A Walk Through the Lobby

This is a walk through the lobby of a casino. As our steps take us along the smooth marbled floors, three spaces reveal themselves, all with their own voices and monologues. There is no common denominator between the voices, beyond the location in this vast interior landscape. Some are uncertain, others are polemic, or simply obtuse. Some are desperately trying to get back to whatever it was that architecture was supposed to do with theory...

“A WALK THROUGH THE LOBBY” HANNES FRYKHOLM PHD STUDENT UMA SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE RESARC PHD COURSE “PHILOSOPHIES” FALL 2015, KTH STOCKHOLM 1

INTRODUCTION ...This walk is the result of reflections on a set of texts presented at the Resarc PhD Course “Philosophies”, at the KTH School of Architecture between October 2015 and January 2016. The first space “The Lobby” begins in the entrance, and considers Georg Simmel and Sigfried Kracauer in relation to the lobby of the modernist metropolis. It continues with discussing the more contemporary lobby space and the aesthetics of desires within neo-liberal economy.

Finally it discusses a possible counterpart through Agnes Denes and Peg Rawes reading of the aesthetics of care.

The second space happens along the several lobby corridors and on a stair. This space considers the architectural elements that compose the experience of the lobby, and to what extent these elements have an impact on the formation of subjectivity. Can the design of a particular staircase, or the framing of a corridor or the light of a room, have an impact on what we become when we are in the lobby? Can this becoming be something more than just the production of the consumer?

The third stop is inside the walls and under the floors of the lobby. This space is inside the inside, dealing with the building components and infrastructural support mechanisms in the hidden interiors of the building.

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TABLE OF CONTENT 1 - THE LOBBY METROPOLIS AND LOBBY 6 Simmel and Kracauer meet in the lobby. They are not strangers to each other, but here is a place to behave regardless of any previous history, a space to be anonymous. The lobby can be a space to immerse into glamour, or to stage oneself, or to simply relax while waiting for someone or something.

THE SPECTACLE OF NEO-LIBERALISM 7 The casino lobby is a plunge into fantasies. It removes the outside for the sake of a complete immersion.

Its imagery and visuals target our dreams and desires. In this regard there is much to learn from its mechanisms.

AESTHETICS OF CARE 8 To what extent can aesthetics introduce of voices and experiences from the outside?

2 - ALONG CORRIDORS AND UP A STAIR VECTORS OF SUBJECTIFICATION 12 If the experience economy has understood one thing very well, it is the lesson of Guattari: Subjectivities are in a state of constant transformation, and the vectors that regulate this process can be located all around us, even on a microscopic scale.

MODULATION OF MEMORY 14 To remember and to pay attention to certain things (literally paying) is a process that integrates us into specific and limited categories of desire.

3 - INSIDE WALLS AND UNDER FLOORS OUTLINES FOR A BESTSELLER 18 What would happen if architects, too often preoccupied with the proclaimed exact science of Gehliology, turned more attention to the microscopic and secret life of buildings?

WHERE DOES THE CYBORG ENDS? 20 If today we are all cyborgs in some way or another, we are it also very much in relation to architecture.

The systems and infrastructure that regulate temperature, light, electricity, sounds etc, are highly integrated parts of our bodies.

MICROSCOPIC REAL ESTATE 22 The casino is real estate, but not simply through a political definition of the term. The materiality and mechanisms of real estate can be found in the small and hidden parts of the casino lobby.

4 - OUTSIDE THE INSIDE CONCLUDING REMARKS 26

3

ENTER

THE LOBBY To enter the casino lobby is to step into a space of extended and sumptuous leisure time and glamour. Shining marble, greenery and thick rugs is as essential as the indifference towards the strangers sharing the experience of the lobby.

4

5

METROPOLIS AND LOBBY In “The Metropolis and Mental Life” Georg Simmel states that he is set on understanding the conditions for the individual in the metropolis, rather than “to complain or to condone” over its multiple varieties and expressions.1 He is an observer. This position centers on an understanding rather than a critical reading (as in revealing specific conditions that are not seen at first) or a projective discussion on how life in metropolis could be different. To be the observer is to consider at a distance, similar to the detached gaze of the flâneur. But is it possible to separate the act of understanding from the complaining voice of criticality?

Simmel describes the metropolis as a condition where survival is based on the individual ability to express him-/herself among the wide torrent of people and impressions.2 For Simmel this condition is the psychological response to money as the “frightful leveler” of every expression and value.

