THE VOUYER'S SERVER ROOM

The service room of the office, which also allocates some of the local computer servers , is transformed into a room for surveillance, a way of entertainment based on an exercise of voyeurism. This way, the invisible woman can see and know the invisible things that are happening everyday in the office.
In these room, the different kind of realities are gathered, so the invisible woman, in her fictitious space inside the narrative is surveying the actual office, the real office in the narrative, but the invisible woman is Nora's own projection, and as such, Nora is survelling and spying what is happening in the real office through the alternative reality that she has created. Therefore it is a self-referential paradox of the narrative.

This point of meeting between the different layers of the narrative, the characters and the spaces is used to show and tell the narrative by means of a short film that recreates the narrative. In this case the psycho-geography becomes a time-based psycho-geography, but this is a false time inside the narrative.

The video that is showed in one of the different tests that we are working on, it has to be said that it is just an example, and in any case the final film that supports the images.

New Spaces in The Office

Due to the nature of the on-going process of the imagery that correspond with this project, we will present the new set of images that the invisible woman inhabits.

The first set of images is based on the spaces that were described and presented as the result of the second term crit. That first set of 5 images will be re-develop to the current narrative although it gathers the same principles that we will use to develop the new set. The two sets of images is made of 10 images. This number just corresponds with the main spaces that we have distinguished in the office realm, just taking into account those rooms that are part of the open plan office.

The first set of images is made of:

VENDING LABORATORY KITCHENETTE
THE FALSE CEILING FLYING SIMULATOR
THE DINING SANCTUARY DESK
THE OPERATION TOILET
THE FORENSIC LAUNDRY

The description of these images can be read in the letters that correspond with the second term crit results. These description, will be re-made taking into account the new develop of our current and final narrative.

The Second set of Images is made of:

TAILOR PHOTOCOPY WORKSHOP
THE RECEPTION ARCADIAN GARDEN
THE GALILEAN BEDROOM
WOMOPOLY ROOM
THE VOYEUR'S SERVER ROOM = Image/Film

The Project Report

http://issuu.com/anaxagoras/docs/final_report

The Invisible Woman of the Tower 42+1/2

http://issuu.com/anaxagoras/docs/narrative

The narrative: The process of construction

This architectural project has been struggling a whole year with the different narratives that could address the main intellectual ideas of a critique of the late-capitalism office space.

The narratives started with the second term "Letter to my imprisoned father" in which Nora escaped from the tyranny of her pushing father as a way of looking for herself and decide what her future could be. This way she lives in secret in the office while re-assesses different occupations while she fulfils her needs in the different parts of the office. The project was presented by the letter she sent to her imprisoned father, that we codified as spatial drawing that reflect her imaginary activities.

From this point, in order to achieve a more believable narrative and also as a way to establish a clear relationship between the story telling and the nature of the main critic of the project to the office space, the narrative has been develop in a new direction. After four new different versions, here is the last and definitive plot summarised:

- It focuses in Nora as a new employee in the office
- She is physically isolated in workstation beside the old archive
- A rumour that she got the job due to her father connection isolates her socially in the office
- She find a box that correspond with someone she decided to call Margaret in which she find some books, magazines and photocopies of someone interested in feminism.
- She used it to reassess gender policies in the office
- She realised that she is a commodity, not just as employee but also as a woman
- Margaret's notes talk metaphorically about an invisible woman who lives in the office
- Nora uses Margaret's notes to imagine as scenario where both, the invisible woman and her office material world are removed of the features that made them to be an object of consumption
- Her exercise of escapism is not time-killing but the means to an end, her own awareness as a female employee in the contemporary office
- The project in that moment instead of text starts to be constructed by the scenarios and parts of the office that she imagine and travel in her imagination.
- The space of the office is transformed as a reflection of the activities that the invisible woman, Nora's own projection, does to fulfil her desires abstracted into her needs.

The system of objects: Commodities

The project focuses on manufactured products that create and fill the space. Taking into account that we consider objects as the elements responsible for creating and completing the spatial environment that we will propose, it is very important to establish an understanding of the system of objects.

In this sense, objects, are not just manufactured products. They are acting as commodities inside the consumer society. For, our critique of the late capitalist society shifts dominance from production, to consumption, and to its media apparatus which fosters the commodification of both persons and objects, the core of our conceptual framework.

