INTRO
The project explores the dynamic transformation and translation of a very well-established architectural product – the office – into a new set of spaces that fluctuate between different kinds of reality, by means of a narrative. It is an attempt to take the dynamic construction of an identity in a multicultural society and collide it with a rigidly institutionalised architectural typology. The subjectiveness that the narrative addresses confronts the objectiveness of a standard office space by means of a reconsideration of the use of things – such as manufactured products within a system of components – that are re-purposed and re-assembled to provide an opportunity to develop a hybrid spatial response.
NARRATIVE
The narrative is the device that addresses the parameters of interpretation, transformation and generation of an office located in Tower 42 of the City of London (Images Set 1). The plot is driven by a non-linear structure consisting of a series of letters that Nora, a 19-year-old Basque girl, sends to her imprisoned father while she lives in secret in an empty office that became vacant during the economic downturn.
Following a strictly disciplined upbringing, Nora is forced by her authoritarian father to study at a Business School in Oxford. Nora detests Business Studies, although she hasn't decided what she does want to study. In June, just after she arrives in Oxford for a pre-seasonal course, her father is accused of committing a massive fraud by selling worthless shares, and is in prison awaiting trial in September.
Unexpectedly released from her father's iron control, she runs away from Oxford to London in a bid to change the course of her life. On her arrival in London she lands a temporary job cleaning an office in Tower 42. After finishing her 3-day stint, not knowing a soul in London and afraid she might be found out, she decides to live in secret in the same office for a while. She hatches a plan: she'll stay securely locked in while she creates a series of letters to her father to convince him that life holds a different future for her.
She becomes a night owl, sleeping during the working day (on the reception area sofa) so as not to arouse suspicion. She eats from the vending machines and uses the ladies' and gent's toilets as her bathroom and laundry room respectively. Thus she allows herself to fall under the powerful influence of "office worker etiquette" in order to find strong arguments against becoming an office worker, while trying out alternative 'occupations' in order to decide her future. The letters are signed by her but, to avoid giving herself away, she puts no return address. As a text in images equivalent to a message in words (Bloomer,1993), the letters are encoded 3D collages, in which Nora describes her mood and activities by portraying the space she occupies, transforming and recreating it with a touch of critic and magic while she tries out potential careers one by one.
(to see the unabridged Narrative and the first 5 letters-in-images visit www.oyarbideproject.blogspot.com/...)
CRITIQUE
As a critique of standard office architecture the project operates on different levels. It focuses on the open-plan high-rise office buildings of Western metropoleis (Images Set 2), particularly London . High-rise office buildings dominate contemporary big cities and are “emblematic of the current post-industrial era" (van Meel,2000:9), accommodating "more than half the working population in the Western world" (Oseland and Bartlett, 1999:3). However, they do not match the personal, multicultural and fragmented framework of so-called post-modernist culture (Jameson,1991 ). Even though capitalism has evolved, office buildings – especially in the UK and USA from the mid-20th century onwards – have undergone hardly any important changes (van Meel, 2000:57-74).
Actually, the current standard UK office is a product that was mainly defined in the American cities of the 1940s, following the doctrines of the modern movement, particularly the Miesian "universal box" (van Meel, 2000:29). Nowadays, "the assumption that the requirements for (office) space are identical anywhere” (Ian Pollard, 1993, cited in Van Meel, 2000) is still present, labelling the office space as the main representative of the objectivity of the modern movement in the current architectural context.
The office space is essentially designed by developers and corporations as a sign of power, outwardly, and as a tool of control inwardly (Foucault, 1978) where there is no place for office users' opinions (Oseland and Bartlett, 1999:67-93). Consequently, its fixed, impersonal and repetitive character is a reflection of the demands of productivity dictated by market logic.
The project analyses and criticizes the activities – apart from office duties properly speaking – that office workers perform every day, such as unhealthy vending-machine eating habits, the unhygienic practice of dining at the desk, the lack of areas in which to rest following prolonged exposure to computer screen radiation and too many hours spent in artificial light and air, surrounded by a rigid environment demanding adherence to a dress code etc.
Aware of the role of architecture as a follower of social demands, this project sets out to define a new spatial configuration based on recycled office architecture.
CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK
The project is developed through two narrative processes: “interpretative – of the structure, plot, characters and voice of the space; and generative, through the opportunities the text offers of materialising the space”. The narrative and the space are in a continuous process of exchange as an "articulation of interactive relation between the text and the design" (Allen, Borden, O'Hare and Spiller, 2000:148-149). In a contemporary context where the hegemony of meta-narratives has been replaced by a myriad micro-narratives (Lyotard,1987:26-31), human needs, experiences, behaviour, aspirations and worries are reflected by storytelling as a device for inspiring, steering and achieving subjective architectural responses. In this sense, the project has drawn its inspiration from certain projects that have been created using narrative as the device that structures them. Examples of such narratives are Dreaming of Flight, by T. Wigfall; Bankrupts' Institute, by B. Clement, based on Hogarth's series of paintings A Rake's Progress; and CJ Lim's Virtually Venice. (Allen, Borden, O'Hare and Spiller, 2000)
The narrative holds within it different levels of reality, reflecting actual spaces (Tower 42) as well as creating both real and fictitious spaces inside the narrative, like Doctorow's Ragtime shows (Jameson, 1991, 24-25). Thus architecture fluctuates between "the actual and the fiction, the speculation and the realization" (Clear, 2010).
