I would like to extend my gratitude to my supervisor, Alessandro Ayuso, for his inspiring excitement in finding the Alien with me. I would also like to thank my design tutors, Penelope Haralambidou and Michael Tite for their weekly dose of architectural insight and supportive warmth.
Advanced Architectural Thesis 2023/2024
ThesisSupervisor: Alessandro Ayuso
DesignTutors: Michael Tite and Penelope Haralambidou
Thesis ModuleCoordinators: Oliver Wilton and Robin Wilson
Beatrice Frant
This thesis questions alienation within domestic spaces, based on the experiential condition of the woman. Specifically interested in the multifaceted dimension of girlhood, the text is concerned in defining the intersection between the Other and the Alien. In developing the argument, it looks at constructing a spatial analysis based on personal insight which stretches across Bucharest and London, places I lived in, proposing a combined methodology of both autobiographical and critical, hence autotheoretical (Fournier, Autotheory as Feminist Practice in Art, Writing, and Criticism, 2022) investigations through the prism of creative writing.
Whilst portraying womanly struggles in the home, the narration in three acts establishes the central concept of the Girl as the Alien, the protagonist, and a sub-category of otherness, and populates the home with animated objects dealing with their own romantic quests under the quiet supervision of humans. Affective involvement provides an opportunity to explore how all lovers, both the objects and the Girl, interact with the home-universe and relate to an external presence. Love is also a main driver in the visual description of the Alien as the witness-narrator in the last act (when her story becomes the primary focus), developing a design vocabulary based on my personal view and experience of the body. There is a background layer to the narration which presents the socio-political context that the female characters in each act deal with individually or communally.
Placed in relation to academic writings on feminist theory, domesticity and regional research on aspects of both British and Romanian social history, the narratives offer an approachable medium through relatability of common themes such as the home. By drawing upon Simone de Beauvoir’s “The Second Sex” as primary material for the female-otherness, the thesis aims to grasp at a careful thoroughness of detail - whom the Alien represents, and which spatial denominators might cause the condition is explained in a theoretical analysis provided after each act. Since the three fictional narratives are set in the three places I’ve resided in, this provides the basis for both personal and overarching interpretations of domesticity as where one should belong but in fact, does not.
This piece of research could lead towards a new premise of homes to which the Alien relates to, without alienating the Other. These propositional spaces are essential in establishing that either could start belonging to the normative socio-political context (which becomes accommodating of the Other) and not drive the divergence further. In devising the cosmopoietic output of a world which does not discriminate, the thesis asks what the domestic qualities of the rooms might be, proposing theatrical interactions with furniture-props as observed in the narration.
figure 0.1. The three domestic spaces: A kitchen, a bedroom and a bathroom. Design work.
The fictitious inflatable being, taking on the role of narrator and metaphorical self-insert. At times it bleeds into the definition of what I have called the theoretical Girl (see below) , but is however a separate non-human entity. It is one of the two dimensions that She appropriates and uses the theoretical framework of Levinas (Humanism of the other, 2006) and Waldenfels (Phenomenology of the Alien: Basic Concepts, 2011).
The human counterpart to the Alien, however independent to it. The Girl is rooted in the non-fiction theory presented in the thesis and she has the peculiar power to either belong to the category of alienation or within the sphere of womanhood.
Simone de Beauvoir’s understanding of being a woman. Present in the narrations in order to pursue the creation of domestic environments which do not cause the Other to become further estranged.
The expected theatrical set of actions and prop-arrangement which offers the outside observer a faux-realist feeling that the home environment is comfortable for the other, and that they navigate it with innate (not learned) ease.
Visual depiction of the lived eating disorder experience, with a focus on body dysmorphia. It summarises the negativity around a plush, inflated feeling of self, expecting heaviness but which is instead empty (hungry, starved).
The focus of society as we know it in patriarchal form; the gendered shape which dictates the measurements, materiality and rules of the our inhabited dimension.
vii.) girl
Character in the second act, independent of the Girl, however she takes part in the othering phenomenon by means of her assumed role: both gendered limitations and expectations.
viii.)
The two distinctive qualities of the sexes, as theorized by de Beauvoir (The Second Sex, 1949). Immanence stands for the innate condition of woman, concerned with basic functions, whereas the man accesses transcendence in pursuing activities of higher importance.
An absolute pleasure which possesses the transformative power to either create the perfect woman or turn man into submissive being (The Gay Science, Friedrich Nietzsche, p. 363). Whether it exists as a wrong assumption of binary genders is discussed in detail in the last act.
The series of repeated actions, learned through prolonged inhabitation of a home. It is the main connector of body and the spatial sphere of owness as both objects and place.
xi.) Tools of occupation
Domestic props which act as bodily extensions for the Other, the Alien and the Girl in manifesting occupation through the carving of negative space. This happens as a scattering action and often involves objects with personal use: perfume bottles, notebooks, cutlery, combs, toothbrushes, hairties.
Ficto-critical dimensions
“I thought if I took off my heavy city shoes, those crucifying monsters, the agony would ease. I took them off, but the mysterious pain did not leave me. In a way it never has; never will”. (One Christmas, Truman Capote, 1956, p. 53).
There is a certain association between femininity and alienation. It is most tangible in their shared parasitical qualities which disrupt the land of man, demanding what is considered an unexpected need of occupancy. The theoretical work which defines the feminist sphere of othering, greatly expanded on in Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex has still not been sufficiently explored; how does one become isolated in specific environments which demand utmost belonging, such as domestic settings? De Beauvoir’s book proposes a core ethos of how femininity is not innate but built under the situated socio-political context. Similarly, the path to alienation observes a mimetic transformation through echoes of external causes and therefore hints that alienation and otherness share the same process of becoming. Within the female/alien intersection we also find the curious case of overlapping otherness, which I explore in this thesis as the Girl; she exists in the home, a spatially fixed case, intelligible in being of relevance to most, where the defining terms for women and aliens bleed into each other. They are all cast aside from patriarchal superiority as they conform themselves to exist within bordered realms, unable to extend beyond architectural domesticity and concrete frames.
I thus extend an invitation to construct a sense of intimacy between the reader and my formulated stories of alienation. The desire to speak about matters which I consider deeply rooted into girlhood and womanhood aligns with allowing my reader to appropriately resonate with the subjects, as they are given a passage to unfold through active curiosity driven by narration. This embodies what other feminist writers have formerly defined as ficto-critical work.
