Architecture and Dirt Introduction
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This article was downloaded by: [Tehran University] On: 19 February 2012, At: 00:41 Publisher: Routledge Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK
The Journal of Architecture
Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rjar20
Architecture and Dirt Introduction
Ben Campkin & Paul Dobraszczyk
a b a b
Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL, London University of Reading, Reading, UK
Available online: 01 Oct 2007
To cite this article: Ben Campkin & Paul Dobraszczyk (2007): Architecture and Dirt Introduction, The Journal of Architecture, 12:4, 347-351 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13602360701614623
PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE Full terms and conditions of use: http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. The publisher does not give any warranty express or implied or make any representation that the contents will be complete or accurate or up to date. The accuracy of any instructions, formulae, and drug doses should be independently verified with primary sources. The publisher shall not be liable for any loss, actions, claims, proceedings, demand, or costs or damages whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with or arising out of the use of this material.
347
The Journal of Architecture Volume 12 Number 4
Architecture and Dirt Introduction
Downloaded by [Tehran University] at 00:41 19 February 2012
Guest editors Ben Campkin, Paul Dobraszczyk
This issue of The Journal of Architecture features new historical and theoretical work around the theme of ‘Architecture and Dirt’. The papers represent a selection of those presented in 2007 at a session on this subject in Pittsburgh during the 60th Annual Meeting of the Society of Architectural Historians. They bring together ideas about dirt and hygiene in relation to history, theory and practice in different cultural, geographical and historical contexts. This theme was resonant in the context of Pittsburgh, a city whose present identity is formed in tension with the ‘dirty’ image of its industrial past, and whose residential neighbourhoods were established relative to topographical features with the avoidance of industrial environmental pollution in mind.1 The relationship between the built environment, hygiene and its ever-present counter, the dirty, has been a justifiably important interpretative theme in relation to architectural Modernism.2 In 1898, Adolf Loos called the plumber the ‘billeting officer of culture’, without whom ‘there would have been no nineteenth century’.3 For Loos, architecture should be clean, pure and upright, echoing the moral impetus behind the improvements in urban sanitation and water supply that had come before. Indeed, if it failed to be so, according to Loos, ‘something very unpleasant, something very shameful, could take place.’4 However, in framing the Pittsburgh conference session it was a central concern to rethink the history of the relationship between Modernism and hygienism with reference to more
# 2007 The Journal of Architecture
Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL, London; University of Reading, Reading, UK recent debates in architectural history and theory, and to theories of dirt and cleanliness (and related concepts) produced outside of the discipline.5 The question of how understandings and perceptions of dirt, as manifest in and evidenced through architecture, cities and their representations, may have shifted in specific contexts since Modernism was highlighted. Is there evidence of architects following contemporary artists in enhancing, rather than eliminating dirt and rubbish in their work, particularly in the context of converting ex-industrial buildings and spaces?6 In what ways do contemporary buildings reflect, or even produce, notions of hygiene through representations of exaggerated cleanliness or, conversely, of dirtiness?7 The seven articles in this collection adopt quite different approaches to the subject and interpretations of ‘dirt’. The following part of this introduction, drawn from the authors’ own abstracts, outlines their arguments and methods, and the themes, concepts and cases they investigate. In his paper, Paul Dobraszczyk considers two buildings that serve to contextualise very precisely the relationship between architecture and dirt in late nineteenth-century Britain: London’s Crossness (1862 –65) and Abbey Mills (1865 –68) pumping stations. In these buildings, human excrement and architecture were brought together at both a functional and symbolic level. Both Crossness and Abbey Mills performed important engineering functions within London’s main drainage system — the world’s first city-wide sewage network, constructed
1360–2365 DOI: 10.1080/13602360701614623
348
Architecture and Dirt Introduction Ben Campkin, Paul Dobraszczyk
Downloaded by [Tehran University] at 00:41 19 February 2012
