Report Draft

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.

Letter R – evidence-Removal laundry room - Result

Letter R – evidence-Removal laundry room - Explanation

Activity: laundering clothes
State of mind: acceptance, acquiescence - survival
Office area: gent's office toilet
Occupation: forensic scientist (evidence removal)

“...filled with a new spirit of embracing her plan, she transforms the gent's toilet into her laundry room. She has few clothes to wash; but she's determined to stay there, so she not only gets her clothes clean but also removes any evidence which might arouse suspicions that the building has an illegal occupant. Whatever objects she takes from the offices around about hers during the night, she takes them to the laundry room afterwards and wipes her fingerprints off them. The laundry room is created by repetition: by blow drying one garment after another she generates the space where the same object and task are duplicated with each new wash. The toilet seat is used as a washboard, the wash-hand basins to rinse the soap off; the pipes help her to wring the clothes out, and finally the hand dryers finish off the operation...”

Letter B – beautician's Bathroom - Result

Letter B – beautician's Bathroom - Explanation

Activity: personal hygiene
State of mind: acceptance, acquiescence
Office area: ladies' office toilet
Occupation: beautician

“… the ladies' toilet is the place where Nora decides to install her bathroom. At first she just washes herself in the wash-hand basin; but she really needs a shower, so she makes one. She starts to accept her situation; she needs to make the best of her current circumstances. The toilet is transformed so as not just to take on the role of a bathroom but also to cater for other personal care issues, such as cutting her nails, combing her hair, and hair removal. With some bottles, wires and coffee machine pipes she creates a shower shielded by a plastic-bag curtain. The hand dryers are suspended in a structure made of pipes to dry her hair, and the toilet seat and office chair swap their components with one another. The bathroom is a beauty parlour for pampering her body as if she were a beautician...”

Letter A – air conditioning Aviator - Result

Letter A – air conditioning Aviator - Explanation

Activity: sport
State of mind: frustration
Office area: false ceiling
Occupation: aviator

“… Nora's angry, she's furious with her father, he never listens to her... She's also angry with herself for not facing up to her own uncertainties. Her feeling of rejection blocks her from going ahead with her plan and she gets very frustrated. To give vent (literally) to her frustration she starts creatively "overhauling" the air conditioning system to create an artefact for practising a sport (aeronautics or flying). She hates doing indoor sports so she decides to use the window area and 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 out at the city through the vents in the façade. The flying simulator is completed by a tape-and-toilet-roll aviator's helmet that helps her avoid drawing attention to the building....”

Letter D – Dining workstation - Result

Letter D – Dining workstation - Explanation

Activity: warm and eat food
State of mind: rejection, denial - agoraphobia
Office area: open-plan office
Occupation: appliance repair person

“... alone in the big open-plan office Nora starts to feel scared during the night. The lifeless workstations conjure up visions of graves in a cemetery. Sometimes a small noise frightens her so much that she goes around checking that no-one has burgled their way in. Her rejection of the open space, her agoraphobia, overwhelms her; so she proceeds to close in one of the workstations so as to create a 'safe space' or den. She takes up the strips of carpet, turns the desk upside down and uses the carpeting to fence in the desk. The ceiling's made by suspending many computer mice from it. She completely encloses the workstation by piling around the upside-down desk in the centre many office machines: computer screen housings, printers, fax-telephones and computers, along with reams of paper and other office supplies. This dining workstation (as she intends it to be) is a sanctuary made of office objects that shield and protect her. She takes the electrical appliances to pieces, as a repair person would, to create artefacts which she uses to store food, heat it up and finally eat it... while she eats she gazes at the diminutive green shoot in a plant pot that she found one night in the occupied office below. She tends it with the utmost care because it's the only living thing she owns...”

Letter L – food Laboratory - Result

Letter L – food Laboratory - Explanation

Activity: food preparation
State of mind: rejection, denial
Office area: vending machine in the corridor
Occupation: chemist (food scientist)

“...Nora's upset. Eating vending machine food is one of the worst aspects of living in the office. She goes from one to another, over and over again, hoping to find a type of food she hadn't noticed before. Something healthier, something fresher than tuna and mayonnaise sandwiches and crisps. Assailed by feelings of deep rejection, she starts making biased, subjective comparisons between the office vending machine food and the fare served at high-class Basque restaurants.
After emptying one of the vending machines of its food she decides to use it as a laboratory in which to create “bug cuisine”. Her game plan is to create flavours and aromas to change the properties of the vending machine food by means of alchemy...
Nora – who is her building's version of the 'Phantom of the Opera' – "borrows" wireless keyboards during the night from the occupied office below. These she chooses because they're the most "infected" pieces of office kit, having picked up germs off people's fingers. In her food laboratory she "extracts" the germs from the keyboards and distils them into bottles – one bottle of distillate per keyboard. Her food-play is completely imaginative. Child-like, she pretends to be a chemist distilling germs, using the vending machine springs, an office tray and a water circuit...reusing the vending machine as a food laboratory that she inhabits...”

State of Narrative - at 2 Term Crit

After sharing an enormous, emotion-filled hug with her best friend, Nora walks back home, head bowed, sad and angry. She's a 19-year-old, Basque girl who never knew her mother. She had a strictly disciplined upbringing. She was in fact brought up partly by her father and partly by nannies, due to her father's regular business trips. Her father – Gorka, as she calls him – is a high-ranking financial executive in an international business based in Bilbao. For the past three years Nora's been a boarder at a private school in Bilbao and after the summer, she's going to begin her higher education at a prestigious business school in England. She really hates economics and business studies; but she's never been able to make big decisions for herself because her father always makes them for her, and she doesn't really know what to study. Gorka's an authoritarian father who steamrollers his daughter. He expects Nora to become a successful businesswoman, following in his own footsteps; so he books her onto an intensive summer course in Oxford, without even asking her what she thinks about it. Every time she says she hates Business Studies, her father gets angry and tells her he's doing everything in his power to ensure a great future for her.