In advocating for the importance of ficto-criticism to unpack my subject of alienation, I find Truman Capote often captures characters which have been similarly exiled from societal norms in his short stories. They are always alien to their own homely environments, from Holly Golightly’s unpacked residence to the ever-changing, class-transcendent bedroom of his controversial selfinsert in Answered Prayers (Hamish Hamilton, 1986). Just like architectural design, fictional personas require an act of character-building in the form of adding structural beams of detail and vulnerability. Not naming her cat in fear of commitment exposes Golightly to the reader, now a witness to her ineptitude to belong – with such a secret to keep, the reader develops a sense of familiarity through the overlap between her internal struggle and the curated face she shows in society. Although privileged and therefore seemingly unrelatable for feminist struggles, I find their resulting complexity an example of alienation similar to mine, as I feel my girlhood was shaped by phenomena similar to the embedded heaviness of Capote’s shoes.
If one was to define the key relationships in othering, it would conclude in a concentric trinity which revolves around its own axis: the Alien requires an external presence which mirrors its existence through enough similarities to attest a world it differs from. Throughout the thesis I will return to this conceptual frame, reworking it alongside my own autobiographical novelties as told through passages of creative writing. Further aiming to explore the close interrelation between alienation and placeness, the narration also references the domestic spaces I have lived in aged 8, 16 and 24. Therefore, the subject of otherness is interpreted by the author (a girl, an immigrant) similarly to architectural matters - of the related three dimensions. In this case, the spatial (the apartments), the theatrical (the prop interaction) and the embodied habitus (centred around the body and its effects on the spatial) consequently provide the critical framework for the fiction. Firstly questioning the theoretical driver (1) and providing a summary of the plot (2), the analytical passage is then given a socio-political context (3); it concludes with the critical output (4).
But as we consider the architectural site of our homes for this fictive writing and their deep patriarchal structures reflected in the construction process (statistically, most buildings we inhabit are built by men), could the story of the girl be closer to the alien than to the other, since her values bounce against masculine visuals they cannot relate to (Waldenfels, Phenomenology of the Alien, 1990, p. 26)? Being a girl at home does not answer to existing as a man, two separate identities which stand in parallel but not opposition. Although often seen as subordinate to it, the Other demands the primary existence that uses the same framework of defining itself, whereas girlhood breathes on its own accord. Alongside the gendered origins of our built environment, the Girl’s dual dimension stretches beyond classical means of theory; the outline demands accuracy through less normative genres, factual in placeness however allowing untied resolutions, much like Capote’s open-ended tragic heroines. Girlhood appears as a gradient, either opposing the demands of the patriarchal society and thus belonging to the Other, or simply inhabiting an unrecognizable place to her innate nature, which makes her the Alien. Pursuing the subject as a considered intersection between both Waldenfels and de Beauvoir opens the sphere of ficto-criticism; it contributes to the development of domestic space through reflection on the “arbitrary nature of objective knowledge” (Frichot, Stead, 2020, p. 19), since academic writing is much too rigid to expand on such a fine line of (almost) femininity. It deals in the juxtaposition of binary architecture (male and female) of spatial occupation, therefore the particularity of the alien-girl contributes to a dialogical approach of self and building, where the body marks the intersection. If maleness is straight lines and solidity, and, in opposition, material softness becomes more of a female approach, girlhood fills the cracks between.
Gradients of girlhood
figure 1.1.
The first act: two kitchens inside an apartment block in Titan, Bucharest, in 1977. Alien shaped by the controversial body politics during communism.
figure 1.2.
The second act: bedroom in a contemporary apartment in central Bucharest. Introduction to a human flatmate, the girl. figure 1.1.
figure 1.3.
figure 1.4.
figure 1.3.
The third act: The Victorian building in London, contemporary. The Alien’s form now stands under the issue of body dysmorphia.
figure 1.4.
The (post) socialist apartment block: origin site for all narratives.
Within well-defined patches of grass, frost glistens underneath passing clouds. Imagine a late evening as cold and crisp as this. Now, allow a string of streetlight to pass through linen curtains, as it opens into an orange tiled floor, climbing upon walls with flickers of white.
It’s 1987 in the Titan neighbourhood, a new expansion of megastructures in South-Eastern Bucharest.
There is a growing veil of steam, stretching over two silhouettes like an animal caging its prey. They shiver with nervous movements and their steps are hurried but light between wood fittings. Disregarding the scene’s secretive nature, the black Carpați cooker lets out heated sighs, desperate to be noticed. It does so because from time to time, through the gas pipes, it overhears the melodious tune of boiling water echoed by what could only be the smoothest cast iron. In its imagination, the pot wears a thick beige coat of ceramic paint, symmetrical with two daisy bouquets flattened upon its body, which extend their petals to handles slightly discoloured by time, like skin pulled at its ends. One of the silhouettes climbs upon the table.
The person towards whom she looks is myself, but forty years younger, cautiously asking to further extend my coat of concrete to perhaps cover the knitting needles my friend is sterilizing on the gas fire. The peculiar smell of hot metal creeps out from underneath the closed kitchen door. A kitchen! I almost forgot where we were. The walls seem to close in on each other in this feminine tension, where tables are not only for buttering fresh bread and defrosted meals brought on the train from the countryside. My friend told me that her first memory at home is watching her mother peeling potatoes.
All the dimensions in this room co-inhabit it like invisible strings layered upon each other, without touching, but always echoing off vibrations if one is touched. For example, in a singular cupboard you can find: a wooden spoon stained by tomato sauce (brought in a glass jar after a weekend visit to home, where her parents crushed plump red skins in industrial-sized pots), a silver cutlery set, a bread knife, a rainbow-full of laundry pegs whose rattle I hear with my inhale; then around the cupboard: a torn up, yellowed cookbook page still wearing flicks of dough as a badge of honour, a hair tie, a wet ashtray, an icon with gold frames that shower in condensation.
