Architecture of Immaterial Labour

Architektur immaterieller Arbeit

English Summary

Architecture of Immaterial Labour

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English Summary: Architecture of Immaterial Labour

The following text is a radically abbreviated adaptation of the original German version. It seeks to introduce the reader to the topic of my dissertation by focusing on the main arguments, but still keeping the arrangement of the chapters of the book. For the time translations are mine for quotes in German, possible existing English translations notwithstanding. Only if a source was available in my own library – and, of course, quotes are originally in English – are quoted from the English-language references.

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Introduction The world is labour. [Die Welt ist Arbeit.]

Antonio Negri, Michael Hardt

Regardless of the discourses on the end of labour, and in contrast to diverse models of feasible utopias like the twenty-hour week or basic social security for everyone, life in our societies is all about work. Particularly in Western industrial nations, work is becoming increasingly diffuse. Labour penetrates all aspects of human activity, work-time and sparetime merge, and the actual job becomes indistinguishable from education and vocational training; nowadays private life and vita activa are becoming commingled. With its organisational as well as juridical constructions, accompanied by popular (neo-liberal) discourses and under pressure by the imperative of global capital, existing labour legislation, as well as pension- and insurance-models of post-war Europe get radically challenged and aggressively re-structured. The old dictum of spatial and temporal simultaneity and concurrence of work processes, as well as the functionally distinct, well-defined attribution of spaces of production disintegrates with current organizations of a labour concept that is becoming increasingly diffuse and becomes more and more immaterial. Today modes, as well as means of production, require different spatial figurations for work that are permanently and continuously manifest in new and unprecedented formations and figurations. This book is about these kinds of increasingly immaterial organizations of spaces.

Spaces of Production From time immemorial, architecture has organized spaces of production. It framed a structural as well as a symbolic order that affected the inner assembly as well as radiated to the outside. The Royal saltworks of Chaux

(1771-1779) by Claude-Nicolas Ledoux, the social-utopian workers project New Harmony (1825-27) by Robert Owen and his architect Stedman Whitwell, but also Boodle’s (1762) or the Athenæum Club (1824) in London constitute the ideal type of exemplary modern models for spaces of labour. They exemplify modes of an architecture of labour: it encloses an assembly of men and women, as well as their machines and composes an ordered and controlled interior. Architecture of work constructs and marks out a space for production, regardless of the mode of community building – be it the quasi-transcendental sovereign that marks the working community or be it a community that authorizes itself.

Architecture efficiently arranges humans and machines in an exclusive interior. The exclusiveness of the production-spaces is thereby conceived in a multitude of modalities, however always regulated by rules of conduct and codes. Furthermore the architecture of work has always been defined in relation to life – to living and free time. Initially its inner logic comes about in dissociation from life, but it simultaneously establishes aspects of life within its boundaries. Thus, great spaces of production are always designs that modify working conditions of assembled workers and create a difference to existing living conditions.

The disparate spaces of work are instruments of subjectification and problematize the structures of power of the subjects – be it the worker, be it the architects, be it the entrepreneurs – who are enmeshed within manifold processes of rationalization, discipline and subjectification, become produced and are not able to step outside, to flee. To paraphrase Foucault, subjects are formed by various powers, are at once subordinated and are subordinating, they have the power over something and the power to something.1 As the sociologist Andreas Reckwitz2 points out, the production of subjects explicitly delimits itself from a liberal idea of two disparate and opposing forces – on the one3 hand of a continuously liberating individual, versus an 207

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inevitable limitation and control of the subject through society. Rather, it understands the forces that operate on and through the subject as cultural forms in which each individual as subject – in other words, as a rational, reflexive, socially oriented, moral, expressive, etc. instance and authority – must needs shape itself and desires to shape itself.4

The Societal Factory Considering experimental projects of the 1960s, one gets the idea that, already then, the regulated framework which accompanied work had disappeared from the concept of living altogether and that pure life orders the world: spare time and play is ubiquitous in selfadapting, fluid forms, or in mobile plug-indesigns for living … Labour, but also new modes of production that arise within an ever increasing automation are not depicted or represented by neo-avant-garde projects for a new leisure society, even though labour is an immanent part of the postulated creative life of the homo ludens.

Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt describe alterations of work conditions in the 1960s in transition from the mass worker to the labourer of society. Negri and Hardt are using – in the tradition of, yet keeping a distance from the Italian philosopher and operaist Mario Tronti – the term factory of society. In doing so, Negri and Hardt expand the traditional Marxian concept of labour with a multitude of social productions – a value-creating form of practice that broaches natural requirements, artificial desires, and social affairs, thus also incorporating the sphere of the Marxian nonlabour (Nichtarbeit).

It is this concept of immaterial labour that broaches a contemporary condition in Western industrialized societies, that today becomes more and more significant. It points out alterations and changes in the very construction 208

of the concept of work – its attributes and its conditions. A transformation that disengages from formerly fixed spaces of production, a changeover that makes obsolete5 a distinction between work, manufacturing and action (Arbeiten, Herstellen und Handeln).

Still, immaterial labour is not a new concept that replaces old concepts of labour, as some postworkerist or post-modern literature would have it.6 Immaterial labour has no monopolistic position. Its modes of production coexist with other forms of production. Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello describe this practice as The New Spirit of Capitalism, composed on the one hand by management discourses that modify identities of labour towards the ideal of the creative artist, and on the other hand, by an material frame of new communication technologies. Such a new cultural practice is a new and general “ideology […], that justifies the engagement with capitalism”7 that is closely linked to the emancipation movements of the 1960s and its critique of capitalism.

Thus, immaterial labour is invoked here as a political concept that allows me to question significant forms of production of a valueadding, symbol-producing activity within the Western industrialized countries. It is a form of production that increasingly marginalizes an economy of physical products and fosters an immaterial economy of information that goes hand in hand with a constitutive modification of capitalism. It is a mode of production – as the concept of the factory of society already proposes – that no longer is fixed to closed, mono-functionally determined spaces.

Architecture of Immaterial Labour The title of the book is the hypothesis of my investigation: Do we find, parallel to a dominant cultural practice of immaterial labour new forms and orders of architecture? Which forces are

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composing these spaces? How is an architecture of immaterial labour being discursively constructed and how is it being produced? Which forms does it take on? As means of subjectification and as part of an organization and of representation, architecture does offer a research subject that is directly connected to the disparate forms of capitalism.

In its outstanding examples, dominant discourse formations crystallize: the idea how people shall assemble, how people are being made productive and how such an assembly can be controlled and steered.

The spatial aspect of a form of production that diffuses into society, that corresponds with no traditional manufacture of physical products but defines itself through communication opens up the problematic of an architecture of immaterial labour. From there I deduce questions that are bound within a political field of the concept of immaterial labour. Every postulated improvement towards more life, every movement that tries to emancipate labour from capitalism is always and already utilized within prevailing discourses – in this case the capitalist system.

So I want to ask, if and how architecture of immaterial labour only portrays the orderly appearance of works in a space of production that is rigorously defined by wage compensation? Thus: does architecture design – in the words of the French philosopher Jaques Rancière – the employment and the attributions of the spaces, onto which workers activities are distributed. Or: does the practice of architecture order new (labour) relations, in relation to society?8 Are architects therefore consultants, hosts and agents of a capitalist order, or … do architects affect familiar orders and distributions with the means of architecture and therefore alter its status?

Precisely because architecture is directly linked to a political, social and societal discourse and since architecture is shaped by a multitude of different discourses, I want to propose an analysis of the diverse framings in which architecture, but also working subjects, are

being produced. Thus I hope to be able to show the conflict and frictions that are immanent in an architecture of immaterial labour.

Projects of the 1960s, projects that are bound to the above-mentioned discourse on automation and leisure society, make it possible to identify and analyze contours of an architecture that mirrors tendencies of altering modes of production and labour conditions of a valueadding immaterial practice. Partly reactive, partly – seen from today – prophetic, the projects that I discuss deal with two things: firstly, the sheer endless extension (both in terms of time and of space) of workplaces in society, and secondly, the modes of assembly and the modes of living together.

This duality of the problem I take up in the two parts of the book. In the first part I write about effects of mobilization of formerly closed and static spaces of production. With the first ever built office-landscape Buch und Ton for the media corporation Bertelsman (1960/61) its architectonic antithesis, the office-building Centraal Beheer (1968-71), as well as the emancipatory spare time project Fun Palace (1962-66). I show the necessity, after the Second World War, to give form to a new social and economic hypotheses – namely cybernetics. In the second part of the book I will discuss strategies of furnishing (einrichten): I refer to the experimental project Mobile Office (1969) by Hans Hollein, a project by Haus-Rucker-Co., and finally to the performance Bed-In. All three frame miscellaneous strategies to deal with a new concept of life and work. Simultaneously, the projects I discuss formulate a variety of architectonic practices that comply with a concept of labour, a labour that converges with life and diffuse into society.

As hybrid examples, that happen parallel to and linked with movements of emancipation in the 1960s, every sample encloses in its peculiar mode, an assembly of people, constitutes an order and controls its interior, organizes and marks a space for production.

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Part 1 To Mobilize Nimm dir einen Regelkreis Und tu dich mittenrein Schnell erhältst du den Beweis Besser kann die Welt nicht sein // Take a control circuit Put yourself in Immediatly you will have the proof: Better the world can’t be

Thomas Meinecke/FSK: “Lob der Kybernetik”

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Irregular Rhythms Brothers Eberhard and Wolfgang Schnelle: Buch und Ton office landscape, 1960/61

In the landscape The two images show the customized open-plan office for the Bertelsmann commision-house Buch und Ton [Book&Tone]. This company was responsible for the mail-order business of the German publishing house & and media group Bertelsmann. The office space was built from 1960 to 1961 and was conceptualized and designed by Wolfgang and Eberhard Schnelle, a management-consultant team.

This office landscape – as the Schnelle brothers would call it – is a pragmatic experiment to create an open, pluralistic and self-organizing space for work. A space designed according to strict mathematic descriptions, designed through the analysis of all ascertainable functional and environmental aspects (Schnelle). In other words, it was designed through the particular assessment and analysis of communication-flow and document circulation within the organization.

This office landscape claims, on the one hand, to suffice a human scale of an intimate architecture, and on the other hand, to be a space that is efficiently organized to allow a dynamic alignment of ever modulating work processes for ever-evolving requirements. The ultimate aspiration when designing and organizing such a space ultimately seeks to free all workers from work through full automation.

To quote Eberhard Schnelle: “[D]oing away with work, insofar as working people consider it to be a burden.”

Here some hard facts: 2540 sqm gross floor area, 2947 sqm secondary rooms on other floors. Room height: 2.95 meters.

Average acoustic level between 49 and 53 Phon (which is comparable to the noise exposure of a VW Beetle [1960] at a speed of 50km/h). Floor covering: nylon-carpet. Ceiling: suspended aluminium acoustic panels, square and coloured. Artificial lighting: fluorescent tubes.

Light colour: Wight de Luxe, controllable illumination level. Air-conditioning: low pressure facility with maximum six times air change (renewal), serves also as heating and humidifier, additionally: de-dusting, sterilising and odourneutralising.

This office space is the direct result of a scientific planning method: Organisationskybernetik [cybernetics of organisation]. It had been developed since 1956 by a transdisciplinary team of German computer and information scientists, mathematicians and philosophers close management consultants Eberhard and Wolfgang Schnelle. The method initially claimed to be a comprehensive, holistic method to organize, plan and design office spaces. Later on the method was applied on a broader scale to organize – amongst others – the German bureaucracy at large.

The ambition was twofold: (1) to create an office space as a flexible and adaptable instrument for corporations – to conceptualize space that is easy to arrange to new formations of work-processes, and (2) to design a workplace as an all-embracing environment for living – an environment that, due to an anticipated automation of administrative work would dismiss people into an everlasting spare-time.

A New Paradigm of Governance and Control The planning-method explicitly refers to cybernetics. In the late 1950s – due to a new epistemological precondition of information211

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theory9 – cybernetics marks a new model for governance. A model that applied to “living creatures, as well to machines and apparatuses, to economic as well as to psychic processes, to sociological as well as to aesthetic phenomena.”10 Cybernetics presupposes the compatibility of information-exchange of human beings and machines through digitality. In doing so the human is less understood as a machine. Rather he and she, like machines and automats are modelled as autonomous, self-directing individuals, whose behaviour (within the cybernetic system) is understood as coded and thus as being able to be re-programmed.

The cybernetic model of control is based on circular feedback loops – it is understood as a universal paradigm of order that can be vividly explained with the different levels of cybernetics of the ship’s crew: The following four points classify the cybernetic modes of operation of the human being: (1) to set goals, (2) to plan [in the sense of developing methods to efficiently aim for the goal], (3) to allocate (in the sense of steering), and (4) physical labour.11 These four points are equivalent to (1) the captain of a ship, (2) the pilot, (3) the steersman, (4) the oarsmen.

To quote from an article of Eberhard Schnelle: “The pilot is the scientist, or, in a company he is at the executive level; it is the planner who, by means of rationalization, searches for an optimal way of reaching the goal, i.e. the index-value.”12 The steersman orders the information into distinct, unambiguous instructions and commands for the oarsmen – who might be the clerk but also, as Schnelle states: “[the] managers who only sign those papers which they themselves did not dictate”.13 The cybernetic model of control cannot be reduced to a central (supervising) power, since every single instance, every level of cybernetics, is already spread out as a network. Every function within the organisation is not being represented by one person, but by a team of 212

experts and its automats. The chain of command is precise and clearly assigned, but due to the formation of the organization as a network, the power is no longer traceable to an origin.

Political Hypothesis, Pragmatic Experiment Understood as a political hypothesis, cybernetics promises a society on equal terms, a pluralistic community and a self-organizing form of governance. The French authors’ association known as tiqqun insists that “the cybernetic hypothesis is a new narrative, which replaces the liberal hypothesis at the end of the twentieth century.”14 For tiqqun, the cybernetic image of steering has become the main metaphor that not only describes politics, but every human agency. As an ideal it translates a stable society into objective, controllable mechanisms of society. Thus cybernetics justifies two types of scientific and social experiments: (1) an experiment that is aligned to render all human beings as mechanisms and (2) an experiment that aims to emulate all living creatures, which leads to the development of automata, robots and artificial intelligence, then to mimicry of collectives, to creation of networks and the circulation of information.

With their planning method, the Schnelle brothers and their team broached the construction of a new, self-organized society in post-war Germany. As an enterprise of subjects acting autonomously it constantly aligns itself to new goals. Thus the planning team enforces a tendency that aims to shape society as a whole and to produce a new kind of workspace – one which functions on different assumptions than traditional workspaces do.