The objectification of material goods and persons, coming from the traditional definition of a commodity – a physical or intellectual substance which is interchangeable by means of an established equivalence (Marx, 1867) – has evolved into the current concept of the object of consumption (Baudrillard, 1981). In the consumer culture, the economic structure has reached the level of a superstructure, an ideology: “it is not simply the sanctification of the object but the sanctification of the system, commodity as system, the more the system is systematized the more the fetishist fascination is reinforced” (Baudrillard, 1981:92). This ideology of consumption determines the social status (collectivity) and self-definition (individuality) of the consumer. It's not just that accumulating objects confers membership of society, but also that “choices, organization and practice are a scaffolding for a global structure of the environment and active structure of behaviour” (Ibid:35).

So our aim will be to implement a decommodification that takes place in a context where use is priority to property, there is no market, nor are there any social discriminants; consequently these objects of consumption are stripped of their:

brand, or social status indicator,
price, not having a market value or an exchange (barter) value equivalent to a sum of money
proper function as a universal idealization of tools that fulfil an objective task, the functional simulacrum.

This subversion of the value system turns every object of consumption into a nude form made from various materials that allow the invisible woman to re-construct an alternative reality, wherein both she and the office environment are liberated from their status, price and proper function.

Gender Policies inside the Contemporary Office

To assess the Gender policies we have made a trip from the last 40 years of the feminist movement. we start analysing Germaine Greer's The Female Eunuch. After it we link her conclusions with the current Gender Policies that officially garantee complete equality but thet at the end of the day there are, nowadays, still many unofficial forms of discriminations.

Germaine Greer's Female Eunuch, is a contribution to “the dialogue between the wondering woman and the world” (Greer, 1970:11), that we will uses to identify the stereotypic woman in the current the consumer society. In the 1970's Greer identified the traditional myth of the Eternal Feminine, the object of male fantasy, the middle-class myth of love and marriage, as “the dominant image of femininity which rules our culture and to which most women aspire” (Greer,1970:15)

Taking this point, we translate it to the current situation, in which, as Greer denounced 40 years ago, women go on suffering discrimination, although in new an unofficial ways.

The project unmasks the principal forms of unofficial gender discrimination in the office:
The difference between women and men as free individuals, in a society where women, while holding down their jobs, also shoulder social responsibilities such as taking care of the family, the children, the elderly and the sick, while men in general do not.
The differential between the sexes with regard to salary levels and selection for promotion, as reflected in the proportion of senior executives of each sex.
Sexual harassment, sexist jokes and bullying, as well as offensive conduct towards women who rise to high positions and become the target of sexist language (bitch, spinster, whore...)
Female dress codes and aesthetic patterns shaped by a stereotyped view of women as sex objects that translates into skimpy, tight-fitting clothes, and high heels that constrict the body's freedom of movement, as well as the greater social pressure exerted on women than on men to take care of their appearance.

Inside The Office: References

The research of the current situation of employees inside the office has been basic to reach our main critique of the office space. The research has focused on those films and book that describe the current life inside the office.

Among cinematographic references, we can find many current films which try to reflect the pettyness inside de office. Here we are not looking for the specific office task properly speaking but however, we try to know as deep as possible how office employees life are, apart from this tasks.

The reflection of the systemic dissatisfaction within the current office is a recurring theme in many films, such as Brasil, American Beauty, Fight Club, Network, 9 to 5, ... and, especially, Office Space.

Each of these examples have been interesting because it has allowed us to construct different part of the narrative that we will used top address the architectural proposal.

From Office Space, we can extract the everydayness of the office, the rumours, the routine and the annoying parts of sharing an open-plan office full of individual cubicles.

From Brasil, instead, we focus on the exercise of escapism, that allows the character to satisfy his empty and stupid life inside the dystopian burocratic society in which he lives.

In the literary genre, two contemporary novels describe in detail the current office realm: Joshua Ferris' Then We Came to the End (2007) and Ed Park's Personal Days (2008). They show how office employees spend their day at work – in a world geared towards competition rather than co-operation, otherness rather than equality, and guarantees instead of trust (Marx,1867). As Ferris' novel exposes, contemporary office workers have to cope with jealousy and dread, petty hatred, exhaustion, and the questioning of personal values and the meaning of work: a depiction of the office as the spiritual focus and centre of our age of complacent prosperity.

Economics and Utopia

In this chapter we focus on political economy as a way of providing a new social and political realm. Our project is not an economical proposal but we start claiming that economy definied hardly our lives and if we do not control the economic system it controls us instead.

The socialist tradition here stems mainly in Marx analysis of the capital and in its possible abolition to reach an unavoidable end of a communist future. From this analysis we take here his concept of alienation.

Alienation, describe as the reaction that human being has when producing something that does not belong to her and therefore that she produces is an alien.Firstly, because you are also what you do, you are what you produce. If your main task is to produce an alien object,in the labour division of function of our society, then there is a lack of meaning and a lack of satisfaction.

