Out of Sight, Out of Mind: Modern Architecture and Waste

AALTO UNIVERSITY MASTER’S THESIS

Author Ella Müller

Title Out of sight, out of mind: Modern architecture and waste

Department Architecture

Major Architecture history and theory

Supervisor Panu Savolainen

Advisor Sanna Lehtinen

Date 08.02.2022

Number of pages 138 Language English

Keywords Architecture theory, modernism, waste, obsolescence, hygiene, dirt, disorder, architecture history

CORRECTED 2ND EDITION 20.10.2022 Slight changes have been made to the layout of the thesis and minor corrections to the text.

The riso print on the cover portrays

Le Corbusier’s Voisin plan of Paris on top of the old quarters it would have replaced.

ABSTRACT

This master’s thesis examines the ways in which the contemporary building culture produces waste. The environmental crisis and the emerging circular economy have drawn more and more attention to construction waste and its reuse. Instead of adopting the problem-solving approach of waste man agement, this thesis asks how buildings and urban environments come to be defined waste in the first place? The question is explored through the history of modern architecture and construction practice.

This thesis introduces critical discourses on waste in social studies and humanities to architecture theory. In a dive into the history of modern ar chitecture and its founding thought, the canonical narrative of modernism is exposed to multidisciplinary writings about dirt, discard, hygiene, order, and obsolescence. A particular interest is taken on the grounds and reasoning of demolition, which often reveal less about waste itself than its counterpart, the ideal.

A key argument of this thesis is that the modernist ideals of hygiene and order continue to have a waste-producing effect in contemporary built environments. The modern project enforced a strict system of ordering that abjected parts of the existing built heritage as incompatible with new values. The modernist legacy persists in legislation, processes, and cultural understanding of the parties involved in construction and urban development. What we perceive as waste is not merely the material product of a linear eco nomic system but also a cultural discard of the modernist design sensibility. New, more ecological building solutions cannot be considered sustaina ble if the existing is subsequently labelled waste. Circular economy envisions an architecture that utilises the old and existing in innovative ways. However, the promise of sustainability combined with continuous economic growth should not be left unquestioned. This thesis proposes that a multidisciplinary approach is necessary for identifying the roles architecture plays in the environmental crisis and the unequal distribution of its effects.

TIIVISTELMÄ

Tämän diplomityö tarkastelee sitä, miten nykyinen rakentamisen kulttuuri tuottaa jätettä. Ympäristökriisi ja kiertotalous ovat kohdistaneet huomion rakennusjätteeseen ja sen uusiokäyttöön. Sen sijaan, että työ käsittelisi rakennusjätettä jätehallinnan näkökulmasta, se kysyy millä tavoin rakennuksia ja kaupunkiympäristöjä määritetään jätteeksi? Tätä kysymystä lähestytään modernin arkkitehtuurin historian kautta.

Diplomityö esittelee yhteiskuntatiteellisen ja humanistisen jätetutkimuk sen havaintoja arkkitehtuurin teoriaan. Se tarkastelee nykyistä rakennuskulttuuria ja sen ylijäämää sukeltamalla modernismin historiaan ja perustaviin ajatuksiin. Modernismin vakiintunut narratiivi altistetaan monialaisille tek steille, jotka käsittelevät jätettä, likaa, hygieniaa, järjestystä, ja vanhenemista. Työn keskiöön nousevat purkamisen syyt ja sen perusteluun käytetyt argu mentit, jotka usein kertovat vähemmän itse jätteestä kuin sen vastaparista, ideaalista.