(1) An enclosed space of the organization is being marked. It is an abstract, horizontal plane, that is preferably extensive and within its compounds accessible, barrier-free. The interior is (2) regulated by artificial climate, acoustic and light design, and (3) moveable elements, like tables, chairs, room dividers, and plants, but

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also personnel and automata are ordered in various constellations on the plane.

A catalogue of precise requirements controls the visually loose arrangement and configuration of interior space. The furniture is arranged according to the workgroups. Similar to the set theory, it is positioned in space. Entrance and circulation routes are marked by plants and never run through a working unit. Special emphasis is placed on intimate the working conditions of every single workplace: through lighting, orientation of every single table, etc.

The loose arrangement of the cybernetically organized workspace resembles a chaotic, extensive landscape of subjective places – as Eberhad and Wolfgang Schnelle would call it.

Here is a description of the office landscape Buch und Ton: “A transparent and generous effect is produced through the furniture design. The irregular rhythm of the arrangement and its chromacity structure the perception of the space: it is only the close-up range that is perceived, so that each workplace produces a subjective place that creates intimacy. Moveable room dividers and plants provide visual protection, as well – they delineate circulation routes and work group areas.”15 The paradoxical phrase irregular rhythms – a rhythm which knows no symmetry, follows no regular motion, no regular repetition, but is instead irregular and non-cyclical – accurately articulates the hypothesis of the planners, and gets to the point.

To put it in positive terms: it postulates an intended fusion of two divergent movements, as Roland Barthes would contrast (1) a selfrhythmical mode of life – a mode of life that does not follow any kind of organization and in which no institutionalized, reified and objectified authority of mediation exists between the individual and the group, with (2) a confined – both spatially and societally – life that accompanies the imminent emergence of a bureaucratic apparatus.16

Every single working individual in the cybernetically optimized administration space needs to realize himself or herself not as crowded cattle (Marx), but as the autonomous subject, which is on equal terms with everyone else. A working subject that needs to come across a familiar atmosphere, being on the same hierarchical level and in spatial proximity to the boss.

Although the office landscape looks chaotic and irregular,a strict, meticulous, virtually totalitarian order operates within the arrangements. An order that is bound to a conceptually autonomous but interdependent individual and strict rationalism.

Formation of a Society of “Cybernetics of Organization” It is the organization as enterprise that the team of Wolfgang and Eberhard Schnelle aims at, as Wolfgang Schnelle puts it: “Organizations with the aim of carrying out visible performances (businesses, authorities, but also political parties and trade unions).”17 The general purpose of an organization is thus the alteration of the environment.

Cybernetic organizers distance themselves from organizations like schools, churches, prisons, but also from factories. These are organizations that aim to influence their members through a centralized power.18 Architecturally speaking, they dissociate themselves from the organizational typology of the factory, which has been prolonged in the hierarchical model of the American open-plan office: Widely considered to be the paradigm of such a hierarchically organized office building is the Larkin Corporation (1903-06) in Buffalo.

Designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, it houses the world’s very first mail-order enterprise. As a kind of ancestor to the Bertelsmann Buch und Ton enterprise, it accommodated 1800 employees 213

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who were organized in 10 state groups on four floors. Significant for the building is the fourstorey high central space – the light court – which accommodates the management and board of directors.

The Larkin Building is oriented towards the centre and establishes a closed society, where no vista of the outside disturbs the concentration of the workers. Clearly apparent is the vertical hierarchy that is organized around the central light court. It is a central, hierarchical power that operates from within: from the centre towards the outer ring of the layout.

It is certainly an automated power that Michel Foucault assigns to light and permanent visibility that operates here, a power that tears out the workers from protective darkness. It is a diffuse but gloomy light that commences through the light court and the overhead light at the workplaces. There the workers are fixed at the heavy metal furniture (custom-designed by the architect): “In use these chairs allowed only a limited arc of movement and may have been uncomfortable over the course of a full work day.”19 The rejection of such a hierarchically organized space of production – of such a disciplinary space, that only works through a central point of surveillance and control, does not liberate the work-place from a subjectifying architecturemachine. Only the figuration of the space of production of the office landscape takes on a different form. Only the boarders have been deferred and are put into different relations to each other.

The figure of the central space of the management has been extended with the design of the Buch und Ton office landscape. The inner organization follows a spatial scheme of a horizontal network. It is network whose paradigm is communication between the workers and the things (the machines, the automata, but also the chairs and tables). It establishes a space that equates all relations conceptually. It is a space in which all relations are indifferent. Seen ideally, this space includes 214

ALL as authorized managers. And there is no longer an outside.20 The problem of the arrangement of such an organization is to control and coordinate a big group of workers and their automata. The assembled collective needs to be gently synchronized and directed. The following lines – which greeted employees at the two entrances to the Larkin Building – could be considered a motto for the office landscape per se: HONEST LABOUR NEEDS NO MASTER SIMPLE JUSTICE NEEDS NO SLAVES FREEDOM TO EVERY MAN AND COMMERCE WITH ALL THE WORLD21

Work of the leisure society In the cybernetically organized Weltbild, informatics machines and automata take over the work and send the human race off to an everlasting, care-free existence. At first they need to take over all the repetitive and exhausting work: regressive work-processes, as cybernetics of organisation would call it – workprocesses that are based on known information and routines, work-processes that can be precisely coded – are being taken over by automats. For the time being employees resume to work as specialists and skilled workers in progressive work-processes – work processes that are based on a high degree of choice, and are based on unknown information. For example: experimental work in research, or creative work, akin to advertising strategies, are based on progressive work processes.22 But this creates a problem for a cybernetically organized enterprise: since the decisions within such progressive work processes are not controllable, and since such specialized singular

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decisions are not normative nor objectively comprehensible, such decisions pose a risk to the enterprise: Each deciding and specialized subject becomes an opaque black box.

For the goal-oriented enterprise such singular decisions are neither predictable nor calculable and complicate an exact and secure solution.

Thus, specialists and skilled workers are being insured for the enterprise as follows: (1) teambuilding, (2) obligation to work with an exact defined planning-method and (3) detachment of skilled authority and disciplinary authority.

In other words: every single specialist is arranged in a group and becomes dependent on other specialists. At the same time every single one has to become active and take on responsibility for his or her decisions. The disciplinary function is furthermore detached from the group of specialists.23 In such a way the given goal is being assessed and objectified by a multitude of specialized perspectives. The inner dependency of the workgroups reduces the possibility of wrong decisions and levels every approach of radicalism that might harm (in the positivistic, rational logic) the system itself. In such a way the team of specialists and skilled workers allows a high degree of variety in decision making processes. Due to the obliged use of a mathematically precise planning-method that allots a regularized decision process, the established risk factor becomes calculable.

Parallel to this, a feedback loop is established that cares for the values of the enterprise.

office landscape needs to be modified continually. Like the organization itself, which reacts to changing parameters of the environment that constantly compares actual value with index value, aiming at an instable balance, the arrangement of the space itself needs to reconfigure the whole time.

Workers, information-processing machines, automata, and furniture are conceptualized within the office landscape as programmable nodes of a network – as flickering signifiers. The material shell of the office space itself is a container. It marks distinct borders of the organization: within its borders information shall freely float. But every border-crossing is precisely controlled: The point I want to emphasize hereis: The office landscape is not a space as network or infrastructure (as the 1960s architecture utopias would conceptualize it). The office landscape is not the architectural representation of a cybernetic model, but rather the direct and literal translation of a cybernetic organization in space. The outer limits of the organization coincide with the building’s surface. Workers, machines and furniture are dimensionless points and the information flow connects them.

The space of Information Flow The network of information that constitutes the space of the office landscape is controlling body and infrastructure of the self-regulating and selforganizing society. Like a dynamically wobbling formation whose frame of reference constantly changes the arrangement and figuration, the 215

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Episode #1: An Incubator for Spare Time Joan Littlewood with Cedric Price, Frank Newby, Gordon Pask and others: Fun Palace, 1962-196624

The World’s First Mighty Space-Mobile “Arrive and leave by train, bus, monorail, hovercraft, car, tube, or foot at any time YOU want to – or just have a look at it as you pass. The information screens will show you what’s happening. No need to look for an entrance – just walk in anywhere. No doors, foyers, queues or commissionaries: it’s up to you to know how you use it. Look around – take a lift, a ramp, an escalator to wherever or whatever looks interesting.

Choose what you want to do – or watch someone else doing it. Learn how to handle tools, paint, babies, machinery, or just listen to your favourite tune. Dance, talk or be lifted up to where you can see other people make things work. Sit out over space with a drink and tune in to what’s happening elsewhere in the city. Try starting a riot or beginning a painting – or just lie back and stare at the sky.

What time is it? Any time of day or night, winter or summer – it really doesn’t matter. If it’s too wet that roof will stop the rain but not the light. The artificial cloud will keep you cool or make rainbows for you. Your feet will be warm as you watch the stars – the atmosphere is clear as you join in the chorus.

Why not have your favourite meal high up where you can watch the thunderstorm? [...]

We are building a short-term plaything in which all of us can realise the possibilities and delights that a twentieth-century city environment owes us. It must last no longer than we need

hub. As space for activity, it is space for traffic.

One can reach it by land, by water, by foot or with the tube or by car, …. It is a limitless thing without borders and has no distinct form. This thing is space for all and its program is learning and playing. Its object: self-determination – a kind of do-what-you-want-autonomy. The goal: Join in, and synchronize with a new society and its atmosphere of leisure-time.

Fun Palace is a piece of cybernetic workers architecture for a leisure society. It is a subjectification machine that activates the visitors for spare time according to cybernetic premises. In its programmatic conception, it expounds the problem of a new leisure society and the expedient use of the time (Price, Littlewood) that increasingly is won through the soaring automation of production.

As architecture, Fun Palace is the representation of its cybernetic conception – its supporting structure is systems boundary. Within its borders, countless machines – based on feedback loops – organize the building. To quote Stanley Mathews: “Virtually every part of the structure was to be variable, with the overall structural frame being the fixed element.”26 According to Mark Wigley,27 the vast open scaffold is the most elaborate version of a networked incubator for leisure time that is associated with participatory democracy, individual creativity and self-actualization. To Wigley, the load-bearing structure has almost disappeared and the building only exists due to zones of activity and zones of a distinct atmospheric intensity. Fun Palace is a building that avoids being a building: “[A] new network architecture emerges, a delicate ghostlike trace that operates more as landscape than building”28

it.”25

Fun Palace never got built. In a brochure though, written by the initiators, the theatremaker Joan Littlewood and the architect Cedric Price, Fun Palace is described as a boundless thing. A building that no longer is a house. An infinite traffic junction, if you will, a boundless 216

Leisure-time architecture In the course of planning29 Fun Palace advances to become a programmable cybernetic theatre, as Gordon Pask would phrase it: a theatre in

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which guests would actually need to play themselves. Studded with communication systems and programmable control systems to efficiently script a dramatic performance (“the present methods of dramatic presentation are not very efficient ...”) the architecture itself shall foster an open-ended theatre.

Indeed Fun Palace is a cybernetic machine for leisure time, a revolutionary apparatus that produces spare-time as learning, an architecture that prepares people temporarily for a new life.

Fun Palace is not passive space in which spare time just could happen. No. Its explicit goal is to usher people into a new life: it activates people and aims to enlighten them. Cedric Price and Joan Littlewood’s intention was that Fun Palace be a space in which people would be awakened from their apathy. It represents an experiment to imagine a new life: “Automation is coming. More and more machines do our work for us. There is going to be yet more time left over, yet

coping with indeterminate systems evolving in time, cybernetics and game theory established the groundwork for information and computer technologies as well as for virtual architecture.”31

Thus Fun Palace’s programme is like software that controls the figuration of all temporary processes within the palace by algorithmic functions and logic interfaces. For Mathews, Fun Palace’s architecture is like an operative spacetime matrix. It represents its immanent cybernetic conception. A set of autonomous, self-organizing enclosures that are constantly connected with each other are hooked into the structure as zones of activity, that are able to adapt and take on every single identity, depending on its use, […], creating an architecture that produces, in the words of Cedric Price an “extremely definitive range of requirements and aims in the determination of means of access, site, structural system, materials, servicing and component design of the whole.”32

more human energy unconsumed. The problem which faces us is far more that of the ›increased leisure‹ to which our politicians and educators so innocently refer. This is to underestimate the future. The fact is that as machines take over more of the drudgery, work and leisure are increasingly irrelevant concepts. The distinction between them breaks down. We need, and we have a right, to enjoy the totality of our lives. We must start discovering now how to do so.”30

Price intends an architecture that is never completed, a building that is never a building: without a specific form, without a specific programme and without a fixed layout. It is a becoming anti-architecture (Price) … or in the words of Rem Koolhaas: “Price wanted to deflate architecture to the point where it became indistinguishable form the ordinary...”33

Versus Container: Anti-Building The variety of activities in the building is not predetermined. The immense structure of the palace needs to permanently adapt to new and unprecedented ideas and new technologies. It needs to suit permanent change and renewal, as well as destruction. To Stanley Mathews the architecture of Fun Palace is like the hardware of a computer that can be programmed in any new and conceivable way: “A ‘virtual architecture’ like the Fun Palace, had no singular programme, but could be reprogrammed to perform an endless variety of functions. By providing methodologies for

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“It is important at least to know what one is talking about; and

Structuring Islands Herman Hertzberger with Lucas & Niemeijer, Centraal Beheer, 1967-1972

The Architect’s Reasoning Both images depict employees in 1974. They work in the newly built headquarters for the insurance company Centraal Beheer in Apeldoorn, the Netherlands. Shot by the architect Herman Hertzberger himself, they are part of a series of portraits that depict the architecture after it had been appropriated by employees and workers. “Only when the users have taken possession of the structures through contact, interpretation or filling in the details, do the structures achieve their full status, after the architecture reached its full-fledged condition.”34 Two years after the building’s opening, it seemed the right time to follow the traces of its inhabitants. Thus the portraits explicitly show the design’s intended use of the spatial structure. They document the built hypotheses, as Hertzberger would call it.

The portraits are observations inspired by ethnology and anthropology. They narrate what the observer knows and thinks about the situation. But it is not – as traditional ethnology would have it – an observation of a world far away, outside Europe, but the ordered interior of a modern office building. To Hertzberger, they are not artefacts that represent historic facts, but are a form of feedback of a situation, that happens simultaneously, a situation that the architect himself orchestrated. They show aspects of a contemporary social life in 1974 and Hertzberger’s interpretation of the interpretations and appropriations of inhabitants and users of Centraal Beheer. In the words of the French anthropologist Marc Augé:

it is enough for us here to note that, whatever the level at which anthropological research is applied, its object is to interpret the interpretation others make of the category of other on the different levels that define its place and impose the need for it.”35

The pictures show employees and users who share a laugh, communicate happily with each other and work diligently, and how they have furnish their work-places, which were designed as the antithesis to office landscaping. Ten years after the first office landscape, Centraal Beheer succeeds with similar organizational criteria, but arrives at a strikingly different solution.

