Walking with fear
Jacob Voorthuis
The following essay was written in response to a
project by a loose affiliation of graphic artists and architects, known as the
SHINE group, who together realised an intervention in one of the more difficult
areas of
The essay was originally published in Theo Hauben & Marco Vermeulen eds.
Fear and Space, the view of young
designers in the
A tweak entails a far from straightforward complement
of activities and gestures. The OED gives a relatively straight forward
definition: “to seize and pull sharply with a twisting movement.” It backs this
definition up with a telling example: “To pull by the nose as a mark of
contempt” That is where the word’s innocence is lost, in the possibility of
contempt. In my own mind tweaking conjures up the image of an experienced hostess
surveying her living room with a penetrating, military gaze while brushing
through and giving a last tug at the curtains and the expensive lush sofa
before welcoming her visitors. A third variation, and one I suspect to be
rather closer to the purposes of the Shine group, involves the small but confident
adjustments to the impressive constellation of knobs on a mixing panel in a studio
before the recording is finalised. All three variations will play an implicit
and silent role in the following essay which tries to explore the theoretical
environment in which the Shine group have launched their TWEAK project.
The essay sets out to do two
things. In the first place it is an attempt to undermine the concept of fear as
a seemingly well-defined and apparently self-evident praxis. In the second I
want to look at the idea of domestication of space. Both of these are
necessary, I believe, to make sense not just of the intentions of the Shine
group, but the possibility of a wider reading of the project.
Shine’s urban intervention
attempts, in my view to do two interesting things. On the one hand it is an
exercise in recalibrating the conventional responsibilities of architectural
and urban design. In this way they have taken Cedric Price’s short sharp thrust
to heart: “It is vital to see where architecture isn’t needed” Their attempt to
design a soft architecture, rather than a hard architecture questions the role of
the urban designer, the architect, whereby the required product is not a
building, not an urban assembly, but merely a questioning of assumptions, a
restructuring of the social space through interventions which have as their
sole purpose to make people conscious of themselves and their ideas about
things. In this sense they are entering the realm of art. In this project they
have chosen to graft the comfortably familiar, an open wall-less living room,
into the all too familiar space of modern alienation. In this way their
simulated living room, is at one and the same time an existential act of the
absurd as well as a gesture with a clean political purpose: (re)domesticating
the modern sublime. The incongruence of the graft, will they hope stimulate a re-evaluation
of urban spaces and our knee-jerk reaction to them.
The idea of the street as an
urban living room is of course not new. Walter Benjamin had explored the idea
of public space as an interior space, the street as a living room. Louis Kahn described the street as a room by
agreement. Aldo van Eyck wanted the city to be a
house and vice verse. People in rather more kindly climates than the Dutch have
been living the idea of a street as a
living room since time immemorial, since the first street was conceived perhaps
in Khirokitia, Cyprus. More recently Koolhaas placed a wall-less living room in the large empty
agora of his conference centre. Mies, Philip Johnson
and Shiguro Ban have explored wall-less-ness in their
houses, inviting a similar confrontation with the outside. The designers of modern
nomadism have often played with the weird intimacy of
domestic bliss in unheimisch surroundings; Archigram and Superstudio are
potent examples from the sixties. So the answer might not be new as such, but
what is new is the question as well as the context in
which the answer is given. And that gives us the peculiar flavour to this project.
This open, wall-less urban living room was specifically conjured up to deal
with spaces that have become infected by fear.
The world has changed. Not just the former colonies,
but now
The circle is nearing
completion: our super-civilisation is also and at the same time a
super-barbarism, the forms and protocols of which are slowly becoming clear.
The two compatible opposites: the increase in wild untamed behaviour and the
enlightened spirit that has accommodated this behaviour and prepared its way have
combined to create a new hyper sensitivity to fear. The enlightened are still
unwilling to act against their vision of the utopian primitive and as a result
two movements have tried to supplant them. On the one hand an increasingly
paralysing technology of safety has been developed. On the other a boorish sect
of quasi military self-help cleansers has stood up to “take matters in their
own hand”. This spiral of the enlightened wilderness has all the potential of
blowing up into a drama of ethnic recrimination requiring football–like
loyalties and aesthetically motivated violence. All this is set against an
urban landscape in which the focus has been on simple logistics, scale enlargement
and economic volume. It has created a modern sublime of scaleless
coarsely woven infrastructure
with its plethora of dark shadowy empty places.
It is in this context that
Shine have done their subtle tweaking. They do not
wish to erase the product of modern economics, the landscape of logistics, they
wish to brace us against it. They wish to tweak the city and tweak our minds,
they wish to regain Aristotles’ wonderful definition
of the city as a place where it is good
to be, not by means of an appeal to our conservatism and knee-jerkish attitude to everything that is familiarly
unfamiliar and by transforming the modern into the twee,
but by setting the comfortably familiar of the domestic into the familiar
setting of the alien. In this sense the wall-lessness
of their living room is interesting.