Työn keskeinen argumentti on, että modernistiset hygienian ja järjestyk sen ihanteet vaikuttavat edelleen siihen, miten rakennettuja ympäristöjä määritetään jätteeksi. Moderni projekti tavoitteli oli tiukkaa järjestystä, joka sulki ulkopuolelleen osia olemassa olevasta rakennuskannasta uusiin arvoihin sopimattomana. Tämä perinne elää edelleen lainsäädännössä, prosesseissa ja rakentamisen osapuolten kulttuurisessa itseymmärryksessä. Se, minkä määritämme jätteeksi ei ole vain lineaarisen talousjärjestelmän materiaalinen tuote, vaan myös modernistisen suunnitteluajattelun kulttuurinen hylkiö. Uusia, entistä ekologisempia rakentamisen ratkaisuja ei voi pitää kes tävinä, jos vanha samalla leimataan jätteeksi. Kiertotalouden ihanteena on arkkitehtuuri, joka keskittyy uudisrakentamisen sijaan hyödyntämään vanhaa ja olemassa olevaa uusin ja innovatiivisin tavoin. Lupausta kestävy ydestä yhdistettynä jatkuvaan talouskasvuun ei kuitenkaan pidä jättää kyseenalaistamatta. Työn pyrkimyksenä on korostaa monialaisen lähestymistavan tärkeyttä pohdittaessa arkkitehtuurin roolia suhteessa ympäristökriisiin ja sen vaikutusten epätasa-arvoiseen jakautumiseen.

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

The contemporary architecture discourse is pervaded by notions of the envi ronmental emergency. Numbers are clear: buildings and construction produce almost 40 % of all global CO2 emissions. What more, buildings sprawl over natural environments, destroying ecosystems and wiping out carbon sinks. It is not only the climate change we should be worried about. In 2009 a group of environmental scientists led by Johan Rockström introduced the model of ‘Planetary Boundaries’, illustrating nine processes that regulate the stability and resilience of the earth, and the degree of human impact in each of these processes. Crossing the planetary boundaries signifies entering an area of in creased risk of large scale environmental change and disaster. According to the scientists, the rate of biodiversity loss and the alterations in biochemical flows of nitrogen and phosphorus have already exceeded the safe zone. In fact, human impact on the planet has grown so significant that some geologists are talking about a whole new geomorphologic era of the Anthropocene.1

There is a widespread understanding that something must be done, but what it is, is not as clear. The position of architecture is essentially instrumental. Historically, buildings have provided shelter, acted as places of worship, and symbols of power. Within the recent centuries, they have acquired a new function as objects of trade in the real estate market. Architects occupy the space between political power and legislation, cultural values and technolog ical and economic realities. Often discussions of the role and responsibility of architects in times of environmental emergency stumble on disciplinary boundaries: It is easier to look outside our field and blame the real-estate

business, construction companies, and politicians for lack of ambition, than to recognize how the planning profession is contributing in environmental destruction.

In this thesis, I will reframe the architect’s role in the environmental crisis by examining the culture of building through the waste it produces. After all, waste is the excess of our lifestyles of abundance, the material product of our disregard for the environment. Waste is the inherent flip side of consump tion, to the extent that it has been proposed that instead of the consumer society, it would be appropriate to speak of a ‘waste society’.2 Yet, waste is elusive and cannot be grasped without a multidisciplinary approach.

Waste is a hybrid concept that occurs somewhere between the ‘cultur al’ and the ‘natural’. Thus, it challenges the ideological divide to human and nature that has influenced Western thinking at least since the Enlightenment, and is still present in disciplinary boundaries today. The human kind has an increased capability to cause harm to the environment, yet, neither natural nor social sciences accept the claim that humans are somehow separate from nature.3 According to sociologist John Urry, the split between the natural and social makes it difficult understand and address the impact of human behav iour in the biosphere.4 The division is particularly evident in the sustainability discourse that positions human society as the contrary force that disturbs the balance of the natural environment. The three aspects of sustainability—en vironment, society, and economy—are often depicted as a non-hierarchical triad, but in practice human society operates within the environment, simultaneously dependent on nature and a part of nature.5

According to ecologist Richard Levins and zoologist Yrjö Haila, “signifi cant changes in the environment are caused by actions practised consistently in vast areas and through long periods of time.”6 Such changes cannot be caused by individuals, but systemic patterns of the specialized society. Thus, change is to be demanded not so much of the individual, but the entire social and organizational system.7 In his book Climate change and the society sociol ogist John Urry emphasizes the importance of understanding how deeply environmental challenges are rooted to societal systems: Systems simultaneously require and give birth to customs. Social life is built on them, and they are not easily changed.8