Managerially it is no longer the single instance (human labourer or machine) but a team of about four members, that constitutes the smallest entity for the organization. Thus a completely different explication of the space for the goal-oriented society is being designed. It is a concrete construct, small in scale, that forms a fixed structure which is seen a series of neutral containers that can be optionally programmed in various ways.

Architectonic Provocation Hertzberg claims that the work of the architect is to propose spaces that can be appropriated by its users for active living. An architect should animate people to think of new possibilities of living – an act which causes, of course, various problems for all parties involved, but is needed in order to achieve a better future. Thus he writes about Centaal Beheer: “This building is a hypothesis. Whether it can withstand the consequences of what it brings into being depends on the way in which it conforms, with the passing of time, to the behaviour of its occupants. The building should be responsive to people, to their evaluations and their inner worth; it should provide everyone with the conditions that enable him to be who he wants to be, and especially who he wants to be in the eyes of others. It should clarify the relationships, involvements and responsibilities of its users; patterns and processes are based in such a way that everyone can evaluate them himself;

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the building should reveal the extent of the space everyone can freely use, and pinpoint where and by whom oppression is being exercised. A building might in this way lead to less oppressive and less oppressed behaviour.”36

The building is a built – for the time being scientifically unproven – assumption of a new and self-organized life at work. It is an experiment that the series of portraits seeks to verify: “However, the architect can still take advantage of the reorganization that moving into a new building always necessitates anyway, to try to exert some influence on the reappraisal of the division of responsibilities, at least in so far as they concern the physical environment. One thing can lead to another. Simply by putting forward arguments which can reassure the top management that delegating responsibilities for the environment to the users need not necessarily result in

The goal of this specific workplace architecture is to create a solidly united work community.

Architecture is intended to foster a society in which people – though in need for taking on more and more individual responsibility – are connected to each other. Architecture therefore is understood as the invisible helping hand.

Thus, Hertzberger claims that Centraal Beheer is not like traditional architecture, like pyramids, temples or cathedrals or palaces, which are – in terms of Hertzberger – only instruments of a prevailing apparatus that only manifests an existing order and thus affects people from above. On the contrary, the spatial structure for labour at Centraal Beheer aspires to be an instrument that everybody can play and thus offering a liberal and liberated life. Structuralist architecture situates all colleagues – as performers – at the very centre of the design.

chaos, the architect is in a position where he can contribute to improving matters, and it is certainly his duty to at least make an attempt in this direction.”37

To Hertzberger, architecture is a means to challenge traditional concepts and traditional ways of living. Thus Centraal Beheer is a catalyst or, as Hertzberger would call it, a provocation for the re-structuring of society, that addresses every single person.

The permanently inevitable changes in the internal organization of the company implicate frequent adaptation of teams and departments within the corporation. Therefore the architecture needs to absorb and contain every single reconfiguration, every single reprogramming, without disturbing the actual work flow, as Hertzberger claims with his concept: “The only constructive approach to a situation that is subject

Polyvalent Appropriation

to change is a form that starts out from this changefulness as a permanent – that is, essentially a static – given factor: a form which is polyvalent. In other words, a form that can be

Hertzberger explicates the office building Centraal Beheer – the workplace for about 1000 people – as a kind of dwelling of the insurance company, a dwelling in which actually all employees shall live to work. Hertzberger intends the shift in meaning from office building to residential building. For him it is even necessary to be able to activate employees:38 “[T]hanks to the differentiation into more or less independent small blocks separated by arcade-like passages (i.e. essentially publicly accessible space).

And since there are exits and entrances throughout the complex, it looks more like a piece of a city than like a single building – most of all it resembles a kind of settlement.”39

put to different uses without having to undergo changes itself, so that a minimal flexibility can still produce an optimal solution.”40

With his concept of polyvalency, Hertzberger delineates a concept of space that fosters flexibility. A flexible architecture is constantly adapting itself to new uses. But, as Hertzberger points out, the flexible plan starts out with the assumption that a right solution does not exist, since the problem that requires a solution is ever changing and can only be temporary. Even with a flexible set-up that adapts itself to change, will never able to offer the adequate solution. In contrast to this, a neutral form, a form that exists through the absence of identity, through the 219

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absence of distinct attributes, offers a different space for solution. The problem of adaptation therefore is lesser a problem of modification of specific attributes, like it is offered by a flexible architecture, but its inherent quality itself.41 Hertzberger conceives an architecture that has not yet an identity, and thus cannot loose identity or become chaotic, just because something unprecedented happened to the programme. Hertzberger’s architecture is an utterly neutral container that, in background spans as infrastructure, and which allows any use.

The concept of polyvalent spaces is not, as Hertzberger points out, a participatory process, that would leave parts of the design to the users.

Polyvalence is rather the quality and competence a space has: the architecture can be interpreted in manifold ways. […] All the modulations and additions to the polyvalent space are thus autonomous decisions of the users and inhabitants, without any intervention of the architect whatsoever.

“The architect can contribute to creating an environment which offers far more opportunities for people to make their personal markings and identifications in such a way that it can be appropriated and annexed by all as a place that truly

“In the case of this office building, it proved that the single

‘belongs’ to them. The world that is controlled and managed

square spatial unit as ultimately chosen, simple as it is, would

by everyone as well as for everyone will have to be built up of

be capable of meeting virtually every spatial requirement.

small-scale, workable entities, no larger than what one

Thanks to their polyvalence, these different spatial units can

person can cope with and look after on his own terms.”45

moreover, if necessary, take each other’s roles, and therein lies the key to absorption of change.”42

In clear opposition to functionalist architecture, whose form is derived from the idea of efficiency and that which represents efficiency, but is not categorically efficient in and of itself, Hertzberger and his colleagues propose a space that wants to integrate and wants to breed a society. It is an architecture whose identity is not yet given, and which the users can appropriate with their use of the building.43 Factually, one thousand employees of Centraal Beheer were allowed to choose their own lighting and the type of table from a list that was collectively put together by members of staff and the architects. In addition, they were invited to furnish and decorate their own islands with flowers, plants, posters and other items and thus – as in line with the idea of the architect – to take possession of the corporate architecture, to make it a home. “[To] make it a home-away-from-home. It is the fundamental unfinishedness of the building, the greyness, the naked concrete, and the many other imposed (but also the concealed), free-choice possibilities, that are meant to stimulate the occupants to add their own colour, so that everyone’s choice, and thereby his standpoint, is brought to the surface.”44

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Insular Open-Space Centraal Beheer was developed beginning with the inside – from the smallest possible space of a socially ordered group that would ultimately organize the vast open space. [...] The formerly horizontal and homogenous space of the officelandscape is established by islands that are stacked 3-dimensionally. At the same time the formerly hermetically sealed and controlled envelope of the office-landscape is perforated.

Hertzberger and his colleagues create a spatial building-block of 3 x 3 x 3 metres, which – as a grid – defines the whole structure of the house that contains all installations for telephone, electricity and data-transmission. The cubic building-block equals one Team with up to 4 persons. Four of these building blocks plus additionally needed aisles and walkways make one island with a dimension of 9 x 9 metres.

Along the 3 x 3 metre grid, islands are horizontally and vertically arranged to become one big mega-structure. The system is strictly defined: height between floors: 3.5 metres, ceiling height: 3 metres, upper edge of ceiling truss: 2.17 metres.

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A catalogue of primary variants of how to use and furnish the islands is developed. It includes all possible constellations of collaboration within the corporation and meets the requirements for working together in a team. In a similar way, a concept is developed for the common rooms and rooms for recreation, as well as variations of the in-house restaurant. In regard to community building the arrangement of chairs and tables is being planned by improving communication with the assumption that creating distance = NON COMMUNICATION46 The flat and horizontal space of the office landscape is thought through with architectural means: “In simple terms, you could say that building order is the unity that arises in a building when the parts taken together determine the whole, and conversely, when the separate parts derive from that whole in an equally logical way. The unity resulting from design that consistently employs this

Centraal Beheer has no decided main entrance.

One could enter and leave the building at various points, depending if you were by foot, by train, by bus, or with your own car or by taxi. The reception zone was placed at the centre of the building, at ground floor level.48 A connection from the planned (but never realized) railway station to the city centre was conceived as an interior public street, as a kind of backbone to which all islands and thus all workplaces where oriented to.49 Seen from the inside – seen from the islands – this backbone conveys a domesticated exterior, a kind of complementary element to the individual islands, it is the collective space for all.50 Hertzberger reflects on the street, following discussions of the Team X and in direct reference to the Provos in the Netherlands as an original place of social contact between the locals and the passer-bys. In that sense the street becomes a kind of municipal place for living, a living room for all.51

reciprocity – parts determining the whole and determining by it – may in a sense be regarded as a structure. The material

“Wherever individuals or groups are given the opportunity to

(the information) is deliberately chosen, adapted to suit the

use parts of the public space in their own interests, and only

requirements of the task in question, and, in principle, the

indirectly in the interest of others, the public nature of the

solutions of the various design situations (i.e. how the building

space is temporarily or permanently put into perspective

is interrelated from place to place) are permutations of or at

through that use.”52

least directly derived from one another. As a result there will be a distinct, one could say family, relationship between the various parts.”47

The City in the City The new headquarters for the insurance company was planned to be the first element of an ample re-structuring of Apeldoorn’s periphery. It was conceived of as a closed building without any formal reference to its direct neighbourhood. Still the building was conceived of as a city in the city and not just a part of the city. In this respect it is similar to the prototypic model of the cooperative workerscommunity New Harmony, which was a selfgoverned and self-organizing colony initiated by the socially engaged entrepreneur Robert Owen.

The vista from any work-place in Centraal Beheer becomes a vista from a corner office, the most desired location in conventional USAmerican office buildings – one of the most prevalent images in idealising the working subject (subjektidealisiert) in US-American commercials of the 1920s and 1930s.53 Between the islands and the bridges, the aisles in the offices, the public street within the building and the public urban space outside of the office building, the boundaries start to become diffused and blurred. This is not only due to the porosity of the building itself, but also due to its materiality – grey, untreated concrete.

As Hertzberger puts it: “It is part of my strategy to have the same material inside and outside in order to be able to overstate or understate their nature, their relativity and interpretation”54 221

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Hertzberger’s concern to create a meaningful architecture for work, that would emancipate itself from traditional constraints and restrictions, that – as a kind of fundament or basis – would offer people a real alternative, is at the same time related with a concept of efficiency and control, that turns itself towards a sociologic concept of the working subject – the enterprising self: he or she is an artist of the everyday, one who must continuously master the situation and be self-enacted, no longer working well-behaved at his or her assigned desk …

This new architecture frames the pro-active employees through: (1) an work-space that is conceived as a place for living, (2) architecture integrates and invites all to actively use and to actively appropriate the building for his or her own personal needs, and (3) a pseudo-public consume- and spare-timeoriented programme is being established in its vast interior, that opens up the building towards the city. Thus, conditions of working got upgraded, at the same time as a new order, a new spatial organization is being established. As Hertzberger would end his programmatic text in Domus: “The building goes from being an apparatus to an instrument that should be played. The instrument has capacities which the performer knows how to extract, and the way in which that happens defines the freedom which it can generate for each of its performers.”55

Non-spaces for Labour Office landscapes and Fun Palace are immediate, Centraal Beheer indirect, reactions to a newly established conceptual model that, after the Second World War, replaced the liberal hypothesis as dominant formation of discourse.

As a form of governance, in the 1950s cybernetics postulated a new form of livingtogether that promised to help to overcome the trauma of the devastating war. In the post-war economic climate in Europe, a situation that was, on the one hand, marked by reconstruction, and, on the other hand, was placed within the area of conflict of a hegemonic, US-American capitalism and a communist form of economy of eastern-European nations, cybernetics represented – for both sides – a conceptual instrument of control. It was an instrument that allowed a universally applicable, consensual democracy, or better, a governance of the self that could be applied to machines as well as to human beings.

As political hypothesis the cybernetic utopia was and still is highly influential and diffused into a multitude of scientific disciplines.56 Not only in economy or management-sciences, cybernetics is a paradigm to the present day, now however as modulations known in other names (systems-theory, cognition, artificial intelligence, …). In the popular discourse cybernetics was very prominent very early.

Especially the utopia of full-automation, accompanied with the promise of a leisure society, through the technologic revolution, are part of a power diagram, in which the abovementioned projects on an emergent form of labour – namely immaterial labour – came about.

Linked to a prevailing discourse, all three projects, – Buch und Ton, Fun Palace, but also Centraal Behher – form reactive manifestations of an architecture of immaterial labour. To this

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very day these projects affect – in their spatialorganizational solutions – work place architecture as paradigmatic examples. They mirror the mechanisms of a cybernetic hypothesis and produce spaces for work, that unfold – in diverse ways and modes – their own power and construct their own worlds and inner logics. In doing so they impressively exemplify the power relations in which designers and architects are embedded and which they need to affirm in order to be able to act upon it.

free more and more anyhow, especially from the rhythms of

By no means are these examples singular. Two experimental projects – New Babylon by the Dutch artist Constant Nieuwenhuys and the Ville Spatiale by the architect Yona Friedman – also relate directly to cybernetics. Both projects are ordered by small and manageable, horizontally organized communities, small teams whose members are strongly dependent on each other. They also mirror the cybernetic discourse and postulate an innocent society beyond all conflict through levelling out of hierarchies, team building and feedback loops – in other words, through the re-modelling of society from a disciplinary regime to s a controlling one.

“Architects thought of Junkspace first and named it

Architectonic and spatially speaking: the network is the formative concept for all of these projects, a network that extends itself infinitely, that represent a holistic, complete world; a concept, that – for the architects – promises to deliver the demand for total flexibility and permanent change.

nature. Man wants to follow his own rhythm. Because usefulness has less of a grip on life, the whole rhythm of day and night will disappear.”58

The vision of the enormous sectors of the leisure city above the clouds that creates its own artificial climate and finally implements the abolition of day and night,59 is something that nowadays Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas calls Junkspace:

Megastructure [...]. Like multiple Babels, huge superstructures would last through eternity, teeming with impermanent subsystems that would mutate over time, beyond their control.”60

Koolhaas talks about an endless interior that abandons architecture. For him this contemporary interior space is so extensive, that one barely sees its limits. It consists of the appliance of a nearly seamless infrastructure: elevators, hot air curtains, …, and most of all air conditioning. It is especially the air-conditioning that allows the sheer endless interior: “Air conditioning has launched the endless building.