For the inhabitant of the metropolis, the nerves are worn out, giving way to an “incapacity to react to new stimulations with the required amount of energy” and to an “indifference toward the distinctions between things”.3 In response to the anonymity and lack of historical forms of social control, the metropolis prompts (or even forces) the individual to express originality in contrast to the masses. This pressure for change can be conferred with the “projective city” as discussed by Luc Boltanski and Éve Chiappelo, where social relations are happening in temporary and shifting projects and success is based on being “prepared for change and capable of new instruments.”4

Simmel is unspecific about the spaces and forms where the plethora of individuality is expressed and produced in the metropolis. An example of such a discussion could perhaps be found in Sigfried Kracauer’s writing on the hotel lobby, partly inspired by Simmel.5 For Kracauer, the hotel lobby of the modern city is a space where the traditional relations are detached for the “sake of a freedom that can refer 6

only to itself and therefore sinks into relaxation and indifference.”6 The lobby does not refer to anything beyond itself, and the “aesthetic condition corresponding to it constitutes itself as its own limit.”7 In its internal logic, the lobby for Kracauer provides a safe haven away from the external expectations on the individual. Just like the metropolis in general has detached humans from the social control mechanisms of the historical village, the lobby allows for anonymity and indifference toward the strangers in the same room. In this sense the temporary congregation of the lobby is no different from a group of people waiting for the subway.

What unites Simmel and Kracauer seems to be a preoccupation with the surface of capitalism rather than the structural depths of it.8 To look at the superficial, the conspicuous and the glamorous aspects of metropolis, is to consider how this physical environment and aesthetics generates particular conditions for living and particular forms of subjectivity.

THE SPECTACLE OF NEO-LIBERALISM Critical readings on neo-liberal urbanism sometime express an almost moral indignation over the visual appearance of this new landscape and its glossiness, surfaces, images, spectacle or simulacra. David Harvey’s text on urban entrepreneurialism is a good example of this reaction. In his critique Harvey notes that economy of the current city has entailed “ephemerality and eclecticism of fashion and style rather than the search for enduring values, […] quotation and fiction rather than invention and function, and, finally, […] medium over message and image over substance.”9 So what are the things no longer there?

“Enduring values”, “invention”, “function” and “substance” appear to be the things that have been marginalized in the city of entrepreneurialism. Yet, these words seem alien, even in the tradition of David Harvey.10 Are they not part of an enlightenment project that disenchanted the world through rationality, economy and engineering, all in an efficient synergy with the expansion of capitalism?11

In the act of negating the phantasmagoria of capitalism, Harvey’s critique reproduces ideas of rationality and function that have been entangled with the capitalistic expropriation of life for the last centuries. Perhaps more importantly, this kind of critique misses the opportunity to challenge neo-liberalism in a realm that it has claimed for much too long; namely that of our fantasies. Instead of only calling for the loss of continuity and substance in current capitalism, it is interesting to ask why the expressions of “fiction”, “image”, “fashion” and “style” that appear in neo-liberal urbanism are so mundane and boring?

In his book Dream: Re-Imagining Progressive Politics in an Age of Fantasy Stephen Duncombe writes: Between arrogant rejection and populist acceptance of commercial culture lies a third approach: appropriating, co-opting, and, most important, transforming the techniques of spectacular capitalism into tools for social change. [—] To do this means recognizing that consumer culture—its crafted fantasies and stimulated desires—speaks to something deep and real within us.12

It is nothing new that architecture is deeply entangled with the current economic system. Even the vocabulary of architectural practice bears signs of this, as in for example the use of the word “project” as both verb and noun. Pier Vittorio Aureli notes that a project “addresses a potential future situation, but in doing this it seeks to organize the available means towards a possible end.”13 The project in this sense is not permanent but rather a transaction of materials and work during a limited period of time. It reflects an economy that is built on instability and changes, where adaptability and transformation are signs of vitality. Every new project is a form of adjustment to specific conditions and requirements. For Boltanski and Chiappelo the notion of the “project” is located in an economy that transcends its critical forces through a grammar of inclusion. They write, “[a] nything can attain the status of a project, including ventures hostile to capitalism. Describing every accomplishment with a nominal grammar that is the grammar of the project erases the differences between a capitalist project and a humdrum creation (a Sunday club).”14 The concept of the project also entails an aesthetic dimension through the spaces and experiences that it promises. Sven-Olov Wallenstein argues that architecture always entails “prefiguring or ‘projecting’ of future human sensations: the architect composes a pattern of possible movement, a possible trajectory of the body”.15

The aesthetic dimension of the projective is related to a particular set of criteria for experiences in the neo-liberal city. The neo-liberal economy operates on a sensorial and bodily level. Investigating the aesthetics of the spaces of neo-liberal economy opens up for a better understanding of how desire is generated in relation to certain activities within this economy. There is in this sense an aesthetic dimension in any built environment, a sensorium that produces affect. To simply negate the sensorial aspects of the current economy as being the chimera of an underlying condition is to disregard the ways in which it operates to form subjectivities on a spatial and experiential level.

