The Invisible Woman of the Tower 42+1/2

http://vimeo.com/15235156

This film narrates an architectural project awarded with Distinction in the M Arch Architectural Design, Advanced Virtual And Technological Architectural Research, Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London. 2010

The project is an extreme détournement of the tyranny of late-capitalist office work from a gender perspective by means of an illustrated narrative consisting of a set of psycho-geographical spaces based on an exercise in escapism.

The spatial proposal stems from the character's literal interpretation of a metaphorical invisible woman of Tower 42, who inhabits and transforms the office following her desires abstracted into needs.

The spatial production follows a particular logic, whereby a rejection of the discriminatory stereotype of womanhood engenders a rejection of the commodification of the working woman's material world.

This translation provides a de-sanctification of the workspace and a de-commodification of the objects of consumption that create and fill the office, as a new personal construction of herself and the world.

DINING SANCTUARY

At the end of the day, the lifeless workstations of the open-plan office conjure up visions of graves in a cemetery. Under this atmosphere, Nora imagines the invisible woman in her particular dining desk. The extremely customized workstation provides a sanctuary for the ritual of eating, critiquing the unhygienic practice of having lunch at one's desk. The sanctification and ceremony of everydayness where the need for eating is abstracted into the desire for feeding and self-care is presented as a ceremonial space.

She takes up the strips of carpet, turns the desk upside down and encloses the workstation by piling many surrounding objects around it such as computer screen housings, printers, mice, fax/telephones and desktops, along with realms of paper and other office supplies. The sanctuary takes inspiration from a repair workshop where the invisible woman takes apart the electrical appliances, creating artefacts which she uses to heat up her food and drinks.

The nature of this space criticizes the conventional conception between interior and exterior in the current architectural production whereby the interior space, the open-plan office, is here an external space of the dining sanctuary. The protected space for office productivity is seen here as a violent jungle from which it is necessary to protect oneself.

The dining sanctuary establishes a spatial link between many of the other dream spaces of the project, articulating many constructions of the narrative, such as the transitional space where the invisible woman makes her ritual for drinking its “placebo” before climbing to the false ceiling flight simulator.

ARCADIAN RECEPTION

The Arcadian Garden is a transformation of the Reception Hall of the office into an office-objects-made Arcadia that blurs the boundaries between the natural and the artificial, leaving the viewer to wonder what is read as natural and why.

The nature of the critique focuses on the plastic plants and posters of the natural landscape that can be found in many office reception halls. This is an attempt to "naturalize" the office, making it look like a nice, comfortable and healthy place that even though it is still an atmosphere filled with mechanical air and electric light .

The invisible woman, taking from a mixture of different traditional Japanese gardens, transforms the reception area following her desire to create a place to practice contemplation and meditation because of her wish for an open air, country-side atmosphere. Post-its become grass and change their colour according to the year seasons. Keys of computer keyboards create a path that goes to the bridge over the drawer-made pond where she also grows some rice plants. The table-lights+toilet-rolls tree in the forefront completes the composition.

VENDING LABORATORY

One of the worst aspects and most difficult thing to avoid when inside the office is eating vending machine food. She goes from one to another, over and over again, hoping to find something healthier.
Assailed by feelings of deep rejection, she starts making unfair comparisons between the office vending machine food and the “molecular cuisine” served at high-class restaurants.

Nora imagines the invisible woman applying her need for cooking and taking part in all the details of what she eats, this becomes a desire to change the composition of the food and drinks. An empty vending machine is transformed into a laboratory where the invisible woman can transform the properties of water into a set of magic elixirs by means of alchemy.

Using the vending machine springs - built of an office tray and a water circuit - the most infected pieces of office kit, the keyboards, are cultivated to increase the amount of bacteria. She uses scientific methods of chemistry under the principles of alchemy to distill germs into bottles of green tea that the invisible woman generates as a psychoactive placebo.

FORENSIC LAUNDRY

The ladies' toilet: a place for intimacy, a shelter from a very bad day, for crying and to not be seen. It is the same place where many times Nora, as well as her female colleagues, has had to wash up a spot from her blouse. This space is transformed into a laundry that the invisible woman uses to wash her clothes up.

This is not a conventional laundry, the invisible woman as any criminal forensic scientist would, tries to remove any fingerprints of her past. She uses the act of washing as a way to remove the discriminatory stereotype of womanhood. It is a rejection of 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.

The forensic laundry is created by repetition, a frozen and over-lapped sequence. By blow drying one garment after another the invisible woman generates a space where the same object and task are duplicated with each new wash. The toilet seat becomes the washboard, the wash hand basins to rinse the soap off, the hidden pipes are revealed, structuring the space and, at the same time, helping her wring out the clothes. Finally the hand dryers finish off the operation of evidence removal which is hidden in the soap foam.

FLIGHT SIMULATOR

Alone and frustrated in her isolated workstation, Nora looks above her head where an air-conditioning supplier is located. To literally vent her frustration, she thinks of "overhauling" the air conditioning system. She starts imagining how the invisible woman - following her need for sport abstracted into her desire for flying - creates an artefact for practising aeronautics. Using one of the oldest human dreams, flight, this space is created through the will of the character, as both a woman discriminated against and an employee of late capitalism, to escape from routine.