If architecture separates buildings, air conditioning unites them.”61 In doing so Junkspace explicates work as spare time; it is labour of the factory of society, as Rem Koolhaas would circumscribe it: “Junkspace is space as vacation; there once was a relationship between leisure and work, a biblical dictate that

Similar to Fun Palace New Babylon as well as Ville Spatiale are representations of the cybernetic discourse as networks – this time above the existing city. As Yona Friedman postulates: there is no global society, but a global infrastructure, that, as material basis is available for a multitude of immaterial organizations.57 The world has become infrastructure that one can adjust at will, as Constant Nieuwenhuys claims for his vision of New Babylon:

divided our weeks, organized public life. Now we work harder, marooned in a never-ending casual Friday…. The office is the next frontier of Junkspace. Since you can work at home, the office aspires to the domestic; because you still need a life, it simulates the city. Junkspace features the office as the urban home, a meeting-boudoir: desks become sculptures, the work-floor is lit by intimate downlights.

Monumental partitions, kiosks, mini-Starbucks on interior plazas: a Post-it universe: ‘Team memory’, ‘information persistence’; futile hedges against the universal forgetting of the unmemorable, the oxymoron as mission statement.

Witness corporate agit-prop: the CEO’s suit becomes

“And in the enormous sectors of New Babylon I have

‘leadership collective’.”62

eliminated daylight altogether, because people are breaking

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Junkspace extends the concept of the French anthropologist Marc Augé, the non-places, the modern transit spaces, the shopping mall, the motorways, railway stations and airports – all of them, as I want to add here – are becoming increasingly molded into our contemporary work-places: Cut off from context, spaces without history, without relation and identity. The non-place seems to be a space that gets promoted and classified as place of memory; a space in which temporary residences are either luxurious or inhuman conditions. A space, for Marc Augé in which a dense network of means of transportation develops that – at the same time – also get inhabited. It is a world – for Augé – in which the nomadic user communicates wordlessly with an abstract, unmediated world of commerce.63 In that way the contemporary working-nomad is connected to automata and machines, and communicates with them in these transitory non-places. There a universal concept of information and its transmission operates “as kind of bodiless fluid that could flow between different substrates without loss of meaning or form.”64 To Negri and Hardt these are increasingly complex networks of work cooperations,65 in which the body is extended by cybernetic interfaces that exemplify the transition towards immaterial labour.

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Part#2 To Furnish When work becomes home and home becomes work Arlie Russell Hochschild: “The Time Bind�

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225 x ø 120 cm Hans Hollein, Mobile Office, 1969

1:06 Minutes on Television The Mobile Office was part of a TV-series sequel.

Das österreichische Portrait – so the name of the TV-series – portrays famous Austrians. The sequel about Hollein was produced in summer 1969 and broadcasted on a Sunday evening in December the same year. The project Mobile Office is a 1:06 minutes segment in the 30minute portrait of Hollein. With help of TV cameras Hollein would delineate an exemplary nomadic, cosmopolitan workers- and architecture future.

The Mobile Office is an architecture of information and its message is being transported via television. Analyzing it in more depth it is an ironic answer to specific parts of the architecture, neo-avant-garde boy groups in Austria and England, about their naïve, sometimes regressive association with political themes of the time, that would, with their gadgets, plug-ins and add-ons, distance themselves from a politically motivated activism of that time.66 Inasmuch as Hollein stages the transparent bubble as an envelope for working he makes architecture visible, as a specific part of a palpable situation. In its presentation via television he relates significant and typical conditions of a nomadic living- and workingformation to architecture and its specific quality and materiality.

The entrepreneur and virtuoso The half-hour show depicts Hollein’s sentimental relationship to tradition-steeped Vienna and to Austria as a whole. It constructs a proximity of his revolutionary Ideas, as they 226

would be called, to the history of Austria and its architecture, but also to a cosy way of living of the former metropolis Vienna, to the horse carriages, to the Riesenrad ferris wheel, etc.

Hollein lives with his wife in the fourth Viennese district … He was born and raised there … He went to school there and then he studied architecture at the Academy of Fine Arts at Clemens Holzemeister’s masterclass … After studying he worked in Sweden and did his master’s degree in architecture in California …

With the refurbishment of the candle shop Retti he became famous … He is now a professor in Düsseldorf … He is about to build a bank in Vienna, a gallery on 79th Street in NYC. He is working on a project for the world fair in Osaka, Japan and on a project for Olivetti in Amsterdam.67 He stages himself as a kind of hybrid working subject: He is the cosmopolitan entrepreneur and a creative subject. He is goal-oriented. He works on a multitude of projects around the world. But he also works in teams, works, for example, also with his wife, who is a hautecouture designer, and designed the costumes and suits for the Triennale exhibition in 1968.

Hollein works not only as an architect, he also does design, commercials and art …

At the beginning of the sequel he presents himself as the creative architect who thinks beyond the norm: “I am not the kind of architect who only builds. I am interested in miscellaneous … Also commercials and things like that. I present products. I am something of an idea man.” (0:39)68 In other words he is a virtuoso, always a bit crazy, visionary, but still pragmatic, always interested in solutions. One needs to go beyond building and set architecture in relation to new technologies. “I think that building alone is no longer the answer. When one starts doing a catalogue of requirements a building nowadays needs to fulfill, a space suit serves the purpose much better than any house that I know.” (0:54) The workplaces of the young architect are “his flat […], on the way to his building sites, the

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airplane, and his third work-place is his atelier.”

(12:55). His workplaces are without boundaries: His office is not only everywhere and mobile but also extended – living and working become one.

The atelier, the airplane, and his flat need to allow all different programmes, a multitude of functions, they are all workplaces and places for living at the same time. Hollein lives and works anywhere, be it in his rocking chair or in his transparent pneumatic construction.

This kind of staging can be described and deemed a post-democratic practice, that, since the early 1970s advances to become the new avant-garde of workers’ culture at the margins of big corporations. Charles Heckscher defines the general model of such a post-bureaucratic organization-type as a system “in which people can enter into relations that are determined by problems rather than predetermined by the structure.”69 It is based on creative project- and team-work and comprehends activities in a new culture-industry that produce symbols: consulting, information-technologies, design, advertising, tourism, finance, entertainment, research … 70 In this new practice it is not so much about knowledge and information work in its original meaning, where knowledge would present a kind of product, but rather labour in which the productive manipulation of signs and symbols in itself is the aim and the object.71 It is a kind of work that calls for performativity – virtuosity – of the workers. For the Italian philosopher Paolo Virno, this kind of work – that he would call postFordist – takes on the traditional characteristics of political acting. To Virno, virtuosity becomes labour for the masses and the spectacle becomes an instrument for understanding. The spectacle – in contrast to Guy Debord – becomes a production process in which the relation to the other forms the basis for a new kind of work that needs to get along without any scripting.72 The Mobile Office is thus a significant design, in a double sense a prototypical model of a postbureaucratic/post-Fordist way of living and working.

An Everyday Situation, an Architecture Prototype The pneumatic bubble is an architectonic prototype of a new paradigm of a creative, entrepreneurial subject: the soft and cuddly sphere isolates the architect from his or her immediate surroundings. It produces an insular indoor climate73 in which the architect is immersed and thus – no matter where – becomes active, is only then able to work. In other words the bubble is – as design – the precondition for nomadic working, modulating itself from place to place.

As a kind of outstanding element, the iconic design affects in a double way: on the one hand, the bubble is its own metaphor. It is its own thought bubble and represents the absolute monadic enclosure of the working subject.74 The bubble is not functionally determined; it is not a production space for a group of people but decidedly an ironically over-subscribed prototypic single-work-place of a boundless daily grind.

It is a technologically feasible and socially conceivable vision that Hollein presents in television. The above-mentioned one-minute clip that represents the Mobile Office is part of a series of utopias at the end of the 1960s that, as the art-historian and art critic Helmut Draxler states, are composed by technological and social utopias. Draxler argues that the precondition of these projects had been a stable, secure economic prosperity attributable to Keynesian economic policy. Next to technological and constructive innovations, this was accountable for conceiving feasible utopias for the near future – not so much utopias of hope and salvation.75 The Mobile Office is decidedly a vision of a workers’ society. In contrast to a number of other pneumatic experiments of the late 1960s and early 1970s that would basically affirm a popular discourse on the leisure society, Hollein uses the new material to visualize with his design a worker’s day. In doing so he uses 227

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everyday objects that are – more or less – trivial and petty items accompanying a modern life in 1969, emphasizing and demonstrating the normalcy and actuality of the project. In using these objects in a twisted way, he then also asserts the difference: the Hoover as compressor, the airplane as everyday vehicle, the suitcase to transport one’s own dwelling, or the mobile phone … the portable bubble in which Hollein sits and works is introduced on television as something that everybody is familiar with in a more conventional form: the trailer, the caravan.

These projects illustrate Hollein’s approach to architecture, which is always about architecture as system and therefore go beyond the threedimensional object by extending the concept of architecture and design that Hollein also emphasizes in his famous manifest-like text Alles ist Architektur. The Mobile Office traces Alles ist Architektur in its full radicalism. In doing so it takes up a moment that Craig Buckley observes in his discussion about Alles ist Architektur: “Between these images one begins to pick up an alternate repetition present in the manifesto, one that shifts from the image of the body to its extensions. Citing the ‘telephone

Artistic Means of the Architect

booth’, the ‘helmets of jet pilots’, and the ‘development of space capsules and space suits’, the expansion of the human environment proceeds by becoming smaller, departing from a ‘building of minimal size extended into global dimensions’

Mobile Office is not architecture in a conventional sense, but is part of a series of early projects of Hollein that deal with the radical extension of the concept of architecture and design. By using and adopting artistic means and strategies, Hollein reacts to various social, but also technological, developments to make them, on the one hand, visible, and on the other hand, to make it possible to pursue it and research it, to extend it and radicalize it with means of architecture and design.

The Extension to the University of Vienna (1960), the architecture capsule series Nonphysical Environmental Control Kit (1967), or the spacespray Svobodair (1968, with Peter Noever) deal with media and immaterial aspects of a manmade environment as architecture. Instead of real built architecture Hollein conceives an immaterial architecture of pure affect – a kind of exceeding atmospheric simulation: the TV-set as extension to the university, the drug to construct a non-physical environmental control, a villa in the countryside, or, in collaboration with the Austrian office-furniture producer Svoboda, a spray that changes the environment immediately, as a revolutionary and new way to change and improve office environment.

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to approach the contours of the subject. The dynamic of extension and contraction stretches the paradoxically inclusive logic of the manifesto, which expands architecture to be identified with all things but regrounds this manifold in one thing: architecture.”76

The Mobile Office takes up the postulation, that everything could be architecture, and returns to architecture. In contrast to all immaterialized experiments, the Mobile Office is tangible architecture. The pneu is a radical design of a nomadic work-life that is able to modulate itself from place to place. It is a hybrid object between the arts: it is architecture, it is installation. And, most importantly, it is being broadcast on television.

Minimal Environment, Insulating In his texts, Hollein stresses the effects of architecture, the impact that the environment has on people. For him this environment is always already man-made, in his sense an artificial environment. In Alles ist Architektur he would describe a topologic situation: men and women are part of an environment that they themselves construct, but it conditions every

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single one of them, and society as well (the individual is always and already part of a group, a society). At the same time, people would act on this environment; they would extend it and re-create new artificial environments. Thus Hollein writes: “Again and again, physically and psychologically, the human being extends his physical and psychological area, affects his environment in the broadest sense.”77 Thus, the vast plane on which the bubble is staged, is already as environment constructed by people and implies already all infrastructure.

The field is an open, extensive plane that is not yet functionally determined. Furthermore, it neither follows a visible grid, nor has a quantitative observable order. The infrastructure and its knots are just there, they are assumed, do not require highlighting, or even definition.

They are just there, as Hollein would relate: “… and everywhere […] I can blow up this thing.”

(09:35) The bubble is the extreme version of an enclosed minimal-environment. It is, in terms of Hollein, a better contemporary dwelling, an architecture, that goes beyond mere function that assures physical protection, but also psychic shelter and at the same time is symbol.

It is a kind of architecture that is, on the on hand, an apparatus that isolates from inhospitable (man-made) ambiances, as do the space suit and the space capsule, at the same time it also allows communication with others far away. Besides that it is an architecture that adapts itself to every single place.

Instantaneous Programming As an envelope conceived for an individual, the pneumatic construction actualizes itself in each and every situation and with each new program.

It is, in a two-fold way, programmatically open.

Firstly, it is its relationality towards the outside.

Secondly, it is in itself a functionally open interior. Depending on its use, the portable house – as Hollein would call his design in the

television broadcast in 1969 – becomes a nomadic dwelling or a workplace, finally becoming the Mobile Office. Similar to simple objects of minimal art – as the German philosopher Juliane Rebentisch points out – that are continuously readable as thing and as sign, that addresses the observer not only as producer of meaning, but at the same time always already subverts the production of meaning,78 the bubble of the Mobile Office allows a constant programming of the functions of the space.

The dwelling becomes what one uses it for. In the specific case it becomes workplace, it becomes Mobile Office. If Hollein had slept in it, it would be probably known today as ‘Mobile Bedroom’. The bubble’s distinct quality is to adapt itself to every situation. The design takes up the dictum of a continuously required adaptability of an architecture of maximized flexibility. But the design does not simply produce a flexible object that adapts itself to functions that are assigned in advance, but, more in the spirit of structuralism, it produces an object without attributes, that, depending on use, is in the process of becoming.

Hollein affirms with his design of the Mobile Office a specific situation in which the modern, flexible working nomad is torn out into the inhospitale, sheer endless spaces of non-places (Augé) that is part of a even larger infrastructure that guarantees the same standards worldwide.

Hollein’s design, however, withdraws from an idea of efficiency that would describe the space by a dense catalogue of requirements, and thus creates a place, that is – due to its material qualities and due to its figuration – able to house a multitude of programmes. In doing so the design of the minimal-environment withdraws as well from any (moral) order: it does not want to affect anyone to appropriate or actively take part in a better (?) life. One can use it, but is not obliged to use it, neither as workplace nor as home for living.