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AESTHETICS OF CARE I am fascinated by Agnes Denes project Wheatfield, a Confrontation, as presented in Peg Rawes text “Architectural ecologies of care”.16 Having said so, it is impossible to deny that it is the images of the project that fascinates me. Everything else is gone by now.

The wheat is harvested, the tools returned to a farm somewhere in upstate New York, the volunteers have gone back to art school and most likely graduated by now, the adjacent World Trade Center buildings have tragically collapsed, and the landfill has been turned into real estate projects with sheets of asphalt or astroturf rolled out over the interstitial spaces between all the new stuff. What remains are the digitalized images. Yet, as Pew Rawes notes, the resonance that the project had “is evidence that aesthetic ecologies are oscillating social, environmental and mental relations.”17 There is an immediate compelling power in the images of the project, as Agnes Denes stands in a field of wheat with the World Trade Center as a backdrop. Wheatfield can be seen as an ephemeral, full-scale montage that questions the spatiotemporal partitions between food distribution and the global economy through the production of an immediate juxtaposition between these different worlds.

There is aesthetics at work here. It is interesting to consider Peg Rawes reading of the aesthetics of care in this project, perhaps more so than in the artist’s own statement of the work operating on a symbolic level as an obstruction of real estate value or as an attempt to highlight global issues concerning hunger or inequalities.18 Rawes convincingly argues how Bateson, Guattari and Spinoza all consider aesthetics as deeply intertwined with the care and wellbeing of others, both human and non-human substances.

Following Rawes reading of Guattari’s transversal thinking, Wheatfield can be seen as an “ethical re-integration of repressed other natures (both anthropocentric and non-anthropocentric) into traditional and advanced technologies and scientific realms.”19 Central in this understanding of aesthetics 8

is the production of difference in an ongoing process of re-singularization. We recognize here Guattari’s call for heterogeneous struggle as something that does not require the constant homogenization of different scales and practices, but instead urges for us to become at the same time “more united and increasingly different”.20 The aesthetics of Denes work is therefore not only a visual juxtaposition of different objects and things, but also aesthetical in the meaning that it introduces a set of sensorial and temporal conditions that are usually kept apart. For example there is the sound of the wind blowing in the wheat field next to the noise of the traffic, the slow growth cycle of the crop next to the high pace trading of the stock exchange, the amber color of the wheat next to the concrete and glass nuances of the high rises, etc.

All of these aspects are part of the aesthetics of care in the sense that they introduce a specific sensorium with a number of “voices” new to a particular milieu.

In other words, the aesthetics opens up for difference.

Montage drawing by author, superimposing of Detroit Airport and disused subdivsion area of Poletown, East Detroit 9

CONTINUE

ALONG

CORRID AND UP A

STAIR 10

DORS

R

Stairs and corridors are holding together the dream of the casino, they extend and dilate time, they regulate the pace of the lobby, and extend it to all the corners of the building.

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VECTORS OF SUBJECTIFICATION In the introductory text to Three Ecologies, Félix Guattari presents a daunting summary of the ongoing ecological crisis of the planet, and at the same time a proposal for an ecosophy answering to how this crisis can be considered as a possibility to reorganize the current mode of life. Guattari’s reading of three ecologies is hopeful in the sense that it does not fall back on a romantic primitivism with the sole purpose of resetting a presumed lost balance between human and nature. Instead Guattari suggests the reconfiguration of life to happen from within the existing techno-scientific system. For Guattari this implies considering a set of ecologies that forms new nascent subjectivities, the introduction of “new systems of valorization”, and a technically supported revitalization of the planet’s many non-human organisms and systems. In moving away from the typical ecological discourse dominated by the need for austerity, Guattari’s discussion centers on the creative and active processes of restructuring the planet. A key argument in the text is that the stratification between different systems and scales needs to be transgressed, so that the “micro-politics of desire” can be related to larger systems of practice in what Guattari refers to as “processes of heterogenesis”.21

