Embed Size (px)
Citation preview
6/6/2014 Nothing to Hide, The Blurring of the Physical and Temporal Line Between Life, Work and Education | microcities
http://microcities.net/portfolio/nothing-to-hide-the-blurring-of-the-physical-and-temporal-line-between-life-work-and-education/ 1/7
By Mariabruna Fabrizi & Fosco Lucarelli
Some years ago an eye-catching tv commercial for Elave, a skincare products company, provoked a rather discernible YouTube backlash.The ad showed completely naked laboratory staff technicians wandering, talking and studying in an ethereal-white open work environment,apparently unaware of their nakedness. The literal message was that Elave had no worrying chemicals in its formulations and therefore“Nothing to hide” (as asserted through the campaign’s tagline).
Curiously enough, in order to promote the safety of the work done in the house, the campaign choose a rather NSFW attitude. Yet it would bemisleading if not puritan to target the stunt as the usual “sex sells” example: not only it is frankly hard to detect any sex appeal in theperfectly shaved humankind appearing in the spot, but a deeper digging could reveal the subliminal and perverse way either publicinstitutions and private corporations are hiding work exploitation and new means for profit under pseudo ethical calls for transparency andopenness.
Oftentimes Léopold Lambert has claimed the violent nature inherent of architecture. Architecture, he mantains, is never innocent, becauseeven the simple translation of a drawn line into a physical wall can express the material condition for an oppressive act of territorialdivision, thus identifying the locus for the manifestation of authority and repression.In the following text we’ll try and evaluate a dialectical position: what if contemporary existential violence linked to (first world) immaterialwork exploitation is no longer perpetrated through physical borders, but also precisely and conversely through the deliberate blurring ofmarkings, limits, lines? What if this physical lack of boundaries finds an existential counterpoint in the societal blurring between domesticand collective space, between working time and life time, between childhood and adulthood?
As the symbol of countercultural 1960’s utopia, the exposed, naked body was the most literal expression of the overcoming of Foucault’sdisciplinar universe and the so-called “changing of paradigm”. The emancipation from an ordered, paternalistic model, (in which religious,moral or political authority constantly interferes with individual freedom, to a new “individualistic” model (in which the individual is able todetermine his own conception of Good and to decide whatever is worth doing of his own life) was, about two decades after, instrumentalizedby a new managerial discourse that translated the original demand for freedom and emancipation into a reorganization of work, around therhetoric of flexibility and the “construction of the self”.
WRITINGS
NOTHING TO HIDE, THE BLURRING OF THEPHYSICAL AND TEMPORAL LINE BETWEENLIFE, WORK AND EDUCATION
4Like Tweet
By Mariabruna Fabrizi & FoscoLucarelli Some years ago an eyecatching tv commercial for Elave, askincare products company,provoked a rather discernibleYouTube backlash. The ad showedcompletely naked laboratory stafftechnicians wandering, talking andstudying in an etherealwhite openwork environment, apparentlyunaware of their nakedness. Theliteral message was that Elave had[…]
WORKS PROFILE NEWS SOCKS CONTACT
6/6/2014 Nothing to Hide, The Blurring of the Physical and Temporal Line Between Life, Work and Education | microcities
http://microcities.net/portfolio/nothing-to-hide-the-blurring-of-the-physical-and-temporal-line-between-life-work-and-education/ 2/7
Today, according to post-operaism thinker Paolo Virno, as post-fordist labor gets dematerialised, capital occupies not only the workinghours but absorbs a worker’s entire existence, as well as his thoughts and creative desires. Products are not just meant to be consumed butthey aim at setting new modes of communication and knowledge. Hence, production, asserts Maurizio Lazzarato, is no longer only the mereproduction of goods, but the setting for new conditions and variations for production itself. As post-industrial capitalism has blurred theboundaries between production, consumption, information and communication, the consumer himself does not merely consume, but is“creatively” engaged.
In 1969, years before mobile-communication had developed ist possibilities, Hollein proposed an inflatable mobile office, that provided atake-along-workspace for the nomadic worker. Photo © Hans Hollein
In modern-day networked society, accordingly, even individual knowledge is a means for profit. As well as companies’ employees, studentsare subjected to similar instances of flexibility and are supposed to evolve their capacity of adapting to the changing conditions of work. Thepedagogical demand-and-offer surrenders to the imperative of production and it is subject to the new-management rhetorics of adaptabilityand elasticity. All this is reflected into architectural’s speculation and practice, one example of which is the project for the new school ofarchitecture at Nantes, built in 2009 after winning the competition, by Parisian office Lacaton & Vassal.
