Out of storage

The Architectural Review, No. 1501, May 2023 ‘Museums’

In 1864, John Edward Gray, keeper of the zoology collections at the British Museum, made a bold proposal in the Annals and Magazine of Natural History. Museums, he argued, should not display every specimen they possess, for risk of ‘overwhelming the general visitor with a mass of unintelligible objects’. Instead, their collections would be ‘best kept in cabinets or boxes from which light and dust would be excluded’, such that scientists could study them ‘uninterrupted by the ignorant curiosity of the ruder class of general visitors’.

Aside from its deep Victorian condescension, this idea was fairly novel. The earliest European museums, most of which date back to the mid to late 18th century, did not require storerooms: their collections were typically displayed in their entirety. By Gray’s time, the holdings of European and North American museums had swelled with colonial spoils, and displaying everything had become unsustainable. ‘What the general public want,’ Gray argued, was not to view fifty specimens of, say, the parrot family, but ‘the most interesting objects so arranged as to afford the greatest possible amount of information.’ 

The division that Gray suggested between curated public displays and separate storage facilities for study and preservation was prescient. Today’s largest museums are custodians of gigantic collections that have long outgrown their premises. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, for example, has a collection of more than two million items, of which it displays around five per cent. The British Museum shows only one per cent. Some objects will travel on loan, but the majority sits in storerooms on‑ and off‑site. Should scholars wish to inspect items in storage, most museums can facilitate a supervised visit. The general public, by contrast, is left to scroll online inventories that may or may not be fully photographed and catalogued.

It is a situation that speaks to a fundamental contradiction in what museum institutions perceive their mission to be. After years of debate, the International Council of Museums (ICOM) ratified a new definition of the museum in 2022: ‘A museum is a not‑for‑profit, permanent institution in the service of society that researches, collects, conserves, interprets and exhibits tangible and intangible heritage.’ It should also be ‘open and accessible to all’ and operate ‘with the participation of communities’. But this obligation is often scuppered by the sheer quantities of museum items held in storage, a situation resulting from the collecting and preservation efforts that are also part of the museum definition. 

Museums have grappled with this paradox for more than a century – not least spatially. Gray’s vision for separate study or ‘reserve’ collections would be realised not so long after his article appeared. In 1881, the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC announced that its collections were ‘being assorted and rearranged for the purpose of placing on exhibition a selected series of objects which shall be of interest to visitors, and of making the remainder serviceable for purposes of scientific and technological investigation’. A new building opened the same year, designed with this programmatic distinction in mind.

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Right to refuse

The Architectural Review, No. 1498, February 2023 ‘Labour’

When ‘Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street’ was published in The Piazza Tales, an 1856 anthology of Herman Melville’s short stories, a reviewer singled it out as ‘one of the best bits of writing which ever came from the author’s pen’. But over time, the story’s titular character – a pallid law-copyist who stops working because, he says, he ‘would prefer not to’ – would, along with Melville himself, be consigned to relative obscurity for more than half a century. That was to change. By the 1920s, a Melville revival was under way in the US literary community, which re-established ‘Bartleby the Scrivener’ as a masterpiece of short fiction, and from the 1980s onwards, the character became something of a darling of continental European philosophy: Gilles Deleuze and Giorgio Agamben wrote lengthy essays on Bartleby; Slavoj Žižek donned an ‘I would prefer not to’ T-shirt.

More recently, it is the architectural community – especially the more academically minded parts of it – that has embraced Bartleby. In a 2007 edition of El País, Spanish architect Iñaki Ábalos ventured that the character ‘represents the most compelling evocation of sustainability’s aesthetic dimension’, while a 2017 lecture series organised by Peter Swinnen at ETH Zürich took ‘I prefer not to’ as its prompt to consider what architects ought not to do, and included Anne Lacaton and Arno Brandlhuber on its list of speakers. In London, Bartleby haunted the Architectural Association’s 2021/22 prospectus, where several unit briefs made mention of him – apparently independently of each other. What to make of this? 

As ever, it is helpful to return to the original text. Its protagonist is not, in fact, Bartleby but his employer – an unnamed narrator – who recounts the story of the recalcitrant scrivener and reveals a great deal about himself, and the economic model he represents, by doing so. He is an elderly and, by his own admission, ‘unambitious’ lawyer whose chambers in Wall Street provide the primary setting for the story. This is the Wall Street of the mid-19th century, one of the birthplaces of securitisation; where financial capitalism as we might recognise it today was forged in the New York Stock Exchange, and in the brokerage and mortgage houses, banks and lawyers’ chambers that served it. The novella includes some of the most detailed descriptions, alongside Melville’s contemporary Charles Dickens’ Bleak House and ‘A Christmas Carol’, of what such chambers might have looked like, and the conditions the copyists worked under: think Bob Cratchit’s ‘dismal little cell, a sort of tank’. It is in such a gloomy ‘cistern’ of an office that the narrator of ‘Bartleby, the Scrivener’ oversees ‘a snug business among rich men’s bonds and mortgages and title-deeds’. Helping him draw up these documents are scriveners, whose gruelling task it is to produce four handwritten copies of each of the lengthy legal texts, non-stop, six days a week. For this, they are paid four cents (roughly US$1.50 today) per page of correctly copied words.

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Riget

‘Seen on Screen’, Disegno #29 (Summer 2021)

Copenhagen’s largest hospital, Rigshospitalet, has a new wing and it’s lovely. Designed by local architects Link Arkitektur and 3XN, it is humanely proportioned, clad in pale natural stone, and brimming with abstract art and light-infused interiors. It couldn’t be further, architecturally, from the hospital’s main wing, which rises behind it like a concrete bogeyman. This hulking monolith, designed by Jørgen Stærmose and Kay Boeck-Hansen in the late 1960s, radiates a malevolence that cannot be extenuated even by a flattering press shot.

Or so it seems to me. I lived in Copenhagen in the 1990s, and watched Lars von Trier’s TV series Riget (1994-97) at an impressionable age. “Riget” means “the realm” or “the kingdom” in Danish (the show is known as The Kingdom internationally) but it is also a shorthand for Rigshospitalet, where the drama takes place. It’s a hospital show like no other, viewed through a sickening sepia filter and populated by grotesque characters, including Dr Helmer, a narcissistic Swedish neurosurgeon, and Mrs Drusse, a patient and self-proclaimed medium who senses sinister goings-on in her ward. The hospital turns out to be haunted, not only by ghosts but by deeper, chthonic forces, suppressed for too long by a haughty medical establishment enamoured with its own scientific rationality.

Stæremose and Boeck-Hansen’s building does a lot of work in Riget. It comes to represent – no, actually embody – the oppressive rigidity of the doctors’ attitudes to death, so that when the demonic reckoning arrives it is from under and within the building, erupting forth through cracks in the concrete. “Tiny signs of fatigue have begun to show in the seemingly solid, modern edifice,” a mysterious narrator warns in the opening credits of each episode. Aerial shots of Rigshospitalet also come up repeatedly – the shaky proto-Dogme camerawork suggesting a sense of imminent collapse. Reason and scientific progress are built on diabolical deeds, the building seems to say. This all sounds dreadful and a bit moralising, but Riget condemns itself through sheer silliness: relaying the wider thematics is a plot that encompasses exorcisms, demonic pregnancies, attempts at voodoo, and a doctor obsessed with the density of his own poo. Since airing, the show has achieved cult status far beyond its native Denmark.

