PUNK
Brothels, Anarchists, Filth, and Architecture
Crosstalk #1
September 2024
xxxxxxx Davis Richardson carves up McMansions, Kaede Polkinghome celebrates the Last Madam, Jack Hilchey thinks your software should be less efficient, Lulu Crouzet ponders the value of filth, and James Heard recites anarchist history.
Punking the Suburbs
Davis Richardson
Image by author.
There is nothing about suburban America that screams “radical.” The punk ethos has historically been anti-establishment, emerging in the 1970s in cities journalist John Savage described as “hollowed out… there to be remapped.” It has occupied unexpected and overlooked spaces, from grungy warehouses to the attached garage. Today, however, punk finds itself in suburbs and small towns due to American cities’ crises of affordability.1 Let’s reconsider the phenomenon which is unexpected both for punks and architects alike: the McMansion.
The McMansion is an obvious villain. It exemplifies the pre-2008 excesses of real estate speculation, racial segregation, American consumerism, and suburban copypasta masquerading as individualism. But it also offers a radical opportunity: Could these homes be re-envisioned as cooperative homesteads?
The famous line from Marx’s The Communist Manifesto that “all that is solid melts into air,” alludes to capitalism’s ever-expanding capacity to convert concrete use values into financial instruments of exchange. 2 While co-ops cannot evade the grasp of housing-as-commodified capital, collective use of McMansions could make housing a bit more “solid.” The backbone of communal housing already exists within these bloated houses: five bedroom/bathroom homes can be easily tweaked to feel more like individually-accessible units that share common living space. To become more unit-like, these bedrooms simply need a private door to the outside and en-suite bathrooms. Such a light touch intervention could exploit the ambiguity of the distinction between single-family and multi-family zoning which typically prohibits such density while encouraging an individualist culture: adding an exterior door and an en-suite bathroom does not convert a “bedroom” to a “unit” under the law.3
One model, the Brunswick, superimposes a ring of units on the existing house, creating a garden courtyard and an interior of common living space. Each bedroom unit has an en-suite bathroom and direct connection to the outside. The common spaces include an open living-dining-kitchen, complete with two stoves, dishwashers, and refrigerators; a private library; laundry room with multiple appliances; and galleries at both the north and south serve as additional work or leisure space. The ring itself serves as a compositional counterpoint to the original McMansion, fittingly the “hoop” on the house-as-earlobe in punk parlance.
To evict the whitewashed American Dream from the McMansions and replace it with a collectivist future is, frankly, punk as hell.
https://amp.theguardian.com/music/2016/oct/07/live-music-punk-move-to-suburbs-out-of-cities
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, 1848
For instance, the zoning ordinance of Marietta, GA (where I grew up) defines single family zones for 1-8 “units”/acre, while multi-family zones are then 8 units/acre and above. A “dwelling unit” is defined in the ordinance as “Consists of one or more rooms which are arranged, designed, or used as living quarters for one family only. Individual bathrooms and complete kitchen facilities, permanently installed, shall always be included in each “dwelling unit.” “Family” is defined as blood relatives or four or fewer unrelated members and excludes fraternities, sororoties, clubs, and group homes among other things. The intent would obviously be to exclude housing models like cooperatives, but it is not explicit and seems legally tenuous. Isn’t a group of people choosing to live together as kin something like a foster family? https://www.mariettaga.gov/DocumentCenter/View/360
After growing up in the McMansion-laden suburbs of Atlanta, Davis Richardson is now a licensed architect in New York and Texas and works at REX in NYC. He is investigating the ramifications of McMansions in his research project, “All That is Solid Melts into Air, or Reconsidering the McMansion.”
Une Maison Est Une Machine-a-baiser
Kaede Polkinghorne
“I found the French Quarter full of hookers. I didn’t start it – they were there when I got there.” Deliciously, this is not a pull quote from a neo-noir film set in New Orleans. Rather, it is plucked from the hours of tapes recorded by Norma Wallace at her final home in rural Mississippi. Norma is primarily remembered as New Orleans’ “last madam” – also the title of Christine Wiltz’s best selling account of the French Quarter queen’s life. From the early 1920s to 1963, she operated houses of prostitution, parlaying her modest beginnings into a widely-discussed life of glamor and intrigue.
Inarguably an icon in the history of sex work, Norma should also be remembered as an icon in the history of architecture. She created spaces that synthesized built and unbuilt triage strategies to minimize risk of harm and produce a world where deviant desires could be fulfilled. Her architecture was an expression of domestic disobedience – an apparatus for engaging with a hostile city while holding space for the grotesque and intimate vulnerability of paid sex.
Her most prolific house was located at 1026 Conti Street. Although it was once owned by E.J. Bellocq and sits catty-corner from the historic Storyville neighborhood, Norma sounds ambivalent about the urban karma of the address in her reflections. Instead, she talks about the sequence of spaces designed to make the house safe and productive over the twenty-odd years that she lived and worked there.
