UNIVERSIDAD POLITÉCNICA DE MADRID ESCUELA TÉCNICA SUPERIOR DE ARQUITECTURA
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federico soriano Textos 2019-2020
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The Minor Composition of Threshold Domesticities
Lucía Jalón Oyarzun. Domestic Urbanism. Monu Magazine. 2016.
Roofscapes Fabricating Common Horizons The tension arising from a state-owned public like the street can turn the private space into a new inventive realm in which to produce a common that goes beyond the private as limited or enclosed space. We can see how this happened in Tehran during the protest that ensued the 2009 presidential elections. For years, the open public spaces of the city had been transformed into controlled interiors while the forced enclosure of sociability and communication turned the houses into an atomised while connected neighbourhood. A reversal of the traditional uses and limits associated with the concepts of public/private unsettled the city: the streets became a new interior configured by strict moral laws and codes of behaviour and the private world turned into a field for political and affective space for social invention. Within that setting, the rooftops of the city became a singular space of opportunity, private but nonetheless shared. They were (more or less) protected from the state control while they offered the possibility to be part of a common horizon. “I just talked to my relatives in Tehran. ... People have left their houses’ doors unlocked for demonstrators to have a safe haven to escape when the riot police attacks them. The solidarity and unity of the people is amazing.” The private realm is turned into shelter as a new kind of publicness arises, fragmented but still interconnected. During those days the interiors became a clandestine city of intense 1
activity and solidarity. Italian photographer Pietro Masturzo attested for it through his pictures, he had gone to Tehran shortly before the 2009 election and soon, as he photographed the street demonstrations he was detained and his material confiscated. He took refuge in the students and opposition’s members’ homes. With them and their neighbours, they climbed up to the rooftops by night. At around half past nine, a growing chorus of Allah-u akbar and Morg dar diktator— the same chants their parents had shouted 30 years ago to protest the Shah— radically transforms the city: “Suddenly, from a nearby building, a powerful male voice is seconded by two or three more fluted, childlike ones, maybe a father and his children. They respond by repeating the motto. As if they had agreed on the script, other neighbours come together. Through the windows of the staircases their figures can be seen, lit up, rushing to the rooftops.”
Pietro Masturzo, From the Rooftops of Tehran, 2009
Fire Escapes Omnivorous Spectatorship “Roof sleeping now popular in New York,” thus read the New York Times of July, 5th, 1908. This witty solution had its origin in the tenement districts of the city where its inhabitants had, by then, substituted fire escapes for rooftops. These iron structures were an improvement, as they were “within easy reach of the windows, thus avoiding the trouble of carrying a mattress to the roof” In 1860 and after a series of fatal fires, the city started developing a proper 2
egress legislation. Not long afterwards different patents and models were being proposed but it wasn’t until 1901, when the Tenement House Act was passed with a large and precise set of regulations, that fire escapes as today are known transformed the cityscape. They were not just a safety measure for the small and cramped up houses, but also a chance for an expanded domesticity: they became gardens, storage, luxury box seats for street parades, bedrooms or playgrounds. For the tenement inhabitants, they became “their makeshift stoop in the sky.” Quite peculiar because of its relation both to their house and to the street: it was an open air sphere while being inextricably entangled with everyday domestic practices and, at the same time, it was out of reach from the noise and social control of the street, visible and nonetheless camouflaged in between the surrounding bustle. In 1937 the Tenement House Department issued a series of posters advising to keep their fire escapes free of clutter. The crammed up balconies were a telling display of the inhabitants’ inner world, part of their public identity. They could also serve as garden, “a kitchen garden with vegetables, ... was almost all the green there was in the landscape. From one or two other windows in the yard there peeped tufts of green...” They were also playgrounds, structures to swing, hang, rock or even tightrope walk, opportunities that ended up sometimes in tragedy as countless reports in the New York Times attest.’ These weren’t the only accidents. The arrival of the summer’s hot nights was marked by “police dispatches [recording] the killing of men and women by rolling of roofs and window-sills while asleep”. On these summer nights “the big barracks are like fiery furnaces, their very walls giving out absorbed heat” and “life indoors is well-nigh unbearable with cooking, sleeping, and working, all crowded into the small rooms together, ... the tenement expands, reckless of all restraint.” Every free space in the fire escapes, on top of trucks or shop’s sunshades was turned into an open-air bedroom and mattresses dragged outdoors. It is fascinating to imagine the atmosphere of the city during these nights. Arthur Miller relates how he walked in Central Park “among the hundreds of people, singles and families, who slept on the grass, next to their big alarm clocks, which set up a mild cacophony of the seconds passing, one clock’s ticks syncopating with another Babies cried in the darkness, men’s deep voices murmured, and a woman let out an occasional high laugh beside the lake.” In the tenement district this turned into a vertical landscape with every family occupying their own level and “laughter and the latest gossip [floating] pleasantly up and down.” “An almost carnivalesque disorder engulfed all senses—whispered narrations and stereophonic snoring among an omnivorous spectacle of the half naked and smelling bodies opened up the way to a relaxed sense of touch and sharing—. The city 3
took advantage of darkness to turn the public sphere of the city into a common and lively bedroom.