In this way the large-scale ecological crisis of the planet is directly related to what Guattari calls “vectors of subjectification” and the emergence of partialized subjectivity.22 According to Guattari, Freud and his disciples acknowledged certain vectors for the shaping of dissident subjectivity, based on “instinctual urges and […] corporealized imaginary”.23 Moving beyond the scope of psychoanalysis Guattari argues for subjectification as an ongoing process of different components intersecting and bifurcating, not necessarily in relation to the individual. However, in discussing this process Guattari only provide vague outlines of what these generators could be, referring to them as “institutional objects, be they architectural, economic, or Cosmic”.24

So where does this take us in terms of de12

veloping an architectural strategy for new subjectivities? Following Vera Andermatt Conley’s reading of Guattari’s text, architecture can be seen as highly involved in the process of forming new subjectivities, as architects have “the responsibility of inventing new territories, of tracing new maps and diagrams while prodding their students and apprentices to do the same.”25

According to Guattari’s and Conley’s arguments, it is not enough for an ecosophical architectural practice to reduce emissions in the building process or to design low energy housings. The practice must also consider how architecture supports and delimits new forms of subjectivity. What are the mechanisms and operators that play a part in this process? Following Guattari’s emphasis on the heterogenesis between various micro-conditions and large-scale social processes it is also interesting to consider how the small elements of architecture operate (and can operate) in the formation of new subjectivities. What are the intersections, the bifurcations and moments in which the elements of architecture, such as the staircase, the door, and the ramp become vectors that form new subjectivities? How can the serial subjectivity that Guattari sees appearing in current consumer culture be challenged through architecture?

The micro-scopic parts of the lobby staircase, to what extent are they part of producing affects and subjectivity?

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MODULATION OF MEMORY I am interest in the mechanisms of memory put in relation to the economization of our cognitive capacities, a process Sven-Olov Wallenstein refers to as noopolitics.26 For Maurizio Lazzarato, the act of memory and attention generates certain flows of desire. Remembering and recollecting fantasies can be seen as part of a becoming: “To remember something – like every activity of mind – is to actualise a virtual, and this actualisation is a creation, an individuation and not a simple reproduction.”27 To remember is not the act of the archivist roaming through old files in our memory banks, but instead a process that actively changes us. Instead of repetition or reproduction, the recollecting of past impressions is always virtual and points towards a difference.

The act of memory and attention is to Lazzarato what generates certain flows of desire. To what extent is the current economic system modulating our memories and desires? What are the operators that orchestrate our experience as we move into built environment? Perhaps it is possible to think about our experience of certain spaces as scripted and edited through the scaffolding of previous references, such as images, sounds, spaces, colors etc. Employing our visual and sensorial memory, contemporary programs like shopping centers, casinos and hotels pray on certain kinds of desires, and their viewpoints produce an immersion into a specific milieu. When entering a building, we are also plunged into an exploration of its interiors with our eyes.

Comparing the absorption qualities of a painting by Robert Hubert, with the entrance of a casino, the similarities can be found in the fact that both of these examples present a set of spaces to explore in the format of a framed perspective: Both of these spaces use foreground to define the viewer’s position. Both of them set out a clear central walkway, a set of shifting light conditions to emphasize depth and suggest numerous passageways and exists to explore and escape through. The moment of entering the Venetian Casino engenders certain desires 14

of exploration, but does so perhaps through a set of familiar references of things and spaces that are already vaguely familiar to us and signal adventure, or glamour, or relaxation, etc.

The process of modulating memories can perhaps be located in what has been called “the experience economy”. Formulated by Harvard economists B. Joseph Pine II and James H. Gilmore, the term describes how many successful business ventures today focus less on selling the commodity and more on the actual experience of consumption. Pine and Gilmore notes: “Commodities are fungible goods tangible, services intangible, and experiences memorable.”28 (my emphasis) In the contemporary spaces of consumption the environment triggers certain experiences and desires through its design. I think the experience economy can be seen as one way in which our memories and desires are integrated to the productive logics of the current economy. How can we as architects challenge this system for memory modulation?

THE FINDING OF THE LAOCOON ROBERT HUBERT, 1773

MAIN ENTRANCE VENETIAN CASINO, 2015

Comparison between two entrances, highlighting different visual components for how the observer enters the image.