By the end of her first week in Oxford she realises the course is going to be a tightly-disciplined, rigid pre-seasonal Business Studies programme. She has to justify each personal decision and she has little access to her money. Before she does anything she has to ask permission of her tutor. She experiences a mixture of fury and sadness.

At the end of the week she receives a phone call from her father's lawyer. The bad news is that her father has been arrested on suspicion of committing a big financial fraud by selling worthless shares; and he's going to be in Nanclares, a north Spanish prison, over the summer. The good news is that he'll probably be released in due course.

After thinking about her father's situation all night long, she realizes this is the opportunity she's been waiting for. She needs to find sound arguments to convince her father that she doesn't want to be a businesswoman; that she wants to do something else with her life. In view of the distressing news, her tutor offers to let her off lectures for a day. She decides to escape from Oxford to London, take a job – whatever she can get – and spend the summer focused on herself and her own future and aspirations.

The following morning she packs some clothes and a notebook into a bag just big enough for a day trip so as not to arouse suspicion. She leaves the college and takes the train to London. Nervous but excited, she starts leafing through a free newspaper lying on the seat beside her. After pages of rubbishy pieces of news, in the classified ads section at the back she spots a job vacancy. A recruitment agency based at 25 Old Broad Street is looking for an office cleaner.

Once she arrives at Paddington Station, she calls for an appointment and by a stroke of luck the agency can interview her that very morning. She makes her way straight to what turns out to be a tall, vast and imposing building. Curiously enough, the office to be cleaned is located in the same building as the recruitment agency – the former is on the 23rd floor and the latter is on the 10th. Among the 1 million sq m of empty office space in the City of London, this office was occupied by an advertising agency that went under early on in the economic downturn.

She has three days in which to throw the useless stuff away and clean and tidy the office, in order to be rented again. On this June Monday, the leaden skies reflect the prevailing economic climate in the City of London; and as she's clearing out all the stuff the advertising agency left behind she realises that all these books, magazines, printed advertising slogans and hundreds of images are perfect materials to make a work of art with. Actually, she doesn't want to throw them away.

Suddenly, among all the stuff, she finds a card with the number of the office door on, and feels an unexpected surge of happiness when she discovers that the card unlocks the door. At first, she's thinking of using the card just to take some of the stuff away with her; but, by the time evening comes, tired and with no place to go, she's started to change her mind. She spends each night in the office, sleeping on the sofa in the reception area. Under the cushions she finds a spare pair of office curtains and she pulls them over her to keep warm. During the week she goes out just to buy food and take a shower in the public rest rooms at the Railway Station.

At the end of her three-day stint, once the office has been checked over, she rides the lift down to the recruitment agency and hands back the card they gave her, meanwhile fingering the 'treasure-trove' card in her left pocket. The assistant pays her in cash, mentioning that the office she's just cleaned probably isn't going to be re-let any time soon due to the current economic situation and the drab décor of that particular office. She thanks the assistant, goes to the lift, rides it up to the 23rd floor and locks herself in the toilet. For over three hours she turns her situation over and over in her mind, trying to come to a decision. She knows her father's probably already been told she's escaped from the business school. Afraid that her whereabouts will be discovered, with very little money in her pocket and not knowing a soul in London, she's determined to spend some time living clandestinely in the office.

She hatches a plan. She'll eat from the vending machines, use the toilets to wash herself and her clothes and sleep on the reception area sofa. She's going to stay there, living in secret in the office until she's sent a series of letters to her father to convince him there's a different future for herself and show him how she despises the office lifestyle. Shortly after 6 p.m., once she can be sure there's no-one about, she lets herself into the office.

That night, she can't sleep at all. She keeps thinking about her father and the letters. How can she muster her strongest arguments and convey them to her father? Maybe she should draw the letters. Instead of telling him about herself directly, she could describe her activities and state of mind spatially, as a critique of what it's like to live in an office. To achieve this she could use the former agency stuff that, fortunately, is still in the big dustbins in the utility room in the corridor. The letters will be signed by her, but she won't include any wording or return address – just images and her name. She does not know how she could manage to post the letters and she falls asleep while she think about it. In her dreams she finds a books of stamps. When she has the first letter ready, she sprinkles some sandwich bread crumb on a windowsill of the office. A pigeon comes to eat it and she grabs it and ties her first letter in a bow around one foot. Above the address is written "POST ME". She releases the bird which, weighed down by the letter, alights on the pavement opposite but the bow unfortunately fails and the letter falls on a car and disappear quickly. Then she takes another copy of the letter and writes above the address POST ME, folds the letter into a paper aeroplane, and launches it out of the window towards the letterbox on the opposite side of the street. The letter flies almost directly into the mouth of the box; but she misses her aim and it falls to the ground, where a passer-by soon picks it up and posts it.

In the drawn letters she sets out to show that she lives in the space she's drawn. The letters portray her mood, uncertainties and aspirations in a dynamic construction of her identity that's related to a specific part of the office and a particular living function while trying out a potential occupation.

The office is used as a dwelling but, like her father, she can't leave the place she's in. She decides to live the life of a night owl to minimize the risk of being found out; her sole contact with the outside world is the view from the office windows of the metropolis on the Thames between 5 p.m. and 8 a.m.