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Episode#2: Rhythmicizing Vanilla Future Haus-Rucker-Co., Yellow Heart, easily transportable home for nomads or just for the weekend, 1967-1968

Presentation at the Building-Site Sunday, 8 June 1968, around 2 p.m. At the site of the new police headquarters, around the corner from the University of Vienna. Amidst the rough building site one sees a translucent, partly yellow pneumatic construction. It hovers above ground. Flexible PVC tubes are connected to the spherical construction. This alien architecture expands in a soft rhythm and contracts again.

People gather around the spacey object. They stand there in groups, around the wafting thing.

In its interior a woman and man linger on a steel-frame-supported pneumatic pillow.

This yellowish thing is the reasonably wellfunctioning prototype of a project by the Austrian architecture group Haus-Rucker-Co. (Laurids Ortner, Günther Zamp Kelp und Klaus Pinter). It explicates in an impressive way what Günter Zamp Kelp would write in the Austrian Newspaper Kurier in 1967: “Architecture is becoming more and more the frame, the support structure to human life.”79 The thing consists of entangled pneumatic constructions that are supported by a steel frame. One can access the spherical inner bubble via a ladder, crawling through a kind of air-lock. The inner space consists of a clam-shell whose inner and outer spheres are inflated in opposite directions.

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The inner bubble is around 1.75 meters in diameter; the outer one is about a meter wider.

Haus-Rucker-Co. calls it the plus-minus-cells.

The enclosing translucent material is printed with red dots, that, when the bubble contracts and expands, as Laurids Ortner explains, slide form milky spots to clear patterns. One needs to lay down on a kind of dinghy-platform, make himself or herself comfortable and fully relinquish oneself to the rhythm of the architecture machine.

Mind-Expanding Programme The presentation of the prototype was a promotion event of sorts. The goal was to get spectacular images of the spacey designobject.80 Members of the group and their girlfriends demonstrate how the apparatus works. Pair by pair they crawl into the thing and – one can imagine – come out of the bubble, after a certain time span, totally happy and relaxed.81 The Yellow Heart is part of the Haus-Rucker-Co. object series known as Mind-Expanding Programme that propagated an expanded consciousness. In the brochure accompanying the Haus-Rucker-Co. exhibition at the Museum of the 20th Century in Vienna in 1970, all performances and objects are presented chronologically. Each project with an image and a short text: Mind-Expander 1, Pneumachosm, Ballon für Zwei, Connexion-Skin, Gelbes Herz (Modell), Gelbes Herz, Fliegenkopf, Electric Skin, Roomscraper, Battleship, Mind-Expander 2, HRC–TV Show, Mondessen, Informationsstand, Magnet-Box. Each of the objects and performances is intertwined within Haus-Rucker-Co.’s conceptual world. The idea of the pneumachosm gets scaled down to the balloon for two. This object in turn becomes the connexion skin and serves as basis for the yellow-heart model, whose prototype then gets presented, as mentioned above, on the building site. Each of the objects is a design product or architecture object, but is never understood as art piece. The

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performances and happenings were events of the boy group, promoting the futuristic products.

All the presentations, all graphics and model photos, but particularly the documentation photos of the prototypes, are outstandingly stylish. They are understood as product ads and are sometimes pictured with provocatively dressed women. The architects stage themselves as pop or rock stars. As Laurids Ortner would recall: “We would appear in tight overalls and drive fast cars.”82 Haus-Rucker-Co. and their products are in line with a series of similar architects’ practices in Europe in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Most prominent was, of course, the English group Archigram, whose popular protagonist Peter Cook would write experiments in his book in 1970. There he would spin a tale about experimental architecture, describing a development in architecture, where architecture would dissolve into an everyday consumer product, that Haus-Rucker-Co. had anticipated with their Mind-Expanding Programme and correspondingly, with the Yellow Heart.

“Here we are really discussing the possibility that architecture will dissolve into being an everyday consumer durable. The notion of the popular package or the optional extra (added to whatever is already there) will gain ground in the next few years. We are already familiar with many environmental supports which are credited with the title of architecture. These could be termed ‘gadgetecture’: they

Regulating Intimate Cell The yellow heart is a dynamic-mechanic machine. The object is enclosed and stands static, but accelerates, simmers form within: expands and contracts slowly again. The whole power of the design rhythmically affects the interior. The steel construction is the conservative part of the machine and holds all other parts in suspension, in abeyance. The flexible tubes and the colourful prints on the PVC foil are the wafting elements of the Yellow Heart that produce the relaxing, luxurious vanilla reality.

Contrary to a programmatically neutral attribution in which, in general, people live, work or sleep, this interior has a singular goal: to produce a relaxed heterosexual couple in order to get productive afterwards. The space itself performs and produces, it actively affects users who passively lay down and are affected.

With their unbridled optimism Haus-Rucker-Co. believed in a future leisure society. They wilfully constructed a soft cell which conditions. At the same time, they distance themselves from a performance that happens near by the day before the presentation – the performance Kunst und Revolution (Art and Revolution) by Günter Brus, Otto Mühl, Valie Export, Oswald Wiener and others at the University of Vienna:

may be tents, they may be packages, they may be things you can knock down or fold up or unpack or combine into

“Viennese actionism celebrated such resurrection, and the

hybrids. At any rate, they will necessarily involve your

tabloids wrote about it for weeks. But Miasma would not fit

choice.”83

into our yellowish vanilla-future. […] We distanced ourselves from this performance and pinned up hundreds of A4-posters

To Peter Cook it is the extra-space that was already being offered by prefab house producers in the 1960s, that however as module of a series of clip-ons and add-ons could be assembled to a novel dwelling. Within this movement architecture would become a service provider: “It is in this area that furniture and environmental development can lead to some kind of composite series of prototypes.”84

against it around the inner city.”85

Hundreds of Haus-Rucker-Co. posters against nudism, masturbation, against whipping and self-inflicted wounds, against smearing one’s own excrement on one’s body while singing the Austrian national anthem. These posters are the logical outcome of a young and dynamic, affirmative practice of architecture.

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But it is a simple affirmation of a socially popular discourse that believes in everlasting spare-time. At the same time this very naïveté is what makes it so powerful until today. The yellow heart produces an exclusive interior for the Voluntary Prisoners86 of a colourful and happy leisure-society.

Working in Bed John Lennon, Yoko Ono: Bed-In, Amsterdam und Montreal, March and May 1969.

Second Act: Recurrence Late evening on 26 May 1969: a young couple, followed by an entourage of managers, camerateams, photographers and journalists, enters their hotel-room in Queen Elisabeth Hotel in Montreal. Both are dressed completely in white.

The young couple are the 36-year-old Japanese artist and avant-garde musician Yoko Ono and the 29-year-old English musician John Lennon.

For a week they will work for peace and will repeat the format of their honeymoon two months before at the Amsterdam Hilton hotel: They are going to repeat the Bed-In. Originally the second week of peace activism was planned to be in New York. But the U.S. authorities refused John Lennon a visa.87 So the couple intended to stage the Bed-In first in the Bahamas, but after a night in unbearable heat, they decided to give it a try in liberal Canada.

They needed to take a stopover at the King Edward hotel in Toronto, to wait for visa, but could finally travel on to Montreal, where they would enter room 1742 of the famous Hilton grand-hotel Queen Elisabeth.

The king-sized bed is positioned centrally at the huge panorama window that would frame the vista like a theatre stage behind the big cushions. Flowers are placed on the wooden board at the window, both slogans of the Bed-In are scribbled on slips of paper and pined to the window behind the bed. Like in Amsterdam we read: “Bed Peace”, “Hair Peace”. To the left as well as to the right self-made posters are hung up. “I love Yoko”. “I love John”. Drawings by Yoko Ono’s daughter Kyoko next to drawings done by John Lennon. A guitar leans on the wall.

A telephone is placed to the right of the bed.

Spotlights are mounted above the bed.

Additional spots are installed to the left and the 232

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right. The local disk jockey Chuck Chandler sets up his studio up in the room, Canadian and other private camera teams, photographers and journalists are present.

From Monday, 26th May until Sunday, 1st June 1969 John Lennon and Yoko Ono work publicly in bed. From there they are present in all of North America, are ON AIR. They give interviews via telephone, welcome guests from their bed and work in dense spatial conditions for their mission: Peace for the world. The famous psychologist Timothy Leary and his wife Rosmary, the Canadian rabbi and peace activist Abraham Feinberg and others visit the two. Late Saturday evening, the day before they leave, the world-famous song Give Peace a Chance is recorded in the hotel room.

The performance in the hotel bed was initially planned to be without script, like an open work of art. In its first version of appropriating the hegemonic space of the hotel in Amsterdam, the roles of the young couple were undecided and open, thus caused confusion. Both Yoko Ono and John Lennon gave interviews, were partners on an equal footing, both with different opinions, different explanations and messages.

Journalists were irritated and confused and did not know how to interpret this kind of activism.

Headlines like “Married Couple are in Bed”, or “They are getting up today” are clear accounts of the disorientation. In its iteration in Montreal the Canadian Television Corporation (CBC) took over to choreograph the Bed-In for its TV-series The Way It Is. The broadcasting corporation used the format of the Bed-In and invited guests, such as the ultraconservative comic-strip artist Al Capp, or the comedian and civil-rights activist Dick Gregory, to come and talk to John Lennon and Yoko Ono at their bedside. Thus in the CBS broadcast, the guests – as well as the hosts – were assigned specific, traditional roles that ultimately became part of the Bed-In myth: The angry, male hero (John Lennon) – maybe a bit naïve, but still very serious and with a lot of attachment, campaigning for world-peace, then the devoted and loyal wife of the hero (Yoko Ono), who

would quietly – quasi voicelessly – adore her husband, and finally you would have – for example – the brutal, heart-less, ultraconservative provocateur and bad guy (Al Capp), who would argue that both the musician and his artist wife only staged this performance in order to earn a lot of money: “I write my cartoons for money. Just as you would sing your songs.

Exactly the same reason. ... And much of the same reason this is happening too, if the truth is told.” 88 Entering the room, wearing a dark suit, similar to a marine corps uniform, he approached the bed limping, his right hand outstretched and saying, totally selfdeprecatingly and knowing his role: “Dreadful, Neanderthal old fascist. ... How do you do?”89 The Bed-In is a kind of entrepreneurial performance of John Lennon and Yoko Ono that was staged as a symbolic act. They appropriate the grand hotel typology and – seen from today – they would prophetically foresee a contemporary working condition. The Bed-In is a kind of mould for contemporary working formats, it is a foil for a life in which working in bed and from the hotel, as the outmost fantasy of a worker – as a kind of extreme fiction and phantasma of freedom and emancipation from work, is slowly becoming reality today and is shifting its meaning. It is a life in which work, spare time and life are increasingly becoming one and the same thing, in which ‘toppling’ moments come about that span a boundless spatial claim and its confined redemption.

In the production of the Bed-In, space for living and space for working converge. The Bed-In is not staged in a theatre, or in a stadium, nor was it arranged and installed in an art museum or a gallery. Rather it takes place in the spaces that John Lennon and Yoko Ono live in. The spatial framing differs constitutive form art-spaces of Yoko Ono’s practice, it differs from the musicstudio in which both of them would be used to work in, nor is it the stage – which are all traditionally separated from the function of living. Now their daily space of living, their habitat becomes the space of work. They live in their performance (work) space and they work in the space they live in: next to meeting with 233

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journalists, holding press conferences and giving interviews on the telephone, both Yoko Ono and John Lennon live in these rooms, they sleep there and they eat there.

Hybrid Workspace: Grand Hotel The hotel rooms in Amsterdam, at the Queen Elisabeth in Montreal, at the Sheraton Hotel at the Bahamas or at the stopover at the Hotel in Toronto, the Hamilton Palace Hotel at Hyde Park Corner in London are home to the two stars around the time they were married, but also the places between London, Paris, Gibraltar, Paris, Amsterdam, Vienna, London, Bahamas, Toronto, Montreal, Ottawa, London, all airports, gangways and waiting lounges, their limousines and airplanes are part of a vast, sheer endless spatial continuum in which both live and work.

This continuum is emphasized even more strongly by the official imagery and all the documentaries that are available toady. Takes and images from Amsterdam, Montreal, Toronto or the Bahamas – in which most of the time one would only see a close-up of the two faces – are used interchangeably. As if timeless and spaceless, they are collaged in a way to tell a specific story, i.e., tell the Lennon myth that was coined by CBC. “Each of our hotels is a little America”90 is the clear and praradigmatic concept of Hilton Hotel Corporation, in which both of the Bed-In Performances were staged. All of the hotels that are used by Lennon and Ono are modern Grand Hotels, a kind of American-style luxury hotel, which is conceived as democratic architecture machine, and is a symbol of a free and peaceful world in the imagination of an U.S. citizen – it is an open, transparent and capitalist society.

These modern luxury hotels were all built in post-war years in International Style, they are all cool modernist buildings: clearly legible concrete structures, big windows and thematically designed interior spheres, exclusive restaurants and shopping malls.

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Analogous to the Clubs in London, for example Boodle’s (1762) or the Athenæum Club (1824), the grand hotels frame an ideal bourgeois mode of work. They are understood as exclusive places of spare time of the newly established bourgeoisie, of entrepreneurs, doctors, academics, but also artists and writers. Still, such a reading ignores the discursive bourgeois concept of work that is understood as a place for the subjective pursuit for happiness. Work that produces values91 is the application of knowledge and the exchange of goods and services. Clubs, but also grand hotels offer a representative space for grouping a multitude of productive activity, something that one calls networking today. In this sense Boodle’s and the Athenæum, but grand hotels also impressively explicate a space in which people are synchronised to become productive for a common goal.

The American-style luxury hotels, though, are modernist modulations of an historic type of the grand hotel and its use as colonial outposts at the end of the 19th century, within a global network of railways, in order to pursue worldwide commerce. The Hilton Hotels were similar to the impressive grand hotels at the turn of the century, as for example the Grand Hotel in Singapore (1887) and the one in Bombay (1904) that have been conceived as outposts for forging trade, or the Palast Hotel (1897) and the Grand Hotel (1905) both in St. Moritz, Switzerland, that targeted an Anglophile, royal audience and a predominantly Jewish upper class, that was always understood as workplace for the travelling merchant.92 The spaces of these modern Grand Hotels, in which the Bed-In was staged, establish an exclusively private interior for an exclusive upper class. Access is granted to those who can afford to pay.93 The space itself constitutes an intimate space of personal and private relations, a kind of second living room that offers a public character in which all members are permanently visible.

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Artistic Framing: “To Assimilate Art in Life”94

sensory perceptions. It is not ‘a get togetherness’ as most happenings are, but a dealing with oneself. Also, it has no script as happenings do, though it has something that starts it

Significant for the Bed-In is the artistic practice of Yoko Ono. Without her, without the conceptual framing and her idea about art, and without the participatory aspects of her poetic practice, without her work on and with rules and instructions that would culminate in her performative practice, the stagings in Amsterdam and in Montreal would have looked different.