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FINALLY

INSIDE WALLS AND UNDER FLOORS 16

The third space is the interior of the interior, the micro-scopic objects and elements that support the life in the lobby: airconditioners, heating, lights, structure, insulation, building materials, hinges, wheels, mechanisms, all located behind the walls and under the floors.

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OUTLINES FOR A BEST-SELLER In Jane Bennett’s argument for an ecology of matter, thing-power is the force of inanimate things to act, produce, activate and resist, despite being inanimate.

For Bennett it is in the assemblage of things that the things themselves begin to have an impact on the surroundings, regardless of the will of humans. This argument transfers nicely into the practice of architecture, in that it allows for a long-needed detachment from the anthropocentric reading of the built environment as nothing but the mute stage for social interaction.

Could we for example imagine an inverted reading of Jan Gehl’s Life Between Buildings, in the form of an alternative bestseller entitled The Secret Life of Buildings, in which the complex assemblage of a building’s infrastructure is mapped in order to understand its impact on everyday life? The creaking staircase, the air conditioner regulating temperature, the noise from the pipes, the smell and dust of the painted plaster walls, the slowly but steadily expanding patch of mold on the inside of a wall only a meter from our desk, etc.29 These are the more or less secret assemblages of objects that architecture often fail to acknowledge because they do not have a clear visual correlation to human life or to the city. To consider thing-power as defined in Bennett’s text is therefore not to apply a non-social perspective, but rather to accept the multitude of objects and conjunctions that also form life. This is how the bestseller would become a page-turner.

To think of the assemblage of objects as an activating force in the built, also suggests a critique of the analysis that limits itself to only dissecting architecture into a set of elements or distinct historical styles. This provides the first step of the analysis, but not the second or the third. If the first step is the autopsy of architecture into a number of objects (or “Elements” as they were called in the 2014 Venice Biennale main exhibition) that all perform in different ways, the second step of this anatomy would be to see the conjunctions between the different elements 18

and how they operate together to produce something that is larger than the sum of its parts. The third, and most interesting aspect is to consider new possible assemblages and constellations between the objects of architecture. We can decide on a specific focus point when we perform the autopsy, but more importantly, in the third step of this analysis we are also responsible for a projective imagination of new modes of life.

In The Secret Life of Buildings there would surely be chapters of suspense and low-intense terror, as the building transgresses from the familiar into the “secretly familiar”30 and produces the uncanny realization that we are integrated components in its hidden and sometimes ugly assemblages. In her text, Bennet considers the uncanny in relation to our bodies, as being the “uneasy feeling of internal resistance”.31 However the same sensation could also appear when we realize how the multiple assemblages of objects that constitute a building – assemblages we assumed were either inanimate or simply not there – have been protecting, hurting, empowering and shaping us since our very first breath. We are moving toward the final chapter now and as any bestseller, the revelation is kept for the end: Following Bennet’s argument, the uncanny introduces fear, but also the potentiality of the secret life of buildings. The secret familiarity of thing-power presents a possibility that is “profoundly productive” and a “protean source of being”.32 In this way, the uncanny aspects of thingpower can help us in the imagination of new modes of life, as they reveal a glimpse of the “invisible fields that surrounds and infuses the world of objects.”33

SHAFT

THE

#1

THE DANISH ARCHITECTURAL PRESS

ARCHITECTURAL BESTSELLER

DUST

PIPES

EFFLUVIA

MOLD

ENGINES

THE SECRET LIFE OF BUILDINGS

Thing-Power and How it Effects You!

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WHERE DOES THE CYBORG END? Donna Haraway uses the term blasphemy as something that “protects one from the Moral Majority from within, while still insisting on the need for community.”34 There is in the notion of blasphemy a built in tension. Blasphemy is an “ironic faith”35, an act of seriousness and dedication that is still at the heart of the project it is desecrating. I think the cyborg should be read in this way, as deeply blasphemous – an impossible hybrid between previously separated worlds that also challenges our notions about given divisions. It is clear that the cyborg also implies non-human forms of life and systems.

I wonder where the boundary can be drawn between the techno-chemical systems and the animated flesh? Haraway asks, “Why should our bodies end at the skin”? How does the integration between architecture and cyborgs happen? Is the technology of the built environment also part of a cyborg system? Perhaps the aircrafts are temporary wings for our bodies, the escalators automated steps for our legs and the interior air-conditioners a cooling system that replaces our bodily perspiration? If we think of ourselves as constantly renegotiated amalgamations between on the one hand animated flesh with specific behavior, and on the other hand infrastructural “stacks”36 of rhythms, flows and physical mechanisms, where does this put the practice of architecture? How can the integration between flesh and building mechanics instantiate new forms of living that prompts for community instead of categorization and morality?