in the 1860s — and both were key symbolic sites for raising public awareness of that system, as the settings of ceremonies to mark its completion. Dobraszczyk’s paper explores how these buildings became the focus of sustained reflection on the relationship between architecture and dirt. In their design, the architect put forward a redemptive vision of excrement in the city, purified by technological development and enshrined as a valuable resource in itself; visitors saw wonder in the noble function of these structures but also expressed disquiet at the monstrous quantities of sewage concentrated in their subterranean spaces. Dobraszczyk scrutinises late-Victorian conceptions of bodily waste, and urban infrastructures for dealing with it, questioning existing readings of the period. The experience of filth in these two buildings is seen to be rooted in specific historical, spatial, material and architectural contexts. Ben Campkin continues the focus on London and on how ideas about dirt and cleanliness are articulated in the design of specific buildings, but here in reference to contemporary architecture, examining David Adjaye’s ‘Dirty House’ (2001–2002) and the so-called ‘Gritty Brit’ architects. What, if anything, is dirty about the Dirty House? Built for British artists Tim Noble and Sue Webster, known for their ‘anti-aesthetic’ and assemblages of rubbish through which they project silhouetted images of themselves, the exterior of the house evokes an ambiguous narrative of urban dirt and cleanliness which develops from the artists’ work. The house-studio, and Noble and Webster’s sculptures, are used as a platform from which to begin an interdisciplinary rethinking of the social anthropologist Mary Douglas’s (1921–2007)
still-dominant theory of dirt, developed in the 1960s, in relation to creative processes and aesthetic tropes of grittiness and recycling in contemporary British art and architecture. Dirtiness and cleanliness are here considered at a range of different interdependent aesthetic, metaphorical, material, cultural, social and pyschological levels. The location and design of the Dirty House, its representation and critical reception, are examined developing an interdisciplinary analysis appropriate both to the building and to the topic of ‘dirt’ as a multi-disciplinary territory. Relevant theoretical contexts and aesthetic precedents are explored from within and outside of the discipline of architecture, such as New Brutalism’s ‘frugal pastoral’; Giuliana Bruno’s ‘aesthetic of recycling’; Sharon Zukin’s analysis of ‘loft living’; Julian Stallabrass’s notion of the ‘urban pastoral’; and Hal Foster’s critique of Frank Gehry’s ‘grunge aesthetic’. Following on from this, Renata Hejduk discusses concepts of decay, eroticism, and violence in Bernard Tschumi’s writings, drawn from those of Georges Bataille, and explores how these themes operate to critique Modernism’s ‘clean’ ideological facade. In the mid-1970s Tschumi began to use the ¸ writings of Bataille, in particular his theories of transgression and violence, as a conceptual framework to locate his own developing philosophy of architecture. Hejduk argues that as he works through and interprets Bataille’s writings, Tschumi develops an alternative and provocative articulation of the complex and dialectical relationship between the ‘ideal’ and the ‘real’ in architecture. In his 1975 Artforum photo-essay ‘Advertisements for Architecture’, Tschumi uses an image of the
349
The Journal of Architecture Volume 12 Number 4
Downloaded by [Tehran University] at 00:41 19 February 2012
rotting and filthy Villa Savoye, designed by Le Corbusier, to confront contemporary art consumers with their deepest fears about the forward march of decay towards death. In doing so, he emphasises the role of architectural Modernism — idealised, rational, clean, and white — as an agent in the wider social repression of anxieties about death. For Tschumi, the dilapidated monument to the machine age is presented as the ultimate ‘erotic’ object/ act — in that it is ‘caught between sensuality and rigour’, revealing both the ‘traces of reason’ and the ‘sensual experience of space’ in its neglected state. Hejduk traces the theoretical underpinnings, as well as the ideological struggle, that Tschumi grapples with as he attempts to find a way to practise and to conceptualise architecture after Modernism. Derelict places of industrial production have often been converted into cultural venues, but little has been written about the underlying attitudes towards accumulations of dirt and leftover materials which often feature in such projects — the subject of Phoebe Crisman’s paper. Dirtiness here is not normally literal dirt found underfoot, but architectural palimpsest, imperfection, and the stigmas of former economic or social disenfranchisement and neglect associated with particular buildings. Returning to a focus on materials, Crisman explores the treatment of dirt and decay in the transformation of four ex-industrial buildings recently converted into art museums: London’s Tate Modern; New York’s Dia: Beacon; the Design Zentrum Nordrhein Westfalen in Essen; and the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art in North Adam. In these architectural recycling projects industrial ‘dirt’ is either purposefully removed or enhanced.