In December 2020, a third season of Riget, titled Riget Exodus, was announced. Written by Lars von Trier and Niels Vørsel (the original screenwriters), the season will start filming in 2021, and I can’t imagine they will utilise the new wing. It’s just so pristine! Or perhaps it’s the perfect setting for a 21st-century reboot, generating a new form of AirSpace uncanny. Imagine the wards blindingly bright, the mid-century-inspired furniture cracking, the suspended Olafur Eliasson mobile inexplicably crashing to the ground. Hit me up Lars! I’ve got this bold new scenography all figured out.

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Hopscotch

For the V&A’s Pandemic Objects series, 8 June 2020

“How do you bring people together when you can’t bring people together?” asks Jenny Elliott, an urban designer and landscape architect based in Edinburgh. Hopscotch, she thought at the beginning of lockdown, might be one way.

Elliott drew up a few squares on the pavement outside her home, left a box of chalk there, and put up a hand-written sign. “Please take a chalk … for … HOPSCOTCH!” it read, and then posed a challenge: “Add some squares to the hopscotch on your walk up the hill, and see if we can make it to the top (Bruntsfield Place) before it rains.”

It didn’t rain for another two weeks, and the hopscotch court grew, by collective effort, into a 400m grid comprising some 1,400 squares. It reached the top of the hill, and even peeled off in other directions before being washed away by rainfall. Elliott had to move her sign further up the road several times to keep up with the design, but “the biggest challenge,” she says, “was trying to source enough chalk. All the neighbours chipped in, and any chalk at the back of their cupboards came out.”

As the world went into lockdown this spring, many cities saw their pavements and streets slowly transformed by chalk drawings. Hopscotch, in particular, was a popular motif combining creative chalking with play. A home security camera in Irvine, California, caught an Amazon delivery worker hopscotching back to his van after dropping off a parcel. (Heart-warming? Yes. Extremely creepy how the video was captured? Also yes.) Clips of refuse collectors hopscotching down streets while picking up bin bags in Hull, Darlington, and Derbyshire circulated on local news websites in March and April. Hopscotch, it seemed, was as popular among children as it was among the key workers who encountered it on their shifts.

Hopscotch is an ancient game believed to have originated in prehistoric India. A game of its description is included on the sixth- or fifth-century BCE list of games prohibited by the Buddha, a list which also features board, dice, and ball games, as well as the curious game of ‘guessing a friend’s thoughts’. In England, it was first recorded by Francis Willughby in the seventeenth-century Book of Games, referred to there as ‘scotch-hoppers.’

A common hopscotch court design is the eight-square: a numbered grid of alternating single and double squares through which players hop on either one or both feet, careful not to tread on any lines. Additionally, a ‘marker’ or ‘lucky’ – often a pebble or bottle cap – is thrown onto the court, with players having to avoid the square on which it falls. But there are many ways of playing hopscotch, and many court designs. Variations of it exist all over the world, and go by different names: the German Hinkspiel, Igbo swehi, French escargot (played on a spiral court), Hindi Kith-Kith, Bengali Ekhaat Duhaat, Swedish hoppa hage, Persian Laylay, to name only a few.

Hopscotch teaches counting and co-ordination, and can be played while observing physical distancing rules. As such, it has made its way onto new lists: Covid-era ones, itemising the kinds of activities parents should encourage their kids to do while self-isolating. “Put the phones and tablets down and grab some coloured chalk for some outdoor fun on your driveway!” writes The Scotsman.

But unless you have a driveway or a private garden with paving in it, such advice is not, well, advisable. In the United Kingdom, at least, you mustn’t draw on public streets without permission from your local council (usually granted in the form of a ‘play street’ permit), even if it’s with chalk. This has been widely flouted and loosely enforced, of course, especially during lockdown. But in 2013, a 10-year-old girl in Kent was threatened with criminal damages by an over-zealous police officer for chalking a hopscotch court outside her home. More recently, last month, a local inspector at a housing estate in Bishopsbriggs, Dunbartonshire, told parents that their children must “refrain from [playing hopscotch] immediately,” arguing that the chalk courts ruined the overall appearance of the property. An apology was later made, and the instruction rescinded.

Why should it be so transgressive to chalk up a play area in public space? Jenny Elliott, who initiated the Edinburgh hopscotch, thinks the game has an inherent mark-making appeal. “That’s the delight of drawing your own hopscotch as a child,” she says. “You’re often drawing it somewhere that you’re not normally allowed to draw in. But it’s alright because it will wash away.” As an urban designer, she finds this impulse important. “It gives you some control over your surroundings as a citizen. I think a lot of people don’t feel they have that ability to shape the way their outside environment looks and feels.”

Perhaps that’s no wonder, given the dominance granted to cars on our streets; the permits required for play; and the threats of mean-spirited property inspectors like the one in Bishopsbriggs. But Elliott’s initiative shows that when given the opportunity, people of all ages delight in shaping the look and feel of their immediate surroundings. “We had people personalising their own squares,” she explains. “When we got to 1,000, somebody did this huge drawing around it.” Participants dedicated squares to NHS staff and other key workers, and wrote birthday messages for local children. The design of the court was also creatively adapted to fit around and respond to urban features along the road: “There was a small laneway that cuts across the street,” Elliott says, “so somebody drew a rocket ship to ‘help’ the hopscotch over.”

As lockdown restrictions begin to ease, traffic levels have picked up again. And although hopscotch courts are normally drawn on pavements, not the road itself, the constant presence of cars makes it less likely for parents to want their children out playing in the urban environment. With a brief interlude of a few months, we are back to the trajectory mapped out in a 2007 report from Play England: it found that while 71 per cent of adults remember playing out on the street as children, only 21 per cent of children in 2007 actually did so.

Architects and urban designers have long stressed the importance of spontaneous play in towns and cities. It was no coincidence that, as personal cars became increasingly present on our streets, some of the most powerful design ideas for play emerged in the postwar decades. The 1960s was even host to the so-called ‘playground revolution’, as well as, of course, other revolutions. This was the time of Dutch architect Aldo van Eyck’s Amsterdam playgrounds: hundreds of spaces developed in squares, parks, and vacant lots, all featuring minimalist equipment which could be played with creatively. (Sadly, only 17 of these playgrounds remain.) In Britain, civil engineer Colin Buchanan’s 1963 Traffic in Towns report led to increased pressure to establish ‘home zones’ or permanent play streets, where traffic was heavily reduced in favour of pedestrians, cyclists and playing children. And architects Peter and Alison Smithson championed the concept of ‘streets in the sky’, traffic-free walkways in high-rises which could be used communally by residents. (That this typology didn’t always live up to the Smithsons’ vision is another story.)

Many of us regret seeing cars return in great numbers to our streets. At the beginning of June, air pollution was reported to have risen back to pre-pandemic levels in China after a significant dip during its lockdown measures, and European countries are expected to follow. While some cities have vowed to pedestrianise more streets and offer pop-up bike lanes for commuters returning to work, it is too soon to say what the long-term effect this period will have on the ways we use our streets. “It’s ultimately a choice,” says Elliott. “Do we want cars to dominate these spaces? Or do we want to give them over to other uses? Or is there a balance that can be struck?”

[Read the entry on the V&A’s website]

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The Convention Centre

For the V&A’s Pandemic Objects series, 28 May 2020

Have you ever attended a trade fair? There’s one for most industries and interest groups. A list of events scheduled at London’s ExCeL Centre this year, which may or may not go ahead because of the Covid-19 pandemic, include: Intelligent Building Europe, The Call & Contact Centre Expo, Oceanology International, The European Pizza & Pasta Show, and, of course, a Comic Con.