Seemingly insignificant conceptual obscurities can have far reaching consequences. In the article Kestävän kehityksen paradoksit (Paradoxes of sus tainable development) (2007) philosopher Teppo Eskelinen asked how it is possible that ‘sustainable development’ has been understood in a way that the lifestyles of countries and people that consume the most resources are left unquestioned. The United Nations World Commission on Environment and Development report Our Common Future (1987) famously defined ‘sus tainable development’ as “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs.” Eskelinen sums up the problematics within the definition in two major con cerns. First, the definition is based on an assumption that future generations share uniform interests, while this is clearly not the case—not even within a single generation. Secondly, the concept of ‘needs’ is ambiguous. Fulfilling biological human needs, such as the need for shelter, has come to depend on complex industrial processes, that in turn require oil, machinery and logistic systems. Since human operations are so comprehensively tied to the eco nomic machinery, specifying what exactly counts as a basic need is no longer straight forward. This leads to a situation where ‘sustainable development’ can be used to justify a contradictory actions.9

Inconsistency is evident in the way we build. Construction industry is thriving, even in European countries, where population growth has stopped and quantitatively speaking there should be no need for more buildings. Old buildings are demolished while still physically sound to make way for new, sustainable ones, despite the fact that even considerable renovations generally result to smaller emissions than renewal.10 Consequently, construction and demolition amount to more than a third of all waste produced in Europe.11 Compared to how much talk there is about municipal waste, the vast amount of construction waste goes virtually unnoticed by the mainstream media. While the public debates on whether or not it is necessary to give out straws in fast food restaurants, physically functioning buildings are smashed into rubble and shipped away by truckloads to make way for new construction. This master’s thesis examines the ways in which the contemporary build ing culture produces waste. The aim is to identify crossings and bridge gaps between architecture and critical discourses on waste in social sciences and

humanities. Waste is conventionally understood through the practice of disposal, and lately increasingly recycling. Studies on waste in the field of archi tecture make no exception: Waste is usually discussed in relation to re-use of building parts or building material recycling. Architecture is essentially problem-solving; hence waste is viewed as a problem to be solved. However, humanists and social scientists studying waste are not primarily interested in technical means and measures of managing unwanted material. Following their example, I will look into the culture that produces the waste object in the first place.

Design and building are activities directed at shaping the environment towards some goal or ideal. In forming the urban environment we are si multaneously labelling certain aspects of it dirty and useless. The object of this thesis is to find out what happens before and around demolition deci sions, and how has demolition been promoted by the ideals of architects and urban planners. In his licentiate work about the modernist demolition discourse in Finland, architecture historian Vilhelm Helander distinguished between structures of the organized society—such as legislation, political will, and the economic system—and the ideas and cultural valuations of building practitioners that both contribute to forming the built environ ment. Valuations of architects reflect dominant cultural values but are based on specialized knowledge of the field in which they operate. Founded on history and custom, “valuations change constantly, conforming to practi cal demands, under the pressure of new social and economic factors, and eventually also subject to new ideologies and fashions.”12 Buildings are not to be interpreted solely as the creations of individual artistic minds, but they cannot be reduced as inevitable products of their particular context, either. Planning ideals can, little by little, shape the built environment. This includes aesthetic ideals that “simultaneously express and alter the goals set for the built environment.”13

This thesis approaches the way contemporary architecture produces waste through the architectural history of modernism. The 20th century was a period of profound change in both building and waste production. It was a time of increased quantity and standardized practices. Furthermore, it was a time of intense globalization, of which the story of modernism is a good

example. International style replaced the traditional and the local with the global and universal. The progressive modernists who continue to be remem bered by their projects and visions were as much the symptoms as they were the creators of their time.14 In discussing their work, I am not saying that the rest is irrelevant. The texts and projects reviewed in this thesis are both evidence of the past and the present: They tell something of their time, but the fact that they are still remembered is equally revealing of their continued effect in our time.

