on stand-by, as its network is available 24 hours a day. Upon opening the screen is just as you left it. The job demands constant availability, with constant access to your emails; we are increasingly expected to respond faster, with multi-tasking demands. Always available to serve your searches. We are mentally in multiple places at once. Windows within the flatness of the computer screen; 3 am emails to China, family on Skype in America, a distracting tv show, delivery from the restaurant down the street, a sitcom playing in the background, scrolling through Facebook, essay waiting to be written, all pile up like pop up ads. There are windows behind the windows. And soon we realize the window is a mirror. Any moment of rest is a time when we are not available to the network. The space of work disguises as the home with sofas, break rooms and kitchens. And the homes mimic the office; small cubicles with internal office windows and corridors. An 8 person shared flat in a warehouse, rented weekly.
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“Before the widespread availability of universal telephony, the working day was clearly defined because work could only occur at specific locations. There was no ambiguity; you were either at the office, factory, atelier, studio … or you weren’t. Today, ‘business hours’ and ‘personal time’ have bled into each other. There is a desperate fear of being left behind, of exiting the loop, of becoming irrelevant, and so we take our work with us. And technology has made that portability easier. ‘I had better just check’, you think, in case you have some unread alert, have not seen some breaking news or have missed an urgent call”(Self). 5
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The bedrooms are getting smaller, making the bed even more so the main focal point of the room. The bed consumes the room. And yet as the apartment gets smaller most are not willing to compromise on bed size. There has been an 45 percent increase in purchase of King Size and super-king size beds in the past year according to Tesco(Lee). Because the bed is considered the only private space in the home it has paradoxically become a social space as well. When having friends over means hanging out in your bedroom as a social activity. Reminiscent of historic use of the bedroom as the most public space of the home. During the Tudor era, royalty would receive visitors from the bed. Today we Skype into work from the bed, dressed only for the cameras view. 7
The house is the object of our labor, the largest portion of the paycheck going towards rent, mortgage and utilities. The income generated from the home far exceeds the income of its tenants salaries. As cities become more expensive, jobs less predictable, ownership no longer seems like a future promise, instead domestic space has become partitioned, packaged and rented as efficiently and often as possible. Apartments built as showrooms, never intended as a home but instead financial investment. Invested in portions, no longer a complete home but shares of multiple constructions or futures. Individual entrepreneurs rent homes in order to sublet them on Airbnb as secondary income. Apartment rentals are paid weekly, and we stay in one place for 6 months instead of decades. Home is no longer permanent, as our world has become more connected, where anywhere with wifi can be the office, we move from city to city, home ownership a thing of the past.
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12 9 Hugh Hefner working in bed. “By introducing the figure of the horizontal media worker (who could just as easily be a writer or a sex worker or ideally both) and constructing a new postdomestic, public-private space that blurred the boundaries between leisure and work, Playboy anticipated the late twentieth-century discourses on “flexible worker” and “inmaterial labor” as well as the transformation for the Fordist economy to a system of production where information, knowledge, affect, and pleasure are the new merchandise”(139-140, Preciado). “Articualted as a single module, the bed and the recording and multimedia station did away with the traditional antithesis between passivity and activiyt, sleep and wakefulness, rest and work. No longer synonymous with sleep, the bed became a topos of neverending, mediated waking... Even as the occupant’s body slept, the bed and its media connections kept him awake, because the Playboy bed- like the modern metroplois- never sleeps”(146, Preciado).
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In order to sustain this drive for property and the promise it holds, there has been a somewhat paradoxical shift towards generating income by partitioning the same space for rent. The property I once sought as a private stakeholder is now subdivided in order to maximize the square footage of my space to generate income. Perpetual re-renting and subdividing existing apartment spaces, made possible by Airbnb and companies like it, has had a dramatic impact on how we understand familial relationships as well. The family is now multiple strangers sharing a home that was initially designed for the nuclear family. All extra space, portioned off as private bedrooms, increasing capacity for rental income.
This can be understood as a move towards privatization and micro-scaling of traditional real estate investments – one which not only directly impacts us economically but also completely reorients how we are able to understand the future of the family. This micro economic shift also adds to and plays on the increasing age in which people start families and settle into careers. Our flatmates become family. The intimate horror of living in close quarters with strangers, the dirty dishes in the sink, the banal conversation, passive aggressive sticky notes on doors. The home of divorce, staying together to afford the rent. So we build more internal walls, and the home designed for the nuclear family becomes increasingly subdivided and shared.
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The city transforms into a system of semiautonomous cells. A studio flat - 7sqm, so small you can work the microwave from the bed can be yours - for £300 a week. A bedroom becomes the void beneath a staircase, the extra space at the foot of the bed, the garage. More and more apartments are being made without kitchens, and with shared bathrooms.