Should you attend such an event, you would be forgiven for thinking little of its architectural setting. There are of course exceptions, but most modern exhibition centres consist of windowless sheds which serve as stage sets for the exhibitors’ stands. They are typically navigated by vast alphanumeric grids, which have you trotting endlessly without the general vista changing much. A73 in Hall B looks exactly like F26 in Hall A, only with a different type of pasta on show, or a new tool for oceanographic exploration. This is the point of such spaces. They are highly serviced, highly adaptable, and highly boring-looking.

It is sometimes difficult to conceive of a convention centre as a single complex, so embedded can it be in its ancillary infrastructure. Venues often have their own train stations (the Köln Messe stop for Cologne’s main halls; the Rho Fieramilano station for Milan’s enormous expo complex) which help shuttle visitors in the tens of thousands from nearby airports directly into the venue. London’s ExCeL sits right next to its City Airport. In Las Vegas, one of the US’s trade show capitals (the Strip alone boasts a staggering 10.5 million square feet of exhibition space), halls are attached to resorts and casinos, with distinctions between any of these spaces, between leisure and commerce, thoroughly obscured.

It is nonetheless a recognisable typology, with roots in the earliest World Exhibitions of the mid-to late-19th century. London’s Crystal Palace, which was built in Hyde Park to host the first such event, the Great Exhibition of 1851, was a precursor to today’s NECs, ExCeLs and Javit Centers. The technologies used to construct it – notably cast-iron and sheet glass – were part of the British Empire’s display of industrial prowess at the time. Crystal Palace accommodated more than 14,000 exhibitors and welcomed some six million people during its five-month run. Today’s convention centres have a quicker turnaround of trade shows (often weekly), and have adapted their services and infrastructure accordingly. The 1980s and 90s in particular, shows Heywood Sanders in his 2014 book Convention Center Follies, was a time when many new purpose-built convention centres were erected, occasioned, in part, by accelerating globalised trade, cheap international travel, and local governments eager to invest in venues promising a boost in commercial activity.

Today, these spaces are being put to new use. At the beginning of 2020, convention centres around the world began to be repurposed to help cities cope with the escalating Covid-19 pandemic. Early on, the China Optics Valley Convention & Exhibition Center in Wuhan, the epicentre of the pandemic, was reportedly transformed into a 1,000-bed hospital in just 24 hours. Other countries followed suit: the Bashundara Convention Centre in Dhaka, Bangladesh; the Durban International Convention Centre in South Africa; the Centro de Convenciones Bicentenario in Ecuador; and the Javits Center in New York City, one of the US’s worst hit areas, being only some of the venues transformed into makeshift medical facilities at breakneck speed. In England, seven NHS Nightingale Hospitals were adapted from existing venues into critical care hospitals in March and April. The two largest ones, in Birmingham and London, prepared temporary hospitals with the capacity of 4,000-5,000 beds within the National Exhibition Centre (NEC) and the ExCeL respectively.

Nightingale London in the ExCeL was built in just nine days with the help of Royal Anglian Regiment and Royal Gurkha Rifles alongside NHS staff and contractors, officially opening on 3 April 2020. Nightingale Birmingham in the NEC followed a fortnight later. The speed at which this happened is testament to the enormous effort put in by all involved, but also to the sheer malleability of the convention centre space. BDP, the architecture firm tasked with designing the Nightingale Hospitals, published an instruction manual setting out some of the main principles of converting exhibition centres (or any “large barn type spaces”) into hospitals. Venue requirements, it says, include a “clear span, large flexible space,” “proximity to appropriate staff accommodation”, “space for medical gases”, and “general parking”, all of which were readily at hand at the ExCeL and NEC. It stresses the importance of using existing infrastructure, including “exhibition stand systems” for building bed bays, and seeking assistance from “available workforce from events sector”.

“Both the NEC and the ExCeL used exhibition stand systems,” says Max Martin, an architect director at BDP who worked on the Nightingale project. “Those systems were quite simple because they’re rectilinear, they clip and click together, and we could make them work for the sizes of the bays.” Ventilation, at least at the NEC, was also deemed to be sufficient for the purposes of a temporary hospital. “Because they’re large, voluminous spaces that are typically used to having large numbers of people in them, they do have quite high air change rates,” says Martin. “I guess that’s an inherent value to that kind of space.”

Other aspects were more challenging. Exhibition centres generally have high electrical capacity, given the events they support, but hospitals require not only capacity, but “electrical resilience,” explains Martin. Backup generators needed to be put in place to make the spaces more compliant. In addition, the delivery of medical gases – particularly oxygen – was an especially gnarly problem. The plumbing for oxygen supplies comes with its own specific fire risks and would normally take many weeks to lay out. “You also need enough space to put up big gas tanks,” says Martin. Finally, there was the issue of delivering hot water to an unprecedented number of individual points. “One of the big things with Covid-19, and with hospitals generally, is that you’ve got to wash your hands a lot. With thousands of beds that involves lots of hand-wash basins.” A schematic design for a portable basin unit can be found in the BDP’s instruction manual. “HOT WATER IF POSSIBLE,” reads the diagram.

It is now late May, and while Nightingale London took in a small number of patients in its first weeks, the demand has not been as high as originally anticipated. At the beginning of the month, it was announced that most of the facilities would be mothballed and effectively put on standby, should they be needed in the event of a second wave. “The purpose of all these buildings was to provide capacity should it be needed,” says Martin, “and I suppose it’s a positive thing that it’s not been needed in quite the way it was thought.”

While the Nightingales lie dormant, and mass gatherings remain out of the question, convention centres around the world are facing hard times. “We went from a very busy, active convention center to zero,” said Dieter Heigl, the general manager of a large Chicago exhibition space, to the Daily Herald this month. “It certainly is the most challenging environment I’ve encountered in my career.” When will we have our trade shows and comic cons back? Do we want them back at the same fervent rate? For several years now, the European design industry’s main trade event, the Salone del Mobile in Milan (held at the Fiera Rho), has been subject to critique. There are arguments for slowing down – industry is overheating, producing new stuff for the sake of new stuff, and it’s far from sustainable. The industrial designer Hella Jongerius and academic Louise Schouwenberg launched a manifesto titled ‘Beyond the New’ at the 2015 edition of Salone. “What most design events have in common,” they wrote, “are the presentations of a depressing cornucopia of pointless products, commercial hypes around presumed innovations, and empty rhetoric”.

Convention centres converted into hospitals: it’s a powerful image of the way in which many sectors of the global economy have ground to a halt in the wake of the virus. The very buildings geared towards facilitating international trade have now been recalibrated for care. It is, perhaps, a time to pause and consider how we want to inhabit these spaces once this pandemic is over.

[Read the entry on the V&A’s website]

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The Pursuit of ‘Appiness

Disegno #26 (Spring 2020)

Silicon Valley’s tech giants have recently become concerned with their customers’ “digital wellbeing”. But how well-equipped are the makers of our devices to wean us off them?

Every spring since 2013, tech-industry professionals in Silicon Valley have gathered at the Habit Summit. The conference, organised by the author and consultant Nir Eyal, brings together entrepreneurs, behavioural scientists and designers to “share their hard-won insights on how to build habits”. Speakers have included representatives from Twitter, Facebook, Google and Airbnb, delivering talks and workshops on topics such as “How Twitter built user habits” and “Investing in habit-forming businesses”.