In a small text, entitled To the Wesleyan People,95 which Yoko Ono understood as a footnote to a lecture she was to have delivered on 13 January 1966 at Wesleyan University, she explicitly describes her artistic strategy. To Yoko Ono, art might offer the absence of complexity of an everyday, of a daily grind, that would ultimately lead to complete relaxation of the mind: “The mind is omnipresent, events in life never happen alone and the history is forever increasing its volume. The natural state of life and mind is complexity. At this point, what art can offer (if it can at all – to me it seems) is an absence of complexity, a vacuum through which you are led to a state of complete relaxation of mind.”96

This artistic option, Ono writes, is an event bent.

It is an everyday experience, everyday occurrence that art might possible bend, in order to free the mind of a multitude of sensorial ideas, pre-conceptions, expectations. A liberation, as she postulates, which only each individual is able to experience voluntarily for herself or himself. The work of art is only the framing of a situation that would initiate the experience. The end of such an involvement is thus contingent and ambiguous, since the whole process happens without a script. In saying so, Yoko Ono delimits her practice decidedly from a collective experience of a happening: “People ask me why I call some works Event and others not.

They also ask me why I do not call my Events Happenings.

Event, to me, is not an assimilation of all the other arts as Happening seems to be, but an extrication from the various

moving [...]

People talk about happening. They say that art is headed towards that direction, that happening is assimilating the arts.

I don’t believe in collectivism of art, nor in having only one direction in anything ...”97

To Yoko Ono the event is an act involving oneself. She spans the frame for a solopsist experience, that cannot be communicated in the very moment of involvement. Her art produces a time span of wonderment that each one can extend or stop whenever he or she feels to do so.

“After that you may return to the complexity of life again, it may not be the same, or it may be, or you may never return, but this is your problem ...”98 Only afterwards, after this very specific experience can one relate the art piece to the everyday.

The openness of Yoko Ono’s works, that only appears due to the participation and interpretation of the audience, a moment that is immanent for example in Ono’s performance Cut Piece but as well in her Instruction Pieces, is something that the art critic Emily Wassermann would explain with Marcel Duchamp’s lecture The Creative Act.99 It is a subjective mechanism that produces art in its raw form – no matter if bad, no matter if good or indifferent. The audience interprets and experiences the work of art and brings it in contact with an outer world, like Duchamp would end his lecture: “The creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications and thus adds his contribution to the creative act ...”100

Yoko Ono’s Instruction Pieces,101 published in her artist-book Grapefruit102 in 1964, challenge our motoric abilities, question our preconceptions and perceptions of the world, play in subtle way with all of our senses, that first come into unprecedented relations to the world through the instructions: the conventional flow of time, or progression of seasons become 235

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sabotaged, the self is duplicated or all in all extracted. In asking, even prompting the readers, never to read an instruction twice, actually to burn the book after they had read it, she questions the impossible iteration, the obnoxious repetition of a subjective experience.

Something that comes to light in her performance Cut Piece.

Yoko Ono asked the audience to cut off all of the clothes that she was wearing. The documentation of the performance at Carnegie Hall shows Ono sitting alone on the stage. She wears compact, dark stockings, a black skirt and a black vest. She sits there lonesome, her legs bent, the upper part of the body and her head proudly upraised. She looks straight ahead, her long hair is bound back to a bun. Her hands brace her position. In front of her one sees a scissor. Slowly, one after the other, the members of the audience approach her on the stage, taking the scissors and cutting off small pieces of her clothes – always only small pieces.

All this happens very slowly and deliberately.

Ono tries not to recognize the people, her gaze is directed straight ahead. At last a man cuts off the strap of her bra, and she raises her arms covering her breasts …

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first version of the Bed-In – is not imitating life, but integrates itself as an art form into life. As an autonomous sphere, it changes perceptions and conceptions that withdraw from a production of surplus value.

Contours of an Exhausting, Creative, Entrepreneurial Practice As a second significant attribute of the Bed-In one needs to consider John Lennon’s practice as an autonomous, responsible entrepreneurial subject. In November 1963 John Lennon performed with the Beatles at the Royal Variety Performance – at the time still as a normal citizen of the British Empire. With Queen Elisabeth II in attendance, John Lennon asks – politely and certainly rehearsed – for help: “For our last number I'd like to ask your help: Will the people in the cheaper seats clap your hands?

And the rest of you, if you'll just rattle your jewellery ... ”

She repeats the performance a few times. First it was performed in 1964 at the Yamaichi Hall in Kyoto as part of the program Contemporary American Avant-Garde Music Concert: Insound and Instructure, afterwards she would perform it at Shogetsu Art Centre in Tokyo (1965), then at Carnigie Hall in New York. However, each interaction with the audience is neither planned nor choreographed. Instead, the audience continuously alternates between exhibitionism and visual desire, between masochism and sadism, between victim and offender, as the art critic Kristine Stiles103 would note.

Some years later, after having toured around in the world, playing in front of thousands of hysteric fans, but also being attached to some of the emancipation movements of the 1960s, John Lennon considers himself self-determined. With his attitude (Walter Benjamin104 ) he no longer wants to follow traditional conventions, or even worse, subordinate to the monarch. On the contrary: in 1966, in an interview with the Evening Standard, Lennon compares his popularity with that of Jesus. At the beginning of 1969 he breaks the bounds to the English Empire by sending back his MBE (Member of the British Empire). Around that time he also starts his solo career and his collaboration with his second wife, the Japanese artist Yoko Ono.

The Cut Piece, as well as the Instruction Pieces have an effect on the concept of the Bed-In. It was the performance’s mottos – Stay in Bed, Grow your Hair – that would act as instructions for Bed Peace and Hair Peace. But it is also the distinct, passive and neutral attitude of the musician and the artist, that – especially in the

John Lennon is not so much Working Class Hero – in its traditional sense – who rebels against the system, as some biographers would have it. Instead he has the contours of a new type of worker, who one can call (using the

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German sociologist Ulrich Bröckling’s term) the enterprising self.105 John Lennon is creative and he is entrepreneurial; he is active and selfemployed, he is innovative and he uses imaginary chances of winning, he bears the risk of his enterprise and he works closely with his wife. He campaigns explicitly for the peace movement and consciously uses his media proficiency. In an interview Lennon would retrospectively speak about his entrepreneurial account of the Bed-In: “Yoko and I, when we got together, decided, whatever we knew, whatever we did, was gonna be in the paper. [...]

personal will for peace and quietness. Taking on this perspective this last song line, but as well as the forgotten images, show the other dimension of a self-authorized, hard-working entrepreneur.

It is the latent exhaustion which can become a depression that Alain Ehrenberg connects to the disappearing borderers and boundaries – between the permitted and the prohibited, between the possibility and the impossibility – that challenges the psychic order of every individual, that alters, irritates and psychologically exhausts the subject. 108

Whatever people like us to do ... it’s gonna be in the papers.

So we decided to utilize the space we would occupy anyway by getting married with a commercial for peace”. 106

Often-forgotten images of the first Bed-In in Amsterdam show the young couple in an oversized bed. They lay there peaceful and somehow lost. Here the first contours of a phenomenon become visible that the French sociologist Alain Ehrenberg calls the exhausted self 107 Having pulled the blanket up to their chins amidst the bleak Hilton decoration, both look rather exhausted and worn out, something that also The ballad of John and Yoko would corroborate.

John Lennon recorded the song, shortly after returning home to London after the first Bed-In in Amsterdam: Drove from Paris to the Amsterdam Hilton Talking in our beds for a week The newspeople said “Say, what're you doing in bed?”

I said, “We're only trying to get us some peace”

The last line of the song … to get us some peace … could mean two things. I can read it – following the intention of peace activism – as a wish to get peace in the world. Otherwise the song line might also mean that Lennon and his wife crave for some peace and quiet. The one is the uncontested interpretation of a prevalent narration about the powerful work for peace through refusal. The other interpretation emphasizes the downside of a self-determined acting subject: the exhaustion, the wish for no conflicts and for harmony, as well as the

The Art Commercial During the days in Amsterdam, the initially neutral, even the passive setting of the Bed-In changes towards active work for their concern: world peace. The use of the room changes totally – both furnish and re-arrange the hotelroom: the bed is placed at the panorama window, flowers are brought in, Bed-In instructions written in block-letters and – to all visible – pinned up at the window and on walls: Stay in Bed. Grow your Hair – Hair Peace, BedPeace.

Here and a month later when repeating the BedIn in Montreal, John Lennon and Yoko Ono stage their staying-in-bed as a commercial for an alternative way of living. They appropriate the bourgeoisie typology of the Grand Hotel, the figure of the monarch in bed. In doing so, John Lennon sells peace like soap: “And you gonna sell and sell and sell until the housewife thinks: Oh well ... Peace or war ... these are the two products”109 Permanently and obstrusive …

“Peace, peace, peace, peace, peace, peace, peace, peace, peace, peace, peace, .... Peace in your mind ... Peace on earth ... Peace at home ... Peace at work ...”110

Is the Bed-In a commercial with artistic means or an artistic performance with means of a 237

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commercial? It is a commercial that uses the framing of Yoko Ono’s artistic practice and it is an Instruction Piece whose instruction so are unambiguous and simplistic, that they are understood everywhere: “Stay in bed. Grow your hair. Bed peace. Hair peace. Hair peace, Bed peace”111 The utopian place of such a practice is the bed: in bed the absolutist king as centre of the world would hold court and in bed here the Biedermeier artist-poet Carl Spitzweg works, dreaming up his poetic fantasies. To stay in bed means to be free, at least not to need to go to work every day …

Spatial Appropriation In its specific use, the bed is the place of utmost convergence of work and life. Both accept the construction of the bourgeois space and appropriate, in a double affirmation, the space of containment – the space of subtle control, of prudential standards and of disciplined life.

By spatially re-configuring the hotel room, and with their specific use of the space, they appropriate the American-style luxury hotel, they re-program the neutral infrastructure of the hotel – the space receives a different direction, a new meaning.

The spatial practice of John Lennon and Yoko Ono is not interested in a kind of truth or in an essence of architecture.112 In the given situation, Lennon and Ono are interested in creating an alternative way of living that withdraws from prevailing ideas of how to live. To them, the direction-less, bound-less, neutral – quasi feature-less, property-less – space, the public character of the hotel, the convergence of life and work, but also their own autonomy and their newly found responsibility in life, form a quality.

At the same time, it is a challenge that they are attempting by double-affirmation – in terms of Gille Deleuze’s Nietzsche – in order to design a new form of living and being together. Even though it fails when CBC embraces the format and “topples” it.

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Spaces of Performative Labour In the experimental projects like Mobile Office, Yellow Heart and Bed-In, the protagonists take a worldwide infrastructure for granted. I even would argue that they partly naturalize it within their designs. These spatial practices would furnish and arrange and rearrange transitory spaces of information flow. They come to an agreement with these pre-conditions and go beyond in projects like New Babylon, Fun Palace or Ville Spatiale and others. In the mid-1960s, these would represent architecture as network and would dream of a consensual society. With each of their very specific practices, Hollein, Ono and Lennon constitute a temporarily stable space for the individual; they mark symbolically a partition in micro-politics of the everyday and – seen from today’s perspective – anticipate forms of working modes and working conditions that are prevalent today and which are only slowly being discussed in architecture.

Yoko Ono, John Lennon and Hans Hollein, but also the members of Haus-Rucker-Co., are thus products of a new and prevailing formation of discourse and point at the nascent contours of a form of subjectification that is today known as the enterprising self.113 But in this situation the Yellow Heart is only the amplification of this discourse and stays in its spatial design – in spite of its flashy colours – very traditional and old-fashioned: It is a disciplinary machine for individuals, whose programming is done from the outside (by the police?). It reduces life – here: love – to become a mechanic rhythm of a comforting love-society, without miasma, without excrements and without any unforeseeable thing. On the contrary, in their projects Yoko Ono, John Lennon and Hans Hollein affirm this situation in a different way.

They affect – in using their given means – in a specific situation a prevailing order; they alter

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with their spatial practice – at least for the moment of the act – the designation and the meaning of the spaces in relation to society.

Hans Hollein is the hybrid, globally acting entrepreneur, he is the idea man, who has an extended understanding of architecture, who wants to produce holistic design. Hollein opens up architecture towards new technologies and stages himself as the creative visionary pragmatic without any moral impetus. With his radical design of the Mobile Office he makes a specific condition of living and working visible and outlines the problems of such a new way of living. At the same time he creates an architecture that has all the necessary – material and programmatic – qualities for a new life as the individualized, nomadic worker: a climate bubble, a psychological cover that adapts to all situations, but also a bubble that allows and guarantees connectibility to others.

John Lennon and Yoko Ono, in contrast, appropriate the hybrid space of the grand hotel.

They affirm the hegemonic space of an exclusive society, its public character, and its transparent architecture, as well as the practice of bourgeois production – the conversation, in order to produce their own unsettling performance. They refigure the familiar space of the establishment for a moment as a utopia of retreat, as symbol for another society.

The Mobile Office, but also the Bed-In anticipate forms of contemporary work conditions and uses of architecture. On the one hand, we have the flexible, permanently mobile creative worker who is doing projects. On the other hand, there is the ultimate worker utopia – working in bed …

Within their time, both projects can be read to be political – in the moment of enactment they would order some of the relations anew. Today the situation shifts radically … and emancipatory attributes of the 1960s have become the norm …

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Epilogue The dream of a leisure society was the great delusion of the twentieth century.

Work is the new leisure.

