Author’s Account: A Journey Around My Apartment
The project investigates the coexistence and correlation between the inhabitants within my apartment building on the basis of artistic practices and my own lived experience. These everyday spaces form the primary interface between ourselves and the larger social entity of the city. Consciously, or partly unknowingly, one interacts with others through spatial demarcations, using the embedded spatial devices (such as a squeaking floorboard, a peephole, mailboxes, etc.) that project life and the presence of other people through sound, light, or matter. Most of these devices are partly unintended, often serve other practical functions, and go unnoticed.
Using my own subjective life-world and critical spatial practices1 these devices are uncovered, deciphered and exposed bit by bit:
It all began with a special affection for the stairway, a shared social space and facilitator of correlation that we pass through daily without giving much attention: a neutral place that belongs to all and to none.2 The public (city) gradually becomes the domestic (an apartment) through a sequence of spatial demarcations. As one ascends the stairway, passing by the neighbours’ domestic realms, the sound of one’s conversations and footsteps are projected through the partly hollow steps, as is the image through the peepholes of the neighbours’ doors.
To probe this threshold between the private and semi-public, I constructed a fully automatic, analogue camera that captured a photograph every time it sensed activity on the other side of the door.3 It taps into the existing elements, using the peephole as the lens and the door as a front panel: without the door, the camera back is useless. The camera captured the comings, goings, and non-events of the stairway in a performative manner, different from the usual static, diagrammatic architectural drawing. One is simultaneously part of the actual space – grasped by the flows of the stairway – and has some distance to it.4 Throughout the process of building, installing, and calibrating the camera I spent significant time at this threshold that one normally transcends and crosses in seconds. The images produced rendered the passing people as only partly readable shapes: as familiar strangers5 that one recognises, yet knows almost nothing about. In combination with the properties and nature of the camera itself, this led to a realisation of the intricate network of already existing spatial projection devices (or hinges) of correlation in the apartment block – as described on the previous page – which facilitate our correlation with others. The camera became a relay6 for gaining new insights and for moving from one point of understanding to another.
I extended the field of inquiry and started mapping out the other, less obvious, spatial projection devices of coexistence. Using a 3D laser scanner I toured my apartment systematically for two full days. Laser scanning is a slow and meticulous process and the exposure time of each of the twenty scans took 2–4 minutes, followed by a careful repositioning of the device and later of the software processing. This slowing down of perception provided a heightened sensitivity and awareness of the seemingly banal:
in the end, sixteen spatial projection devices were located and unfolded through creative writing, departing from my own spatial encounters. However, this is not an absolute and finite number; instead, it provides a wide range of different scales and media used for projecting life across the spatial demarcations, from the acoustic relation with Boulevard Caféen, reflected through the window left ajar (an event in real time), to the discarded cigarette still smouldering by the entrance door, providing a sense of prior presence or of an event that just unfolded (a deposition over time).
The camera, the 3D laser scanning and the written descriptions could all be related to photographic practices and lend terms such as ‘field of view’, ‘exposure’ and ‘development’. Each work is complimentary to one another: the vague and temporal images of the camera, the precise depiction of geometrical space produced by the laser scanner, and my own lived encounters withheld and processed through written descriptions. They all play their part in the overall research, like instruments in an orchestra forming a whole. The photographs and the laser scans are proofs that something existed7, while the written part is ‘[unable] to authenticate itself’ because ‘language is, by nature, fictional’8 since it is filtered through the body and mind of the author.
Both the peephole camera and the 3D scanner captured occupation – capturing not only the blank spaces of architecture but also everything in-between. Usually this is something that is absent in architectural drawings or in the thinking of architects in general: in most cases, in the eyes of architects, architecture ends with occupation, in contrast to ‘the milieus of artists, photographers and film-makers[, which] resonate with the characteristics and fates of their inhabitants’.9 Hence, we as architects need to establish new tools for engaging with the socio-spatial realm – and need to consider the inhabitants as co-authors of space.
Partly because of its existence for more than a century and the construction methods of the time it was built, my apartment building is full of imperfections and spatial devices that enhance the sense of collective being and existence. When building and designing today, one strives for the opposite: ultimate isolation from others in one’s own domestic realm. Spaces are mute and blind. Instead of the usual negative connotations, there is a latent potential in embracing these spatial ‘imperfections’ to prompt new devices, spaces, and future building practices with a larger emphasis on (indirect) social interaction and coexistence. If the city is to continue being socially sustainable, with the fast-paced growth, splintering, and privatisation of space, a recalibration of the city’s social dimension becomes gradually more important.
1. ‘I suggest a new term, “critical spatial practice”, which allows us to describe work that transgresses the limits of art and architecture and engages with both the social and the aesthetic, the public and the private. This term draws attention not only to the importance of the critical, but also to the spatial, indicating the interest in exploring the specifically spatial aspects of interdisciplinary processes or practices that operate between art and architecture.’ Jane Rendell, Art and Architecture: A Place Between (London: I. B. Tauris, 2006), p. 6.
2. Georges Perec, ‘On the Stairs, 1’, in Life, a User’s Manual, trans. by David Bellos (London: Collins Harvill, 1987; repr. London: Vintage, 2003), pp. 3–6.
3. Powered by Arduino Nano and an x-band motion detector. See illustration
for details.
4. Henri Lefebvre, ‘Seen from the Window’, in Rhythmanalysis: Space, Time, and Everyday Life, trans. by Stuart Elden and Gerald Moore (London: Continuum, 2004), pp. 27–37.
5. Georg Simmel, ‘The Stranger’, The Sociology of Georg Simmel, trans. and ed. by Kurt H. Wolff (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1950), pp. 402–8.
6. Michel Foucault, ‘Intellectuals and Power: A Conversation between Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze’, in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. by Donald F. Bouchard, trans. by Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977), pp. 205–17.
7. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), p. 85.
8. Lonneke de Groot, Look with All Your Eyes Look! Georges Perec and the Photographic Gaze on Space, From Atget to Gefeller (Amsterdam: L. de Groot, 2013). p. 7.
9 Juhani Pallasmaa, Encounters 2: Architectural Essays, ed. by Peter B. MacKeith (Helsinki: Rakennustieto, 2012), p. 261.
1. Shutter in aluminium with brass blades.
2. Peephole lens in door.
3. X-band motion sensor, senses movement through door.
4. Arduino Nano microprocessor.
5. Servo controlling shutter mechanism.
6. Lens from an old optician’s set, for focusing light onto film.
7. House for 35mm film, 3D-printed plastic, coated.
8. Mechanism for rewinding film.
9. Gear and servo for advancing film after each shot.
10. Body, water-jet cut metal sheets.