Eyal insists that getting people hooked on their devices can be a good thing. “When used appropriately, habits can help people live happier, healthier, more productive and more connected lives,” he said during the opening remarks of the event’s 2014 edition. Of course, getting customers to use devices and digital platforms habitually – that is, with “little or no conscious thought”, by Eyal’s own definition – also benefits the makers of those devices and digital platforms. “Creating habits supercharges growth,” he declares. “The longer a user engages with our product, the more they’re worth to us as a customer.”

This is about as concise a description of the “attention economy” as can be found. The longer you spend on your smartphone – scrolling, tapping, posting and interacting – the more data you generate about your interests and preferences. That data is then monetised by being traded with advertisers who wish to target receptive audiences. “If I want to reach women between the ages of 25 and 30 in zip code 37206 who like country music and drink bourbon,” writes Jonathan Taplin in his 2017 book Move Fast and Break Things, “Facebook can do that.” Like most free-to-use online platforms, Facebook is essentially an advertising company. Although you’re a user, you’re not its customer. You are, in fact, the product.

There is a powerful economic imperative, then, for tech companies to keep users on their platforms for as long as possible and to do so with the help of interface design. As to ensuring that we don’t overuse our devices; that our habits don’t slide into addiction; that we don’t keep scrolling when we’d rather be doing something else – well, what’s their incentive for that? There is no Hippocratic Oath for techies. Legally, Facebook and Google are governed by contract law, which assumes a peer-to-peer relationship between user and provider. They are not bound by fiduciary law, which applies when the provider is deemed to be in an asymmetrical power relationship to the user and ensures that any information shared between the two parties is employed only in the user’s best interests. Traditionally, that form of law applies partly to lawyers, physicians and priests. But who do you reckon has more detailed information about your most shameful desires and your most crippling anxieties: Google, with its complete record of your search history, or a priest?

The Habit Summit grew out of Eyal’s research for his bestselling 2014 book Hooked: How to Build Habit- Forming Products. It has become something of an industry textbook for entrepreneurs hoping to emulate the addictive feedback loops of Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest. “Innovators build products meant to persuade people to do what we want them to do,” writes Eyal. “We call these people users and even if we don’t say it aloud, we secretly wish every one of them would become fiendishly hooked to whatever we’re making.”

Hooked pays special heed to user-interface design, one of the most important tools for holding people’s attention. It breaks down features such as pull-to-refresh (invented by Loren Brichter for Twitter in 2008), which it analyses as an example of a “variability reward”. “Research shows that levels of the neurotransmitter dopamine surge when the brain is expecting a reward,” Eyal writes. “Introducing variability multiplies the effect, creating a focused state, which suppresses the areas of the brain associated with judgement and reason.” Never mind that what you actually see once you’ve refreshed your inbox, Twitter feed or YouTube page rarely feels like a reward. It’s the anticipation that is thrilling and, by extension, potentially addictive. “Although classic examples include slot machines and lotteries,” writes Eyal, “variable rewards are prevalent in many other habit-forming products.”

The study cited by Eyal in this passage is a 2013 paper from Socioaffective Neuroscience & Pathology entitled ‘Pathological Gambling and the Loss of Willpower’, which ought to give readers pause. Nevertheless, he insists that designing habit-forming tech products has nothing to do with addiction. For anyone concerned, Eyal writes, “it’s important to recognise that the percentage of users who form a detrimental dependency is very small.” Pathological addicts – even those hooked to the most habit-forming products, including slot-machines – make up only one per cent of the total number of users, he explains.

That, at least, is according to Eyal’s source, a 2010 white paper from the American Gaming Association. Ten years on, it is becoming increasingly evident that habitual smartphone usage is leaving many people feeling permanently distracted, frustrated and depressed – if not pathologically addicted. In the past decade, Facebook alone has been the subject of a swathe of studies in the American Journal of Epidemiology and Computers in Human Behavior, among others, which have found that frequent use of the platform is correlated to higher rates of envy, depression and loneliness. As John Lanchester writes in his 2017 London Review of Books essay ‘You Are the Product’, “there is a lot of research showing that Facebook makes people feel like shit.”

Facebook is not the only culprit here. When the entire business model of free-to-use online services relies on maximising “time on device” (a gambling- industry term), there is hardly an app that does not in some way employ variability rewards or other design tricks to keep us engaged. As a result, reports of smartphone addiction and other internet-related disorders have risen steeply in the past decade. Recently, a study from King’s College London found that roughly a quarter of young people use their smartphones in ways that would qualify as addiction. “We don’t know whether it is the smartphone itself that can be addictive or the apps that people use,” said Nicola Kalk, one of the report’s authors. Perhaps it’s an amalgamation of both?

The tech industry has made moves in response. In 2018, Apple launched Screen Time for iOS, a feature that tracks your smartphone use and delivers a bracing weekly report (“Your screen time was up 8% last week, for an average of 2 hours, 33 minutes a day”) and a detailed breakdown of app usage. That same year, Facebook (which owns Instagram) and Google (which owns YouTube) introduced features that let users track their time on each of their platforms and ask for stop cues after a set amount of time. The British journalist Paul Lewis interviewed a number of Silicon Valley engineers in 2017 – Justin Rosenstein, the inventor of Facebook’s “Like” button, and Loren Brichter among them – in what became an explosive Guardian long read. As it turns out, they were all fearful of the features they had unleashed on the world. “Everyone is distracted,” Rosenstein lamented. “All of the time.”

Even Eyal, the organiser of the Habit Summit, seems to have sensed a paradigm shift. His latest book, published in 2019, addresses not the entrepreneur wishing to hook their user, but the user driven to distraction by the hook. Both poison and cure, addiction wizard and self-help guru, Eyal is a parable for tech in our time. His new book is called Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life.

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[Read on]

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Big Panda Energy

Disegno #24 (Autumn 2019)

In 2006, biology student Nathan Yaussy launched a blog dedicated to “endangered ugly things”. It was an effort, he wrote, to “promote awareness of endangered species that wouldn’t otherwise get noticed due to appearance or obscurity”. Endangered Ugly Things featured humorous and informative posts about creatures such as the Ohio lamprey, a blood-sucking eel with a gaping, multi-toothed maw for a head, and the biological ingenuities of the old world sucker-footed bat, purple burrowing frog and legless skink. Then, in 2010, Yaussy added the giant panda to the list.

This was an unexpected nomination. The giant panda is perhaps the most charismatic of “Charismatic megafauna”, the unofficial category for large animals that hold particular symbolic power in human culture. The panda has adorned the logo of the World Wildlife Fund since the 1960s, and has been the subject of such concerted breeding and re-wilding programmes that the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) declared it was no longer endangered in 2016. The People’s Republic of China, the only country in which giant pandas appear in the wild, has used the animals as diplomatic pawns since the late 1950s, offering them to nations with which it wants to establish friendly relations. Two of the most famous among these were Hsing-Hsing and Ling-Ling, the pandas gifted to the United States following Richard Nixon’s state visit in 1972. The giant panda is far from obscure. It also can’t be described as ugly.

Yaussy’s argument, however, was that this overexposure has made us oblivious to the creature’s plight. The panda is a wild animal and although its diet consists largely of bamboo, it is technically an omnivorous scavenger. “All creatures have behaviors that humans aren’t fond of,” Yaussy wrote, “but we can’t expect them to act like giant teddy bears.” Cue links to ugly video footage of pandas attacking people and gnawing on fly-encrusted carrion. At the time of the panda post, Endangered Ugly Things sold merchandise encouraging people to “Forget the panda, save the Ohio lamprey.” Even so, Yaussy was adamant: “Turning an animal into a symbol makes you forget that it’s an animal.”