20

Ventilation units on outside roof, Venetian Casino, Las Vegas, NV. 21

MICROSCOPIC REAL ESTATE In his critique of the 2014 Venice Biennale, Reinhold Martin argues that real estate, and the regulations and economy that constitute it, should be considered an element along with the other (the door, the wall, the stair etc). Martin suggests that real estate is “a primary infrastructural element” that expands through the infinitely repeated process of subdividing undeveloped land “into a one-stop shop for single-family suburban homes.”37 In the repetitive process of suburban housing, developers acquired “large, undeveloped tracts of land, […] laid out street patterns and utility grids, divided the land into smaller parcels, and built residential neighborhoods on those parcels.”38 Since the main exhibition on “Fundamentals” according to Martin shies away from real estate as “arguably the one truly globalizing force” it also fails to recognize the ties between the elements of architecture and the economic and political conditions in which these elements are always situated.39

In Martin’s text contemporary architecture is placed in an unavoidable relation to power, and the most urgent question is therefore how to “limit, redirect or neutralize it, or at least not to be seduced by it”.40 This call for a withdrawal from the power’s seduction reveals an understanding of the concept as innately repressive and static. In discussing power, Sven-Olov Wallenstein’s makes a distinction between on the one hand Michel Foucault’s understanding of power as being a relative and changing “series of transitional forms”, and on the other hand Giorgio Agamben’s reading of the concept as a “sovereign operation” happening in a “moment before or outside of history”. Martin appears closer to Agamben than to Foucault on this matter.41 Power becomes an ontological concept that defines life from outside of life itself. This presents a problem. As a practicing architect it is impossible to detach from the structures of power, but at the same time it is impossible to engage in them, if one does not want to take the explicitly callous position of accepting global inequalities, etc.

We are left with negation as the only way out.

22

Martin’s focus is mainly on the process of real estate prior to the completion of the project.

The many different immaterial aspects of real estate, such as the “site acquisition, planning, construction, financing, insurance and marketing” take part in defining the conditions for particular modes of life. However, once the physical space of real estate is there, through for example a subdivision housing, it also carries an impact on a mundane level – through the doors, stairs, floors, lawns, driveways, etc. All of these elements form certain modes of life, and even though the immaterial forces are still there – for example through the ever looming threat of another housing recession – there is an immediacy of life that happens independently of planning documents, site acquisition and marketing. Martin does not deny this. His point is simply that the mechanism that produced all of the other elements, ie. real estate, should have been acknowledged in the biennale exhibition, as a primary condition.

There is a valid point in Martin’s critique of the exhibition’s tendencies to frame the elements as inert artworks rather than as performative objects located in a larger infrastructure. Is the Fundamentals exhibition not simply a collection of dead artifacts?

A bestiary of the many different designs of toilets, that is then safely reintroduced into capitalism by the business fair-like seminars held around the inauguration days of the Biennale. In his critique of the essentialist tendency of the exhibition, Martin introduces another essential category that operates with similar universal claims, that is real estate. Real estate supersedes and frames all other elements. It reduces them to components in an infrastructural system. Real estate is everywhere. It is for Martin the most common condition in which architecture meets the world. It appears in the subdivision units and in the colonization of generic land, but also in ”cultural monuments, leisure palaces and other political-economic symbols.”42

The concept of real estate, if analyzed from

the “micro-historical” perspective that pervaded the main exhibition, probably would have been dissected into more parts than just “land”. The point is not the “eternal recurrence”43 of a limited set of architectural categories, but the analysis of the small parts of architecture as a way to produce “evidence of key moments of […] metamorphosis while offering an interpretation of architectural elements as products of cultural and political shifts”.44 To analyze the minor parts of architecture, can be a way to study the micro-politics of power as something plastic, rather than as a transcendental force of permanent oppression. This to me is an aspect missing in Reinhold Martin’s critique.

The supportive wheel, an essential feature to support the transformation of the door into a wall, as well as a part of the microscopic logic of real estate.

In the conjunction between inside and backside, worlds collide even on the level of two different floor materials meeting along a thin line.

Ceiling on the inside and on the backside of the inside.