A significant divide in the texts of early modernists was between local and universal, unique and standard. Modernists saw standardisation as an inevitable course of development, and local traditions often became tram pled under the globalizing strive of modernisation. I have made the conscious decision to repeat, once more, a ‘Western’ and particularly Europe an narrative, often neglecting local nuances and opposing opinions. The importance of the particular, as opposed to the universal, comes up in the texts of waste scholars. Yet, the essential changes in the culture of building that intensified construction waste production in the 20th century were not local but transnational.

This thesis attempts to re-evaluate prevailing design practices by locating architecture within the multidisciplinary framework of critical waste studies. It consists of a qualitative literary review, that juxtaposes discourses on waste with architecture history and theory. The work is an extended piece of archi tecture criticism motivated by environmental justice, through which issues related to architecture and waste are reflected.

Besides introducing a new perspective to architecture theory, approach ing waste from an architectural perspective has the potential to open up the waste discourse to a wider understanding of the way the built environment contributes in waste making. Considering the volume of discard produced in building and demolition, critical analysis on construction waste has been sparse. Scholars of waste and material culture frequently focus on objects close to hand. Buildings have a curious tendency to escape their consideration. Perhaps their scale places buildings within the scope of urban studies, or maybe it is our comprehensive dependency on buildings that makes them difficult to grasp.

Diving into unfamiliar situations and problematics is a standard part of an architectural design process. Each new assignment starts with acquiring knowledge. As the process goes on, the designer enters unknown areas that require research. Thus, there is nothing exceptional in adapting an interdisciplinary standpoint. However, the object of this work is not to come up with solutions but rather to reframe the problem of construction waste.

The thesis is built up as a series of essays that range between topics but are simultaneously thoroughly interconnected. Chapter 2. Critical perspectives on waste provides a brief introduction to discourses on waste in social sciences and humanities. The chapter defines ‘waste’ for the purposes of this thesis and constructs the framework through which architecture will be examined. The chapter draws from a selection of literature from various fields such as anthropology, sociology, and philosophy. Recent Finnish publications, such as the introductory book to waste in social sciences Tervetuloa jäteyhteiskuntaan (Welcome to the waste society) by Valkonen & al (2019) and the waste-themed issue of the philosophy magazine Niin & näin (2020), relate my work within the current local discourse. Contemporary writings are combined with international classics, such as anthropologist Mary Douglas’s Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (1966), probably still the most cited work in waste literature. I am using ‘critical waste studies’ as an umbrella term for the research on waste in social studies and humanities. As the chap ter makes apparent, however, there is no unified field of waste studies. The topics raised here provide one lens for a critical re-examination of modern architectural discourse.

Chapter 3. Sorting architectural discard consists of four essays about modern architecture and waste. This chapter depicts the period from the emergence of modern town planning in the 19th century to the environ mental awakening of the 1970s. It is impossible to dig deep into the history and theory of modern architecture within the length of this thesis. This is why I have distilled the historical account into four snapshots that revolve around different scales and design problems and emphasise different aspects put forward in the waste literature. The popular canon of European and North American modernism provides material for examining the ways waste has been defined in relation to architectural ideals. Along the lines of Mary

Douglas, “where there is dirt, there is a system.”15 Disorder is the inevitable flipside of order; cleanliness does not exist without dirt. Manifestations, writ ten and built, are thus interpreted as verbalisations and materialisations of a cultural system of ordering. The intention is to examine what kind of order is promoted, what is rejected, and why.

Architecture theory has a vibrant culture of re-theorising history. Rayner Banham started a tradition of critically re-writing the history in his book Theory and Design in the First Machine Age (1960). In The Origins of Modern Town Planning (1967), Leonardo Benevolo connected the formation of modern town planning practice with societal and political developments of the 19th century and mitigation of epidemics. Mark Wigley and Beatriz Co lomina have analysed modern architecture from the point of view of cleanliness and hygiene in their recent writings. Colomina directly accounts the “intra-canonical” view to Banham in her book X-Ray Architecture (2019), where she explores the relationship between 20th Century architecture and parallel developments in medicine. Wigley’s article Whitewash (2020) revised the history of architecture through concepts of hygiene, particularly the use of the colour white, with reference to recent debates on racial injustice. In the book Obsolescence: An Architectural History (2016), historian Daniel Abram son approaches 20th-century construction culture through the concept of obsolescence. He traces the origins of the use of the term in the American real estate sector and locates it in the modernist architectural discourse. These texts, along with others, have been used as references for this chapter, in terms of both content and form.