Separated by a layer of concrete, a mirrored scene unfolds. The exo-skeleton of my arm extends all the way to the other kitchen window. If I wanted to, I could pull at the seams so hard that the two mosquito nets touch. In this apartment, a woman in a gigantic fleece bathrobe with rolled up sleeves ties a dotted apron loosely around her middle and scurries down rectangular tiles, arms heavy with precious items she queued for on Sunday, at 6am: meat, oil and eggs. She’s cooking a sour soup, ciorba, for her two children, peeling potatoes with lazy eyelids which still need to be powdered after she’s done with cooking, even puffier after standing above grease vapours to watch it boil as her Virgin Mary icon watches her. I gently push my orange palm into her wall to let her know she needs to hurry because the gas is turned off in thirty-five minutes, as per. All for the greater good of our communist country. She approaches the stove and picks up the large pot from beneath. This is her time to catch up on domestic gossip, such as fights between her forks or how the pipes dripped onto the elegant flowery plate. But today the sink, queen to the kingdom of rust-coloured tiles, tells her one of the pots has supposedly
caught the attention of a fiery foreigner from the apartment above.
The heater echoes. The radio isn’t on before sunrise, so, in absence of it, she curiously places her ear next to the cold metal. “Please make sure the blood doesn’t get on the mortar, I’m still renting!”. A second’s pause in her movements as she taps her finger to the grainy surface, realization of what is happening in the neighbouring kitchen drawing upon her. Opening the painted shelves again, she reaches for the smaller pot, clinking it against the door hinges; in the other apartment, a stove (the famed foreigner) shivers at the sound. He knows it’s his beloved by the sound of a wellmemorized choreographed escape from the back of the shelf, as it bumps into the stacked plates, one, two, three times then disrupts a glass bowl at the very front. It must be! She watches the condensation on the window for a second, then grabs a brandy and her keys. It seems impossible to the cooker that the mother’s steps are now increasingly loud with
figure 2.1.
The sink and her surrounding acquaintancess: Still from animation. .
figure 2.2.
The parallel flats: Still from animation showing the connection drawn between the women.
figure 2.3.
The architectural scale costume: Design intervention within the kitchen.
proximity. Every tap, tap, tap (that I try to push my plush fingers beneath to absorb the sound) is bringing the cream iron pot closer to his apartment. He wishes his head was not covered in oil stains and burnt scraps; or that at least the atmosphere was slightly more romantic for such an important moment.
A knock disrupts the monumental silence and panic hits all three figures through the steam. Have they been found? Will they be taken to prison for taking part in such illegalities? The avalanche of emotions is, ultimately, pointless. They knew the risks before they even asked their girlfriends in quiet voices underneath the university how to remove the growth. My friend keeps her too-early-matured composure and shushes the other, closing the kitchen door as she reaches to look through the peephole for her unbeknownst visitor, only to find the lady from Flat 47 looking at her door with a softly tired gaze. She considers it for a second then decides it would be more suspicious to not open at all.
figure 2.1.
“the sink, queen to the kingdom of rust-coloured tiles”
Before her “Buna dimineața!” , the older woman had already asked in a hoarse whisper: “Is it done?”. There are moments when one returns to the primitive survival instinct and clearly reads between danger and companionship. Here, it was the case of the latter.
There are two different alcoholic clouds of a motherly aftercare rising along the steamy window. One which promises protection, calming rapid breaths, disinfecting insides… And the other makes its way past the lips, burning the throat in an effort to mimic anaesthesia.
I suddenly notice a push past the pot lid, forgotten and filled with boiling brandy. Are there droplets touching the face of the cooker? In between illicit stares, I realize the creamcoloured pot is reaching, unsuccessfully, to touch the stove’s metal grates.
As they confided in each other under this biopolitical exile, the women might have already succeeded in merging these two architectural cages of kitchens… Then, what if one were to, say, continue writing this story between the two lovers? I am too soft to make myself seen, but could I possibly pull at these steel beams in the walls? I am bored in mute solitude, and I suppose I have heard from the curtain that there is a certain satisfaction in meddling with lives when you’re just a voyeur.
Preoccupied with the scarlet streaming between floor tiles, the three women miss my fingerless pull on the wall’s edges, squishing ceramic to gas-opening in one longing movement, the modernist framework bends into a kiss.
Transl. from Romanian: Good morning!
figure 2.4.
First look at the Alien: Still from animation. The hidden protagonist whilst sheltering her female friends.
Initiated by a rebellious act of denial, disagreeing with theory you have seen applied and skewed by human nature becomes an almost effortless process. Since modernist apartment blocks coincide with many socialist regimes, the association between hypothetical inclusivity and domestic environments provides a space heavy with meaning to be considered as a theoretical set for the first narration, “The Rust that Grows Between Kitchens”. Whilst approaching the concept of alienation mostly through an autobiographical methodology (meaning I was raised to oppose communism, born in a convalescent Romania, as it is still recovering after more than 30 years posthumously), I discovered a theoretical link to socialist beliefs. Political theorist Karl Marx saw the home as an economic entity, in relation to which we are to feel either alienated subjectively (failing to belong at home or belonging although their domestic space is not a home) or objectively (where the social context they inhabit is not a home, nor do they feel otherwise) (Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, 1932). The unexpected duality of political thought provides a fruitful area to dissect, specifically the three-dimensional vagueness. Could the domestic sphere be considered both instigator and domain of alienation? Under feminist fictive ideology I question whether Marx’s approach to societal rupture, despite his equalitarian values, seemingly forgets the disconnect instigated by patriarchal homes.
Unfolding in the context of communist Romania, “The Rust that Grows Between Kitchens” explores alienation as voyeuristic observations through familiar lenses of the domestic. The subjective narrative perspective is one which we will return to, as the Alien makes her way through her array of homes. I suggest unpacking my own alienated characters through autotheoretical practice: the narrator as my inflatable giant, the three women and the lovers as the pot and the hob, altogether icons of both socially inherited stories and lived experience. The narration follows them on an early winter morning, the mother struggling to fit in domestic duties before work and the two girls undergoing an illegal abortion. Using the proposed framework for analysis, we observe the spatial as two mirrored rooms, both kitchens of a socialist block and therefore identical in architectural layout. When the dialogue between the Others (the women) and their domestic props (the appliances) enhances the theatrical interaction, they are driven to aid one another whilst the Alien sees the opportunity to transform certain aspects of their environment with her body.
