"Sensing a Dwelling" - Papanek is my new St Francis
I am working on my research outline for my curatorial project “LA Chair.”
I applied for a research grant with the Center for Craft to pay for my time to work on this project - but the project will move forward whether it is funded or not.
A large aim of this project with regards to research, is creating a system that is replicable, so that others can use that system in their research.
So anyone can pick a
Geography: Los Angeles
Object: Chair
Timeline: Now
LA, Studio Pottery, 1980-2000
North Carolina, Wood Casegoods, 1940-1960
East Long Beach, Suburban Track Home Builders, 1954
Etc…
3 Elements.
Always be Trining.
What is nice about craft objects is that we can gain a certain amount of qualitative data because they are designed for use.
With art objects, we typically just get to look at them.
In my reading this year, I’ve been interested in writers from the 80s and 90s in Architecture and Design who were trying to articulate this space between late modernism to postmodernism to the digital age…
I didn’t receive any of these reading assignments when I was going through school.
A lot of folks have read Victor Papanek’s work - but I went to art school, I truly never head his name until recently. Architecture and Design school students are more familiar - especially the millenialls and older.
The point is, the stuff I’ve been thinking and writing about have lead me to authors who have articulated the very same things - just in a different time and place, and about different things. Time, Place, Thing.
Chapter 4 in The Green Imperative Natural Design for the Real World is titled '‘Sensing a Dwelling.”
Opening quote, “Think with the whole body.” - Deshimaru
Yes!
One of the the exercises that we’ll be doing for the next LA Chair event is a blindfold sitting event.
Because of this question:
When was the last time you experienced something for the first time with your eyes closed?
Papanek opens chapter 4 with this anecdote:
The other day a friend visited me at my office. While waiting to see me, he picked up a magazine and looked at some pictures and floor plans of a recently completed building in Portland, and then said, ‘What a beautiful building!” I replied, ‘How can you possibly know?”
I love that energy.
It’s very Kip, “Napolean, how could anyone possibly ever know that?”
A few months ago I was asked to write a paid piece for an online publication - which was an honor to be asked.
The piece requested was largely open ended, but needed to be about mid-century modernism, and needed to a critical/think/provocative, etc…
When I got down to the process, I realized that there isn’t really anything I wanted to say except, can we please stop talking about mid-century stuff? And then I wrote a piece on that, and trashed it. Because that’s a waste of pixels.
And then I started drafting something that was junk for publishing, but on the road to a bigger idea.
So nothing got published, but it got me thinking about where I want to go with my writing and curating…
And the bigger idea is also the bigger idea I am interested in with LA Chair…
And so it seems that the work I’ve been doing in my writing, reading, making, thinking, is all coming together.
In the piece I drafted, which I haven’t re-read in 2 months, I was pointing to the fact that I’ve lived in mid-century homes my whole life, but I’ve never lived in ‘Mid-Century Modern” homes my whole life.
I live in a mid-century modern home now.
It’s not a “good one.”
Very few of them are.
And that IS precisely my point.
Most architecture is just built.
Most architecture just IS.
My piece centered on that issue, and the questions of who and when and how do we decide what is “Significant Architecture,” or not.
Papanek’s anecdote above leans into my point, and the importance of LA Chair being a project where we experience chairs - not just look at them.
“Significant Architecture,” is architecture to look at, not live in, it seems.
Papanek proceeds:
“Architects, architectural students and the general public experience buildings that are considered ‘important’ largely through television images, slides projected on to a screen or photographs in a book.”
If we follow this logic, our cultural anthropology would suggest something like:
Architecture becomes important, culturally, when it is no longer architecture.
Objects become powerful when they become images/illustrations of ideas, it seems.
That’s how discourse works. No issue there.
The problem, of course, is when the discourse is driving the work rather than responding to the work.
And the reason that is a problem is because Architecture is for people, not for talking about architecture.
At the LA Chair event in October, one participant said, “I feel like like I sat in more chairs today than my whole life!”
Is that true in the real sense of the statement?
Did this person actually sit in more chairs that day than their whole life?
Of course not.
We merely introduced a discourse about chairs that may have potential recourse as you go on through the course of your day and life .
It may be true, that is the course of life, we’ve sat in hundreds of chairs without giving much awareness or attention to it.
So yes, it might feel as if we are doing something for the first time - but I think that has more to say about how unaware we are with regards to our awareness and feelings about everyday things.
It is the everydayness of architecture and design that I am interested in.
Not transcending the everyday.
Feeling every day.
Feeling every thing.
How does a chair feel?
How does this chair feel?
What are you feeling?
How does that feeling feel?
-E