Crisman’s analysis is structured in reference to several overlapping contexts and conditions: the shift from industrial to cultural production; from anonymous sites, obscured from view, to branded sights; a consideration of the cultural construction of the significance of different materials; and strategies towards weathering, history and memory. The argument is put forward that in the case of leftover and reconfigured ex-industrial architecture, openness to material change, patina and even dirtiness constitute an effective means of allowing the past to remain visible and provocative, while positioning cultural institutions in the present. Psychoanalytic theory provides a particularly rich territory for the exploration of ideas about dirt and cleanliness, and in his paper Lorens Holm draws on this work, in a subjective and humorous account of relationships between architecture and dirt. Holm’s paper begins with a reminiscence about a high-impact memory from his school days, in which the word ‘shit’ was smeared in shit upon the walls of the academy. It uses the ‘grossness’ of shit as the site for a process of free-association which traverses the topics of shit, our bodies, memory, writing on walls (graffiti, the doom-laden prophesy), defacement, and loathing, in contemporary architectural culture. In the process Holm draws on a number of texts familiar to cultural historians, in particular those of Jacques Lacan and Dominique Laporte. The paper also explores a form of confessional style that plays counterpoint to the academic research culture of which it is a part. Teresa Stoppani returns us to the psychoanalyticallyinformed work of Bataille, with her consideration of dust and architecture. Seeing dust as an omnipresent,
350
Architecture and Dirt Introduction Ben Campkin, Paul Dobraszczyk
Downloaded by [Tehran University] at 00:41 19 February 2012
if often overlooked, element of architecture, Stoppani argues, in a similar vein to Hejduk, that dust questions the relationship between architecture’s image — its idea and representation — and its physical realisation and inhabitation. Using Bataille’s writings as a platform, the reader is prompted to engage in a material approach to architecture that subverts its established ideals and the fixity of its material forms. Dry, light, impalpable, volatile, dust is somewhat less dirty than dirt. And yet it remains — physically and hygienically but also metaphorically — an ambiguous antagonist and an always-present element of architecture. Dust physically attacks and alters the materials of architecture, while it is, in fact, partly made of architecture’s materials, through their wearing, weathering and ruination, from fragments, to debris, to powder. Always at work with and on the materials of architecture, dust alters their properties and produces visual and tactile modifications. Dust, argues Stoppani, thus measures and occupies the distance between architecture’s image and its physical realisation, construction and inhabitation. The architectural mediation of urban ‘pollution’ has always been part of the restructuring of urban space from Victorian times to the present. While the history of nineteenth-century sanitary reform and its architectural manifestations in the Victorian city are well known (if under-theorised); less understood are the architectural mediations of urban pollution in late-modern urban development. David Gissen’s essay examines how the development of the Washington Bridge Apartments in the Washington Heights neighbourhood of New York City promised middle-class residents an enclave
from urban pollution in an otherwise working-class and impoverished precinct. The Apartments were one of the first highway ‘air-rights developments’ in the United States — a form of construction in which highways are built with inhabitable structures spanning the open space of the highway. As such, the Bridge Apartments offer a new image of the architectural mediation of pollution as an integral aspect of urban gentrification. In this development a neighbourhood was transformed through simultaneously introducing the pollution, dirt and grime of a highway and providing an enclave from that pollution. The seven papers included in this collection raise many provocative questions about relationships between architecture, cities and dirt, and suggest new ways at looking at this theme. As well as highlighting themes such as the architectural aesthetics of hygienism and the conversion of contaminated ex-industrial spaces and structures, the papers also emphasise the ways in which conditions of dirtiness, decay and disorder have been and continue to be important in developing means to challenge or subvert dominant modes of architectural production, programme and form. They provide a platform on which to begin to rethink the history of Modernist hygienism, and to explore contemporary aesthetic interests in dirt and dealings with contamination from an interdisciplinary perspective.8
Acknowledgements
We wish to express our thanks to Professor Dietrich Neumann, General Chair of the 60th Annual Meeting, April 2007, of the Society of Architectural
351
The Journal of Architecture Volume 12 Number 4
Downloaded by [Tehran University] at 00:41 19 February 2012
Historians; and to the editors of The Journal of Architecture, Allen Cunningham and Peter Gibbs-Kennet in particular.