Weegee (Arthur Fellig), Heat Spell, Children Sleeping on the Fire Escape, the Lower East Side, 1941
Court of Miracles The Organization of Survival Jacinta and Guillermina walk down the eventful and noisy landscape of shops and taverns of calle Toledo in Madrid towards a corrala in the street Mira el Rio. Corralas were popular forms of collective housing in which small private rooms opened up onto a common long courtyard through wooden galleries. The first corralas were built during the 16th and 17th century to accommodate the population flooding the city after the royal court was established there. By the 19th century, when Benito Perez Galdos writes Fortunata and Jacinta: Two stories of married women, these popular ecosystems had become inner city slums for the working classes. Their movement down the street is described as a battle against a distressful though enticing atmosphere of a city trapped in its singular version of capitalist modernity. Against that background, the entrance into the corrala is almost unnoticed. There is no threshold whatsoever, just a sharp change of atmosphere. 4
Suddenly, they “found themselves in a rectangular patio... [with] two rows of lowwalled open-air corridors and large wooden pilasters painted ochre, quantities of clothes hanging, lots ofyellow underskirts, lots of undressed sheepskin stretched out to dry, and ... a buzzing, as if from swarms.” They are looking for Ido’s house and as they traverse dark corridors and stairs they feel upon their bodies the interconnectedness of houses and courtyard: stares follow them and activities are interrupted to participate in the visit. Then, “at every step something blocked their way. Either a brazier that was being lit, with the iron pipe over the live coals so that it would catch, or a pile of undressed sheepskin, or mats, or a basket of clothes, or a jug of water.” These objects attest of the domestic condition of the corridors and stairs, frayed edges of an interiority that requires the courtyard to exist. “From all the open doors and windows came voices: arguments or festive clamor They could see the kitchens: pot set on the stove ... They went through a residence that was a cobbler’s workshop, where the shoemakers’ hammering on soles together with their off-key singing made an infernal racket. Farther away they could hear the convulsive tick-a-tack-a-tick of a sewing machine, and the faces and busts of curious women peering out of windows. Here they saw a sick man lying in a broken-down bed, there, a married couple shouting at each other.” Working and living, laughter and conflict, are entangled in an undifferentiated movement of survival. All opposites battle with no hope of resolution, and in doing so, they weave a common fabric and become a common flesh. This is underscored by Jacinta and Guillermina progress into the heart of darkness: a second corrala is linked to the first through a corridor, “another patio, much uglier, dirtier, and more dismal than the one before.” This second layer of the corrala, its own underworld, is differentiated only through the intensity of its misery and bleakness: the houses were more crampier and shabbier, the marks of the wall scratched more angrily, the pencilled lines in the walls more stupid and obscene, the air, more foul... In threshold domesticities, everything is a matter of intensity and proportion, there are no clear-cut distinctions. Finally, Jose Ido del Sagrario’s house, “a narrow hall and two interior rooms, still more oppressive and gloomy”. In the middle of the main room there is a long table covered with reams of white paper at one side and black paper at the other: “I’m in the mourning business; I paint mourning paper. When I don’t have something else to do, I bring home a few reams and turn them into mourning paper”. Death and mourning become means of living. We have no wish to prettify or romanticize the resulting scenarios of an unfair and dramatically unequal social system, however we want to show how, in a precarious condition in which every act is part of a strategy of survival, the abstract divisions between public and private or even life and death as separate spheres, fall down and the unavoidable fluidity of life becomes clearer. 5
Francesc Català-Roca, Corrala del Mesón de Paredes, 1952
On the Stairs Common Memories In 1974’s Species of Spaces Georges Perec outlined a project for a novel about “a Parisian apartment building whose facade has been removed ... so that all the rooms in the front, from the ground floor up to the attics, are instantly and simulatenously visible”. Four years later the project had become Life a user ‘s 6