Theoretical driver
Socio-political context
The fictional snippet echoes simililar concerns of corporal freedom for both the women and the Alien, since the the latter’s embodied habitus is constructed as her own hidden environment of comfort which she uses to co-exist with the Others (as conditioned by their femaleness, per Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex). Architecturally connected, the two apartments communicate through piping which allows unlikely characters to fall in love: the mother’s pot of boiling water and the young student’s stove. Albeit magical-realist in premise, the narrative uses recognizable domestic cues in order to further enhance the two different dimensions of not belonging. The background-layer story of the three women sets a space for the Alien to bounce against whilst she controls the pot/stove pairing, ultimately driven by the romance to use her body in shifting the architectural fabric.
The plot is centered around the ban on abortions in communist Romania, which lasted from 1967 to 1990 and supposedly led to the death of almost 10,000 women. Reminiscent of the complex fabric created by a socially accepted image of female emancipation during communism, the creative passage explores the domestic disruptions and their effects on constrictive body politics, especially limitations on certain bodily functions such as reproductive health. A piece of work which thoroughly explores femininity of the late 1970s and 1980s is Iulia Statica’s Urban Phantasmagorias (2023).
I find referring her text imperative in the cosmopoietic construction of an alternate, fictious layer to my inherited experience. There she portrays a most extreme situational change for apartments under female occupation, where furniture was repositioned and assigned a dual function such as operation board; since the ban often resulted in severe punishment, women resorted to abortions in the kitchen due to access to the facilities, such as hot water and fire. However, even those had schedules of restriction; communist apartment blocks acted more as cages than areas of feminist freedom, nonetheless progressive in their egalitarian values.
In the last years of the totalitarian regime, queueing for essential groceries in the early morning and rationing electricity and gas was common, therefore women had to cook before leaving for work or perform motherly duties at candlelight (Statica, 2017). Since they were primarily considered workers, mothers were expected to care for their families under both impediments. This is mentioned in the background layer of the fiction, where the parallel kitchens each deal with one of these female issues. The narrative site is thus crucial in enriching the social context, as Statica’s work on socialist
2.5.
domesticity in Urban Phantasmagorias (2023, p. 6) considers the Eastern European cinematic depiction of kitchens as “tokens of psychological realism that justifies the behaviour of fictional characters”. By choosing a space heavy with memory and identity such as the kitchen, it portrays the female persona through otherness particularly well, cast into guilt due to political issues but unified in sufferance.
Speaking to other colleagues within the sphere of architectural education about their memories of home, I was surprised to hear that they remember the kitchen most vividly as an eclectic mix of objects used to create taste and a sense of care. How does the organization change when the domestic purpose of rooms is flipped, much like communist homes such as the one in this narrative passage? When a place where one nourishes itself physically and spiritually as such transforms into a makeshift hospital room, all of the ‘tokens’ we gather inside shelves are witnesses to this change, and therefore keep the score. Marx believes that alienation happens when the worker is in disconnect with either the product of labour or from the external world (Marx, Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, 1932, p. 23); if considering domestic work a form of labour, then foodstuff becomes the product to be received by respective families. This happens without distancing the worker from neither the external world or the object of labour.
Critical output
figure 2.5. The “Carpati” cooker. http://www.cimec.ro/ PatrimoniuIndustrial/satumare/pagini%20web/satumare.html
figure 2.6. Common advertisement for kitchen furniture in the 70s.
I therefore acknowledge that the fiction opposses Marx’s theory, as he states that social power and ingenious labour are proportional aspects of one’s self, whereas in the case of both the alien-girl and the women, kitchen labour (although now sanitary too) enhances their fight for corporal freedom.
I propose that having to carve within the negative space we inhabit with tools of occupation (combs, pots, pillows, photographs, books, etc.) in order to make it ours opposes a nascent lack of belonging, instead disregarding all that we own as personal; thus drawing upon the animated props and sphere of owness from the fictive excerpt, one must wonder how the case-study individuals manage daily life as the outcast. To provide the theoretical output for the narration, we will be referring to the Marxist objective alienation, which expands on inhabiting a space but not feeling at ease within. The home he describes therefore appears as a generic place where one returns after purposeful activities to rest and nourish; however, it seems to me that the residential shell must also subconsciously pressure the individual to inhabit it; the narration exhibits this abstracted, however essential, dimension through the conversation between the mother and the sink. We are therefore allowed to observe how the act of scattering pieces of personal importance brings relatability to a space and can subsequently create a dialogue between the female body and architectural constraints.
figure 2.8. Historical map of Titan neighbourhood, Bucharest, 1977.
figure 2.9. Historical map of Titan neighbourhood, Bucharest, 2022.
Twenty years have passed now, and my hiding space has climbed up to central Bucharest, somewhere on the fifth floor. You can find me right between the walls of a bedroom with wooden furniture painted white and textile touches thrown to cover its impersonal shape. I live with a girl in her early twenties now. Lit by streetlamps below, she often navigates the space with learned mannerisms in bringing delights to whom she calls her lover. The carpet always tells me he’s terrified of the spring in her step the nights when the man visits, when minuscule doses of food fall unceremoniously on his scalp. She always picks them up, although late at night.
However, it is the bed which seems to collect the crumbly debris of the girl’s illicit affairs with her tray. She brings her carefully curated meals on ornate metal, places it down on the purple quilt. Her guest is the one indulging in it, never her. God forbid! Her lines must remain sleek, which would be an unspoken rule if her mother was not so invested in her weight. She balances the champagne glass on the dip between her fingers and its luminous surface could not agree with her beliefs more. Similarly, the glass carries the bubbling surface inside, but she never consumes it; she’s too infatuated with her thin transparent neck lengthening towards the sky. But suddenly the glass is tilted by an unexpected kiss between the lovers, and she finds herself staring at a wide, luscious veneer of wood. Has she not seen such brown veins before and thin dips to be filled between long planks. She’s suddenly jealous of the dust mites hovering above.
She longs to spread herself thin, liquid skin on top, offering it like an act of loyalty. A drop is on her lip’s rim. His cold touch burns under the “tip”, then echoed by “tap”. Since then, every sound of combined laughter is followed
by breathless anticipation; it ricochets on the south side of the door to the kitchen shelves where the glass is, and on the north side, well under the bed, for the floor to hear. She now considers herself a fur-lined woman, like in the movies she forcefully watched with the girl. I remember seeing her tightening the elasticated beige around her waist until almost breathless but thinning like the actress on the screen.
It’s in the dark, when her lover sleeps, that she wipes viscous stains from the lacquer with my long hands, collects the clothes thrown on the carpet and fluffs up pillows. She never cared for company but how nice is it that she’s being observed in her sheen glory?