Notes and references
1. T. Myers, ‘Up, Down, Over and Around: an Introduction to Pittsburgh’s Physical Environment’, lecture, Society of Architectural Historians 60th Annual Meeting, Pittsburgh, USA (2007). 2. See, for example: W. J. Cohen and R. Johnson, Filth: Dirt, Disgust, and Modern Life (Minneapolis and London, University of Minnesota Press, 2005); A. Forty, Objects of Desire: Design and Society Since 1750 (London and New York, Thames and Hudson, 1986); N. Lahiji and D. S. Friedman, eds, Plumbing: Sounding Modern Architecture (New York, Princeton Architectural Press, 1997); D. Laporte, History of Shit, trs, N. Benabid and R. el-Khoury (Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, The MIT Press and Documents Magazine Inc., 2000); T. Markus, Buildings and Power: Freedom and Control in the Origin of Modern Building Types (London and New York, Routledge, 1993); P. Palmer, Domesticity and Dirt: Housewives and Domestic Servants in the United States, 1920 – 1945 (Philadelphia, Temple University Press, 1989); M. Wigley, White Walls, Designer Dresses: the Fashioning of Modern Architecture (Cambridge, Mass. and London, MIT Press, 2001). 3. A. Loos, ‘Plumbers’ (1898) in N. Lahiji and D. Friedman, eds, Plumbing, op. cit., pp. 15, 18.
4. Ibid., p. 19. 5. See, for example: Z. Bauman, Wasted Lives: Modernity and its Outcasts (Oxford, Polity, 2004); W. J. Cohen, ‘Introduction: locating filth’, in, W. J. Cohen and R. Johnson, eds, Filth, op. cit., pp. vii – xxxvii; M. Cousins, ‘The Ugly’, AA Files, 29 (1994), pp.9 (1994) 3 –6; M. Cousins, ‘The Ugly’, AA Files, 28 (1996), pp. 61– 64; M. Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London, Routledge Classics, 1966/2002); J. Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trs., L. Roudiez (New York, Columbia University Press, 1982); D. Laporte, History of Shit, op cit.; E. Shove, Comfort, Cleanliness and Convenience: the Social Organization of Normality (Oxford, BERG, 2003); P. Stallybrass and A. White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (Ithaca, New York, Cornell University Press, 1986). 6. On ‘dirt’ and rubbish in art see L. Vergine, Trash: From Junk to Art (Milan, SIAE, 1997); and J. Scanlan, On Garbage (London, Reaktion Books, 2005). 7. Adrian Forty discusses the ‘imagery of exaggerated cleanliness’ in relation to the hygiene aesthetic in modern design in A. Forty, ‘Hygiene and Cleanliness’, Objects of Desire: Design and Society Since 1750 (London, Thames and Hudson, 1986), p. 156. 8. For further discussion of the topic in relation to spatial disciplines, see also Ben Campkin and Rosie Cox, eds, Dirt: New Geographies of Cleanliness and Contamination (London: IB Tauris, 2007).
