UrbaneSpaces had an exhibition- gharbzadegi, at cafe domus, which ran till 9september, 2006.
revolving around the themes of critical theory, it specifically challenges the articulators of vernacular architecture and questions the possibility of ’speaking for a mute orient’ or even to articulate an aesthetic not from a position of dominion.
Exploring the themes of whether the subaltern(a la Spivak) can truly speak, I’d often wondered about the conservation debate currently going on.
While there are plenty of dissenting voices speaking out against the en bloc process of Pearl Bank apartments, the same cannot be said for the mainly Thai worker-denominated Golden Mile Complex.

An ideal project for the coming weeks would be going down(preferably with a thai-speaking person) to Golden Mile Complex interviewing its denizens and habitues on what they feel about the impending en bloc exercise. Let me look up what Spivak has to say…

Our tongue in cheek (anti) press release for our new tongue in cheek service.
It’s a real service that simultaneously serves as our social commentary on the real estate industry. References to the Situationist International which would explain the otherwise bizarre quotations.

From here:

Palimpsest

Frank A. Mills

In the last post, “Rain, Poems, and Alleyways: Framing Space,” we looked at framing space through cognitive perception. Last week, while wandering about Buffalo, Wyoming, population 4290, another framing tool, palimpsest, made itself evident. Palimpsest, strictly speaking, refers to parchment that has been written on, erased, and then written on again, with some part of the original writing still remaining legible, although covered over. By extension, then, palimpsest is a place, object, or area that reflects layers of history. Founded in 1879 Buffalo offers serves up a cornucopia of palimpsest. While much of it is rather easy to discover, a substantial portion is hidden in the town’s nooks and crannies, best explored on foot. Buffalo, being a small, compact town, that is what I did early Saturday morning for several hours.

As I wandered about, letting my senses lead as they would, I was constantly reminded of the town’s history, although not in a preserved sense. Yes, there was the prerequisite museum, but most of the reminder was “layers written over”— layers of faded, peeling painted advertisements and store names on building walls, an almost unrecognizable railroad station, sans track, converted into a home, an alleyway to nowhere disappearing into an angling crevice, even a Rexall Drugstore sign hanging over the doorway of what was soon to become merely a soda fountain cum gift shop. There was the Occidental Hotel (founded in a tent in 1789, the same year that Buffalo was founded) where Owen Wister’s Virginian finally got his man (if you ask, the proprietress will show you the room where Wister wrote). Still a hotel, but much different than it once was with its back-door brothel. The door, and its narrow steps to the second floor are still there; the brothel is not. Look over the door and there are still traces of its previous purpose. On the front, if one looks closely, the faded names of the old first floor stores are still legible, now a hotel restaurant and bar. All in all, contemporary Buffalo is an interesting mix of evolved restoration with little historic preservation (the most notable preservation effort is nearby Fort McKinney, three miles to the west). The Occidental Hotel is the perfect example of a building’s evolution, not covering over the past entirely, but building over the years in a way that allows the building to evolve with the environment while leaving the palimpsest legible.

Today, in our urban cores and neighborhoods, palimpsest is in danger of becoming irrevocably lost. Those of you who are regular readers of Urban Spaces | Urban Places are well aware of my insistence that for urban revitalization to be sustainable, it must flow from the history of the place. Yet, as new development comes into place, we are rapidly losing all sense of palimpsest, and in my opinion, our urban cores and neighborhoods are none the better for it.

There is, fortunately, a new breed of urban planners on the threshold; different to the point of calling themselves “Radical Urban Planners.” Neither New Urbanists or Modernists, Radical Urban Planners range over a broad spectrum of planning philosophies and disciplines. However, one discipline that seems to be common to all, is urban psychogeography. Psychogeography, the evolved offspring of the turn of the 19th-century flâneur, or wandersmänner, is a postmodern discipline that studies the “precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behaviors of individuals,” especially within a geographic context (Guy Debord, “Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography,” Les Lèvres, No. 6, 1955).