6/6/2014 Nothing to Hide, The Blurring of the Physical and Temporal Line Between Life, Work and Education | microcities
http://microcities.net/portfolio/nothing-to-hide-the-blurring-of-the-physical-and-temporal-line-between-life-work-and-education/ 3/7
Interiors of Nantes School of Architecture. Photo © Yvan Razafindramanana
Following the competition brief’s demand for “adaptable, elastic, flexible, evolutive and neutral spaces”, the architects provided a literalinterpretation of a vocabulary that’s more common to corporate workplaces than to public scholar institutions.
Designed as a Koolhaasian generic plan, this manifesto-building is constructed “like an Ikea”, empty like one of the corporate offices in theLondon City, but visually brutal as a huge manufacturing warehouse whose structures are in naked concrete and transparent, polycarbonateskin.
Plans of Nantes School of Architecture. © Lacaton & Vassal
6/6/2014 Nothing to Hide, The Blurring of the Physical and Temporal Line Between Life, Work and Education | microcities
http://microcities.net/portfolio/nothing-to-hide-the-blurring-of-the-physical-and-temporal-line-between-life-work-and-education/ 4/7
Interiors of Nantes School of Architecture. Photo © Yvan Razafindramanana
In a comparable shift from the workplace as a disciplinar space (we remember Tati’s Playtime cubicles) to the 60’s rational heterotopia ofthe Bürolandschaft, the underpinning conception of the school of Nantes is the reduction to superposing, neutral plateaux. Here, the spatialindeterminacy and the “weakness” of the plan are destined to favour a permanent adjustment, and an eventual openness to third partyactivities (other than teaching and architectural researching) by private ventures, as clearly asked even by the competition’s brief.At the same time, the first years of the school show how the individual students feel disoriented and seem incapable of transforming thesehuge, empty spaces into a warmer place. A defeat that evokes Fredric Jameson’s analysis of postmodern hyperspace (“The cultural logic oflate capitalism”): “(…) This latest mutation in space–postmodern hyperspace–has finally succeeded in transcending the capacities of theindividual human body to locate itself, to organize its immediate surroundings perceptually, and cognitively to map its position in amappable external world”.
Whereas educational institutions tend to adopt the spatial rhetoric linked to spaces of manufacturing and immaterial production,contemporary, advanced workplaces borrow, in turn, their aesthetics from places which are traditionally antinomic to productiveenvironments.
6/6/2014 Nothing to Hide, The Blurring of the Physical and Temporal Line Between Life, Work and Education | microcities
http://microcities.net/portfolio/nothing-to-hide-the-blurring-of-the-physical-and-temporal-line-between-life-work-and-education/ 5/7
Interiors of Google headquarters in Zurich. from Il Post
Following the idea that the longer an employee voluntarily stays at work, the more he is productive, a new trend in bureau design isincreasingly updating the general model of the open plan into a further iteration, currently sold under the name of “imaginative“ or “creative”workplace. Behind this expression lie environments which are conceived to adapt to different personalities, allowing to work in a morestatic or nomadic way, to relax, to gather with co-workers through the integration of facilities like gyms, cafes, yoga and play courts.
The most known example is the Google Headquarters (Googleplex) whose entire effort behind the design seems to let people forget that theyare entering an actual workplace.
More than an interior design, a camouflage operation, that makes the whole complex look as a bizarre collage between a domesticenvironment, a public city-scape, a playground for grown-ups, a college: confusing the qualities of heterogeneous environments, blurringthe line between typologies and the spaces they identify.
Geek references and legends, somehow connected to the toponymy, (even “Googleplex” refers a minor character in The Hitchhiker’s Guide tothe Galaxy), and a generically chaotic and informal space layout, tend to underline the resemblance with a university campus, where you areused, and expected, to work long term hours.
“It’s designed almost as a living environment—it’s much more like being at a university than being in a conventional workenvironment.”(http://www.metropolismag.com/story/20060619/behindtheglasscurtain)
As Googleplex is considered one of the best place to work according to a number of reports(cit. http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/bestcompanies/2011/index.html) we see that the rhetoric of the management discourse, -employee manipulation through the illusion of a self-realisation through corporate work-, has found another ally: the ambiguity of spacedecoration.