The invisible woman creates a flying simulator in the false ceiling. She moves the air conditioning grilles and tubes so as to aim the air and noise in one direction while an office chair seat, a fire hose, some pipes and a stack of filing drawers enable her to be suspended while looking at the city, projected on a hanging screen.

What at the beginning was a product of her frustration becomes one of the favourite psycho geographies of Nora's trip through the invisible woman. The fancy dress that the invisible woman made in the Tailor Photo room is completed by a tape-and-toilet-roll aviator's helmet that helps her avoid drawing attention to the building. The psychoactive placebo that she has drunk in the dining sanctuary takes her higher than the clouds.

OPERATION TOILET

The gents' toilet, a forbidden place for women, is the new space for body caring. The discriminatory pressure that society exerts upon the appearance of women is applied inside a particular space for males. Body care is taken to the extreme, it is not just a parlour for pampering the body but it is also a space for medical treatment and surgery, an operation toilet.
The current need for body care is abstracted into the desire for transforming the body, this goes to the extreme of surgery, affecting many more women than men. This fact is used as an opportunity to transform the invisible woman's body as a part of the new identity of Nora as a female employee.

The invisible woman recreates a body-care-transforming multifunctional space that gathers any self-deliberated body change inside the gents' toilet. The office chair and the toilet seat are assembled to provide a couch that is surrounded by a health monitoring system and an auxiliary tool table where the “real” toilet is located. This central set is surrounded by the plastic-bag curtains that enclose the shower along with the toilet-roll corner where the invisible woman can perform less risky activities such as: cutting her nails, combing her hair, hair removal and tinting, claiming that these activities are not necessarily related just to women as they are conventionally stereotyped.

VOYEUR'S SERVER ROOM

The Server room of the office is transformed into a space for surveillance and voyeurism.

The need for security inside the office is critiqued by modifying the space into one for spying instead. The servers and DVD players surround the space where a wire-covered elevated chairs with a big console allows the invisible woman to control not only what is going on in the 42 floors of Tower 42 but also in the 1/2 part where she lives.

This space is a link between both the real space of the office inside the narrative and the dream space of Nora where the invisible woman inhabits.

Here the invisible woman is a spy into the life of the office and is able to see the spaces she transforms. This encloses a paradox: Nora imagines the invisible woman and is then spying on both herself and the invisible woman, so both characters reflect each other. The invisible woman is Nora's own projection, or is Nora the own projection of the invisible woman? Is the invisible woman spying or being interrogated?

GALILEAN BEDROOM

The meeting room, a place for collective time-killing to rest from the office routine, is transformed into a bedroom. The narrative focuses on "the meeting of the meeting" where the main topic is the horoscope.

In this magic place, the invisible woman sleeps upon the stars and the solar system while interpreting and changing the signs of the universe. Her need for a deeper belief in the world is seen in her desire to control destiny. She plays with the horoscope in order to create and control her beliefs and superstitions, a topic highlighted in the long working days inside the office.

The boundaries are blurred between the science of astronomy and the beliefs of astrology, critiquing the hegemony of the scientific code of interpretation, a different code of beliefs. The invisible woman plays the role of both transformer of the universe and interpreter of its signs.

LUDOPOLY'S DRAWER

Ludopoly is presented as a board game created inside the drawer of the director's desk, the most secret part of the office. Here the invisible woman, as she is imagined by Nora, abstracts her desire for power into her need to transform the world of the Office of the Director. The role of the Director is magnified among the employees, elevated into a role close to divinity. The power is trivialized as a board game that is developed as an antithesis of Monopoly. The exercise of the invisible woman consists of creating the game and the rules, but instead of then playing the game, it is the construction of it where the real power rests!

The macro regime is reduced to the micro dimensions of the drawer and the city is constructed out of office objects. These configure a new reality where office tasks and leisure are shared, where the public and private spaces are mixed, enabling a de-sanctification of space and a new realm where:

Instead of the underground there is a Roller Coaster.
There are Bumper Buses.
The Jail of Monopoly is Tower 42.
The main landmarks are kept but transformed, such as the Haunted Gherkin, the Old Broad Mirror Maze, the Lloyd slide and the Bank of Chewing Gum.
The Office park replaces the office buildings.

TAILOR PHOTOROOM

The Photocopier room of the office is transformed into the tailor's workshop. As a way of recognizing herself, the invisible woman uses the photocopy machines to take photos of her body, through this discovering and reassessing her identity. This becomes a direct reference of self-identification during the construction of her character identity and in her journey to awareness. The desire to transform her identity follows her need of self-identification.

These photocopies are used to make the patterns that give rise to the invisible woman making one of her fancy dresses. They are realized with the help of a hand-made sewing machine, carpet strings, office scissors and staplers.

In this case, the fancy dress is the “Crazy Pilot” that she wears to improve her experience playing sports in her false-ceiling-based Flying Simulator. The fancy dress is a way of showing the individual fight for creating Nora’s own identity in an increasingly impersonal world inside the unified corporate identity of the office.