***

I knew about Yaussy’s blog, as well as his stance on the giant panda, when I visited Copenhagen Zoo’s new panda enclosure this summer. I also knew about the complex’s diplomatic implications. Designed by Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG) and backed at government level, it was officially opened by Queen Margrethe II on 10 April 2019. The enclosure had taken five years to design, and cost 160m Danish kroner ($24m). Denmark’s acquisition of the pandas themselves – Mao Sun, a five-year-old female, and Xing Er, a six-year-old male – had taken the best part of a decade, and makes Denmark the latest addition to a relatively small group of countries (21 as of 2019) to host pandas from the People’s Republic. At the opening, the Chinese ambassador to Denmark, Deng Ying, made the pandas’ political import clear. “The comprehensive strategic partnership between China and Denmark has continued to deepen,” she said, “and is moving towards a higher level in the new decade.”

When the panda loan was officially confirmed during Queen Margrethe’s state visit to China in 2014, it was accompanied by 40 new trade deals between the two countries. This has become the norm with panda loans: Edinburgh Zoo was offered two pandas in 2011, and the Scottish government signed an estimated £2.6bn-worth of trade deals for salmon, renewable energy and Land Rover vehicles with China shortly thereafter. China’s previous salmon provider, Norway, consequently lost its trade deal, which critics suggest was China’s response to Norway having awarded the Nobel Peace Prize to the Chinese dissident activist Liu Xiaobo in 2010. It is difficult to quantify the exact role pandas play in China’s trade policy, but Oxford researcher Kathleen Carmel Buckingham, lead author of a 2013 Environmental Practice article on the topic, has suggested that “the panda can be used to seal the deal and signify a bid for a long and prosperous relationship [with host nations].” They help exercise a form of “soft, cuddly power,” as the title of the paper has it.

Equipped with this information, and Yaussy’s warnings against the teddification of the giant panda, I approached the enclosure feeling galvanised in my cynicism. The specially built Panda Shop, also by BIG, was the first structure I encountered. It touts panda slippers, panda toys, panda mugs, panda tea, panda posters, panda crystal balls, panda ice-cream, and even panda-themed wireless speakers (“Be the loudest panda in the living room”). Then, past a bamboo-clad bamboo storage shed, was the circular 2,450sqm enclosure itself. Largely composed of concrete, corten steel, glass and lush greenery masterminded by Schønherr Landscape Architects, it had been sunk some 3m into the ground. Given that pandas are solitary creatures that prefer not to meet outside of the three to five days a year during which the female is in heat, it had also been divided into two equal parts. First up, as I entered the area, was Mao Sun’s pen.

I was not prepared to be so charmed. Mao had found a shaded spot under the swooping concrete arch which also serves as a pavement for visitors circumnavigating the enclosure. As I arrived, she climbed a small timber platform, flopped onto her back and set about devouring a sheaf of bamboo leaves. Soon her hind legs were wiggling indulgently in the air, like those of a tickled toddler. My jaw tightened at the sudden onset of cute aggression. Must get closer. On either side of the raised pavements were routes leading down and around the enclosure, occasionally opening up onto glazed views of the pandas at panda-level. I stopped at one such aperture but was disappointed – the glass had been scumbled with white paint to slightly above eye level. Perching awkwardly on a rock feature, I managed to peer into the pen. From there, I saw Mao from behind, close, sitting up now but still munching. Temples churning and ears twitching with every bite, she held onto the bamboo stems, adorably, with a fuzzy paw.

Get a grip, I thought, stepping down to compose myself. This was neoteny at work. Features common to young mammals – large round heads, pudgy limbs, and bumbling movements – tend to elicit powerful feelings of affection in humans. The effect is intensified by the fact that bears are particularly easy to anthropomorphise, their proportions being roughly akin to ours. This is the irresistible appeal of the giant panda – it’s what renders it such an economic boon to zoos, and such an effective conduit for positive feelings towards China. “The political power of the panda,” writes E. Elena Songster in her 2018 book Panda Nation, “[is] its innate ability to exude an apolitical image.”

I continued along the lower circuit towards Xing Er’s pen, which was flanked not by an overpainted window, but by Panpan, an upscale Sino-French restaurant with a capacity of 150 people. Its low-lit interior had dark furniture and fittings, making the panoramic view onto Xing’s pen especially striking. Xing himself seemed unruffled by the presence of diners seated only metres from him and the large group of onlookers peering down from the upper circuit. He had propped himself against the gentle incline rising to one side of his pen and was placidly making his way through a large bouquet of bamboo. This went on for a while. Momentarily, Xing made as if to move, and the diners looked up from their plates – but he was only repositioning himself to reach more leaves. Pandas, a sign outside the restaurant read, “typically spend 16 hours a day eating up to 40kg of bamboo. For the remainder of the day, they rest.”

The enclosure and its ancillary structures are more thoroughly designed than most other buildings in the zoo. The concrete edifice has a rusticated effect, achieved by free-pouring cement into moulds made from bamboo rods. Similarly, stylised casts of bamboo rods in corten steel make up fencing between Mao and Xing’s enclosures, as well as decorative railings throughout the site. The plantings mimic the natural habitats of pandas in the wild, with two types of biotope – “foggy mountains” and “bamboo forest” according to Schønherr – represented. At points, images of pandas can be found embedded in the architecture. Examples include the corten-steel panel near the restaurant that sports what looks like a pinpression of a life-size animal and the enormous black and white mosaic that greeted me as I entered the ladies’ toilet. From above, BIG has explained in its promotional material, the entire structure is meant to look like a yin-yang symbol, with the male and female pens looping around each other. Thankfully, this emblem does not register when navigating the site on the ground. It might’ve been one symbol too many in a project already awash in symbolism.

***

[Read on]

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Even in the Face of Adversity

Disegno #22 (Spring 2019)

Back in October 2017, the US Consumer Electronics Association (CTA) was on an outing in Napa Valley. The scenic north Californian wine county was the setting for the organisation’s triannual board meeting. On the agenda: the upcoming Consumer Electronics Show (CES), one of the world’s largest tech fairs, which takes place in Las Vegas every January and which is organised by the CTA. When the board members woke that morning, however, the power had gone out. “Most of us thought there was something wrong with our hotel rooms,” recalls Gary Shapiro, president of the CTA. But then the phone service died. “It turned out that the wildfires had really enveloped the area,” Shapiro explains. Some from the group tried to get information on their car radios. Others ran into town. “We didn’t know whether to evacuate or not.”

In the end, they didn’t. The board went ahead with its meeting as one of the deadliest, costliest, and most destructive firestorms in California’s history raged around them. No light, no phones, no power-point presentations – and no coffee. “How do you do a meeting without coffee?” exclaims Shapiro, throwing up his hands. It’s a brief moment of levity. “For many of us it was a changing experience,” he says. “That in conjunction with climate change and all the disasters that seem to be occurring more frequently around the world. CES is about exposing our attendees and the industry to new things and new trends. It’s about innovation and making life improve in all areas. But you also have to have a life saved.”