I observe the four of them from above for months. Gradually, the girl had gained a pace more confident in gestures, not easily losing her balance like before. Gone is her light step! She has fully claimed her flirtatious role. It surprises me that the man never wakes up, disturbed by the hoovering sound, or ever mentions how the room seemingly tilts on its own to hang his shirts on metal hangers, tucked away in the closet. On the other hand, this means the floor does not get his chance of absorbing his lover anymore. Dents which once rose to meet another droplet from the champagne glass have now returned to a monotone height.
When she stops filling the glass to the brim, maturing but putting the inanimate romance on hold, is the moment I decide I must intervene. I hang my arms low and loose over the frame of the bed. The two closets on each side poise the mattress, topped with a theatrically curled up bedcover - the girl’s attempt of being in control of her newfound seductress persona, banned from the embarrassment of spilling
her drinks. In the middle of the night, I put my plan into action. If I slightly squeeze my elbows inward, perhaps I can force a bend in the metal string. My game of dominoes succeeds, and the champagne glass tilts just enough for the thin neck to lean and lose its footing, falling over in an inelegant curve, bouncing off the gold frame and then it spreads into a broken conclusion on the parquet. Remnants of Chardonnay form a scattered circle, and sharp edges scratch the lacquer coat then roll well hidden under my arms. The girl might find them if sent into a cleaning frenzy, but her lover will definitely not.
I cover them quickly, secluded in their eternal (or, at least until I move out) embrace.
figure 3.1.
The output of the second narrative chapter, “Weaving One’s Skin”, plays upon the idea that the individual must define their own “sphere of owness” (Husserl, 1977). The girl and the champagne glass both feel the need to perform certain roles to their lovers and this helps them exhibit a state of normality they are comfortable with, thus erasing the inaesthetic bodily issues (namely eating disorders) they deal with as results of their respective social environments. Here, the Alien is separate from the conceptual Girl the thesis has previously defined, introducing the character of the girl. This encourages further questioning into their differences, spatial freedom and interactivity with their respective environment. Whereas the Alien is still in the hidden graft of the building’s structure, neither adapting to nor opposing the architecture, the girl plays on her own soft furniture. We therefore aim to access the theatrical as a dimension of otherness whilst considering the spatial constraints of the home as receiver for both the gestural and habitual body of the Other. The thesis pursues the concept of owness primarily, but the current chapter begins the construction process of a propositional framework for the Alien and, through physical interaction which transforms objects into bodily extensions (embodied habitus), it also starts considering the secondary othered presence of the girl.
The piece of fiction unveils two feminine bodies which, in their habitual collaboration, transform the architecture that constraints them. They each have a goal: the girl prepares romantic sets within her bedroom and the Alien pursues her mastermind persona in directing another love story. By taking hold over her neighbour, the girl adapts her invisible labour to theatrical playfulness. Whilst still oppressive as it happens within the patriarchal context, the product of her work allows her to grasp onto the social constrictions and shape them according to further desires in receiving her lover again.
As a closer relationship develops between the protagonist and her new friend, we find that her inflatable limbs have now become wearable extensions to use when cast out into otherness. The Alien exits her space of safety within walls, but only in the form of costume - the visual language of the bedroom then starts responding to the othered (the girl) with theatrically tensioned cloths and systems aiding the girl’s choreography.
Theoretical driver
Plot
figure 3.1. The spilling glass of champagne, explored in the design module as wearable props.
Socio-political context
The obsessiveness of posing domesticity stems from a perpetual jealousy of the ones who belong, which enables the Other (the girl) to mimic it artificially for the third presence in the narrative: the male lover. When suddenly singled out by him, unable to return to either anonymity or distinction, the seen/unseen ambivalence of the Alien therefore seems to be in close connection with the girl having control of her environment. This can be related back to the fact that the girl also belongs to the sphere of the Other. She needs to know the distance between the chair and the wine bottle on the table so she can turn gracefully in her own je ne sais quoi, an inner humoristic dialogue between the seduced and the seductress, where they are played by the same person. It is the effortlessness which she acts out.
As a teenager, I spent several days reading in the comfort of the same bedroom which inspired this chapter’s setting; Camil Petrescu’s “The Last Night of Love, the First Night of War” gave me one of my first literary insights into masculine love, which is perhaps why I return the autobiographical aspect of the male gaze to the form of his male protagonist, Stefan. Obsessing over the possibility that his wife might be having an affair, he wrongly assumes superficiality, stating that her gestures have lost their innocence and become those of a ‘mistress’, educated in seduction. Closely linked in the experiential weight of my understanding of that very same bedroom space, my fictive persona curates her movements unbeknownst of outsider judgement, in hope of instead presenting herself as a painting (de Beauvoir, 1949, p. 587).
The home, particularly the bedroom, becomes a space where one can be perceived on their own terms within carefully choreographed props. Arranging her furniture, Marie Bashkirtseff envisioned the finalised room along with subjects whose poses she directs –
“Hanging above the divan are two mandolins and the guitar. Put a blond and white girl with fine small, blue-veined hands in the middle of this.” (Journal de Marie Bashkirtseff, Bashkirtseff, 1887).
The paradoxical equation which balances spatial constraints and emotional relatability might apply here to the wider concept of alienation, unpacked as accessibility and inaccessibility (Waldenfels, 1990, p. 22) of the domestic world: either familiar in actions it triggers through its shape (such as the innate knowledge of opening a shelf) or incomprehensibility. Within the
unseen labour present in the narrative, the girl’s access to domestic duties forces her to inhabit a secondary dimension in her home, that of utility, closed off to the male gaze and therefore alienating her.
Returning to the Marxist forms of alienation (Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, 1932), we note how they all refer to an undefined concept of home, mentioned without further clarification. Yet, it is the economic emphasis of Marxist theory which also decides against exploration of the greater sensitivity in the psychological dilemma when one feels dislocated from belonging, ultimately reveling in the economic aspect. But the home in this chapter cannot be categorized under the same
name as the home in the other two narratives; their structural enclosure doesn’t tell us anything about the lived experience. It is the embodied habitus of the objects which defines the context better, such as the crumbs falling on the bed or the girl’s rehearsed tidying up of the pillows and clothes, therefore revealing the othering.
