Voluntary Prisoners of Architecture

   
In Exodus, or the Voluntary Prisoners of Architecture (1972) by Rem Koolhaas, Elia Zenghelis, Madelon Vreisendorp, and Zoe Zenghelis, the Strip is a prison. Two parallel walls cut through central London and define a linear enclosed zone—isolated, aggressive, and relentless. There are barbed wires, tank traps, checkpoints, and guard towers. Papers are banned; radios are not operational. Despite all the suppressions, fugitives flock into this dystopia voluntarily. They know it is actually the Good Half of the city. It provides a new urban culture, “a strip of intense metropolitan desirability” as Koolhaas and Zenghelis described it. The authors took a “mirror image” of the terrifying architecture of prison walls, using its intense and devastating force “in the service of positive intentions.” Suddenly, all defense mechanisms turn to the outside. They are there to prevent contamination from the Bad Half.

Exhausted Fugitives Led to Reception

The Allotments

This inside-out contradiction alludes to Berlin during the Cold War. In 1971, when most of the AA students made their Summer Study on Palladian villas or Greek mountain villages, Koolhaas chose the Berlin Wall. He was amazed by the fact that it was West Berlin, the “open society,” that was imprisoned, not the East. “I now realize that [the Wall] encircles the city, paradoxically making it ‘free,’” he wrote in Field Trip: (A)A Memoir. People from the East would risk their lives to enter the Western enclave, escaping into a prison the scale of a metropolis. In the divided city of Berlin, freedom was relative.

The Berlin Wall 

Koolhaas admired the Berlin Wall, for it was forbidding and seductive at the same time. He embraced the horrifying beauty and imagined a full spectrum of joyful activities inside the tall walls of the Strip. “The inhabitants of this architecture, those strong enough to love it, would become its Voluntary Prisoners, ecstatic in the freedom of their architectural confines.” Wannabe prisoners receive a “spectacular welcome” upon arrival, and perform minimal training “under the most hedonistic conditions” in the Reception Area. In the Park of the Four Elements, ducts “emit various mixtures of gasses to create aromatic and hallucinogenic experiences.” In the Park of Aggression, visitors can vent their suppressed hatred by “freely abusing each other.” Average life expectancy is low, but nurses are dancing in transparent uniforms in the Institute of Biological Transactions.

The Reception Area

The Park of Aggression

The Institute of Biological Transactions

The most provocative sector is called the Baths—a place that “brings hidden motivations, desires, and impulses to the surface.” In the collage of the public action and display area, Koolhaas used explicit stills from De Blanke Slavin (The White Slave, 1969), a film he co-wrote with Rene Daalder as members of the youthful “1,2,3, enz” Group. The film is about a group of young women who plan to be trained and work as volunteer nurses in overseas aid projects, but end up trapped in a North African brothel, forced to belly dance and sexually please the white slave master. By putting these images of capture and abuse to illustrate the indulgence and fantasies in the Baths, Koolhaas may be hinting a subtle sign of Stockholm syndrome within the enclave of the Strip. Hallucinated or not, the Voluntary Prisoners do enjoy their captive lives. Their behaviors and emotions reflect an almost twisted hedonism, eerie and dreamy, taking pleasure from a highly controlled situation. No wonder their “ode to the architecture that forever encloses them” is Charles Baudelaire’s poem in Les Fleurs du mal.

The Baths

The Baths

The Avowal

The “1,2,3, enz” Group, including Rem Kolhaas (back left) and Rene Daalder (back right)

Enduring hardships in the pursuit of dreams in the confinement of the Good Half. Aren’t we all voluntary prisoners of architecture?
   

Buroscape

   
I spotted an article on the BBC website yesterday about open-plan offices. “They can be noisy and distracting or depressingly quiet, and frictions with co-workers are guaranteed,” the article writes, “so why do so many of us continue to work in open-plan offices?”

It reminds me of another article I read in Wired a few years ago. Both articles reviewed the history of office layouts and accounted the start of the open-plan office to the Taylorist idea of efficiency. In the American industrial boom of the late 19th century, bosses packed more and more clerical workers in a completely open environment, assembling them into rows of desks facing one direction, much like on a factory floor with production lines. We can see this inhuman condition in movies, and the great work room in FLW’s Johnson Wax building is a living example, although better design and better materials did warm up the space. Hierarchy here is clear – the managers oversee the employees from the mezzanine level, from their private offices with a view outside.

King Vidor, “The Crowd”, 1928

Billy Wilder, “The Apartment”, 1960

Frank Lloyd Wright, Johnson Wax building, 1939

In the 1950s, Quickborner – a team of management consultants in Germany – developed a new office layout concept called “Bürolandschaft” (Office-Landscape). As a critique to the cold and rigid array of desks, this new plan looked free and organic. Desks were scattered in a seemingly random fashion, and clustered in work units of different sizes. Large plants softened the environment, and created some degree of differentiation and privacy. In fact, this overall arrangement was anything but random. It was based upon an intensive study of patterns of communication – between different parts of the organization and different individuals. The Quickborner team put company staff of all ranks together on one open floor, creating a non-hierarchical environment that encouraged communication, discussion, and debate, and at the same time allowing for future flexibility.