CES. You’ll know it, even if indirectly. It’s the annual week-long tech extravaganza which, since 1967, has supplied us with gadgets that we may or may not need. The first-ever home VCR player, produced by Sony, launched at CES in 1970. Apple’s failure-prone Newton was unveiled there with much fanfare in 1993. In the last 20 years, CES has had its permanent home in Las Vegas, where it has grown into the mega-convention it is today, showcasing some 4,400 exhibitors and attracting almost 200,000 visitors from the US and abroad. It has also become something more than a consumer electronics showcase, with the latest speculative takes on driverless vehicles, AI, and robotics increasingly taking centre stage. Earlier this year, Wired’s Lauren Goode described CES well when she evoked its “blinking smart lights, liquid-looking displays, hovering drones, yogic phones, driver-free vehicles, newfangled wireless protocols, and intangible technologies that all come with the promise of making life better.” CES is a particularly concentrated encapsulation of 21st-century consumerism.

The catastrophic 2017 board meeting in Napa Valley presaged further calamities ahead. A few months later, CES 2018 kicked off with a freak downpour, ending a 116-day stretch without rain in Las Vegas with what became its wettest day on record. Flash floods choked the city’s streets, forcing outdoor booths such as Google’s “giant funhouse” to shut on the Tuesday, CES’ first day open to the public. Then, on the Wednesday, a major power outage threw the north and central halls of the Las Vegas Convention Center – one of CES’ main venues – into total darkness for two hours. “All the flashlight vendors at CES are like, ‘Now it’s our time to shine!’” someone quipped on Twitter. Another attendee posted a video of a woman playing the violin at Intel’s booth while visitors waited for power to be restored. “#CESblackout,” it read. “This is some titanic level shit,” a retweet shot back.

It’s hard not to see the metaphor: CES as a behemoth too big to fail, beset by powers even greater than its kaleidoscopic arsenal of human-made ingenuities. For what use is a smart kitchen when it’s flooded? What’s a new VR headset in a wildfire? What can any of these things do for you, really, without power? Such questions seem to have prompted a press release issued by the CTA a few months later. “Resilience to be New Part of CES 2019,” it announced. The next iteration of CES, it said, would feature “a new conference program and exhibit area focused on Resilience and resilient technologies.” Resilient technologies are technologies that help “keep the world healthy, safe, warm, powered, fed and secure,” the statement explained. “Even in the face of adversity.”

[Read on]

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Precarious by Design

Disegno #19 (Summer 2018)

A notification: “Meal, 2 min away.” My phone is beeping and flashing, urging me to accept the opportunity with the help of a 15-second countdown bar. “Hurry up!” the indicator seems to say. “There are plenty of others poised to take on this gig.”

It’s my second weekend of cycling as a delivery partner with UberEATS in London and I’m beginning to get the hang of the Uber Driver app, a piece of interface design that mediates every dimension of the job. That job, I should declare, is not what I do for a living. I am on a full-time contract with the publication you’re holding and a beneficiary of the existential securities that come with employee status in the United Kingdom. The reason I’ve signed up with UberEATS, which offers very few protections, is to understand the role played by interface design in the ballooning on-demand economy. And while my day job may appear secure, I am acutely aware of the increasing gigification of my line of work, with setups such as Fiverr and TaskRabbit now offering copywriting, editing and translation services for end-user rates as low as $5 per job. This new economic model affects me and it will almost certainly affect you. My most immediate concern right now, however, is my flashing phone: the countdown bar is ticking; above it a map indicates a two-minute route I can take to the restaurant. It’s just around the corner, so I tap the screen to accept the job and set off.

UberEATS is a branch of Uber, the global enterprise that launched as UberCab in San Francisco in 2009. In 2011, the company dropped its “Cab” suffix after complaints from San Francisco taxi operators. “Cab” implied that Uber was a cab service, the authorities reasonably argued, and this meant it should comply with local taxi regulations. Uber didn’t and still doesn’t. Since dropping the suffix, Uber has described itself as a tech company rather than a transportation or delivery service: it simply provides a platform, it claims, on which independent contractors can solicit jobs. For use of this platform, the company extracts what it argues is a reasonable cut: between 25 and 35 per cent per job. The platform for both Uber and UberEATS consists of the Driver app (which is what I am using), the end-user apps (which are the interfaces through which you book either a car or some food) and the inscrutable cocktail of algorithms that link the two together. It is because of the company’s role in pioneering this form of business model that Uber has become known as poster child of the gig economy.

On this weekend in May 2018, I am using a Driver app that has been subject to numerous accumulative redesigns since 2010. Only a month ago, however, on 10 April, Uber announced that it had designed a brand-new Driver app entirely from scratch. Most driver and delivery partners haven’t been notified of the design overhaul yet, but it is set to be slowly rolled out across the hundreds of cities that Uber operates in over the coming three or four months, and more than 3 million people will potentially use it. Now seems the right time to assess the affordances of the current Driver app and what the redesign professes to achieve.

My pick-up point is a pizzeria. I secure my bike, make myself known to the staff, and show them the order number on my phone. I’ve been advised in a chirpy instruction video (“Getting started with UberEATS” on Vimeo, my only formal training for the job) to separate hot and cold foods in my box backpack and always to double-check the order, the complete details of which I can view in the app (“Incomplete orders are very frustrating to the eater,” the video’s narrator warns). It is only once I’ve verified these and swiped “Start trip”, that my drop-off address is revealed. This bears repeating because it comes as a surprise to many Uber end-users: cyclists and drivers have no idea what their final destination is when they accept a job, or what the fare will be for that matter. This is known as “blind driving” and is integral to Uber’s strategy – it means there’s no destination-based bias on the part of the driver or cyclist, and that passengers and “eaters” can always rely on securing the service with a few taps of their thumb. This structural feature will remain the same in the new Driver app, says Uber spokesperson Michael Amodeo: “We want to make sure that people can get a ride from wherever they are to wherever they want to go. That’s an important principle for us in terms of expanding access.”

Blind driving is good for the end-user, but it can have unwelcome consequences for drivers, as Alex Rosenblat and Luke Stark found in a 2016 study published in the International Journal of Communication. “You’re driving around blind,” says one of Rosenblat and Stark’s interviewees. “When it does ping, you might drive 15 minutes to drive someone half a mile. There’s no money in it at that point, especially in my SUV.” The UberPOOL feature, whereby several passengers going in the same direction are linked on the platform and given a cheaper rate by sharing a trip, is notoriously unprofitable for drivers (“UberPOOR they call it,” says an interviewee in journalist James Bloodworth’s 2018 book Hired: Six Months Undercover in Low-Wage Britain). Turning down trips, however, by letting the timer run out or tapping an X labelled “No thanks”, eventually leads to being bumped off the app. If a driver consistently rejects UberPOOL trips, for instance, the app will either log them out for period of time, or, it would appear, implement other punitive tactics: “So it looks like Uber has put me in some sort of time-out, ever since I started turning down every single pool ride for the past month,” writes a Seattle-based driver in the forum uberpeople.net. “The low quality rides I’m getting from Uber now is noticeable.”

As a driver or cyclist partnering with Uber, you are supposedly self-employed. According to gov.uk, this means you should be able to “decide what work [you] do and when, where or how to do it”. But blind driving means you’re in no position to see, let alone negotiate, the terms of the jobs you take on. What’s more, you are penalised for acting on the small amount of wiggle room allowed by the choice architecture of the app. “The fact that you have blind routes within an app is an indicating factor that the person [using it] is not running this relationship as a business,” says Emma Wilkinson, an employment law specialist at the charity Citizens Advice. “The problem is, it’s not the be-all-and-end-all. It’s an indicating factor rather than the indicating factor.” Wilkinson says the picture is complicated by a legal precedent which classifies black cab drivers as independent contractors. Under the taxi rank rule, black cab drivers are technically not allowed to turn down a fare, provided it is “reasonable”. “The taxi rank rule,” says Wilkinson, “could equate to this blind driver.” Blind driving seems to sit in somewhat of a legal grey area in terms of employment status. To Ron, one of Rosenblat and Stark’s interviewees, however, it is the main sticking point: “Show the destination before. If we’re independent contractors, we should have the right to refuse.”