23

OUTSIDE THE INSIDE

24

Loading docks on the backside of Caesar’s Palace Casino, Las Vegas, NV. 25

CONCLUDING REMARKS We are on the outside now. A door opened and there is way of no turning back. Even the hinges are working against the idea of returning. Circumscribing the lobby is a system of edges and borders, where supportive machines and stacks of materials are located.

These edges are the immediate outside of the interior space that help define the inside, through regulating and controlling the intake of air, light, sounds, materials, objects and people. It is here that the relationship between the interior and the exterior is curated in a certain way. In the setting of the typical Las Vegas casino these edges are stripes of grey infrastructure between the interior of the building and the adjacent highway lanscape behind. The edges allows for the lobby to operate like a one-way-street where circulation happens only in one direction and in a strictly controlled manner.

This walk through the lobby has discussed a number of theoretical concepts for the purpose of testing them against a commercial entrance space such as the casino. The different texts have been placed in relation to a specific set of spaces and scales in the lobby, starting with the immediate entrance, continuing along corridors and up through a staircase, and finally moving into and under the walls and floors of the lobby. I think the different arguments in the texts and the fact that they are located in a spatial relation can help us to dissect the lobby into a number of possible perspectives.

Despite the lack of consistency between the texts within each space, I think it is possible to identify some themes. The first space, the main lobby, is related to temporality and social life. The lobby of the casino introduces a particular temporality. Through the spatial and environmental detachment from the outside it sets its own pace. This has a number of consequences for the affordance and social dynamics of this space.

In the second space, the circulation areas of the lobby, the composition of architectural elements such as stairs, floors, walls and ceilings is considered 26

in terms of how it produces particular emotions and experiences, often related to affects like glamour.

Thirdly, the experience of the lobby should be understood as an infrastructural stacking of machines, materials, labor and logistic processes. The hidden inside of the lobby is what facilitates the production of experience.

I think these three set of spaces can be seen as important parts of how the lobby operates as a stack of machines, ideas, infrastructure, labor, and surface. Architectural theory can help us to not only identify the different parts of this system, but perhaps more importantly, it can support an unreading of these spaces, where new opportunities can be located inside the built environment of the experience economy.

This is the edge of foyerness. Coming from the wrong direction this edge is a wall against entering.

The door opens to the outside. It has no doorknob on the exterior side and opens only from the inside.

Once it shuts there is no return.

The edge of the lobby is an infrastructural support system, where materials and machines pile up in stacks, waiting for the interior show to happen.

27

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347- 72.

Boltanski, Luc, and Eve Chiapello. The New Spirit of Capitalism. London: Verso, 2005.

Bratton, H. Benjamin. “The Stack.” Log 35 (Fall 2015).

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Press, 2007.

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Hogarth Press, 1955.

Frisby, David. Fragments of Modernity: Theories of Modernity in the Work of Simmel, Kracauer and Benja

min. London: Routledge, 2013.

Gissen, David. Subnature: Architecture’s Other Environments. New York City: Princeton Architectural Press, 2009.

Guattari, Felix. The Three Ecologies. London: Athlone Press, 2000.

Haraway, Donna Jeanne. “A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the

1980’s.” In Feminism - Postmodernism, edited by L.J. Nicholson. New York: Routledge, 1990.

Harvey, David. “From Managerialism to Entrepreneurialism: The Transformation in Urban Governance in

Late Capitalism.” Geografiska Annaler. Series B, Human Geography 71, no. 1 (1989): 3-17.

Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor W. Adorno. Dialectic of Enlightenment. Stanford CA: Stanford University

Press, 2002.

Koolhaas, Rem. “Foreword.” In Elements of Venice, edited by Giulia Foscari. Zürich: Lars Müller Publishers, 2014.

Kracauer, Siegfried. The Mass Ornament: Weimer Essays. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995.

Lazzarato, Maurizio. “Life and the Living in the Societies of Control.” In Deleuze and the Social, edited by M.

Fuglsang and B.M. Sørensen. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006.

Martin, Reinhold. “Fundamental #13: Real Estate as Infrastructure as Architecture.” Places Journal (2014).

Pine, B. Joseph, and James H. Gilmore. The Experience Economy. Boston: Harvard Business Review Press, 2011.

Rawes, Peg. “Architectural Ecologies of Care.” In Relational Architectural Ecologies: Architecture, Nature and

Subjectivity, edited by Peg Rawes. London: Taylor & Francis, 2013.

Simmel, Georg. “The Metropolis and Mental Life.” In The Blackwell City Reader, edited by G. Bridge and S.