Where can the girl stand in comparison to Marx’s beliefs of the alienated when she mimics belonging through the theatrical nature of material ownership? The dramatic vocabulary bleeds into terms used in this chapter: pose, curation, set, prop, performance. Her body makes her both a director and an ingenue; although the first is the product of her work and is invisible to the lover, the latter role offers her authority over man. Once again through girlhood we stray from the politics of labour:
“Estranging (happens through) (...) the relation of the worker to the product of labor as an alien object exercising power over him” (Marx, Manuscripts of 1844, 1932, p. 24).
As the girl becomes more acquainted with her place under the spotlight, the mannerisms, rather than losing their act, are embedded into her relation to the space, much like an actress playing the same role each night. Beside the domestic layers of one-dimensional communist flat, where can one find the embroidered pillows given by one’s aunt or the tightly buttoned trousers? Within the context of home, all physical objects are of importance, including bodily restrictions of clothing matter. Whereas the male gaze is dominant for Petrescu and Marx, “Weaving One’s Skin” seeks to uncover the gestural spatiality in the architectural realm (the floor responding to the spilled liquid) or the self (the girl putting on a corset). The embodied habitus of the second act is an increasingly stronger expectation for the woman to perform, even in her quiet sanitary process.
figure 3.2-11. How people own their space through props; difference in inhabiting the same socialist space: 10/1, Bogdan Girbovan, 2016.
I am moving again. I wonder how many places I will have to force myself to see as home now that it seems I get older but am never aging. This time around I’m trying on London’s coat of cloud, further away from the seemingly infinite array of modernist frames on Bucharest’s wide boulevards. From sleek cubic rooms to buildings with less floors and skirting draping their insides.
My mornings start with coffee in vapour form. There have been no less but perhaps more than 20,454 sunrises which keep on blessing the same concrete face and that means my tan is uneven. I find pleasure in the small things such as smelling soap water, pushing all the buttons in the wooden elevator and listening to steps on the stone hallways trying to decipher who is coming down. I am not lonely. My insides creak sometimes when small children chase each other around, but that is not often as most of my neighbours are old. I like stretching my pink limbs out in the morning sun before anyone can notice me; after all, I am quite shy. I must be, my condition tells me to say so. But I am not lonely.
Sometimes I do feel alone. There is a space within you, my Victorian flat, where I go to belong, or rather make myself up into belonging. Imagine the smallest creak as you open a wooden door painted white. Then how a soft step becomes rigid onto the slightly bent parquet, extruded with occasional pulses of humidity. These bricks have been here for 150 years, which makes this structure to be the oldest I have ever touched but the newest in feeling. Somehow this brings comfort to me, that it is more likely to have had others choosing London, this building, as a home, than my childhood frames of socialist blocks. My British initiation was a column-framed entrance – and since I hadn’t known full
carpet flooring before, it felt like stepping into another world.
I tear myself up from the wall make my way there, I shed as many layers of costume as I can. I stop by the mirror which shines with orange reflections of glossy arms, and I let myself be guided into the crevice to remind myself of my largeness and its unwanted pockets stuffed with plush. I check the hole in my stomach is still there. It is. Can I still see the back of the room through the gap of my thighs of pink textiles? I can. My shoulders narrow at the top and widen at the ground, fingerless hands heavy with air.
I realize I’m not sure I know what I look like anymore while I go through my routine, making sure my body fits inside these metal rings I own of 90-60 and 90 centimetres respectively. Bust, waist and hips. It’s a wooden device I built a while ago during my times locked away with no permission to see others, in the hope that when I do, they would look through me. I still spill over.
My belongings are all over your layers now, inside your drawers, rested against your walls. I used to be more careful with how I move in you once I found all the laws about how I could not change your colours, your single glaze to double glaze, even ornate you with flowers on the windowsill. This somehow gave me the impression they must have the same authority over your insides, too – I have seen it happen, back in 1987. But slowly, limb by limb, I began to leave markers of myself. A hairbrush that I can’t use because I have no hair. Nail polish that I use not on my fingers but to draw on my eyes. It wasn’t until I had the courage to hang a new plastic sheet of iridescent lustre that I decided I could cover myself in inhabiting you. So now I’m using
my inflatable occupancy and I have built an extension for my body to step through when I head towards the mirror.
A while ago, after a few of my matchmaker plays, I was given a series of gold wires, which curiously looked like some I had read about, the ones they used when they made the Universe. The only thing that I could fathom about that strange offering was that someone seemed to have trusted me with the role of a builder. They now pave my way from where I’m hidden between walls and bricks and egg white paint to the shiny surface of the mirror, tensioned to my wrists, tied to chunky boots of skin and therefore to my every movement, almost nearly as high as your lightbulbs. Before I answer to myself, I must put on my glasses, big blue eyes drawn upon them to keep me from seeing. I can only approach their golden stand if I don’t see any of my reflections on this journey, because if I do, I retreat, discouraged and swollen with air, to my area of belonging.
Unlike previous times, I have not managed to find myself a friend to live (interfere) with (their life), since the many outsiders I have met intimidated me with their excellent imitation of a British accent. The high vowels pronounced loudly pull them to living rooms, whereas I stay glued to a corner. It happened so often I decided to accommodate myself inside the structural layers, taking a chunk of plastic from my thigh and blowing it into a blanket.
As I climb out and inwards the other routetunnel, there is a chair whose straight back I covered in the roundness of faux fur, so I don’t accidentally deflate. I try to stay inside the paths extruded around my movements inside the bathroom because I think you can’t see me here. When I first met you, I couldn’t
believe your large, omnipresent frame that could not only fit me, but allowed me to twist and spread without touching your ceilings. I hung ribbons from the nails to distract myself from the humidity stains left by your past residents, high above and grey with betrayal. But today there is something hiding behind my perfume bottles, its white peeking through like a fang. You managed to cut through the mortar and are staring at me wide panelled.
I hadn’t planned it. Didn’t you know I take pride in being the mastermind? Your passive frame let me populate dollhouses with stories, recreating miniature worlds of pots falling in love with stoves and modern socialites cleaning in the dark. Caught unprepared like this, I wonder whether it was supposed to happen either way. My shoulders are still bruised from my days spent trying to fit in the cracks of a plastic couch which seemed soft at first, but twisted around my body like a snake until my air-filled arms were forced to take the same skinny shape.