manual. He adapted the building’s cross section to a 10 square by 10 board and applied the knight’s tour to it so that each square would become a chapter. This procedure kept the novel ordered behind an apparent disorder. We focus here in the twelve chapters that take place on the stairs. It all begins there, on the stairs, “between the third and fourth storey”, not in the main entrance nor in a singled out apartment, but right in the middle, in “this neutral place that belongs to all and to none, where people pass by almost without seeing each other, where the life of the building regularly and distantly resounds”. Neutral? Maybe, but certainly not without friction, the place where shared cohabitation gets organized and distributed is necessarily a source of conflict: “It is one of those breaches around which the life of a building is structured, a source of tiny tensions, of micro-conflicts, allusions, implications, skirmishes ...” The stairs become threshold to each apartment while constituting a proper world of its own. Its common character is not intentionally produced, on the contrary, it is minutely composed out of endless and almost imperceptible negotiations and gestures doomed to be forgotten. Valene devotes himself “to resuscitate those imperceptible details which over the course of fifty-five years had woven the life of this house and which the years had unpicked one by one...” Each detail awakes in him “a memory, an emotion, something ancient and impalpable, something palpitating somewhere in the guttering flame of his memory: a gesture, a noise, a flicker, a young woman singing operatic arias to her own piano accompaniment, the clumsy clickety-clack of a typewriter; the clinging smell of cresyl disinfectant, a noise of people, a shout, a hubbub, a rustling of silks and furs, a plaintive miaow behind a closed door knocks on partition walls, hackneyed tangos on hissing gramophones...” This is not collective memory but common memory as an spatio-temporal experience that unfolds only in the stairs and lights differently for each inhabitant. At its core there are objects and overlapping non-visual signals that do not dissolve the singular within the common. Domesticity becomes present while remaining invisible and enclosed. Those objects, an obsession of Perec’s, have different roles. Some act as framing devices for the doors, like signs of the inner worlds and its inhabitants’ identity, but then there is also a “draft inventory of some of the things found on the stairs over the years” The things in this list act as mobile portals, they give access to other places and times, real or fictional, as the stairs become threshold to unexpected dimensions. Every found object acts as a question mark that keeps all possible explanations about their origin and meaning open and present, vibrating within the stairway to affect each body that passes by.
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Left: Georges Perec, diagram of the building in Life a user’s manual (Bibliothéque Nationale de France) Right: Georges Perec, diagram of the knight’s tour in Life a user’s manual (Bibliothéque Nationale de France)
Through the Looking-glass Numbed Thresholds “The lock pick. Every hacker’s favorite sport. The perfect system to crack, mostly because unlike virtual systems, when you break it, you can feel it. You can see it. You can hear it.” Thus ponders the inner voice of hacker Elliot Alderson in Mr. Robot as he faces a locked door in the apartment of his downstairs neighbour, Shayla. Elliot is comfortable, even if not fully alive, behind the screen, hacking the electronic activity of anyone who comes his way, friend or foe. The computer becomes a door into their privacy. A privacy equalled to identity, and reduced to electronic data and online activity. Through the classification of all this information Elliot builds his comfort, each individual is quickly dismissed as soon as it can be tagged and tabbed within his world order. The screen does not work as threshold, it is a flat instant hyperlink with restricted versions of life and mere simulacrums of privacy at both ends. When Shayla confronts him and says he doesn’t know her, we can hear the reply in his head while looking at his blank face, “Of course I know Shayla. I hacked her email as soon as she moved in next door. With a simple phishing scam, I owned her password pretty easily.” However when Shayla shows him some handcraft she’s made, scraps of life she has patched together- ”a lot of different pieces, um, from different things, like from my photographs or drawings and...”-, Elliot’s inner voice turns from his usual apathy to speechless shock-”it’s beautiful... together” he mumbles-. He has not seen these before. She never posted them online: “She’s got her own private maze too.” It is a captivating experience for Elliot in two senses. First, it is the material character of the fabrics, its hardcore actuality. He touches the pieces, clumsily caressing them, it is touch, not sight, that enlivens the discovery. Second, the surprise. 8
He is deeply astonished to acknowledge this private world of hers, hidden away from any hackable network. The touch of these textures overwhelms a numbed sensorium which has been inadvertently reduced to a restricted version of vision. These fabrics stir up his senses and ignite his ability to perceive difference, and thus, they become effective threshold between their private mazes. Contrary to many contemporary approaches that look at the Internet as some kind of mythical arcane, Mr. Robot looks at our hyper-connected world with astonishing technical and social accuracy. Accordingly, it focuses its attention on the actual affects and effects it unfolds upon life and not just on the pre-formatted conceptions of it. Materiality regains its headline role: trigger for a productive threshold sensibility that unravels new forms for the private and the open. As Mr. Robot explains to Elliot when he is welcomed within their cell, our encryption is the real world.
Mr. Robot, Elliot hacking social network account in 01x02 -eps.1.1
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