The Journal of Architecture
Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rjar20
Architecture and Dirt Introduction
Ben Campkin & Paul Dobraszczyk
a b a b
Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL, London University of Reading, Reading, UK
Available online: 01 Oct 2007
To cite this article: Ben Campkin & Paul Dobraszczyk (2007): Architecture and Dirt Introduction, The Journal of Architecture, 12:4, 347-351 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13602360701614623
PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE Full terms and conditions of use: http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. The publisher does not give any warranty express or implied or make any representation that the contents will be complete or accurate or up to date. The accuracy of any instructions, formulae, and drug doses should be independently verified with primary sources. The publisher shall not be liable for any loss, actions, claims, proceedings, demand, or costs or damages whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with or arising out of the use of this material.
347
The Journal of Architecture Volume 12 Number 4
Architecture and Dirt Introduction
Downloaded by [Tehran University] at 00:41 19 February 2012
Guest editors Ben Campkin, Paul Dobraszczyk
This issue of The Journal of Architecture features new historical and theoretical work around the theme of ‘Architecture and Dirt’. The papers represent a selection of those presented in 2007 at a session on this subject in Pittsburgh during the 60th Annual Meeting of the Society of Architectural Historians. They bring together ideas about dirt and hygiene in relation to history, theory and practice in different cultural, geographical and historical contexts. This theme was resonant in the context of Pittsburgh, a city whose present identity is formed in tension with the ‘dirty’ image of its industrial past, and whose residential neighbourhoods were established relative to topographical features with the avoidance of industrial environmental pollution in mind.1 The relationship between the built environment, hygiene and its ever-present counter, the dirty, has been a justifiably important interpretative theme in relation to architectural Modernism.2 In 1898, Adolf Loos called the plumber the ‘billeting officer of culture’, without whom ‘there would have been no nineteenth century’.3 For Loos, architecture should be clean, pure and upright, echoing the moral impetus behind the improvements in urban sanitation and water supply that had come before. Indeed, if it failed to be so, according to Loos, ‘something very unpleasant, something very shameful, could take place.’4 However, in framing the Pittsburgh conference session it was a central concern to rethink the history of the relationship between Modernism and hygienism with reference to more
# 2007 The Journal of Architecture
Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL, London; University of Reading, Reading, UK recent debates in architectural history and theory, and to theories of dirt and cleanliness (and related concepts) produced outside of the discipline.5 The question of how understandings and perceptions of dirt, as manifest in and evidenced through architecture, cities and their representations, may have shifted in specific contexts since Modernism was highlighted. Is there evidence of architects following contemporary artists in enhancing, rather than eliminating dirt and rubbish in their work, particularly in the context of converting ex-industrial buildings and spaces?6 In what ways do contemporary buildings reflect, or even produce, notions of hygiene through representations of exaggerated cleanliness or, conversely, of dirtiness?7 The seven articles in this collection adopt quite different approaches to the subject and interpretations of ‘dirt’. The following part of this introduction, drawn from the authors’ own abstracts, outlines their arguments and methods, and the themes, concepts and cases they investigate. In his paper, Paul Dobraszczyk considers two buildings that serve to contextualise very precisely the relationship between architecture and dirt in late nineteenth-century Britain: London’s Crossness (1862 –65) and Abbey Mills (1865 –68) pumping stations. In these buildings, human excrement and architecture were brought together at both a functional and symbolic level. Both Crossness and Abbey Mills performed important engineering functions within London’s main drainage system — the world’s first city-wide sewage network, constructed
1360–2365 DOI: 10.1080/13602360701614623
348
Architecture and Dirt Introduction Ben Campkin, Paul Dobraszczyk
Downloaded by [Tehran University] at 00:41 19 February 2012