We analyses this concept that is related to production in the factories,shifting it to the current white-collar factories, the contemporary offices and the levels of dissatisfaction that office employees suffer, as Rosse and Saturay (2004) show.

To attack the current structure we have to focus on late-capitalism, and for that we use its political opposition, this is socialism. First we will focus on production, and after in consumption. However, we do not believe not the socialist utopia neither the liberal utopia.

The Liberal utopia, has its roots in Adam Smith's natural economy. This is the natural right of humans to take the material good of the earth, own, transform them to fulfil their needs, and sell them in a market among free individual fellows. But, as Marx argues, this natural way its not natural but historic, it has been socially constructed and imposed. There is not an origin or beginning of it. This beginning, or the mith of liberalism, is expressed in Robinson Crusoe adventure.

In our proposal we use both sources, on the one hand, the socialist superstructure of a lack of individual ownership, the lack of capital and the communist production, but abstracted into a unique individual-society, so using the mith of a Robinson Crusue whose island is the office and whose material goods are manufacture products.

Here Utopia, or may be Dystopia, is not used as and end, just as a means to a very personal and particular end that no longer will bring any universal salvation, but just a personal awareness of our character.

Constant's New-Babylon Review

First,from the manifesto: New Babylon: Outline of a Culture 1965, we want to highlight the three key points of the social model it deploys:

Automation: of all useful, repetitive activities frees, at the mass level, an energy that can henceforth be directed towards other activities
Collective ownership of the land: and the means of production, and rationalization of the production of consumer goods, facilitates the transformation of this energy into creative activity
With productive work disappearing, collective timekeeping has no more raison d'etre; the masses will, on the other hand, have a considerable amount of free time.

In 1980, when the project was abandoned Constant says that all the key question that made sense to New Babylon are not present in 1980: enormous energy is being withdrawn from the labor process and it finds no other outlet than in aggression prompted by dissatisfaction. The possibilities that allow a project such as New Babylon have disappeared, the prospect of social revolution are obscured by nuclear fear, the idea of collective creativity is no believeable nowadays.

Taking into account the reason that made Constant not to continue with his project, we try to re-assess its relevance in a contemporary architectural context.The Utopian collectivity describe by Constant in his two decade project is very evocative for a new scenario inside the office. The assessment of New Babylon stems from a contemporary approach that reject and re-propose:


- The goal for history, the believe that history has an unavoidable end does not correspond with the current post-modern approach, so this dialectic approach that Marxism took from Hegel is used by rejecting the so-call end of history.

-According to this we look for Utopia as a means and not as and end and that has to be explicit in the project.

- The universal attempt of a world covered by a mega-structure is rejected and instead a particular structure is required. This universal attempt is also reflected in the collectivity that we are going to deliberately avoid using just an individual, a social abstraction of a world inhabited by a unique person, our character in the office

- The ambiguous and non determined life inside New Babylon should be highly defined. The infinite world inside Constant's grid is very particular and belongs to the subjective world of the character inside her office, this is, her material world.

- The superstructure, this is, the ideology that govern the space is re-used but a detournement of the current capitalist stage could be implemented as a subversive attitude to criticise its monopoly.

- The New-Babylonian sector could be implement just in the specific economic sector in which my project is based, the financial capitalism in the City of London

Conclusions and Blueprint

The main critiques:

- Re-assess and judge the project
- The relevance of story-telling in my spatial proposal
- The fundamental intellectual idea
- The relevance of the site, the scenario..could it work anywhere? does it matter?
- Alternative reality atmosphere definitions: sinister, magical, positive, dark...
- Gender policies in the contemporary office
- The character, is unbelievable and to some extend unnecessary. The narrative needs a detournemental force. The relevance of the story-telling has to be clear.
- The space that is depicted correspond to a content that is expressed in the narrative, and it would be much more interesting if the depiction also constructs the content and viceversa.
- The images do not express any emotion, but my narrative talks about that.
The new scenario that allows her to travel a new office configuration, has to be clearly describe in the nature of a critique, e.i. New- Babylonian, Robinson Crusoe,
- Instead of letters that I illustrate, the character could be imagining its episode.

New research:

- Socialist utopias: Specially New-Babylon, which Interiors are very evocative
- Economics and Utopia
- Gender policies in the office and unofficial forms of discrimination
- System of Objects and Object as commodities
- Office life research through films and literature
- Escapism and Time-killing practices, as an opportunity to create a new scenario
- Detornement and Phycho-geographical depiction as an innovative assembly of existing manufacture products, tools and brands