(projects)
(soft)
“a conduit, a container, a spot of ink” steals one historic disjunction to produce a few more. In modernity, Henri Lefebvre identified identity as increasingly separated between two times: leisure time and labor time. While labor predicates on producing something, leisure has increasingly involved consumption.1 It is difficult to identify how one sources a form of being, inhabiting time, or otherwise doing, that does not produce nor consume. McKenzie Wark phrases this more succinctly: what would it mean to construct a positive freedom within time?2
A possibility exists within the domestic sphere. Here it is possible for work to occur that does not quite fit into either of Lefebvre's definitions. This type of work is that of maintenance and care: cleaning, bathing, playing an instrument, re-arranging, looking out the window, or otherwise occupying space without mandate. While an exertion, domestic work may not actively produce nor consume, but it can prolong time, material, and constructions.
Hosting these customs, domestic spheres can refuse to privilege external modes of capital circulation. The performance of the political occurs here not by getting involved but by refusing. While the value of politics revolves around the outside – in "the public" – the private realm is equally political and deserving of analysis.
A first set of models draw on Robin Evan's descriptions of the developed surface.3 A blip in the history of Western Bourgeois architecture, this form of representation prioritized internal elevations over the plan of the house. Leisure proliferates along the walls through ornament and furniture.
One model describes an apartment and mounts each interior by its partitioning face. This extends to a tapestry: a stitch of internal elevations is an unfolding epic of the interior where multiple readings are flattened into one. Annotations of construction, both of the projected space and of the physical tapestry, layer onto the surface. An elongated plaster pillow fills this. Marks and annotations of the interior fabric mold transfer onto the plaster in the process of curing, inscribing the act of observation through the material.
Who engages domestic work, and its ability to be qualified and monetized into "labor" or care, all uphold a performance of the American Domestic. Bodies – distinguished by class, gender, race, and nationality – stand behind the domestic sphere, rendering it a tool of political subjugation. Working with tapestry and soft forms connotes who typically performs this type of work and craft.
Additionally, creating plaster casts work with the interior– rendering the space between surfaces rather than a surface-based model– and adopt similar rituals to domestic work. Plaster is finicky, it is exhausting, it is imprecise and time consuming, and it is uncertain whether that pays off to the unknowing eye. It is an unwise choice of material. But the process is intimate, requiring a careful knowing of the medium, process, and structures required to make it successful. The act of work, what qualities it takes on, and what it requires of its enactor is integral to the models themselves.
Domesticity is ritualistic: it repeats, drags out time, and takes care to the point of frivolity. It enhances the trivial details of the internal landscape. What suspends the distinction between labor and leisure, of production and consumption, is the intimacy that lies there. Intimacy is used here not in its associations with sentimentality, but as a way of framing the relationships between otherwise distinct subjects.
One can engage this understanding of intimacy in domestic work and its relationship with the materials that uphold it. Domesticity relies on systems of material management that enable its work to occur. Channels, hidden behind walls, funnel gas, water, electricity, and excrement. The private home is therefore tethered to the public. It is part of a larger network of material management, bridging the delicate world of the domestic and the monumental scale of infrastructure.
To illustrate, the relationship of the built landscape with hydrostructures is largely that of, to anthropocentrically misuse Jacob Metcalf's term, "intimacy without proximity."5 Domestic spaces, toiled grounds, and water systems operate and respond to the same natural factors, whilst affecting each other in turn. However, they are removed from one another: the vast networks of aqueducts and reservoirs are better off away from tract housing. Tension occurs when these two systems are pushed against each other.
Take the San Joaquin Valley in Central California. A Modesto resident's water anxiety paradoxically stems from the 133 canals in Stanislaus County running right next to them. Surrounded by water and its transport, homeowner and farmer constantly dispute over rights to a limited and unpredictable supply. Both groups depend on this infrastructure while accepting regulation, idealism, and tension as the norm.
Precarity in this scenario trumps proximity. California water, and how much of it, is not predictable throughout the wet or dry seasons each year, nor throughout the decades of drier or wetter years, nor even over the centuries. 160 years of colonists studying the climate, including its tremendous deluges and droughts, are not close to covering what is "normal" for the area's hydrology.6 It is simply unknown.