in the 1860s — and both were key symbolic sites for raising public awareness of that system, as the settings of ceremonies to mark its completion. Dobraszczyk’s paper explores how these buildings became the focus of sustained reflection on the relationship between architecture and dirt. In their design, the architect put forward a redemptive vision of excrement in the city, purified by technological development and enshrined as a valuable resource in itself; visitors saw wonder in the noble function of these structures but also expressed disquiet at the monstrous quantities of sewage concentrated in their subterranean spaces. Dobraszczyk scrutinises late-Victorian conceptions of bodily waste, and urban infrastructures for dealing with it, questioning existing readings of the period. The experience of filth in these two buildings is seen to be rooted in specific historical, spatial, material and architectural contexts. Ben Campkin continues the focus on London and on how ideas about dirt and cleanliness are articulated in the design of specific buildings, but here in reference to contemporary architecture, examining David Adjaye’s ‘Dirty House’ (2001–2002) and the so-called ‘Gritty Brit’ architects. What, if anything, is dirty about the Dirty House? Built for British artists Tim Noble and Sue Webster, known for their ‘anti-aesthetic’ and assemblages of rubbish through which they project silhouetted images of themselves, the exterior of the house evokes an ambiguous narrative of urban dirt and cleanliness which develops from the artists’ work. The house-studio, and Noble and Webster’s sculptures, are used as a platform from which to begin an interdisciplinary rethinking of the social anthropologist Mary Douglas’s (1921–2007)
still-dominant theory of dirt, developed in the 1960s, in relation to creative processes and aesthetic tropes of grittiness and recycling in contemporary British art and architecture. Dirtiness and cleanliness are here considered at a range of different interdependent aesthetic, metaphorical, material, cultural, social and pyschological levels. The location and design of the Dirty House, its representation and critical reception, are examined developing an interdisciplinary analysis appropriate both to the building and to the topic of ‘dirt’ as a multi-disciplinary territory. Relevant theoretical contexts and aesthetic precedents are explored from within and outside of the discipline of architecture, such as New Brutalism’s ‘frugal pastoral’; Giuliana Bruno’s ‘aesthetic of recycling’; Sharon Zukin’s analysis of ‘loft living’; Julian Stallabrass’s notion of the ‘urban pastoral’; and Hal Foster’s critique of Frank Gehry’s ‘grunge aesthetic’. Following on from this, Renata Hejduk discusses concepts of decay, eroticism, and violence in Bernard Tschumi’s writings, drawn from those of Georges Bataille, and explores how these themes operate to critique Modernism’s ‘clean’ ideological facade. In the mid-1970s Tschumi began to use the ¸ writings of Bataille, in particular his theories of transgression and violence, as a conceptual framework to locate his own developing philosophy of architecture. Hejduk argues that as he works through and interprets Bataille’s writings, Tschumi develops an alternative and provocative articulation of the complex and dialectical relationship between the ‘ideal’ and the ‘real’ in architecture. In his 1975 Artforum photo-essay ‘Advertisements for Architecture’, Tschumi uses an image of the
349
The Journal of Architecture Volume 12 Number 4
Downloaded by [Tehran University] at 00:41 19 February 2012
rotting and filthy Villa Savoye, designed by Le Corbusier, to confront contemporary art consumers with their deepest fears about the forward march of decay towards death. In doing so, he emphasises the role of architectural Modernism — idealised, rational, clean, and white — as an agent in the wider social repression of anxieties about death. For Tschumi, the dilapidated monument to the machine age is presented as the ultimate ‘erotic’ object/ act — in that it is ‘caught between sensuality and rigour’, revealing both the ‘traces of reason’ and the ‘sensual experience of space’ in its neglected state. Hejduk traces the theoretical underpinnings, as well as the ideological struggle, that Tschumi grapples with as he attempts to find a way to practise and to conceptualise architecture after Modernism. Derelict places of industrial production have often been converted into cultural venues, but little has been written about the underlying attitudes towards accumulations of dirt and leftover materials which often feature in such projects — the subject of Phoebe Crisman’s paper. Dirtiness here is not normally literal dirt found underfoot, but architectural palimpsest, imperfection, and the stigmas of former economic or social disenfranchisement and neglect associated with particular buildings. Returning to a focus on materials, Crisman explores the treatment of dirt and decay in the transformation of four ex-industrial buildings recently converted into art museums: London’s Tate Modern; New York’s Dia: Beacon; the Design Zentrum Nordrhein Westfalen in Essen; and the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art in North Adam. In these architectural recycling projects industrial ‘dirt’ is either purposefully removed or enhanced.