The first floor parlor was both a legal front and reception area where clients could be surveilled and vetted. Architectural thresholds were protective membranes that the intruding client was manually shepherded through. Some spaces were night-to-night, while others were in-case-of-emergency – like the tunnel that Norma carved into a courtyard wall to hide clients when the police stopped by. Passwords, peep holes, and beautiful gowns came together to create a space that, to say the least, defied definition by conventional land use law.
The French Quarter is littered with plaques, but there is no plaque at 1026 Conti. In fact, the Vieux Carre Commission (established in 1925 as an advisory body and expanded to a regulatory one in 1937) issued a demolition by neglect permit for 1026 Conti Street in December of 2023. Even though Norma’s architectural contributions to our city are undersung, we can experience her work through the oral histories she left us – a jewel in the sparse tiara of accounts by women who have made space sexy.
Kaede Polkinghorne is a designer, organizer, and writer who has just moved from New Orleans to Cambridge to study city planning at MIT.
Cyberpunked
Jack Hilchey
It’s all over our feeds: nascent artificial intelligences, rapidly updating BIM suites, and real-time rendering plug-ins beckon us to join the great productivity orgy in the sky.
And yet, given that by 2010, workers were already over 400% more efficient than they were in the 1940s,1 it may behoove us, on our ascent to the cloud, to stop and ask ourselves: why do we seek to improve our working efficiency with ever slicker tools and workflows? Is our industrywide reliance on a handful of proprietary, subscription-based softwares really such a great idea in the first place?
Photograph of a broken screen. Lakeview Images. Shutterstock.
One of the main selling points for these applications, plug-ins, and design aids is that their expediency will enable us to do more of what we enjoy — sketching and ideation. But even on this point, setting aside clunky interfaces and pervasive bugs at the time of writing, the reality is murky. Increasingly sophisticated clients’ expectations adjust to technological changes, and, as a result, design workers may be expected to develop a clearer picture of pricing sooner by producing higher-resolution models and images earlier in a given project,2 squeezing the concept design phase in the process. Even more troubling is the fact that, as the capabilities of these tools expand with each release, they become increasingly prescriptive of the actions a user must perform to complete a task. Much of the time, working in BIM resembles data entry, and AI promises to simplify image production into exercises in keyword selection. As it stands, this building-in of workflows risks constraining designers’ longstanding, vital diversity of ways of working.
We can hardly reset our digital tools overnight. But we do decide how we interact with them. Rather than passively proceeding to allow these softwares’ increasingly seamless suggested workflows to dictate how we do design work, in the long-run we will be better off actively developing more frictional, D.I.Y. modes of practice in relation to our impressive tools. We should be scrutinizing and testing, but also intentionally misusing, stretching, and breaking them to understand their limitations, deploying softwares in tandem to develop unorthodox hybrid workflows, and even building our own tools with what we’ve learned. After all, if all one has is a hammer — no matter how sophisticated — every design prompt looks like a nail. Perhaps the hammer could be put to better use…
U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. “Nonfarm Business Sector: Labor Productivity (Output per Hour) for All Workers [OPHNFB].” FRED, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, 17 June 2024, https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/OPHNFB. Accessed 22 June 2024.
Ng, Amelyn, et al. "Models, Technicity, Labor: In Conversation with Amelyn Ng." Plat, 17 Sept. 2021, www.platjournal.com/ninepointfive/models-technicity-labor-in-conversation-with-amelyn-ng.
Jack Hilchey is a designer and sometimes educator based in New York City. He has worked as a Project Director at Architecture Research Office and as a Project Manager at Metalab Studio, and has taught and TA'ed studios at the University of Houston and Rice Architecture.
Punked
Lulu Crouzet
The age value of architectural heritage often reveals itself through imperfection, patina, lack of unity, and tendencies towards dissolution of form and color. These characteristics are opposed to those of modern, newly created, seemingly timeless, or manufactured objects.1
Under that definition, the legibility of historicity through neglect, filth, and vandalism can be considered part of heritage and thus worthy of preservation. “Counterpreservation” appends memories of buildings by embracing iconoclastic rebelliousness and appropriating decrepit appearances.2 As said by Tschumi: “The most architectural thing about [a] building is the state of decay in which it is. [In fact], architecture only survives where it negates the form that society expects of it.”3 The traces of age and decay allow for the processual character of architecture to gain some recognition. The acceptance of patina is a reflective form of subversion and anarchy of both social and material processes.
