A Greyhound bus driver and his family eating Sunday dinner. Photograph: Esther Bubley, 1943.
Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, LC-USW3- 037502-E.
Interior spaces become obsolete at paradoxical speed. Well-established habits can be reinvented in a few years time but often the spaces we inhabit remain unchanged for decades. Alberto Giacometti wrote: “The art of the past rises before me, the art of all ages and all civilizations, everything becomes simultaneous, as if space had replaced time.” Art is emotion, a sudden and almost involuntary reaction, and thus outside of time. In architecture, on the other hand, time is always very important. While primary functions such as sleeping or eating remain unchanged, secondary and tertiary functions define our contemporary mode of inhabiting a space in a way that can be clearly identified in time.
On the phone. George Grantham Bain Collection, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, LC-B2- 5952-5
A couple watching television in their living room. Photograph: Warren K. Leffler, 1968.
Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, LC-U9- 18633-25
The interiors
of the 1940s, 1950s,1960s and so on until today are immediately identifiable. It
is like turning back on a mobile phone from the year 2000 after using for a while a brand new smartphone: the old device is slow and no longer
adequate. The same thing happens with interior spaces. We find in these images those things that people grow attached to and that demand specific routines. They belong to a different time, when even people’s dreams were different: a stable job, material
well-being, a nice house and car. These desires found expression in elegant and formal living rooms, dining rooms good only for Sunday meals, freestanding
televisions, and super-accessorized kitchens.
If we look at
the plans for the micro apartments recently completed in New York and promoted
by Michael Bloomberg, we see similar features. Here too we have a
one-room apartment, measuring approximately 25 square meters containing
everything one might need. But it is the city that has completely changed in
the meantime. Since the 1980s, birthrates have fallen and the percentage of adults and elderly who live
alone has significantly increased. And the quantity and quality of
round-the-clock services has also increased.
Silver tureen. Photograph: Elio Elisofon, 1951. LIFE, TimeLife_image_728038
I'll now refer to domestic spaces in the metropolitan context of
highly developed Western countries. The metropolis is the place of
unpredictable encounters among singularities coming from elsewhere,
singularities that have different cultures, languages, mentalities and
knowledge (Hardt and Negri, 2009). The vitality of these urban centers depends precisely on these
differences, absorbed and
transformed into creative energy. Without a heterogeneous “outside”
that fuels creativity the “center” dies.
Untitled (Fachada IV). Photograph: Anna Malagrida, 2002. COLECCIONES FUNDACIÓN MAPFRE / Fernando Maquieira
In Italy in
the 1980s, the big city was still considered a dehumanizing, unnatural space.
Renato Pozzetto’s tiny apartment in the film Il ragazzo di campagna [The
Country Boy], presented to him as the result of careful human-scale research,
is an emblematic example. With its cooking nook, privacy nook (wc), shower nook
with dressing area, recreation nook, tv nook, telephone nook with built-in
seat, fold-down dining table with collapsible chairs, and fold-down bed, the
room/apartment is a functionally antagonistic space. At the end of the movie the
protagonist returns to his “normal” life in the countryside.
My Micro NY, Typical floor plan, nArchitects, 2015.
Corner Store, Troy, New York. Photograph: Brenda Ann Kenneally, 2008.
Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, LC-DIG-ppmsca-39887
The
construction industry has fully embraced the idea of the minimal house and
consequently regulations have changed. Architects have revised their standards. Interior domestic space was reduced to the point
that people were forced to go out onto the street. And the urban space had to
keep up.
“The street and shops were crammed with people.
The whole of the commercial sector and services were overcrowded. People were
meeting, sniffing and greeting one another and making gestures of natural
understanding. One of the paradoxes which automation engendered on a social
scale consisted in the great development of the human interface within society
and in public spaces. This has given rise to a gigantic migration of people
from the industrial suburbs to the commercial centers.”
These
apartments are very small and it’s not just a matter of square meters. The
ceilings have been lowered, ranging between 2,7 m in the living areas (living
room and bedroom) and 2,4 m in utility areas (kitchen, bathroom, hall,
closets), with utility areas taking on more importance than the living areas.
These low ceiling are made bearable by full-height windows that make the
interior seem bigger, projecting it out into the infinite urban space. These
interiors are designed to give people just a minimum of privacy. An ethnologist
would point out that today even the most intimate, private activities are
deliberately on view and become of public domain, but that is another story.
I’ll only point here to the many activities that we used to do at home and that
now we do outside, in the city.
Deerhead Diner, Manhattan Laundry Center, Park Slope Wash Center.
Photographs: Bill Barvin, 1992-1998. Bill Barvin Location Photograph Archive, New York Public Library.
These
interiors are not suitable for a nuclear family, only for an individual. They
cost the dweller, who spends there a little under one third of the day, one third of the salary. It is essentially a utility space, a room (with
kitchenette) where you can sleep and takes care of yourself, where you might
occasionally have a guest, make tea or heat up some soup. We find this type of
apartments everywhere in the world and, like Coca-Cola, Starbucks cappuccino or
IKEA furniture, the spaces are always the same, they look familiar. There is a
small square table, two chairs, a sofa, a bed, a shower, a kitchenette, and a
small balcony. There isn’t room for much else. It is not a space where one
“lives” and the only reason it can work is that there is plenty of places in
the city that can be shared: the gym, the public park around the corner, the
cafés where you have breakfast every morning and the diners where you eat every
evening. These too are familiar and informal places where one feels at home.
New York City. Photographs: Lee Friedlander, 2015.