You don’t say anything to me and frankly I too am frozen in movement and sound, unconvinced that I should continue breathing. Like that moment at the end of a journey that you had just entirely spent imagining your destination, being finally faced with the reality of your fantasy was, well, truly alien. Looking at a tangible object feels fictitious when you had already traced the line of each dip and curve with your mind. To my surprise I ignore your teasing looks. We set about choosing what to do. “I will go to the hallway,” I say to myself, “so you can’t follow me.”
It’s been like that for 34 days now. I wake, I stretch, I eat and then become human but all under your gaze of three windows, two in your living room and one in your bedroom. I open
the main door and slip onto the wallpapered surface of your external facades, the hit of cold air a reminder that I am free from you for a second. We still don’t talk. Wide rooms are not my freedom anymore but feel too far away to reach doorsteps when I leave them. I count the steps it takes to get to the naked white of you in the bathroom; it’s 22 from the seat that I always use in the middle of the living room (never the other two), 15 from my coffee machine and 26 from where I rest. Admiring your frame was one thing, but having you look back? Unbearable. If only you did something. I am faced with your reactionless gaze, intense ceramic as it follows me around.
But then one evening, long after giving up on hearing from you, I heard a faint language of plastic sweeping sounds - those I only speak with myself in my head when I twist the doorknob, locking my door twice. In the bottom of my eye, through the hole in my
stomach, I see you’ve taken out your finest pillow covers, glossy rubber echoing the wind’s movements and repeating the murmurs of passers-by.
You leaned your wooden doorframes over me and spoke softly:
I see you’re uncomfortable, but maybe you should know - so am I, master of this brick and mortar and carpet family. And I meant to ask, is it because you don’t see yourself in anything you own?
figure 4.1.
The Alien in her final form: Coming from her resting place between the walls.
He pauses for a second as if to gather the strength to push his open door to the wall.
But you don’t realize the way you scatter them across my floors always takes your shape.
I tilted my silky head in confusion. Have my unusual shapes, unable to stretch out for so long before, seem to have built their own Although you’d aways been here, have you also been pushed into a separate entity from the world you grew up in? Perhaps assembled to look over never-ending green fields, then faced with the reality of minuscule London squares and business offices as neighbours. I wondered if your metal beams also felt too tight around your waist, but you continued to tell me about your concerns. It makes me think of how I’ve been inside you for four years now, but I’ve never been sure if my props look right here. My tall beloved’s empty ceilings creaked slightly, my plants flutter with the movement of carpet as you sigh with the 120 years you’ve been here. I look at you as if to tell you “I get what you’re saying about the society you’re forced to be part of, with no choice of your own”, but you mishear and interrupt me. You say:
They stuff me and tear at me as if to erase my beginnings, but I will always know I was born of a man. My lines are too rough to have come out of a womb.
Now that I look at my reflection on this other half, I recognize that I might not be faulty at all, nor is the bounce of my big balloon hips underneath another’s touch. How strange it is for someone’s presence to change the colour and weight of a room.
I had a strange alienating feeling and right then it seemed to reach its peak, because I was certain my body wasn’t built to
experience belonging in your words. I need not mention that to the chalk inside your brain. It’s a suffocating emotion that I feel cold and spherical all around, as gold curtains of your hair draw shadows on my deformed body until I’m swimming in darkness. I lose track of minutes, hours, days inside your rooms.
This large plastic body must have forgotten what it feels like to be seen and not just inhabited. The metal beams of my Victorian lover hold me up as I rest my head against a skin of ceramic tiles.
But as soon as I become familiar with you, I suddenly cannot feel myself as I have before. My previous detachment from the norm was quiet, always pointing out my contrasting softness against abrasion. Headed outside of my walls, I’d be overwhelmed with cold stares from a yellowing fridge (older than I am, possibly) or separate faucets for cold and hot water (peculiar for my European soul). But that seems to have stopped under your cover, or more likely through my association to you. It feels strange to comment on comfort, even stranger in feeling too much comfort. My emotional routine of tip-toeing around a space I am pressured by, tensioned by being seen, has turned into strolls running my fingers along the grainy paint on the walls, which makes me feel common. And unless one can observe the blatant ignorance towards their being different, surely there is no point in calling yourself an alien? This ease, I do not recognize. I’m too afraid to lose myself within layers fluid with eagerness to adapt for me. So I decide I am leaving for Paris tomorrow, where I don’t speak the language and the apartment buildings are even taller.
I spend the journey in quietude, draped over a white silk chiffon.
figure 4.2. The Victorian flat morphing for the Alien:
A cold and spherical emotion she feels all around, covered in gold curtains.
figure 4.3.
The parallel flats: Design intervention within the kitchen, illustrated as a theatrical set.
Theoretical driver
Plot
Perhaps what is most unknown to the Other is belonging, and belonging we find in another. If a woman in love singles herself out and experiences feelings of an idiosyncratic persona, the environmental alienation could be intensified to some extent (feeling that no one has gone through the same motions in the eros). “The Other... and Another” constructs a spatial dimension for the love language developed between the narrator, who appears here as the intersection between Girl and Alien, and her current living quarters.
The final narration delves deeper into the Alien herself occupying space, nor for ownership or performance, but to become common enough to be invisible to whom she yearns for. She directs the construction of her props (“They are tensioned to my wrists, tied to chunky boots of skin and therefore to my every movement”) and uses them to gain full control, meticulous in not repeating past missteps where her body was ultimately changed. What started as the one-sided passion after her move from Bucharest to London grows into the amazement of observing herself become the reason of physical change in a space that can comfortably contain her. A question of scale is often a subject in lovers’ intimate conversations, where the feminine counterpart wishes to be seen as small, utterly aware of her immanence and wishing for it to be thoroughly encompassed (de Beauvoir, 1949, p. 703). In “The Other... and Another”, the driver of the romance is, in fact, the perceived magnitude of the Alien’s Victorian apartment. Drawing upon the second act which explored domestic props as gestural extensions, the alienated persona put in a hosting situation is in danger of exposing itself as uncomfortable in their appropriated space, as they feel the pressure to assume a role of familiarity with the objects. A glimpse of one’s living quarters is enough to assess their own theatrical performativity: a sofa is suddenly a plush mass which exposes flesh soft sinking into its crevices, the lack of armrests on the chair reinforces a thoughtful repositioning of palms by their sides. This becomes the embodied habitus, effectively caused by the theatrical furniture and the spatial Victorian flat.