One of the worst scenarios in what has been documented in this timeline is the great flood of the winter of 1861-1862. The "two-hundred-year" flood rendered the Central Valley an expansive inland sea up to thirty feet deep.7 It was possible to row from Downtown Los Angeles to Newport Beach – around forty miles away – over what is now the Golden State Freeway.8 Yet time and time again, after sweeping away property and lives, the silt-laden water settles into the dirt, nourishing the terrain into mythologizing the Edenic promise of California. Thus the cycle repeats.
The maintenance of a perfect domestic performance relies upon infrastructure to distance constructions from material realities. In doing so, California and its materials are rendered another component in the manufacturing of a nation state. The domestic sphere is not operative on its relationship with land or material but in the bureaucratic organization of resources and the concrete monuments that accompany it.
Other sets of models in this project document the channels that transport these resources. The massive concrete extrusion of a canal was rendered through older ways of making ornamental plaster molding. This entails the piling up of plaster at a specific and elusive consistency and pulling a profile through. Knowing the material is even more important here than with a mold. In addition to what structures are needed to support the process, the molding maker must know when it is time to pile the plaster –a pretty small window, for the record– when it is time to drag the profile through, and most importantly, when it is time to stop dragging.
Some profiles reflect Central Valley canals while others reflect the space they capture. This collection expands further to include traditional molding styles and rubber sealants normally tucked between windows and doors. These models appropriate these profiles and take them out of context and scale, wherein only its base action of extrusion remains as a linking factor. Each element in this context can be compared against one another, evaluated as a model of something much larger or as a domestic frivolity all the same.
Among the network of politics, resources, and management, in the Central Valley there is a town called Ceres, named after the Roman goddess of agriculture. On the edge of suburbia and farmlands, there is a house next to a canal.
Three surfaces support the models: a high table, a low table, and shelves. Beneath every surface are drawers containing drawings, tools, recipes, and research. The low table folds upwards, forming the profile of an aqueduct. Sitting somewhere is a model that is a cast by the Canal in Ceres. The building, deemed the Waterkeeper, takes on the formwork of a Silo as a place to simply watch over the aqueduct. This very real job in Californian water districts seems to beg Claude-Nicolas Ledoux's treatments in Saltworks Factory. The Waterkeeper takes on a house form that plants itself adjacent to a driving infrastructural network whilst performing in friction with it: a static position.
Given the flood of 1862's loose description of magnitude by time – a "two-hundred-year flood" – one could foolishly assume we are on track for another one in 2062, when I am a gray-haired architect pushing the peak of my career. In an age such as this, the Promethean promise of hydrologic predictability is a myth, isolating the purpose of the concrete canal to be read as just another form.
When that great flood comes, washing away thirty-year mortgages, two-hundred-year-old oak trees, pistachios, cow shit, generational orchards, and the Mexicali Restaurant in Bakersfield over the 400-mile thumbprint that is the Central Valley, the cast conduit, the canal, and the cast container – the Waterkeeper – remain. Within the Waterkeeper, activities can finally take place with no compulsion from the outside. This is not to protect property values, but rather to accept domesticity as existing in a state of constant precarity, outside of the orders of the infrastructures put in place to reinforce the idea of a norm. The flood is a mere frame for the project, reinvigorating the idea of the form of canal and home.
When the building becomes container, it takes on the form of the contained, highlighting the resource over infrastructure. When the flood washes away, this cast simply becomes a container, self-contained, removed from the infrastructure on which it was meant to be dependent.
1. Lefebvre, Henri. “Forward: Critique of Everyday Life.” In Critique of Everyday Life. Verso, 1988.
2. Wark, McKenzie. The Beach Beneath the Street. Verso, 2011.
3. Evans, Robins. “The Developed Surface...” In Translations from Drawings to Building and Other Essays. MIT Press, 1997.
5. Metcalf, Jacob. “Intimacy without Proximity: Encountering Grizzlies as a Companion Species.” Environmental Philosophy 5, no. 2 (2008): 99–128.
6. Ingram, B. Lynn, and Frances Malamud-Roam. The West Without Water. University of California Press, 2013.
7. ibid.
8. Davis, Mike. Ecology of Fear. Metropolitan Books, 1998.