Walter Henn, Plan for Osram Offices in Munich, 1965

Osram Offices in Munich

Office Type Organizational Diagram

I don’t know if it was intentional, Ishigami’s Kanagawa Institute of Technology Workshop seems like a contemporary example of the Bürolandschaft idea.

Junya Ishigami, Kanagawa Institute of Technology Workshop, 2008

The Bürolandschaft concept inspired Herman Miller to produce the first modular business furniture system – the Action Office. It had flexible work surfaces that allowed the worker freedom of movement and the possibility to adjust work position according to the task. But the low dividers undermined the original openness and charmingly random quality of Bürolandschaft. Eventually, the competing demands of openness vs. privacy, interaction vs. autonomy landed in a compromise – the cubicle. This new solution defined personal territory while keeping chances to communicate with others, and it was cheap, versatile, and easy to assemble. Soon it became extremely popular and the sea of cubicles (a.k.a. cube farm) was born, although nowadays, especially in sci-fi movies, it has become the symbol of “ordinary and boring jobs.”

Herman Miller’s Action Office system

Jacques Tati, “Playtime”, 1967

Tron, 1982

The Matrix, 1999

A more open office environment may be too noisy and distracting. It may cause more conflicts, over minor things like windows open or not, absent-minded comments, inappropriate jokes, or even ring tones… But I am so glad that I don’t need to work in a sea of cubicles. I guess at the end a healthy office environment really depends primarily on the people who work in it.
   

Phone calls – two new fictional stories

   
#1: Tokyo, Japan

Ito: Moshi moshi?
Sejima: Sensei, congratulations!
Ito: Oh you.
Sejima: We haven’t talked for three years…
Ito: Well, you never called. What do you expect me to do?
Sejima: I still felt guilty after we spoke last time. But now I am really happy. You finally got what you deserve!
Ito: Everybody says “finally,” like I’ve been really waiting for my whole life and my chances were gone. Well, nobody was betting on me this year anyways, not right after you and Wang Shu.
Sejima: Yeah, I was a bit surprised that Yung Ho was powerful enough to get two Asians in a row. Thank Buddha they didn’t pick that Danish kid.
Ito: I would have had a heart attack if they did that.
Sejima: You should have got the prize right after Sendai. It’s truly a masterpiece. The jury was very impressed by the structural tubes.
Ito: I just did what the computer showed. I am glad that it didn’t collapse during the earthquake.
Sejima: The earthquake actually gave us architects some interesting new work. Your “Home-for-All” was great at the Biennale last year.
Ito: I just wanted to bring some young energy and variety to the show, you know. Cheaperfield is quite boring. Can’t believe people bet on him this year.
Sejima: Yeah, he doesn’t change. But you’ve changed quite a lot. Yung Ho said you keep pushing the boundaries of architecture and you are “not afraid of letting go what you have accomplished before.” That’s very nice.
Ito: I am surprise to hear that from you. You know I don’t fix on skinny columns and white buildings all the time. I like to try new things, but they are not easy. People say I’m getting crazy with age. They hate the towers in Barcelona and the solar stadium in Taiwan, for example.
Sejima: It’s OK, sensei. They are not so bad. The jury citation calls you “a creator of timeless buildings, who at the same time boldly charts new paths.” you’ve developed a “syntax” that combines “a spectrum of architectural languages.” Those are very kind words.
Ito: They are basically saying I’m swinging a lot. I think last time they said sometime like that was to Philip Johnson. I guess I am officially the new whore of architecture now.
Sejima: Oh by the way, are you trying something new for the M+ competition in Hong Kong? What is it like?
Ito: Hold on. That’s really why you are calling, isn’t it? Would you tell me what your scheme is like also?
Sejima: Ano…
Ito hangs up.

Nishizawa (staring at Sejima as she puts down the phone): Seriously? The towers in Barcelona? That ugly blue thing in Taiwan?
Sejima: If I told him the truth, he would have hung up right then!


#2: Chengdu, China

The phone rang. Holl picked it up. The other side of the line kept talking but he just remained silent, staring blankly at the Sliced Porosity Block across the street from his hotel room. After what seemed like an hour to him, he slowly put down the phone, shook his head, and huffed, again.
   

Massive Messe

   
The new hall of Messe Basel by HdM had been standing at the end of Clarastrasse for some time before it officially opened a few weeks ago. Much debate was going on about this new gigantic structure: Is such a big building necessary for Basel? How bad is it to block the view towards Messeplatz? In response to the controversy, Jacques Herzog reiterated his vision of a metropolitan Basel that could adopt this large scale, and stated the fact that there had never been an axis intended through Messeplatz in history. On the contrary, the new “City Lounge” provided a covered public space with a dramatic open oculus, continuing traffic and activities from Clarastrasse, and creating a compressed threshold into Messeplatz and the fairs.

I couldn’t decide until a recent tour into the newly finished building. It was mind-blowing. The building is what it needs to be: a very large box with wide span and high ceiling. Standing inside the overwhelming exhibition halls, I felt the scale well justified. I guess it was the only time we could see the entire hall completely empty. But one thing was clear: size does matter.

This vast emptiness will soon be filled with pavilions for the upcoming BaselWorld – the annual international watch and jewelry fair. Rumor has it, the pavilions inside cost twice as much as this already fancy-looking “shell.” And the fair is so profitable that with only 5 days a year, Messe Basel can pay off the construction cost within three years. Crazy.