By delving into architectural-scale infatuation, the narrative tackles certain outdated Beauvoirian aspects such as female submission to her lover. An abstracted being herself, the Alien is charmed by grandeur. We are given a more concrete visual on the Alien in this final chapter, as she faces herself in the mirror of self-remembrance (such as the hole in the stomach and the view she catches through it). She is still not seeking obedience, but rather a series of objective ideals that offer her comfort under the condition of
physical invisibility through belonging. The ulterior change from anonymity to being pursued aligns with a shift in societal background, from Bucharest to London: origin to choice of environment. The Alien is caught off guard by what has become an inessential frame for her to fabricate belonging, instead bringing her closer to accepting a world-builder role.
The context here differs from the other two narrations in that it is spatial only as an effect of the romantic feelings, and not the other way around: the kitchen and the bedroom are both receivers, while the Alien morphs her own boudoir. This is why her love is seemingly different than that of a male counterpart through her vulnerability (the inflatable body, her exposed skeleton). However, if we were to consider Nietzsche’s depiction of the more perfect woman as herself being affected by her feminine love, whilst concomitantly stating that the same feeling would turn a man into a slave (The Gay Science, Friedrich Nietzsche, p. 363), we might find that these gendered sentiments bleed into each other. In unpacking this conceptual affective ‘perfection’ that the Alien seems to submit to, I return to de Beauvoir’s separation between the sexes as either immanent, concerned with basic aspects of life, (female) or transcendent, navigating wider dimensions of possibilities (male) (de Beauvoir, 1949, p.20). Regardless of misdirected feminist intent, which in this form is anachronistic to progressive gender study pylons such as J. Butler and M. Nelson, de Beauvoir answers the Nietzschean dispute plainly: men preoccupy themselves with such an externalized social existence that by submission to another they could not hold onto their sense of self. Spatially, this translates to the Alien’s frenzy where the lover morphs for her, as she becomes witness to feminine love herself. Both members of the couple respond to the other’s yearning by becoming the more perfect woman. In similar tonality to finding comfort in the familiar, once she eases in the welcoming shift of the apartment and loses the anxious need to hide, she faces death of her infatuation.
It could be argued that a certain social domain encourages a change in selfperceived scale. In terms of a broader psychological engagement with the feminine, there seems to be an understanding that the Girl always looks back in its childhood to declare a certain mysticism that feels strongly vivid; de Beauvoir argues this is due to the given freedom synchronous with protection offered by a patriarchal hand on the head (p. 687). This gives a false impression that the girl could relate to the Baudelairean concept of the flâneur, an aimless wanderer of urban space (The painter
4.5.
of modern life and other essays, Baudelaire C. 1964). The two spheres of individuality crash when the woman is mature and independent since her spatiality is suddenly constricted: the flâneuse must worry about companionship, lighting conditions and timing for her safety, which is expanded in “The Other.. and Another” through her unease to be seen. Therefore, the opportunity to belong to another entity grouping within which she can experience the same difference in scale as in childhood (that is, monumental enough to feel as if there is no constriction at all) could be in itself a cage she believes has the chance to control.
In relating to a being of difference which supposes and also demands equality, Marx observes that it is the othering quality of the female sex which enhances the human male experience, thus an embodied natural experience of living.
“The direct, natural and necessary relation of person to person is the relation of man to woman” (Philosophical Works, Vol VI, Marx, 1884).
The lovers exist in parallel, not opposition, as a series of questions to be discussed and this makes our innate need to belong be in close relation to how we associate with one another. That is not to say the presence of Another is essential to the Other, but there is a theatrical value in setting up a domestic scene to be shared, engaged with, which historically belongs to femininity. The feminine love does not enslave the Alien, instead it allows her to access opposing features of her being (which could be considered masculine, but it is however not essential to categorize these), such as the spatial freedom on the train to Paris; in leaving the comfort of a home which changed for her, she finds the architectural belonging she seeks in her own body.
The girl at 8 years old, in her childhood home. Personal archive.
figure 4.4.
The girl at 16 years old in the socialist block lift . Personal archive. figure 4.3.
figure 4.5.
The girl at 24 years old in her neighbourhood in London. Personal archive.
The Girl is not an Alien, nor a woman, nor a man. In her early years, she put on Capote’s shoes, whose weight she carried over the British Channel, taking the strange feeling of alienation from the ingrained domestic life to an assumed othering as foreigner. This is the character we bring forward in the autotheoretical context, to help shape a space for the Other. Her magical realm must also accept visibility to the man; Simone de Beauvoir alludes to the mysticism contained in the female sex, specifically to perceptive mirages which the man is bound to admire and perhaps lose himself in, but the essential is to recognize that her experiences are no less real (de Beauvoir, 1949, p. 781).
As the research developed alongside critical fiction, a series of key denominators solidified each narration in constructing the vocabulary for girlhood: absorb, cages, burn, steam (“The Rust that Grows Between Kitchens”), to spill, to pose, transparent (“Weaving One’s Skin”), and to be seen, inflatable, adaptation, reflection, props (“The Other... and Another”). From the resulting visual only, we can recognize spatial qualities which are engrained in the lived experience of the girl, hence a complex fabric of duality between impending womanhood, the accepted societal personality, and alienation. If considering each of the words a structural beam in building the domestic realm for the girl, is there a factor is at risk of causing further othering? The hosting genre of ficto-criticism which the thesis aims to contribute to (as curated by Frichot and Stead) encourages the association between world-building in both writing and through architectural design (Rendell, 2020); what we gather from the cosmopoietic word-sphere is that the girl bounces against rigid framework of patriarchal values, both abstract and architectural, and exists in a state of alternating rebellion (inflation) and oppression (constriction, invisibility), but relates to the man in a reclaimed performance of her own vulnerability. The elemental dimension of liquids and steam is her immanence reaching toward masculine transcendence, using the alienated being as extension of her bodily limits. I return to Marx’s theory of labour estrangement which states “Private property is thus (...) the necessary consequence, of alienated labor (...) of the worker to nature and to himself”, in which the worker submits to another man, standing outside of the alienating environment. But in appropriating the ownership over her political body as home-property and considering it an object of labour, it blurs the lines between the space which she calls her own (the private property) and the extensive bodily space. What this succeeds in is creating a non-alienating space, since it is not an effect of the estranged man, because she is not one – she is a girl.
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