J.G. Ballard: “Super-Cannes”

Somewhere in the hills northwest of Cannes, you find the business park Eden-Olympia. It is the ideal workers’ paradise for an elite group of skilled workers: luxurious mansions with swimming pools, private high-class medical care, ideal tax conditions and, most of all, a climate like that of northern Californian attracts a dozen multi-national firms. At first sight, the dream-palace of J.G. Ballard’s novel Super Cannes, is the perfect place, a softened design vision – a mix of Richard Neutra’s modernity combined with the fantasies of Frank O. Gehry, a humane version of Villa Radieuse of Le Corbusier. The real social life happens at the office. And at night, people only want to mix a Martini, have a swim in the pool and be alone for a while, as Wilder Penrose, psychiatrist of Eden Olympia explains. Work is the better game. Real fulfilment is to be boss of an investment bank, design an airplane, or to introduce a new line of antibiotics. When work gratifies people, they won’t need spare time any longer. And there is no longer time for an affair, nor for a fight with the partner, the friend, and no time for festive gatherings. Then there will no longer be social frictions, and no energy for anger, jealousy, or prejudices … But the people will suffer sleeplessness, have respiratory problems, migraines, or skin rashes … and one sunny morning a doctor will run amok …

Not everything is invented in J.G. Ballard’s novel. No. Super Cannes is not only a fiction of a space that is about to topple, a fiction of a calculated, managed society. At least the territory and the spaces of the novel, but also the symptoms of employees, are part of a today’s reality we are not able to neglect. Super-Cannes is the luxurious enclave in the hills above Croisette, as J.G. Ballard points out in the 240

foreword to the novel. It is the territory of all the Science Parks along the French Riviera, far away from the casinos and the Belle Époque hotels, the predecessors of the Hilton Hotels, and far away from a nostalgic Riviera with Alain Delon and Cathrine Deneuve.

But Super Cannes is also the campus of Google in Mountain View, California, but also numerous developments in the Unite States or Europe that dominate the real-estate market.114 SuperCannes is also the hotel room in Montreal in which management guru Tom Peters stages his portrait.115 Tom Peters stays in hotels 200 nights a year. He lives and works there in king-sized beds, works about six hours a day, writes e-mail and prepares for his next lecture.116 The portrait shows the youthful-looking, older gentleman sitting on an oversized hotel bed.

Thirty-five years after John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s stay in the Queen Elizabeth around the corner, he is at the St. James Hotel, working on his laptop, surrounded by books, newspapers and design magazines.

The image refers to the utopian moment of the Bed-In, displacing its goal: now it is only about the working subject without a defined workplace. A living environment which establishes a homogenous, seamless interior envelope, it constitutes a circular, self-referential production space for the creative entrepreneur.

It is a workplace that was declared a space for retreat, whose inner organization leaves nothing to chance and tries to keep out everything which exists beyond its confines. Uncoupled from time and space, this room is circularly oriented around the subject in bed. It is a nightly headquarters of a creative entrepreneur: a selfreferential space.

Hotel bed – hotel and bed – have become, so to speak, symbolic places of an architecture of immaterial labour. The bed – and not the garage – is a new production place, in which not only Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple Computers – got inspired to invent his Apple I, while working in his bed, doing his enterprise Dial a Joke in the early 1970s. Bound to his bed – then

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becoming the High-Tech apparatus – was also the overweight and thus immobile entrepreneur Walter Hudson. Architecture critic Michael Sorkin would report about him, how he became famous in the late 1980s, connected to media and to technology, becoming a permanent guest in talk-shows. Today the bed-room producer becomes the Utopian figure of the Piracy Movement: Due to a radical convergence of technology, young musicians start not only to produce all sounds at home in bed at their laptop, but also distribute it via internet, as the story goes – forgetting that this figure had already been embraced by the majors.

But it is also the hotel. First in the 1980s, the extensive office-complexes replace the grand hotel of the turn of the century – i.e. in England where privatized railroad real estate, namely the rail stations, started to become gentrified. A paradigmatic example here is Liverpool street station in London’s East End. Here a major development, the biggest Office Development for times in London – Broadgate (1985–90) – was built around and above the existing rail station and its hotel: 129,499 m2. Fifty times larger than the Buch und Ton office landscape,117 it is still built following basically the same rules, even has the same density. Under the aegis of Arup Associates and SOM, market and trend analysis, as well as international user studies, would be integrated as feedback into the design. It was all about the most efficient utilization of the quarters – an extensive neutral interior that is equipped with modular office furniture systems, such as Knoll International’s Powerflex, Herman Miller’s Action Office or Ethoscape, Steelcase’s Stratus, or Westinghouse Furniture Systems, etc. All designed to be ergonomically perfect.

They are – all in terms of cybernetics of organizations – flexible and promise, like it was already done by the Brothers Schnelle in the late 1950s, an efficient work-flow and a subjectively easing, comfortable space for working.

developments an office was furnished that was organized like a hotel: people could call in and book a room if necessary. This takes up a trend that culminates in a paradigmatic project of workplace-consulters DEGW and their Dutch counterpart Twynstra:118 the Shell Learning Center for Senior Consulters. They would make a contract with a Holiday Inn in proximity of Amsterdam’s Shipol airport. During eight weeks in summer and during weekends, the building was used as hotel for tourists. The rest of the time, Shell would use it. Minor adaptations needed to be made – a small auditorium was built that houses the learning sessions during the week and is a cabaret stage on weekends; the Shell emblem was projected onto the façade, …

These examples exemplify a situation, that again today require architects and designers not only to be mere agents of an predominant discourse, but also to affirm life, to propose architectures and designs, that – for the moment – re-arrange workplaces in relation to society, to produce better workplaces. In the words of French philosopher Gilles Deleuze: “Creating has always been something different from communicating. The key thing may be to create vacuolws of noncommunication, circuit breakers, so we can elude control.”119

And finally hotelling got implemented in the early 1990s. Ernest&Young opened their first hotelling office in Chicago’s Sears Tower. To reduce real-estate costs, but also to adapt to technological and juridical transformations and 241

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Notes 1

Cf. Olov Wallenstein: Foucault and the Genealogy of Modern Architecture, in: ibid.: Essays, Lectures. Axl Books: Stockholm: 2007, S 361-404, Sven Olov Wallenstein workes on the double-structure of the Foucaultian concept of the subject that Foucault himself developes most of all at the Collège de France between 1977-78 and1978-79 and concludes (S 362): “Power is always both ‘power over ...’ (application of an external force that moulds matter) and ‘power to ...’ (the work of shaping a provisional self as a repsonse to external forces), and its operations are always connected to a certain knowledge that is formed of the self.”

Cf.: Michel Foucault: Die Geburt der Biopolitik, Geschichte der Gouvernmentalität II. Suhrkamp: Frankfurt/ Main, 2006 (French original edition: 2004, lecture: 1978) 2 Cf. Andreas Reckwitz: Das hybride Subjekt, Eine Theorie der Subjektkulturen von der bürgerlichen Moderne zur Postmoderne.

Velbrück Wissenschaft: Göttingen: 2006 3 4

Andreas Reckwitz: Das hybride Subjekt, Eine Theorie der Subjektkulturen von der bürgerlichen Moderne zur Postmoderne.

Velbrück Wissenschaft: Göttingen: 2006, S 10 5 Cf. Hannah Arendt: Vita Activa, oder Vom tätigen Leben, Pieper, Munich: 2007 (English original version: 1958) 6 E.g.: David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Inquiry into the Conditions of Cultural Change. Blackwell Publishers, Oxford: 1989, pp. 125-188.

7 Luc Boltanski, Éve Chiapello: Der neue Geist des Kapitalismus, UVK Verlagsgesellschaft mbH, Constance: 2006 (French original version: 1999), p. 43 8 Jacques Rancière: Das Unvernehmen, Politik und Philosophie, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt/Main: 2002 (French original version: 1995), p. 44 9 Cf.. Joseph Vogl: Regierung und Regelkreis, Historisches Vorspiel. In: Claus Pias (ed):

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Cybernetics – Kybernetik, The MacyConferences 1946-1953, Diaphanes, ZürichBerlin: 2004, pp. 67-79. Vogel zeichnet in dem Text historische Konturen einer Kybernetik als Regierungskunst anhand des Policeylichen Regulierung seit dem 17. Jahrhundert nach.

10 Cf. Claus Pias: Zeit der Kybernetik. Eine Einstimmung. In: ibid. (ed.): Cybernetics – Kybernetik, The Macy Conferences 1946-1953, Diaphanes Verlag, Berlin-Zürich, 2004, pp. 9-41, here: p. 14, my translation into English 11 Müller, A. (Eds.): Lexikon der Kybernetik, Verlag Schnelle, Quickborn bei Hamburg, 1964, pp. 73-74 12 Eberhard Schnelle: Organisationskybernetik, in: Kommunikation Nr. 1, September 1965, Verlag Schnelle, Quickborn, p. 10 13 Eberhard Schnelle: Organisationskybernetik, in: Kommunikation Nr. 1, September 1965, Verlag Schnelle, Quickborn, p. 11 14 Tiqqun: Kybernetik und Revolte. Diaphanes, Zürich-Berlin: 2007 (French original version: 2001), p. 13 and subsequently: pp 13-24, own translation 15 Brochure “Beschreibung der Bürolandschaft des Hauses Bertelsmann in der Firma Kommisionshaus Buch und Ton”, keine weiteren Angeben erhältlich, Archiv of Quickborner Team, Hamburg. My translation and emphasis.

16 See: Roland Barthes: Wie zusammenleben, Frankfurt/Main, Suhrkamp, first edition, 2007, p.

90 17 Wolfgang Schnelle: Organisation der Entscheidung, in: Kommunikation, Nr. 2, 1965, p.

60 18 Cf.. Wolfgang Schnelle: Organisation der Entscheidungen, in: Kommunikation, Nr. 11, 1965, Verlag Schnelle, Quickborn, pp. 59-74, here: p. 60 19 Jack Quinan: Frank Lloyd Wright’s Larkin Building, Myth and Fact, The Architectural History Foundation New York, The MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., and London, England: 1987. p. 62

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20

Such a perfection of the network is something that the Mark Wigley also states: “It is a landscape without an exterior. [...] When the space suit, space craft, and space station are the architectural models, it is understood that to leave the system is to die.” Cf. Mark Wigley: The Architectural Brain, in: Anthony Burke, Therese Tierney (eds.): Network Practices, New Strategies in Architecture and Design, Princeton Architectural Press, New York: 2007, pp. 30- 53, here: pp. 31 & 36 21 Jack Quinan: Frank Lloyd Wright’s Larkin Building, Myth and Fact, The Architectural History Foundation New York, The MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., and London, England: 1987. p. 92f 22 Cf. Eberhard Schnelle: Organisationskybernetik, p. 21 23 Eberhard SchnelleSchnelle: Organisationskybernetik, p. 22 24 All of the publications that I know of and which I quote in this chapter date the beginning of the Fun Palace with 1961, sometimes even earlier. Stanley Mathews, whose dissertation is published as “From Agit-Prop to Free Spce, The Architecture of Cedric Price”, tells that Joan Littlewood and Cedric Price first meet in spring 1962, and then only in summer 1963, where Cedric Price presents sketches of an architecture that would eventually become Fun Palace. Mathews dates the end of the project with December 1966.

25 Fun Palace brochure design, Cedric Price Archiv, quoted in: Stanley Mathews: From AgitProp to Free Space, The Architecture of Cedric Price, Black Dog Publishing, London 2007, p.

136 26 Stanley Mathews: From Agit-Prop to Free Space, The Architecture of Cedric Price, Black Dog Publishing, London 2007, p. 81 27 Cf. Mark Wigley: The Architectural Brain, in: Anthony Burke, Therese Tierney (ed.): Network Practices, New Strategies in Architecture and Design, Princeton Architectural Press, New York 2007, pp. 30-53, here: p. 40f 28 Cf. Mark Wigley: The Architectural Brain, in: Anthony Burke, Therese Tierney (ed.): Network Practices, New Strategies in Architecture and

Design, Princeton Architectural Press, New York 2007, pp. 30-53, here: p. 42, my emphasis 29 Planning is done in teams directed by Joan Littlewood, Cedric Price, Frank Newby and Gordon Pask 30 Fun Palace brochure, Cedric Price Archive, quoted in: Stanley Mathews: From Agit-Prop to Free Space, The Architecture of Cedric Price, Black Dog Publishing, London 2007, p. 70 31 Stanley Mathews: From Agit-Prop to Free Space, The Architecture of Cedric Price, Black Dog Publishing, London 2007, p. 74 32 Cedric Price: Fun Palace, in: Cedric Price, catalogue accompanying the Cedric Price exhibition at the AA, London, June 1984, pp. 916, here: p. 20, first published in Link, June-July 1965 33 Rem Koolhaas: Introduction Re: CP, in: Hans Ulrich Obrist (Ed): RE:CP, Birkhäuser – Publishers for Architecture, Basel, Boston, Berlin, 2003, pp. 6-9, here: p. 6 34 Arnulf Lüchinger: Strukturalismus in Architektur und Städtebau, Karl Krämer Verlag Stuttgart: 1981, p. 57.

35 Marc Augé: Non-Places, Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, Verso, London-New York 1995 (French original version: 1992), p. 23 36 Herman Hertzberger: An Office Building for 1000 People, in Holland, in: Domus, 522/5, March 1973, pp. 1 & 7, here: p. 1 37 Herman Hertzberger: Lessons for Students in Architecture, Uitgiverij 010 Publishers, Rotterdam 1991, p. 25 38 Herman Hertzberger: Baudokumentatie, University of Technology Delft, 1971, I-2: “Dat het kantoorgebouw tot woongebouw wordt is daarbij een noodzakelijke betekenisverschuiving. De andere vorm komt voort uit de poging om dit nieuwe mechanisme toegankelijk te maken.” Übersetzung: Dass das Bürogebäude zum Wohngebäude wird ist dabei eine notwendige Bedeutungsverschiebung. Die andere Form [im Sinne von diese Bedeutungsverschiebung] ergibt sich aus der Notwendigkeit, den neuen Mechanismus zugänglich zu machen.

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39

Herman Hertzberger: Lessons for Students in Architecture, Uitgiverij 010 Publishers, Rotterdam, 1991, p. 80 40 Herman Hertzberger: The Public Realm, in: A&U, Architecture and Urbanism, April 1991 Extra Edition, E9194, p. 22, der in A&U unter dem Titel “The Public Realm” publizierte Text besteht aus Ausschnitten von Texten die Hertzberger in der holländischen Architekturzeitschrift FORUM, zwischen 1962 und 1973 erstmals publizierte.

41 Cf. Herman Hertzberger: The Public Realm, in: A&U, Architecture and Urbanism, April 1991 Extra Edition, E9194, p. 18 42 Questionnaire to Herman Hertzberger, in: A&U, Architecture and Urbanism, 8312, 1983, p.

41 43 Cf. Herman Hertzberger: The Public Realm, in: A&U, Architecture and Urbanism, April 1991 Extra Edition, E9194, p. 18, the text in A&U “The Public Realm” is a compilation of parts of texts Hertzberger initially published in the Dutch architects magazine FORUM, between 1962 und 1973.