Considering that architecture is a discourse about space (Bloomer,1993), space itself becomes the subject of the narrative instead of time, as in Perec's "Life: a user's manual". A series of letters, undated and therefore in no particular order – and consequently without a beginning or an end – based on John Berger's "From A to X", reveal space as a reflection of Nora's circumstances. These letters-in-images, as a hybrid tactic, express the reaction against the dominance of visual imagery and written language in Western architecture, questioning the neutrality of both as the proper correspondence of the act of seeing and speaking (Bloomer,1993)
To avoid linear development of the narrative, the order of the series of letters is left to the personal understanding of the reader who, as Nora's imprisoned father, has to unravel her circumstances by studying the spaces reflected in the letters. In this metaphor the reader is a prisoner of cultural conventions who is challenged to throw off the chains of linear thinking and grasp the ambiguous whole.
PRODUCTION METHODOLOGY
The production methodology consists of a confrontation between the dynamic construction of the character in the narrative and the rigid structure of the office space, for the purpose of allowing her to perform her activities. This collision generates the displacement of fragments (Bloomer, 1993), thus establishing a catalogue of manufactured products that play a role in configuring the office space, from miscellaneous to furniture and from office duties material to M&E (Nicholson, 1990 ). The catalogue, made up of the most standard and/or cheapest manufactured products offered by UK office suppliers (online), classifies them by their features and properties instead of by their (supposedly) 'proper' functions. These products are appropriated by simulation rather than mimesis, as a way of exchanging them for one another (Virilio, 2000 in Hermitage's interview); highlighting their legitimacy as components of our current world (Baudrillard,1983); blurring the dualism between the artificial and the natural (Images Set 3); and defining the visual simulation of architecture as an artistic status in its own right (Images Set 4) (Thomas Hänsly, 2008, cited in Gleiniger and Vrachliotis).
The strategy of reassembly is based on the concept of Design by use(Brandes, Stich and Wender,2009). The project attacks the idea of a proper, and privileged, function of objects. Here things are "not considered isolated artefacts but become involved in ongoing practices". Instead of the "recalcitrant prototype", we consider a 'system function' of things (Ben Preston, 2006, Costal and Dreier).
The character combines, in one and the same person, three of the analytically-distinct roles in the theory of objects – 'Designer', 'Maker' and 'User' – thus inverting the traditional process that each object has followed from concept to product. (Ben Preston, 2006, Costal and Dreier). Design by use starts with NID (non-intentional design), whereby an object with some particular features provisionally fulfills a purpose other than the one it was designed for (Images Set 5). This spontaneous re-purposing fosters a different use for existing products, thus giving way to intentional re-design (Images Set 6). Thereby manufactured products as ready-made objects are "borrowed, adopted and recycled"(wikipedia, appropriation in visual arts) from the office space and re-used to reconfigure the space, which is “made from parts found or stolen, appropriated, plagiarized ... manipulated so as to join readily to their neighbours. It concerns neighbours and spatial relations, not sequences of events and causes and effects” (Bloomer,1993)
This Design by use strategy, where a function may be fulfilled by many different objects and an object may perform many different tasks, can be found in the practice of Bricolage or DIY (Randy.J.Hunt,2002)– “making creative use of whatever material may be to hand, regardless of its original purpose” (Wikipedia, Bricolage) . These tactics follow in the footsteps of design groups such as “Superstudio”, “Archizoom”, “Alquimia” (Brandes, Stich and Wender, 2009:53-102) (Images Set 7)
The spatial configuration is completed by this particular kind of appropriation that operates always in the context of the office, although it mixes areas for different activities in a translation from a place to a space. This translation consists of a change in the integrity of the original place-based spatial system, whereby “elements are distributed in relationship of coexistence...excluding the possibility of two things being in the same location". Then the monotonous repetitiveness of office places and tasks is translated into the particular repetitiveness of being designed-by-use, whereby products are progressively tested and checked as a means of generating a space, a “practised place”, one that takes into account vectors of direction and location of things over time (Certeau, 1984:117)
CONCLUSION
The project is a proposal for a more dynamic and personal type of architecture, using narrative as a vehicle to inject personal experiences into a rigidly-institutionalized architectural production of office space. The reassembly of components stems from a collision between standard space and narratives, in an expression of a subversive attitude towards the rigid market-logic structure in which the standard office space is locked. The project attacks the established role of the designer by using the role of user to foster a design agenda for more versatile potential uses for the manufactured products that populate the space we inhabit.
I think that, as well as office typology, there are still other architectural institutions that continue the doctrine of the modern movement, or to some extend, they are its heirs. Thus, this project aspires to contribute, as an example, of how they could be attacked and collapsed, firstly as fixed typologies, and then as cultural products in order to give way to a contemporary architectural response.
