SPAZIO

Mahendra Raj (Gujranwala, 1924) graduated in civil engineering from the Punjab College of Engineering and Technology (Lahore) in 1946. Soon after, he joined the Punjab Public Works Department and was attached to the Soil Stabilization Department to learn the art of using stabilized soil in buildings and roads. After Partition, he moved to Shimla where he was in charge of maintaing all government properties and the Shimla-Kalka road. By 1952, he was transferred to Chandigarh where he became Executive Engineer and worked both on the High Court and Secretariat buildings by Le Corbusier. "Every day was a day of learning something new, which I enjoyed considerably. It was a delight to study the American codes and design aids of Portland Cement Association, and apply this knowledge to the design and detail of one part of the High Court or the other and prepare construction drawings." After the work in Chandigarh was completed he moved to the US and in 1956 he obtained a Master degree in Structures at the University if Minnesota and a CE at Columbia. In New York he worked for three years at Amman & Whitney to gain expertise in large-span structures.

The Structure. Works of Mahendra Raj. Zurich: Park Books, 2016.

"The construction of large-span structures was a carefully staged process and meant analyzing the different structures that emerged due to changing forces and shifting loads at different stages of construction." When he moved back to India in 1959 and started his own firm "the construction of these complex and large buildings, with no previous precedence and with the rudimentary and manual construction technology of the early 1960s to 1980s, required instilling courage and confidence in the contractors, which was done through detailed communication. The notes helped analyze and resolve issues such as economy of time, material and construction resources, and reduce the use of scaffolding and other materials while ensuring the required strength for the setting concrete."

Raj's drawings resonate the words of Pier Luigi Nervi: "The pattern of steel should always have an aesthetic quality and give the impression of being a nervous system capable of bringing life to a dead mass of concrete."

"Engineering is not an exact science. As a structural engineer, you try to idealize the structure, understand its behaviour and then make some assumptions on your own. You can never be sure that the properties will, in fact, follow the assumptions, and you are not sure of the loads, the placement of materials and the strength; yet you are required to design a building and put reinforcement in it - very accurately. Analysis and design have a large number of grey and dark areas, but you can't say that you won't design something or the other for this reason; you have to decide upon some strength and materials on the basis of assumptions and experience."

For an overview of Mahendra Raj's work see also MRC.

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.

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.

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.

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.