44 Herman Hertzberger: An Office Building for 1000 People, in Holland, in: Domus, 522/5, March 1973, pp. 1 & 7, here: p. 7 45 Herman Hertzberger: Lessons for Students in Architecture, Uitgiverij 010 Publishers, Rotterdam, 1991, p. 47 46 Herman Hertzberger: Baudokumentatie, University of Technology Delft, 1971, I-16 47 Herman Hertzberger: Lessons for Students in Architecture, Uitgiverij 010 Publishers, Rotterdam, 1991, p. 126 48 Cf.: Herman Hertzberger: Baudokumentatie, University of Technology Delft, 1971, I-19 49 Cf.: Herman Hertzberger: Baudokumentatie, University of Technology Delft, 1971, I-2 50 The program of the street is as follows: newspaper kiosks, a bar, a bank, a hair-dresser, an insurance agency, a travel agent’s and a post office, but also a kindergarten, break-rooms and cafés are being arranged in the building and along the street. Moreover a restaurant and, in its proximity, a space for the workers’ council.

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51

Herman Hertzberger: Lessons for Students in Architecture, Uitgiverij 010 Publishers, Rotterdam, 1991, p. 48 52 Herman Hertzberger: Lessons for Students in Architecture, Uitgiverij 010 Publishers, Rotterdam, 1991, p. 16 53 Cf. Roland Marchand: Advertising the American Dream. Making Way for Modernity, 1920-1940, Berkeley: 1985 und Andreas Reckwitz: Das hybride Subjekt, Eine Theorie der Subjektkulturen von der bürgerlichen Moderne zur Postmoderne. Velbrück Wissenschaft: Göttingen: 2006, p. 355f 54 Questionair to Herman Hertzberger, in: A&U, Architecture and Urbanism, 8312, 1983, p. 41 55 Herman Hertzberger: An Office Building for 1000 People, in Holland, in: Domus, 522/5, March 1973, pp. 1 & 7, here: p. 7 56 Cf. Claus Pias: Zeit der Kybernetik. Eine Einstimmung. In: (ed.): Cybernetics – Kybernetik, The Macy Conferences 1946-1953, Diaphanes Verlag, Berlin-Zürich 2004, pp. 9-41 57 Cf. Yona Friedman: Machbare Utopien, Absage an geläufige Zukunftsmodelle. Fischer alternativ, Frankfurt/Main: 1977 (French original version: 1974), pp. 136-139 58 Constant Nieuwenhuys: the City of the Future, HP-talk with Constant about New Babylon. In: Martin van Schaik, Otakar Máčel (ed.): Exit Utopia, Architectural Provocations 1956-76.

Prestel, Munich, Berlin, London, New York: 2005, pp. 10-12, here: 11, originally published in in: Haagse Post, 6 August 1966.

59 Cf.: Mark Wigley: Mark Wigley: The Architectural Brain, in: Anthony Burke, Therese Tierney (eds.): Network Practices, New Strategies in Architecture and Design, Princeton Architectural Press, New York 2007, pp. 30- 53: here p. 40: “Constant [...] defines his 1956-74 city of the near future as a ‘wide world web’ for spontaneous play. All the technical infrastructure is buried below the surface so that the open framework above can be endlessly reconfigured.”

60 Rem Koolhaas: Junk Space, in: AMO/OMA, Rem Koolhaas, &&& (Simon Brown, Jon Link): CONTENT, Taschen, Cologne: 2004, pp. 162-171, here: 164; my emphasis

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61

Koolhaas, Rem: Junk Space, in: AMO/OMA/Koolhaas/&&& (eds.): Content, Taschen, Cologne: 2004, pp. 162-171, here: p. 162 62 Koolhaas, Rem (2004): Junk Space, in: AMO/OMA/Koolhaas/&&& (eds.): Content, Taschen Verlag, Cologne, pp. 162-171, here: p.

169 63 Cf. Marc Augé: Non-Places, Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, Verso, London-New York: 2000 (French original version: 1992), pp. 77-79 64 N. Katherine Hayles: How We Became Posthuman, Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago & London: 1999, p. xi 65 Antonio Negri, Michael Hardt: Die Arbeit des Dionysos, Materialistische Staatskritik in der Postmoderne, Edition ID-Archiv, BerlinAmsterdam: 1997 (original version: 1994 and 177), pp. 5 & 13 66 See chapter: Episode #2: Rhythmicizing Vanilla Future 67 These are the biographic cornerstones as they were presented on television.

68 The numbers in brackets depict the timecode of the DVD I received from the Austrian Broadcasting Company, ORF Kundendienst, that was broadcasted on 7 December 1969. Cf.: Dieter O. Holzinger: Das österreichische Portrait, DVD Archivs des Österreichischen Rundfunks ORF, 2008. “Ich bin nicht so ein Architekt der nur baut. Mich interessiert Verschiedenes. Auch die Werbung und dergleichen. Ich mache Produktvorschläge. Ich bin so etwas wie eine Idea-Man.” 69 Charles Heckscher: Defining the PostBureaucratic Type, in: Heckscher, Charles und Donnellon, Anne (ed.): The Post-Bureaucratic Organization: new perspectives on organizational change. Sage, Newbury Park, CA: 1994, pp. 14-62, here: p. 24 70 Andreas Reckwitz: Das hybride Subjekt, Eine Theorie der Subjektkulturen von der bürgerlichen Moderne zur Postmoderne.

Velbrück Wissenschaft: Göttingen: 2006, p. 500 71 Andreas Reckwitz: Das hybride Subjekt, Eine Theorie der Subjektkulturen von der

bürgerlichen Moderne zur Postmoderne.

Velbrück Wissenschaft: Göttingen: 2006, p. 504 72 Cf.: Paolo Virno: Grammatik der Multitude, Verlag Turia + Kant, Vienna: 2005 (Italian original version: 2001), p. 80 73 For a extensive discussion of insular climate and its contemporary constructions […]: see Peter Sloterdijk: Sphären III, Schäume, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt/Main 2004, pp. 309-500.

74 Mit dem französischen Philosophen Gilles Deleuze gesprochen wirkt die Blase als außerordentliches Symbol, als Leerstelle und Konvergenzpunkt des Projektes. Cf. Gilles Deleuze: Was ist Strukturalismus, Merve, Berlin 1992 (original: 1973), p. 41.

75 Helmut Draxler: Die Utopie des Designs, Ein archäologischer Führer für alle die nicht dabei waren. exhibition catalogue, Kunstverein München: 1994, no pagination.

76 Craig Buckley: From Absolute to Everything: Taking Possession in “Alles ist Architektur”, in: Grey Room, Summer 2007, No. 28, pp. 108-122, here: p. 114 77 Hollein: Alles ist Architektur, »Physisch und psychisch wiederholt, transformiert, erweitert [der Mensch] seinen physischen und psychischen Bereich, bestimmt er ›Umwelt‹ im weitesten Sinne.« 78 Cf. Juliane Rebentisch: Ästhetik der Installation, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt/Main 2003, p.

55f 79 Günter Zamp Kelp: Bevölkerungsnahes Planen – Beat Architektur, in: Kurier, Saturday, 29 July 1967, p. 8 80 Interview with Günter Zamp Kelp, 3 June 2008, Berlin, by the author.

81 Faktisch waren die Mitglieder der Architekturgruppe froh, wenn der experimentelle Mechanismus funktionierte und sie die doppelschalige Blase nicht händisch im Rhythmus aufblasen und zusammensacken lassen mussten. Auch der Lärmpegel in der Blase war ein nicht gelöstes Detail des Prototypen.

82 Antje Mayer: Jedem Kaff sein Bilbao. Poppig, populär oder populistisch? Eine junge Generation von österreichischen Architekten scheidet die Geister, wie jüngst die Biennale in 245

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Venedig zeigte, http://www.kwml.net/output/?e=58&page=rb_A RTIKEL&a=a945fefc&c=Architektur (20.03.2006) 83 Peter Cook: Experimental Architecture, Studio Vista, London 1970, p. 127 84 Peter Cook: Experimental Architecture, Studio Vista, London 1970, p. 128 85 Günter Zamp Kelp: Journal. In: HAUSRUCKER-CO. 1967 bis 1983. Deutsches Architekturmuseum, Frankfurt am Maien, Verlag Friedrich Vieweg & Sohn, Braunschweig, Wiesbaden, 1984, p. 42 86 Cf. Rem Koolhaas, Elia Zenghelis: Exodus, or the Voluntary Prisoners of Architecture. Thesis project at the Architectural Association, London, 1972 and competition entry: Casabella, ‘The City as Meaningful Environment’, also 1972.

Published in: OMA, Koolhaas, Mau: S,M,L,XL, 010 Publishers, Rotterdam 1995, pp. 2-21; and in: Martin van Schaik, Otokar Mácel: Exit Utopia, Architectural Provocations 1956-76, Prestel, Munich 2005.

87 A year earlier John Lennon had been found guilty in London of possession of marijuana. The U.S. government used this as an excuse to deny him a visa.

88 John and Yoko’s Year of Peace (DVD), Paul McGrath (director), Alan Lysaght (producer), Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, 2000, timecode: 17:42 89 John and Yoko’s Year of Peace (DVD), Paul McGrath (director), Alan Lysaght (producer), Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, 2000, timecode: 17:35 90 Conrad Hilton: Be my Guest, quoted in: Annabel Jane Wharton: Building the Cold War, Hilton International Hotels and Modern Architecture, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago & London: 2001, p. 1 91 Cf. z.B. die Arbeitswertlehre des schottische Moralphilosophen Adam Smith, der selbst Mitglied im Boodle’s war.

92 I discuss this issue extensively in the German version – analyzing the space of the Clubs in London as a bourgoise space for production that is based on communication.

93 One only had access to some clubs if an active member signalled his or her support.

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94

Yoko Ono: To the Wesleyan People, in: Kristine Stiles, Peter Selz (eds.): Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art, A Sourcebook of Artists’ Writings, University of California Press, Berkeley, Los Angeles, London 1996, pp.

736-739. First published in: Yoko Ono: Grapefruit, Wunternaum Press, Tokyo: 1974 95 Yoko Ono: To the Wesleyan People, in: Kristine Stiles, Peter Selz (eds.): Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art, A Sourcebook of Artists’ Writings, University of California Press, Berkeley, Los Angeles, London 1996, pp.

736-739.

96 ibid: p. 739 97 Yoko Ono: To the Wesleyan People, AaO, p.

738 98 Cf.: Yoko Ono quoted in: Emily Wasserman: Yoko Ono at Syracuse “This is not here”, in: Artforum, 10 June 1972, pp. 69-73 99 Cf. Emily Wasserman: Yoko Ono at Syracuse »This is not here«, in: Artforum, 10 June 1972, pp. 69-73 100 Marcel Duchamp: The Creative Act, lecture to the American Federation of Arts in Houston Texas, 1957. http://ubu.artmob.ca/sound/aspen/mp3/ducham p1.mp3 (30.10.2007) 101 E.g.: 2Hide until everybody goes home. Hide until everbody forgets about you. Hide until everybody dies. (Versteck dich bis alle nach Hause gehen. Versteck dich bis jeder dich vergisst. Versteck dich bis jeder stirbt)” – HIDE AND SEEK PIECE, “Stand in the evening light until you become transparent or until you fall asleep.” (Steh im Abendlicht bis du transparent wirst, oder bis du einschläfst.) – BODY PIECE 102 Yoko Ono: Grapefruit, first edition, Wunternaum Press, Tokyo: 1964; second edition: Verlag Simon und Schuster, New York: 1970.

103 Kristine Stiles: “Uncorrupted Joy: International Art Actions”, in: Out of Actions: Between Performance and the Object, 1949– 1979, Paul Schimmel (ed.), MoCA Los Angeles, New York/London, 1998, p. 278 104 I introduce the term attitude with Walter Benjamin in the first part of the German version, but was not able to grasp it in English without a

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proper translation – thus left it out for the time being.

105 Cf. Ulrich Bröckling: Das unternehmerische Selbst, Soziologie einer Subjektivierungsform, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt/Main 2007, particularly chapter 3.2.

106 John Lennon: Imagine (DVD), Andrew Solt (director), David L. Wolper (producer), Warner Home Video, 2005, timecode: 52:57 107 Cf. Alain Ehrenberg: Das erschöpfte Selbst, Depression und Gesellschaft in der Gegenwart, CampusVerlag, Frankfurt-New York: 2004 (French original version: 1998) 108 Cf. Alain Ehrenberg: Das erschöpfte Selbst, Depression und Gesellschaft in der Gegenwart, CampusVerlag, Frankfurt-New York: 2004; French original: 1998), p. 9 109 The U.S. vs. John Lennon (DVD), David Leaf, John Scheinfeld (Directors), 2006, timecode: 22:07 110 The U.S. vs. John Lennon (DVD), David Leaf, John Scheinfeld (Directors), 2006, timecode: 22:15 111 The U.S. vs. John Lennon (DVD), David Leaf, John Scheinfeld (Directors), 2006, Timecode: 23:30 112 In the original German version I discuss – in the paragraphs above – how some architecture critics deal with the Hilton and the issue of searching for essential truth in architecture, which in my opinion, does not lead anywhere.

113 Cf: Ulrich Bröckling: Das unternehmerische Selbst, Soziologie einer Subjektivierungsform, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt/ Main: 2007. Marion von Osten (ed.): Norm der Abweichung, Edition Voldemeer Zürich, Springer Verlag, Vienna, New Yor: 2003. Gabriele Michalitsch: Die neoliberale Domestizierung des Subjekts, Von der Leidenschaften zum Kalkül, Campus Verlag, Frankfurt/Main, New York: 2006. Pauline Boudry, Brigitta Kuster, Renate Lorenz: Reproduktionskonten fälschen!

Heterosexualität, Arbeit & Zuhause, b_books, Berlin: 2004 (1999). In popular discourse see: Richard Florida: The Rise of the Creative Class, Basic Books, Perseus Books Group, New York 2002

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Cf. David Walters: Workplace and the New American Community, in: Chris Grech, David Walters: Future Office. Design Practice and Applied Research, Taylor&Francis, New York 2008, pp. 41-62 115 My in-depth analysis has been published elsewhere: Andreas Rumpfhuber: Über-GuruSpace, in: Gabu Heindl (ed.): Arbeits-Zeit-Raum, Bilder und Bauten der Arbeit im Postfordismus, Turia&Kant, Vienna 2008.

116 Cf. Tom Peters, Essentials: Design, Innovate, Differentiate, Communicate, DK Publishing, London, New York, Munich, Melbourne, Delhi, 2005, pp. 16-18 117 Cf. Part 1, Irregular Rhythms 118 In 1969, Twynstra developed brief and the work organization for Centraal Beheer. Cf. Part 1. Structuring Islands 119 Gilles Deleuze: Control and Becoming, in: Gilles Deleuze: Negotiations. New York: Columbia University Press, 1990, here p. 175

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