If everyone who used buildings were to form a union, how might they go on strike? They could demand faster escalators, better lobbies, wider halls – and they could boycott the buildings they work in. After all, if everyone got together and declared themselves the Building Users Union – We are the users of buildings, they say, and here is our list of demands – how might the built environment be forced to change? In other words, if architects can unionize – a big if – then why not the people who use their buildings?
Can an audience go on strike?
The users of buildings march on Washington – on Whitehall, on the UN – demanding action, and the strike goes on for years. People are soon camping in the streets, sleeping in makeshift tent cities, and refusing to enter architecture until their demands are met. The world of interiors is lost to them. Children are born in parks; schools are founded beside undammed rivers; religious services take place in wooded groves.
Architects are beside themselves. They live alone inside distant high-rises, opening windows here and there, wondering where everyone has gone. (BLDG BLOG)
Poetic, and an appropriate counterpoint to my unprompted declaration against anti-urban romanticism. I like the idea or image insofar as it has an affinity with that of a general strike, one that posits a “class” consciousness around something as seemingly universal as being a user of buildings. But in the end it is little more than whimsy, and we all know where that leads. It reminds me a great deal of Actual Air, not that there’s anything wrong with that per se.
However, celebrating life in the parks against merely surviving in buildings still seems like an ultimately conservative gesture for two reasons:
- It’s a regression into that facile conviction of standing with the “authentic” against the “alienating” without concern over why which one is (or has come to be) which and whether it has to (or should) be that way. The architects living alone in their towers? Like the fluffy intellectuals left behind with their abstractions by those who are out there “really living their lives”?
- It’s a very particular aesthetic that is often at work providing an escape from economic reality. For example, there are a fair number of people for whom the world of interiors is lost and who do make their lives on the margins of architecture, but far from voluntarily and certainly not in protest of such luxuries.
It’s still a nice bit of language, but the whimsical should be kept clearly separated from the political. Also, I will probably continue to post the pictures.