While architecture with a recognized status seems extraordinary, or historically significant; a comprehensive approach toward heritage also values mundane and generic qualities. This contributes to tracing a more accurate history by preserving diverse evidence. After all, “heritage is about the process by which people use the past.”4
1. Shōden-ji temple, Kyoto, 2014. Photo by author.
2. Shōden-ji temple, Kyoto, 2014. Photo by author.
The Shōden-ji Temple recounts the story of a historical event in Kyoto in the 16th Century. Hundreds of samurai committed seppuku or harakiri, a Japanese ritualistic suicide at the Fushimi Castle. The resulting blood stains, called “chitenjo”, remain impregnated in the wood planks. They were repurposed and relocated to adorn the ceilings of temples as a memento mori to commemorate this event (images 1, 2). A second example shows how buildings can be recognized for their sub-culture aesthetics. In the 1970s, ETH Zürich filed a lawsuit for vandalism against Harald Naegeli for his graffiti art in the parking lot of the main campus. Many years later, aided by social protests, the graffiti not only endured but was preserved and restored by the university’s Art Collections and Archives (images 3, 4).
3. Harald Naegeli, Figur Ki-00274-12, 2015 (ETH-Bibliothek, Kunstinventar) http://doi.org/10.21263/ethz-a-000000679
4. Harald Naegeli, Figur Ki-00274-12, 2019 with additions after water damage (ETH-Bibliothek, Kunstinventar) http://doi.org/10.21263/ethz-a-000001064
The value generated from preservation can contribute to gentrification, social displacement, and the proliferation of urban ruins. However, designers can “punk” the public and manipulate the market by recreating social relevance in order to increase or decrease perceived worth. Both options are hostile and their repercussions are multifold. The exploitation of existing architecture’s historical and social qualities is questionable, but at least it keeps us from building new buildings.
Langenberg, Silke. “Das Konzept „Ersatz“? Probleme bei der Reparatur industriell gefertigter Bauteile.” Berlin: Technikgeschichte, 2012. p. 269 citing Riegl, Alois. “Der moderne Denkmalskultus, sein Wesen und seine Entstehung.” Augsburg: Gesammelte Aufsätze, 1929, p. 144–193.
Sandler, Daniela. “Counterpreservation: Architectural Decay in Berlin since 1989.” Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2016.
Tschumi, Bernard. “Advertisements for Architecture.” 1975.
Harvey, David. “The History of Heritage.” In The Routledge Research Companion to Heritage and Identity. London: Routledge, 2008.
Lulu Crouzet is a Ph.D. Candidate at ETH Zürich. She is researching the repair and care of digitally fabricated architecture and the preservation of the related digital-born data. She previously worked as an architect in Canada, Germany, and the USA.
Edelmann in New York
James Heard
On the evening of May Day 1892, workers representing labor organizations throughout New York City had filled Union Square to speak on the eight hour workday. The Central Labor Federation, the Central Labor Union, the Socialist Labor Party, and the newly formed Socialist League all fielded representatives to speak. When John Hermann Edelmann attended the 1892 May Day celebration, he and a cohort of likeminded comrades had just been kicked out of the Socialist Labor Party for espousing anarchist views, forming the Socialist League in response.
While it’s not known if Edelmann spoke from the Union Square rostrum on May Day 1892, he did design the nearby Decker Piano building. Besides being one of America’s foremost anarchist orators and publishers, Edelmann was an accomplished architect, having mentored Louis Sullivan and worked alongside the canonical figures of Chicago School of architecture. Commissioned in 1892 and completed in 1893, the Decker Building was at the time one of Union Square’s tallest buildings. While at first glance it’s a normative nineteenth-century high-rise, its ornamental program—the selection and arrangement of decorative motifs—pay homage to Edelmann’s influences. The Venetian Gothic style derives from John Ruskin’s The Seven Lamps of Architecture, the flowing vegetal patterns from William Morris’ textiles, and the ordering of the decoration from Gottfried Semper’s The Four Elements of Architecture. Edelmann, lecturing in the evenings, would have spent his days designing what would become the backdrop for his speeches and those of his anarchist comrades.
Postcard commemorating May Day in Union Square. The rostrum in the foreground was designed by Olmstead and Vaux. In the background, the Decker Building, designed by John Herman Edelmann, can be seen. Anarchism in New York: The Cottage in Union Square from Which the Open Air Meeting of the “Unemployed” Was Addressed. Photograph by unknown author, 1893, New York Public Library Digital Collections. https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47e1-06bd-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99
Though Edelmann completed numerous buildings, the Decker Building is the only one that remains. It is a monument to a period of economic and social transformation in the United States. Edelmann’s personality bridged the 19th century class divide, traveling in both the rarefied circles of the Chicago School’s elite and the working-class of New York’s Bowery. These tumultuous moments are captured in the Decker Building’s idiosyncrasies. Its ornamental program marks a moment in time where the same individual who advocated for the expropriation of property from the capitalist class, also spent his working hours designing their buildings and superintending their job sites. Edelmann’s iconoclastic life and architecture may have become an historical footnote, but his irreconcilability continues to remind that revolutionary theory and practice reside in the contradictions of capital.
James Heard is a Doctoral Student in Architecture at Columbia GSAPP and licensed architect in California. He is currently researching the relationship between labor organizing and disciplinary formations in the mid-20th century.