Watson. Oxford and Malden, MA: Wiley, 2010.

Wallenstein, Sven-Olov. Biopolitics and the Emergence of Modern Architecture. New York: Princeton Architectural

Press, 2009.

———. “Noopolitics, Life and Architecture.” In Cognitive Architecture: From Bio-Politics to Noo-Politics ;

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28

NOTES 1 Georg Simmel, “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” in The Blackwell City Reader, ed. G. Bridge and S. Watson (Oxford and Malden, MA: Wiley, 2010), 19.

2 Ibid.

3 Ibid., 14.

4 Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism (London: Verso, 2005), 112.

5 Siegfried Kracauer, The Mass Ornament: Weimer Essays (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995).

6 Ibid., 179.

7 Ibid.

8 David Frisby, Fragments of Modernity: Theories of Modernity in the Work of Simmel, Kracauer and Benjamin (London: Routledge, 2013).

9 David Harvey, “From Managerialism to Entrepreneurialism: The Transformation in Urban Governance in Late Capitalism,” Geografiska Annaler.

Series B, Human Geography 71, no. 1 (1989): 12f.

10 Or maybe not, if we juxtapose the rational critique of Karl Marx to the dreams of utopian socialists like Charles Fourier and Henri de Saint-Simon.

11 Cf. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment (Stanford CA: Stanford University Press, 2002).

12 Stephen Duncombe, Dream: Re-Imagining Progressive Politics in an Age of Fantasy (Ann Arbor, MI: New Press, 2007), 16.

13 Pier Vittorio Aureli, The Project of Autonomy : Politics and Architecture within and against Capitalism (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2008), 16.

14 The parallels between the contemporary starchitect and what Boltanski and Chiappelo refers to as the “great man of the projective city” is obvious here. Boltanski and Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism, 111.

15 Sven-Olov Wallenstein, Biopolitics and the Emergence of Modern Architecture (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2009), 25.

16 Peg Rawes, “Architectural Ecologies of Care,” in Relational Architectural Ecologies: Architecture, Nature and Subjectivity, ed. Peg Rawes (London: Taylor & Francis, 2013).

17 Ibid., 46.

18 Ibid., 41.

19 Ibid., 49.

20 Felix Guattari, The Three Ecologies (London: Athlone Press, 2000), 45.

21 Ibid., 34.

22 Ibid., 25.

23 Ibid., 37.

24 Ibid.

25 Verena Andermatt Conley, “The Ecological Relation,” in Relational Architectural Ecologies: Architecture, Nature and Subjectivity, ed. Peg Rawes (London: Taylor & Francis, 2013), 278.

26 Sven-Olov Wallenstein, “Noopolitics, Life and Architecture,” in Cognitive Architecture: From Bio-Politics to Noo-Politics ; Architecture & Mind in the Age of Communication and Information, ed.

D. Hauptmann and W. Neidich (Rotterdam: 010 Publishers).

27 Maurizio. Lazzarato, “Life and the Living in the Societies of Control,” in Deleuze and the Social, ed. M. Fuglsang and B.M. Sørensen (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006), 185.

28 B. Joseph Pine and James H. Gilmore, The Experience Economy (Boston: Harvard Business Review Press, 2011), 98.

29 In fact a good example of such a book would perhaps be David Gissen, Subnature: Architecture’s Other Environments (New York City: Princeton Architectural Press, 2009).

30 Sigmund Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (London: Hogarth Press, 1955), 245.

31 Jane Bennett, “The Force of Things: Steps toward an Ecology of Matter,” Political Theory 32, no. 3 (2004): 361.

32 Ibid.

29

33 Ibid., 362.

34 Donna Jeanne Haraway, “A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980’s,” in Feminism - Postmodernism, ed. L.J. Nicholson (New York: Routledge, 1990), 190.

35 Ibid., 191.

36 H. Benjamin Bratton, “The Stack,” Log 35 (2015).

37 Reinhold Martin, “Fundamental #13: Real Estate as Infrastructure as Architecture,” Places Journal.

38 Ibid.

39 Ibid.

40 Ibid.

41 Wallenstein, Biopolitics and the Emergence of Modern Architecture, 16ff.

42 Martin, “Fundamental #13: Real Estate as Infrastructure as Architecture”.

43 Ibid.

44 Rem Koolhaas, “Foreword,” in Elements of Venice, ed. Giulia Foscari (Zürich: Lars Müller Publishers, 2014), 7.

30