My drop-off address is just under two miles away. This seems to be the average distance that the Driver app will send me; eaters can only order from restaurants within a certain radius of their location, which means that orders can be delivered by bike in a reasonable amount of time. It’s a little different for drivers, who have no restrictions as to how far the app can ask them to go. Last year, Uber introduced a “Long trip” notice, allowing drivers to see the distance, but not the direction or destination of a job, before accepting it. I ponder this as I pedal towards the drop-off, remembering an Uber cab ride I had taken from Gatwick airport to my home in London a few weeks earlier. Immediately after accepting the trip, the driver rang me; the interface allows for encrypted in-app calls once a trip is active. “I just wanna check you’re not headed for Brighton,” he explained. Brighton and London are, of course, equidistant from Gatwick but in opposite directions.

The airport driver may have used up his quota of a rationed in-app “Set for destination” feature, which was introduced by Uber in 2015. This allows drivers to set the general direction of travel twice a day (typically for heading out and then home again). Last year, after the departure of Uber’s scandal-swept founder and CEO Travis Kalanick, the company attempted to woo its US and Canadian drivers with a campaign titled “180 Days of Change”. One of its concessions was to allow drivers to use the “Set for destination” button up to six times a day. They loved it, and used the feature so much that it ended up changing the overall market conditions. The company swiftly retracted the move, leaving drivers not a little miffed. As I delve into a residential area in south London, and calculate that I’m about 40 minutes from home, I find myself wishing there was a “Set for destination” feature enabled in my cyclist’s setting on the Driver app. My next ping could quite easily propel me further away still, and then I’d be looking at an hour-long bike ride back; time and physical effort for which I’m not paid. As Bloodworth writes in Hired about his experience of driving for Uber, it is, all in all, “a peculiar sort of freedom”.

[Read on]

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The Vulgar: Fashion Redefined

Disegno #13 (Winter 2016/17)

When you run an image search for “vulgar outfit”, Google throws up a gallery of female celebrities. There is Kim Kardashian clad in a sheer blouse and Miley Cyrus in minimal metallic bondage; Lady Gaga wearing beef and Cara Delevingne in a pizza-patterned onesie. Either too much or too little, it would seem, is the charge implied by the word “vulgar”, although of what exactly is unclear. What is obvious is the fixation on the female or feminised body.

This much is evident, too, in The Vulgar: Fashion Redefined, an exhibition on view at London’s Barbican Art Gallery. Co-curated by fashion historian Judith Clark and psychoanalyst Adam Phillips, it proffers a rich display of historic and contemporary fashion designs clustered around 11 speculative definitions of “the vulgar”. Penned by Phillips, these definitions are witty, illuminating and sometimes unexpected – one section, “Puritan”, stands as a form of counter-definition, with its historical collection of demure falling-band collars displayed alongside a selection of pastiche 17th-century Dutch burgher outfits designed by John Galliano for Christian Dior. But none of these definitions – “Showing Off”, “Common” and “The New Baroque” among them – suggest what a Google search yields in an instant: vulgarity, especially when used to describe dress, is a deeply gendered term. That this dimension should be left unexamined is surprising given that, with a few notable exceptions, the garments featured in The Vulgar are all clothes made to be worn by women.

Apart from this conspicuous absence, Clark and Phillips treat the term with imagination and intellectual curiosity. Their premise is simple, albeit complex in its implications: vulgarity has no preordained essence. Something once deemed the height of fashion – the extreme proportions of crinolined mantuas worn in the court of Louis XIV – could soon be considered gaudy. The trompe l’oeil evening dress from Martin Margiela’s spring/summer 1996 collection, for instance, could be deemed vulgar when re-editioned at a lower price point for H&M in 2012. “Vulgar” is a word people use to identify that which they hope they are not (out-of-date, cheap), and as such it’s a key ingredient of social formation. Here, Clark and Phillips are on well-trodden territory: the role played by the judgement of taste in class positioning was extensively examined in 20th- and 21st-century sociology. French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s quasi empirical 1979 book Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, perhaps the most epoch-making of these studies, took the tastes of the French postwar bourgeoisie as its data set. Distinction also introduced to wider audiences terms such as “cultural”, “social” and “symbolic capital” to describe the ways in which lifestyle choices (what we choose to consume as much as what we reject) continually project our class positions.

It is no coincidence, then, that The Vulgar affords special attention to garments made in or inspired by the late-17th and 18th centuries, a period when western societies began transitioning to industrial capitalism and organised into social strata still recognisable today. Among these exhibits are elaborately decorated rococo fans and encrusted court mules by Manolo Blahnik. There is also La mariée, a crinolined wedding dress accompanied by a voluminous headpiece that served as the final look from Galliano’s spring/summer 2005 couture collection for Christian Dior. Galliano, too, seems to see the 18th century as a starting point for his understanding of fashion, as La mariée concluded the gradual reverse chronology that his collection had presented, with the first look being a plain black leotard. These pieces demonstrate or invoke the type of luxury items that were available to an increasingly affluent middle class thanks to international trade and the colonial enterprises of a handful of European countries – in short, an economic model that depended on slavery.

But with the emergence of the European middle classes also came a pervasive social anxiety connected to luxury consumption: how best to distance oneself from those “below”? How to avoid signalling too blatantly one’s upward social ambition? It was in the 18th century that the word “vulgar” changed from its classical sense – that which pertains to or is used by the people – to the epithet we know today. It was also in this period that the judgement of taste became a hot topic in aesthetic philosophy. “Every voice is united in applauding elegance, propriety, simplicity [...] and in blaming fustian, affectation, coldness, and a false brilliancy,” wrote the philosopher David Hume in his 1757 essay ‘Of The Standard of Taste’. “But when critics come to particulars, this seeming unanimity vanishes; and it is found, that they had affixed a very different meaning to their expressions.” While Hume continued to address the relativity of taste, he and near-contemporaries such as Immanuel Kant (in his 1790 Critique of Judgement) tended to treat aesthetic judgement as a “pure” realm – one unsullied by commercial considerations. It was Bourdieu’s accomplishment, some two centuries later, to systematically hammer home the role played by taste, lifestyle and consumerism in the operation of social positioning: an approach he incidentally called, in Distinction, “a ‘vulgar’ critique of ‘pure’ critiques”.

Obsessively identifying that which we consider socially “below” us is an aspect of the vulgar that is played out spectacularly in a collection to which Clark and Phillips give ample space: Chanel autumn/winter 2014-15, designed by Karl Lagerfeld. The collection was originally presented in Paris’s Grand Palais, which had been painstakingly converted into a giant budget supermarket for the show, complete with discount posters and brightly coloured shopping trolleys. The garments in the collection exploited some of the crassest stereotypes about who might shop in such a store, at times producing a repulsive glamorisation of poverty – several models walked down the runway-come-aisle in tattered and ripped sweatpants, for instance.