Crisman’s analysis is structured in reference to several overlapping contexts and conditions: the shift from industrial to cultural production; from anonymous sites, obscured from view, to branded sights; a consideration of the cultural construction of the significance of different materials; and strategies towards weathering, history and memory. The argument is put forward that in the case of leftover and reconfigured ex-industrial architecture, openness to material change, patina and even dirtiness constitute an effective means of allowing the past to remain visible and provocative, while positioning cultural institutions in the present. Psychoanalytic theory provides a particularly rich territory for the exploration of ideas about dirt and cleanliness, and in his paper Lorens Holm draws on this work, in a subjective and humorous account of relationships between architecture and dirt. Holm’s paper begins with a reminiscence about a high-impact memory from his school days, in which the word ‘shit’ was smeared in shit upon the walls of the academy. It uses the ‘grossness’ of shit as the site for a process of free-association which traverses the topics of shit, our bodies, memory, writing on walls (graffiti, the doom-laden prophesy), defacement, and loathing, in contemporary architectural culture. In the process Holm draws on a number of texts familiar to cultural historians, in particular those of Jacques Lacan and Dominique Laporte. The paper also explores a form of confessional style that plays counterpoint to the academic research culture of which it is a part. Teresa Stoppani returns us to the psychoanalyticallyinformed work of Bataille, with her consideration of dust and architecture. Seeing dust as an omnipresent,
350
Architecture and Dirt Introduction Ben Campkin, Paul Dobraszczyk
Downloaded by [Tehran University] at 00:41 19 February 2012
if often overlooked, element of architecture, Stoppani argues, in a similar vein to Hejduk, that dust questions the relationship between architecture’s image — its idea and representation — and its physical realisation and inhabitation. Using Bataille’s writings as a platform, the reader is prompted to engage in a material approach to architecture that subverts its established ideals and the fixity of its material forms. Dry, light, impalpable, volatile, dust is somewhat less dirty than dirt. And yet it remains — physically and hygienically but also metaphorically — an ambiguous antagonist and an always-present element of architecture. Dust physically attacks and alters the materials of architecture, while it is, in fact, partly made of architecture’s materials, through their wearing, weathering and ruination, from fragments, to debris, to powder. Always at work with and on the materials of architecture, dust alters their properties and produces visual and tactile modifications. Dust, argues Stoppani, thus measures and occupies the distance between architecture’s image and its physical realisation, construction and inhabitation. The architectural mediation of urban ‘pollution’ has always been part of the restructuring of urban space from Victorian times to the present. While the history of nineteenth-century sanitary reform and its architectural manifestations in the Victorian city are well known (if under-theorised); less understood are the architectural mediations of urban pollution in late-modern urban development. David Gissen’s essay examines how the development of the Washington Bridge Apartments in the Washington Heights neighbourhood of New York City promised middle-class residents an enclave
from urban pollution in an otherwise working-class and impoverished precinct. The Apartments were one of the first highway ‘air-rights developments’ in the United States — a form of construction in which highways are built with inhabitable structures spanning the open space of the highway. As such, the Bridge Apartments offer a new image of the architectural mediation of pollution as an integral aspect of urban gentrification. In this development a neighbourhood was transformed through simultaneously introducing the pollution, dirt and grime of a highway and providing an enclave from that pollution. The seven papers included in this collection raise many provocative questions about relationships between architecture, cities and dirt, and suggest new ways at looking at this theme. As well as highlighting themes such as the architectural aesthetics of hygienism and the conversion of contaminated ex-industrial spaces and structures, the papers also emphasise the ways in which conditions of dirtiness, decay and disorder have been and continue to be important in developing means to challenge or subvert dominant modes of architectural production, programme and form. They provide a platform on which to begin to rethink the history of Modernist hygienism, and to explore contemporary aesthetic interests in dirt and dealings with contamination from an interdisciplinary perspective.8
Acknowledgements
We wish to express our thanks to Professor Dietrich Neumann, General Chair of the 60th Annual Meeting, April 2007, of the Society of Architectural
351
The Journal of Architecture Volume 12 Number 4
Downloaded by [Tehran University] at 00:41 19 February 2012
Historians; and to the editors of The Journal of Architecture, Allen Cunningham and Peter Gibbs-Kennet in particular.