The home is a corridor with bedrooms attached. The architecture avoids human contact and separates functions into contained drywall. “The cumulative effect of architecture during the last two centuries has been like that of a general lobotomy performed on society at large, obliterating vast areas of social experience. It is implored more and more as a preventive measure: an agency for peace. security and segregation, which by its very nature, limits the horizon of experience by reducing noise transmission, differentiating movement patterns, suppressing smells... incidentally reducing daily life to a private shadow play”(278,Evans). Each additional enclosure rentable as a bedroom relieves a portion of the monthly cost. The value of the apartment directly correlates to number of bedrooms. Room and furniture arrangements begin homogenous, still designed the same way even if we no longer live this way. Rarely are apartments rebuilt, if we don’t fit, we move on, add walls, or adapt to the building. The bed is the first object purchased for the home and discarded on moving day. An apartment plan is drawn with the bed, as a piece of furniture it is treated as an architectural element, a room within the room. This bed size dictates the construction of the home. A bedroom is liable to certain zoning laws, the door must be wide enough for the mattress to enter.
Additionally there has been an increase in artificial lighting, as each bounded space requires individual lighting. Until the 18th century people would go to sleep multiple times in the night in order to break up the long hours of darkness and be as productive as possible. 16
With the introduction of artificial light, work continues into the night and sleep is increasingly scheduled. With all other functions of the home shared, the only thing left of the private home is the bed. The kitchen table, the gaze of conversation was replaced by the sofa and meals in front of the television. Which in turn was replaced by the bed. Its inhabitants can be found laying under the blue glow of a laptop screen. The bed is at once the space of withdrawal and of active communication.The room as mediated by multiple screens has produced a distracted gaze, together but alone.
“The tendency to retreat into a private room of one’s own could be considered either as a concession toward societal conditions or as a rejection of the public sphere. Yet retreat, as we witness it today, has become the very condition of the social sphere”(Unhomely bed, Antonas).
As these apartments become further divided the proportional bed size increases. The bed has become the room and soon fills the entire home. It is no longer a piece of furniture but now at the scale of architecture. Bed has become a state of mind; sleep mode on the tube train, daydream space out of the perpetual scroll on Iphone. A recent study by RIBA has found that the average one bedroom flat London is now the same size as a Underground tube carriage. We now rent bedrooms instead of homes, temporary storage units in our freelance lifestyle.
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Just as new technologies and infrastructures have informed the home, separating it from society. Plumbing allowed for private bathrooms, with climate control and delivery we never need to leave the interior. The bed as home, will soon become autonomous as well. Technology means that most of us can work from home. You can rent out your home or room during the day as workspaces on websites like Breather. The bed becomes the ultimate space of labor, re-sold each day.
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The new bedroom is a device. Smart as equated with production, ones patterns and preferences become the most valuable asset in the home. A platform for connectivity, regulating temperature, optimizing experience and collecting data. A new form of labor arises. Convenience is traded for surveillance. Google street view of your living room. A free Airbnb photo of your room allows you to make more money on the site, but now a corporation owns the image of your home. 21
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As our searches, clicks, and even eye movements are tracked, perhaps we are not far from a home that calibrates desires, watches our amazon wish lists, recent Pinterest saves and our tinder preferences – a process already in place with Facebook using software such as AdRoll and Umbel. Most recently Airbnb purchased Lapka, a company that creates devices that look like jewelry and monitor your home and body. Our inhuman desire to be constantly productive even while dozing is now possible with data collection. “In the age of networked everything, technology is the silent observer of our daily lives, and the home the locus of a final transaction exchanging privacy for convenience. If data is the new oil, the home is the next Texas”(Grima). The bed is plugged in. A smart mattress that monitors your sleep patterns and measures your breathing and heart rate. Devices like the Apple Watch and Fitbit, wearable technologies attach to our bodies, even when sleeping. An ever-present internet of things. We swallow the pill. The inhabitant becomes the quantified self, producing an estimated one gigabyte of data per week. Privacy is no longer mediated by spacial organization. “The bed is the furniture par excellence of this new era of the infrastructure; the bed will be the hero of this type of sleep, of immaterial work and distraction, all understood as concessions to predetermined durations. Sleep introduces a necessary horizontal spatiality for inhabitation, and the concept of a dead time of rest in an ever moving infrastructure”(Shelter, Antonas). Immaterial labor prefers software over hardware and streams its information live. Touch screen intimacy. The home of the week has become commodified to a shopping list, personalized and produced to our likes, sponsored by commercial breaks, and we rent it gladly for the low cost of our privacy. 26
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The permanent vacation, sleeping in all day, happily twitting and chattering in sublime relaxation. Work has been replaced by leisure. The bed mines the inhabitants most valuable resource; their active boredom. It is a space of voluntary yet total participation.The autonomous bed as sedative calms and puts user at a state of temporary paralysis, comfortable, novocaine, waiting the high score, next level, bonus round reward. The exterior has dissolved in relation to the interior expanding. It is all bed.
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APPENDIX
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