Moreover, the discount posters touted wares marked up, not down, by 20 to 50 per cent. This was clearly the wealthy playing at looking poor. So what to make of such an ambivalent flirtation with “vulgarity”? Here, Phillips’s background in psychoanalysis sets up a helpful – and novel – framework. “Psychoanalysis is basically about what people do with the unacceptable in themselves and in others,” he says. “The vulgar is part of the vocabulary for the unacceptable. It seems to me that the so-called vulgar are the scapegoats of good taste. In other words, we’re constituting our good taste by mocking somebody else’s supposed bad taste.” That identifying vulgarity should be so key to constituting ourselves might account for the obsessional detail with which the faux budget supermarket was created in the Chanel show. It included more than 100,000 wares, at least 500 of these repackaged with jocular Chanel branding (for instance, garbage bags labelled “sac plus belle” instead of “sac poubelle”). The fact that these items were then marked up as luxury objects (that is, made inaccessible to many who shop in budget supermarkets) seems to speak of the double operation, in psychoanalytic terms, of the vulgar: it must be clearly identified and made ridiculous in order to be rejected and cast off. “It’s entirely to do with dominating somebody, even if it’s secret,” says Phillips. “Because really it’s based on contempt.”

This assertion marks the re-entry of the elephant in the room, because if vulgarity is predicated on class contempt, it is also predicated on misogyny. A glance around the section of the exhibition centred around the definition “Extreme bodies” intimates this, even if Phillips’s text leaves it unstated. Divided into two sub-sections – “Exposed Bodies” and “Exaggerated Bodies” – the room features a topless one-piece bathing suit by Rudi Gernreich, a buttock-skimming Courrèges minidress, a butt-enhancing 1996 “faux-cul” bustle bag by Vivienne Westwood for Louis Vuitton, and the much-copied punk Tits top by Westwood and Malcolm McLaren. These garments expose or exaggerate the features that generally make the female body “other” to the male body (breasts, fuller thighs, wider hips), and it is these features that are being policed when such outfits are labelled vulgar, or, to use Phillips’s term, “unacceptable”. An oppressive cultural inheritance pervades this scene — you can look as far back as Aristotle to find descriptions of the female body as materially excessive (and providing raw “matter” for reproduction rather than the, supposedly superior, “form” given by the male) – and the legacy of such dichotomies has been vigorously upheld and given new formulations by the Christian church for centuries, as well as by writers of pseudo-scientific tracts such as Otto Weininger’s atrocious 1903 book Sex and Character. The exposure of “feminine attributes” continues to set off moral panic today, with breastfeeding, nipple slips and wardrobe malfunctions regularly lampooned by the tabloid press as somehow inherently shameful (or, to use one of Donald Trump’s favourite words, “disgusting”). “Vulgar” is another word we use for disciplining the female body.

But like the double operation of obsessive fixation and class contempt identified in the Chanel show, the denigration of female or feminised attributes seems to pivot between disgust and fetishistic desire. “For some people vulgarity is the precondition for sexual excitement,” writes Phillips in the exhibition catalogue. One exhibit that could’ve brought home this ambivalence was the garment chosen to illustrate “mutton dressed up as lamb”. Instead, this was given over to one of the few items of men’s clothing in The Vulgar: Clark has chosen a suit from Electric Eye, Walter van Beirendonck’s spring/summer 2016 menswear collection, which is cut from a print of children’s drawings. The implication is that a grown man wearing a childish print expresses the sentiment of the phrase. This seems a euphemism that purposefully evades the usage of “mutton dressed up as lamb”: it’s an epithet aimed at humiliating women who are judged to project, through dress and makeup, a sexual availability deemed unsuitable for their age. I ask Clark about this choice. “I couldn’t have that as a woman’s dress because” – she pauses and places her hand on her heart – “solidarity. I couldn’t stage women within that idea because it’s so awful and so humiliating.” It’s understandable: “mutton dressed up as lamb” is a term that whips up a perfect intersectional storm of class contempt, misogyny and ageism – all under the banner of male desire.

This is where I feel I’ve had enough of the vulgar. Heading towards the exit, I pass through the opening display of the exhibition and pause. Here, a collection of classicising evening dresses are on show, all chiffons, folds, and drapes. There is an exquisite 1955 pleated jersey dress by Madame Grès (a pinnacle of taste, surely?) and immaculate Grecian smocks by Sophia Kokosalaki. The curators’ intention is to set the scene by reflecting on the cyclical nature of fashion and the fact that no dress is truly classic or timeless. But I cannot help but think of these pieces as embodiments of the no-win situation set up by the charge of vulgarity. Even the simplest constituent elements of women’s dress – plain fabric draped over a feminised form – can be judged vulgar, because it is not the envelope that matters: it is the female body itself that is targeted, desired, and ultimately humiliated when the vulgar is invoked.

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Heerup and the People

from the book Henry Heerup and the Avant-Garde (2015)

The Unrepresentables

from the book Dispossession (2015) and Third Text

A kinetic contraption, with four coloured T-shirts hanging from its mechanical limbs, performs an awkward choreography in the Palazzo Donà Brusa. Two T-shirts – red and white, folded in complementary halves – are thrust toward each other, then fall still. Side by side they signal a Polish flag, but also a torso or body made provisionally whole. Soon the machine jerks into action again, pulling the emblem apart to produce new configurations. A German flag appears when black and yellow T-shirts are combined with the red. More often than not, however, the colours are suspended in a fragmented state, awaiting instruction.

The instruction comes from a single-channel video projected onto the headboard of a heavy letto matrimoniale (double bed) placed in the middle of the room. In the video, the artist Tomasz Opania interviews three of his family members about their national belonging; his nonagenarian grandmother Jadwiga Heller, his aunt Ruta Kamela (née Breitkopf) and his mother Barbara Opania (née Heller). Their answers are contradictory, vacillating between identification with Poland and with Germany; the factors that determine these identifications are never established conclusively. ID cards, food stamps, language and schooling are proffered, but ultimately fail to produce a consistent narrative. The family is from Silesia, a modern-day industrial region with a mottled history of Bohemian, Prussian, and German claimants that became Polish immediately after the Second World War. ‘When Poland came,’ says ninety-nine-year-old Heller matter-of-factly, ‘we were all Polish and no-one was German anymore’. The contraption swivels its colours to adjust the flags accordingly.

Opania’s piece, Illegal Border Crossing – grüne Grenze (2015) is part of the exhibition Dispossession, a collateral event of the 56th Venice Biennale. It is organised by European Capital of Culture Wrocław 2016, and takes as its prompt Wrocław’s turbulent history of displacement. The largest city in Lower Silesia, Wrocław underwent major changes of governance in the twentieth century. As Breslau, it was the capital of the Weimar province of Niederschlesien in the interwar period and then, at the close of the Second World War, it was Festung Breslau under Soviet siege. In 1945 Breslau became Wrocław, part of Poland along with most of Silesia, resulting in the abrupt expulsion of the city’s mostly German population and a concomitant influx of Polish settlers.1 The curators of Dispossession, Michał Bienek and Małgorzata Miśniakiewicz, premise their choice of artists on this history, tracing an axis from Lviv in Ukraine, via Wrocław in Poland, to Dresden in eastern Germany. In the east as in the west, the borderlands – the Kresy – were subject to drastic demographic change following the war. Annexed by the Soviet Union following the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, then forming part of independent Lithuania, Belarus, and Ukraine in the post-1989 moment, the Kresy occupy to this day a romaticised position in the Polish imagination as ‘lost lands’.

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