The primary tool of psychogeography is the dérive, or drift. Although appropriated by “urban explorers” wandering about urban ruins (and often leaving their graffiti mark) the drift is the primary tool of the psychogeographer. The drift discovers hidden stories within the urban environment by playfully combining all of the senses, including the imagination, with technical analysis to discover both neighborhood narratives – of people, buildings, landscape, and infrastructure – and the core behaviors embedded in them. For psychogeographers, the drift makes plain the palimpsest in a way that assists in understanding how the past evolved creates the present. Psychogeography does not peel off the layers to reveal the past, but rather sees the past in the present. Palimpsest is not the removal of more recent layers to reveal the past, but individual layers legible through later layers.

Psychogeographers understand that palimpsest – as history revealed in the present – is an essential part of the geographical environment, a part that is crucial to understanding both the evolution of the environment and how that evolution affects the behaviors of present day residents. Psychologically, palimpsest provides the necessary sense of connect to the past. A future not rooted in the past is no future at all. New development can uproot the past through total disregard for it. It can rootlessly approximate the past through nostalgic reproduction or preservation. Or it can sink its roots into the past, building new, but allowing the past to be legible. Only the latter can be fully sustainable; not that it will forever remain in its current built form, but in that it is built to evolve with the environment.

Have not been able to shake off my sense of dramatics-
Guy Debord, leader of the Situationists International, warned of the ‘Spectre of the Spectacle’- where one work of art inspires its own set of reproductions and is copied over and over again, further distancing us from the real experience.

Showflats, a space where ‘apartment living’ or quite often, ‘aspirational living’ is re-created, have de-generated into copies of one another. It’s the same, frozen look with fake books lining the shelves, plush furry upholstery decidedly unsuitable for our tropical climates, lots of leather, plenty of mirrors working around the dictum of mirrors=illusion of more space, ambient lighting and a set temperature conducive to the showflat-shopping process.

At the other extreme, I’ve seen showflats that try to break away from the mould by having dangerously curvy staircases- helmed by rough ropes- to the second floor, unwieldy pieces of art in the centre of what is an ultimately small space and a minimum of plush toys(cushions/tiny roll blankets/roll pillows).

My objections with showflats, beyond that unrealistic re-creation of what ‘living’ is supposed to be like, is their increasing like-ness to each other. It’s become a polished, professional way of engendering more sales, along with bland brochures, silly tv ads of happy families engaged in some activity convenient to the development.

If we’re going to pariticipate in a system where experiences are mediated by images, could they at least not be tiresome copies of one another?

When a real estate ad in a mainstream paper declares:’Philippe Starck finishing’ ,
‘modern loft’ and ‘zen minimalist apartment’ become keywords /phrases that become part of real estate marketing jargon, possibly it’s time to move on.

Judging by some of the apartments I’ve seen that were advertised as ‘zen minimalist’, there are some peculiar interpretations of the minimalist aesthetic out there.

We all know of the commercial sell-out of the enterprising Philippe Starck. Zen minimalism is somewhat ‘done’ but most of us still adhere to variations of it.
So in an industry where there is considerable jostling to be considered as an arbiter of taste- who gets to define what is ‘cool’ and what is not?

I once wrote an essay on the Foucauldian concept of the power/knowledge dichotomy and how it plays out in an industry unabashedly subjective(where the correlation between power and knowledge becomes considerably tighter and self-fulfilling).

Adherence to google’s motto of ‘don’t be evil’- can be relatively difficult- sure, it’s in my/our interests to be considered the arbiter of taste and to consequently sideline the rest as ‘mainstream’. The design-conscious real estate scene is an industry that I would prefer to think of as a non-mainstream, marginalized segment of the real estate industry and according to Foucauldian logic, marginalized= not evil, although I sometimes wonder if today, niche, designer conscious markets(in real estate or otherwise) are exercising a tyranny all of their own through the perpetual documentation of what’s fashionable and cool and what’s a pathetic interpretation.
It’s the tyranny of the (supposedly marginalized) powerful few over the mainstream public, which puts part of the Foucauldian logic on its head, doesn’t it.

For all the above rantings, I’d probably be including a post where I (not-so-subtly)sniff at supposed mediocre interpretations of modern design and architecture.