Notes and references
1. T. Myers, ‘Up, Down, Over and Around: an Introduction to Pittsburgh’s Physical Environment’, lecture, Society of Architectural Historians 60th Annual Meeting, Pittsburgh, USA (2007). 2. See, for example: W. J. Cohen and R. Johnson, Filth: Dirt, Disgust, and Modern Life (Minneapolis and London, University of Minnesota Press, 2005); A. Forty, Objects of Desire: Design and Society Since 1750 (London and New York, Thames and Hudson, 1986); N. Lahiji and D. S. Friedman, eds, Plumbing: Sounding Modern Architecture (New York, Princeton Architectural Press, 1997); D. Laporte, History of Shit, trs, N. Benabid and R. el-Khoury (Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, The MIT Press and Documents Magazine Inc., 2000); T. Markus, Buildings and Power: Freedom and Control in the Origin of Modern Building Types (London and New York, Routledge, 1993); P. Palmer, Domesticity and Dirt: Housewives and Domestic Servants in the United States, 1920 – 1945 (Philadelphia, Temple University Press, 1989); M. Wigley, White Walls, Designer Dresses: the Fashioning of Modern Architecture (Cambridge, Mass. and London, MIT Press, 2001). 3. A. Loos, ‘Plumbers’ (1898) in N. Lahiji and D. Friedman, eds, Plumbing, op. cit., pp. 15, 18.
4. Ibid., p. 19. 5. See, for example: Z. Bauman, Wasted Lives: Modernity and its Outcasts (Oxford, Polity, 2004); W. J. Cohen, ‘Introduction: locating filth’, in, W. J. Cohen and R. Johnson, eds, Filth, op. cit., pp. vii – xxxvii; M. Cousins, ‘The Ugly’, AA Files, 29 (1994), pp.9 (1994) 3 –6; M. Cousins, ‘The Ugly’, AA Files, 28 (1996), pp. 61– 64; M. Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London, Routledge Classics, 1966/2002); J. Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trs., L. Roudiez (New York, Columbia University Press, 1982); D. Laporte, History of Shit, op cit.; E. Shove, Comfort, Cleanliness and Convenience: the Social Organization of Normality (Oxford, BERG, 2003); P. Stallybrass and A. White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (Ithaca, New York, Cornell University Press, 1986). 6. On ‘dirt’ and rubbish in art see L. Vergine, Trash: From Junk to Art (Milan, SIAE, 1997); and J. Scanlan, On Garbage (London, Reaktion Books, 2005). 7. Adrian Forty discusses the ‘imagery of exaggerated cleanliness’ in relation to the hygiene aesthetic in modern design in A. Forty, ‘Hygiene and Cleanliness’, Objects of Desire: Design and Society Since 1750 (London, Thames and Hudson, 1986), p. 156. 8. For further discussion of the topic in relation to spatial disciplines, see also Ben Campkin and Rosie Cox, eds, Dirt: New Geographies of Cleanliness and Contamination (London: IB Tauris, 2007).