The idea that
the house should be reduced to mere equipment is certainly nothing new. One of
its most eloquent proponents was Reyner Banham, who in 1965 wrote about an
un-house as an equipped shelter, a non-architectural anti-building, a warm and
dry Lebensraum. Banham claimed that men have exercised control over the environment
in two ways: building a shelter or interfering with the local meteorology. He
also realized that American architecture tended towards the open space. He had
in mind Philip Johnson’s Glass House (1947) with its solid roof, radiant floor
slab and service core. Johnson had seen the design of the Farnsworth House by
Mies van der Rohe (1945). There is nothing monumental about these houses:
Banham stated that America’s monumental space was the great outdoors, Whitman’s
plains and Kerouac’s infinite road. And indeed, these are not city houses. In
both case a carefully designed landscape ensures the necessary privacy, keeps
the occupants safe from prying eyes. Banham did not failed to point out that
this architecture was made for the suburbs and that this is where America wanted to live. As emphasized by Alison Smithson, Mies could still afford to ignore
cars and noise.
“Mies could take quietness for granted in the
first half of the century. He could be sure of the individual rights of the
undisturbed, inhabited place situated away from industry until almost at the
end of his life, when the new state highway was built directly opposite to his
last pavilion, the Farnsworth house. A mobile home camp grew on the other side
of the river; the tree screen had to be left so dense one is barely conscious
of the river when in the house or on the property… Starting to work in the
1950s we never could make the innocent assumptions available to the Heroic
Period of Modern Architecture. In the American magazines of the 1940s and 1950s
we could foresee the consumer-oriented society that would, through
advertisements, change all our lives… World War II had acted as the great
divide between ourselves and our grandparent architects, who built for the few
tall cars and for the genteel who shopped for rarely replaced objects.”
To protect
their privacy the Smithsons always surrounded themselves with walls, making the
interior invisible from the outside, as is the case with the House of the Future or the Solar
Pavilion. The former was a super equipped house, a sort of impenetrable bunker,
designed to protect the family from pollution, noise, dust, cold, hot, germs.
It was intended as a shelter against all threats but the result was a “tomb”.
The latter was once again a country house in an idyllic setting. There was
still a protective wall but inside the equipment and furniture are reduced to a
minimum to encourage a casual lifestyle. Both scenarios are incompatible with
metropolitan life. In the metropolis isolation makes less and less sense and it
is precisely the elements once considered negative to create a certain degree
of privacy around the individuals. Take for example the background noise that
allows for a private conversation in a crowded room. In the city people are
bombarded with information and content at all types, and most of the times this
allows us to slip by unnoticed. We live in very dense spaces: dense with
information, activities, services, products, and possibilities. And it doesn’t
all necessarily have to belong to us. We are getting used to sharing our
workspace, out car and bicycle, our resources both material and immaterial.
Outdoor shopping center in Los Angeles, California. Photograph: Carol M. Highsmith, 2012.
Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, LC-DIG-highsm-22058
Furthermore,
under economic pressure leisure and work time have progressively intermixed.
People are not forced to work all the time must be constantly ready to do so,
they have to be always reachable. And technology makes this possible.
It is
partially for this reason that we work less and less in offices and more and
more in informal, almost domestic spaces. Many companies encourage their
employees to work from home, thus reducing the number of desks and the
operational costs at the office. The recent real estate crisis is proof that office buildings are currently not the best investment. To work all one needs is an electronic device and a network connection. We spend our days in front of a
screen, interacting remotely with people we have never met. We experience
physical contact during work breaks, when we step outside for a cigarette, take
the dog for a walk, go out for lunch… This character of informality is one of
the most interesting aspects of contemporary interior spaces. The open-plan
kitchen and the sofas where to lounge barefoot are clear signs of the trend to
do without formalities. The same trend is seen in public spaces.
Picnic, Trinity River. Photograph: Terry Evans, 2013.
If it is true
that the act of inhabiting consists in creating routines to counter the
unforeseen circumstances of day-to-day life and that the acquisition of new
habits is a response to the emergence of the new and unexpected (Teyssot, 2013), we also have
to look at emerging extraordinary situations and non-customary events. In this
regard films have always been an excellent barometer: among those released recently
we see that climate change and related natural disasters, epidemics, the
collapse of oil pries and the recession, wars and associated mass migrations
are part of those aggravating circumstances that worry people the most.
Workers cleaning up chemical spill after refinery explosion in Los Angeles Harbor, October 1992.
Photograph: Allan Sekula, from the series Fish Story.
Allan Sekula, Waiting for Tear Gas, 1999-2000.
We got used
to living in the metropolis by accepting diversity, working everywhere, and
adopting “informal” behaviors. We have witnessed the definitive establishment
of the immaterial world and we are aware that it has radically changed how we
live. But what have we inherited from the past? Are things that we want to
keep or simply debris that we have a hard time getting rid
of? Certainly we got better at choosing among thousands of possibilities. And
this holds for every aspect of our lives: from our morning coffee (tall decaf,
2% milk, honey) to the type of lighting on our bedside table (dimmable soft
white led). We try to do without red meat and sugar, plastic bags, bottled
water, and all the stuff that tends to accumulate. We fight pollution and chemicals
by surrounding ourselves with plants. We go to the gym twice a week for yoga
and Pilates lessons. We are in favor of scent-free environments. We eat
organic. We are aware that virtually nothing of the enormous quantity of
neglected history can be erased for being insignificant and that most things
have the tendency to resurface. But we cannot live without personalities and have
replaced the consumption of material goods with that of immaterial ones.
An extended version of this post was published on Rooms. Novel Living Concepts. Venezia: Marsilio, 2016.
Mathiew Lehanneur, Andrea Air Purifier, 2009.
An extended version of this post was published on Rooms. Novel Living Concepts. Venezia: Marsilio, 2016.