The inclusion of furniture like lounge sofas, houseplants and lamps, alongside walls’ and floors’ bright colors schemes dissimulates anoffice typology behind the appearance of an idealized home, cozy and somehow responding to a personal style. “Why head home wheneverything you need is at work?” (cit. http://computer.howstuffworks.com/googleplex3.htm)
6/6/2014 Nothing to Hide, The Blurring of the Physical and Temporal Line Between Life, Work and Education | microcities
http://microcities.net/portfolio/nothing-to-hide-the-blurring-of-the-physical-and-temporal-line-between-life-work-and-education/ 6/7
Interiors of Google headquarters in Zurich. from Il Post
The rhetorics of creativity as a rediscovery of an inner childish side is underlined by a parallel infantilization of taste and entertainment allover the campus: round coloured pillows, slides, retro video games. But who needs constant care and guidance more than a child?
In fact these places end up mirroring, as its corresponding physical expressions, the all arising culture of “coaching”, (increasinglypromoted by contemporary management), or the practice of “supporting an individual through the process of achieving a specific personal orprofessional result”. Motivational speeches, devoted to the idea of self respect and the promotion of an individual lifestyle, translate intospace organisation and decoration. The workplace itself is today able to guide the employee to an apparent self-realization, while improvinghis/her own efficiency and better fitting the companies’ goals.
The high level of personalization and apparent freedom of these places coincide with the need for “flexible, evolutive spaces”: the capacity toadapt to changes in the organic is a feature which is easily sold even by the firms which provide the interior design: “Such flexibility is highlysignificant, since it comes in an age where needs quickly change, technology constantly advances, staff members are added or positionsare deleted.“
Google promotion of individual creativity, through the creation of a proper complex for its expression, is becoming a model for companieswilling to adopt the “Don’t be evil” look, while increasing their employees productivity and market dynamism. (See Accenture Workplace2.0, and Orange Campus). And if a complete makeover reveals too expensive, why not capitalize in the sympathy factor of “creative”employees glueing 8bit figures of post-it against the companies windows? (http://www.postitwar.com/)
An all encompassing marketing strategy and the consequent building of brand’s identity are increasingly set-up through thecommercialization of the workplace’s mise en scène. By breaking down the fourth wall, under the rhetoric of nothing to hide, the companyfocuses on the image of the worker, that smart-naked-playful individual who is supposed to embody the spirit of the company, whilebecoming its voluntary prisoner.
Further reading:
Michela Marzano: Extension du domaine de la manipulation : De l’entreprise à la vie privée (Grasset & Fasquelle, 2008)
Luc Boltanski / Eve Chiapello: The new spirit of capitalism (Verso, 2006)
Fredric Jameson: Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Post-Contemporary Interventions) (Duke University PressBooks, 1990)
Paolo Virno: A Grammar of the Multitude: For an Analysis of Contemporary Forms of Life (Semiotext(e) / Foreign Agents)
Valéry Didelon: Valeur d’usage, valeur d’image: la nouvelle école d’architecture de Nantes (in Criticat magazine #8 / septembre 2011)
Maurizio Lazzarato: Les Révolutions du Capitalisme, (Empêcheurs de Penser en Rond, 2004)
6/6/2014 Nothing to Hide, The Blurring of the Physical and Temporal Line Between Life, Work and Education | microcities
http://microcities.net/portfolio/nothing-to-hide-the-blurring-of-the-physical-and-temporal-line-between-life-work-and-education/ 7/7
4Like Tweet
Keti Chukhrov: Towards the Space of the General: On Labor Beyond Materiality and Immateriality (in: Are You Working Too Much? Post-Fordism, Precarity, and the Labor of Art – E-flux Journal, Sternberg Press 2011 )
Originally published on The Funambulist.
SIMILAR PROJECTS
RECENT NEWS
Microcities selected for a research program
on the habitability of the roofs of Paris
Flat in Paris (Avenue Saint-Ouen) is
completed!
# Occupy Biennale # Common Battle Ground
Microcities on Domus!
LAST WORKS
Renovation of an apartment in Paris
The Trellick Tower: The Fall and Rise of a
Modern Monument
El Crusat, Intergenerational Housing /
Residence intérgénérationnelle à Canohès
(Perpignan)
White Noise, Helsinki Central Library
CONTACT
Microcities is:
Mariabruna Fabrizi
and Fosco Lucarelli Architects
16/18 Place de la Chapelle
75018, Paris
P: (+33) 1 77 19 13 44
M: (+33) 6 77 34 87 04
Search here...
MORE
Writings
The Trellick Tower: The Fall andRise of a Modern Monument
Writings
Rituals, Before and After SpaceWritings
Measuring Space