Fear is a curious concept in that, more than any other
word, it is defined within the blind parameters of cultural and perhaps
biological prejudice. For the purposes of this essay we need not dig too deep,
but it would be useful to define fear not in terms of the catalogue of different possible
fears and phobias such as agora-, claustro- and assymmetrophobia. Nor do we need to look at the theatre of
repression and the metaphysical psychology of Freud. What we need to do is to
look at fear as a praxis, as an activity rather than a
feeling. To define fear we have to have an idea of what people with fear do. Fear
as an activity is similar to the Aristotelian theoria, a form of exercise
whereby one’s image and knowledge of the world is consciously brought forth, contemplated,
rehearsed and made subject to a rigorous critique of its internal structure. In
this sense fear, as a dialectical activity upon a flood of images and affects
in the mind is an act of continuous portraiture. The connection between fear
and mobility, which the Shine group have seized upon
is cogent. Movement and fear are complementary, even if that movement is
realised only as a wish. Fear is an act of portraiture, in which modalities are
given concrete form in provisionally prepared responses, rehearsed as the familiar
landscape of fear unfolds itself to us as we walk. The repainting of the object
of fear is thus continuous; it is like the Mona Lisa, continually reworked and
continually reinterpreted: now the portrait of a middleclass housewife, then
the portrait of Leonardo himself... Fear is a portrait which is continually
reworked up until the moment of the artist’s death. It forms part of his
legacy; he leaves behind him the most complete portrait of his fear. This
portrait apart from being an instrument of self-revelation is also magical in
Collingwood’s classic sense. A person’s portrait of fear is not disinterested;
it is primarily a useful thing, or at
least a thing that can be acted upon. It creates possible situations in the
mind and prepares appropriate gestures and actions so that the movement of the
person walking through the city becomes an urban gallery of the portraits of
his mind. This dynamic portrait is not could be mere myth,
it could represent reality, but it is always virtual in that it is always an image of possibility: an
imaginary monster related to the real and to the fantastic through the infinite
world of possibility.
Fear, like the personal
law-enforcement that is violence, is an extraordinary powerful generator of
urban usage and form precisely through this continuous act of life –like or
fantastic modal portraiture; moreover, a portrait that does not like to discriminate
too rigidly between fantasy and the actual. Although such an act of portraiture
is highly individual, it nevertheless has the power to shape the city. The city
is a product of individual movements multiplied by the numbers and desires of its
population. This, within the parameters of necessary urban movement, creates
patterns of usage and avoidance which in turn decides the art of political
prioritisation and eventually designed urban form.
Imagine now the grafting of the comfortably familiar,
such as a simulated living room, within the territory of the alien. The walls
of this simulacrum are merely defined by the inscriptions on the ground. As
such the non-existent walls become overwhelming views of the dull-grey
background of the modern sublime, much like the walls of the Sala dei giganti
by Giambattista Bologna in the Palazzo del Té in
The television they are proposing to install plays a subversive
role not without its ironies and completes the spatial and conceptual inversion
of their living room. Television is the prime suspect of the post-modern
condition: real life follows media. Instead of using it the way television
appears to work best, that is by promoting and disseminating the culture of hypersensitivity
to the outside and by encouraging a passive response to it, it is used to
offset the frightening cinematographic non-walls by neutralising them through
the projection of stories and monologues about personal and everyday experiences
of local space.
It is difficult to see whether the Shine group will
achieve their heroic aim of tweaking the urban conscious into learning to live
with the modern sublime. Or indeed whether they will succeed
in their brave aim of domesticating those spaces which have been infected by events
and local myths. I fear their
living room will merely exacerbate the all-too human wish for blind erasure by
becoming part of the landscape they are trying to improve, simply through the
incongruence of the attempt. Perhaps that is not so sad. After all, they say
themselves that fear is good. At least these spaces speak of doom in a
reasonably clear language. The possibility of violence is always real and it is
good to accommodate that possibility in rhetorically similar spaces. In any
case the act of domestication is at best two-faced. Domestication is an
ambivalent form of evolutionary progress because it systematically chooses the
more fragile complement in every binary opposition: man/woman, wild/tame,
rough/gentle etc and achieves an extraordinary docility of which the most
resonant example, certainly within a Dutch context, is the tragedy of the
large-uddered cow. The cow has sacrificed much to
achieve its haven, even, paradoxically, the hope of a peaceful old age. The
domestication of savage places will bear a monstrous fruit, perhaps even
indifference.
Jacob Voorthuis