Chapter 4. Recycle, reduce, reuse, refuse proceeds to examine our contem porary relationship with the built environment. It focuses on the contemporary phenomena, practices and ideas that contribute to the production of waste today. The chapter consists of three essays exploring three different viewpoints to the contemporary built environment and waste. These could roughly be called the managemental perspective, the philosophical perspec tive and the architecture theory perspective. The chapter begins at a construction waste depot and introduces the practical reality of construction waste management dictated by legislation, technology, and economic considera tions. This is contrasted with a more philosophical outlook on our relation to

the spaces we occupy and the objects we use. The chapter ends with a review of two essays in contemporary architecture theory, discussing the architectur al pursuit to order and the sorry results it has produced.

During the process of writing, I was constantly remined by the elusive nature of waste. However hard I tried to focus on the unwanted and discard ed, it kept slipping away and I soon found myself writing about the very opposite of waste, the ideal and aspired for. The very act of writing about waste, focusing one’s attention to its materiality, significance and potential seems to turn it into something else entirely, re-appropriate it as an object of human

interest when by definition it should remain anonymous and unwanted. This difficulty is the very reason why waste should be brought to front.

When discussing something as all-encompassing as waste, it sometimes felt easier to explore the subject trough anecdotes, memories and metaphors rather than sticking to a strict academic form. Last summer, I participated in an architecture workshop in Greenland where our group designed and built a pavilion out of found materials from the local junkyard and on site. This ex perience of rummaging around the dump is described in the second chapter, because the memory of the place became a reference point on which to reflect the texts I read. Using my own voice may give the work a subjective feel, but it would hardly be possible to convey the same message with an appearance of objectivity. After all, the topic of this thesis made me enter strange areas and accept that I can only ever know very little.

Urry, 2011, p. 156.

e.g. Valkonen & al, 2019, have named their book Tervetuloa jäteyhteiskuntaan! (Welcome to waste society!)

Haila & Levins, 1992, p. 9; Urry, 2011, p. 8.

Urry, 2011, p. 19.

Economy, on the other hand, is a human concept and as such, it belongs within the sphere of society.

Haila, Levins, 1992, p. 249.

Urry, 2011, p. 156.

Ibid.

Eskelinen, 2007.

Huuhka & al., 2021.

Eurostat, 2021.

Helander, 1972, p. 11.

Ibid., p. 12.

Till, 2007, writes on p. 126 that ”Le Corbusier and the others are not a cause of modernism; they are the symptoms of modernity.”

Douglas, 2002, p. 44.

CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES ON WASTE

2.1 Dump diving

This voyage begins in a Greenlandic dump. It is, of course, not the actual starting point of my inquiry into trash, but an editorial move. Writing is about organising thoughts and words, to form a logical story of events that were a complete mess when they actually took place. Much of the sentences and chapters in this thesis were random thoughts, written down one by one, finding their place in the final text through a tedious sorting process. Not everything fits the narrative, and such material is cruelly dropped out.

The junkyard in Kangerlussuaq, Greenland, remains unsorted. It is out of sight from the settlement, across the Watson river that springs down masses of meltwater from the inland ice sheet. Kangerlussuaq is located at the head of a 190 km fjord with the same name. The settlement was founded as a US Air Force base during the second world war and is now functioning as the largest international airport in Greenland. With a population of four hundred people, Kangerlussuaq is liveliest around the time big aeroplanes land, or when bad weather delays flights and lengthens layovers. There is a harbour, not actively used, twelve kilometres down the fjord. It can be reached by car but this is about as far as you can drive. Habited areas in Greenland are too distant to be interlinked by a network of roads. Presently under construction, a new 130 km road from Kangerlussuaq to Sisimiut will be the first driveway between settlements.

Due to its remote location, transporting anything to Kangerlussuaq is expensive. Once things are no longer needed, they will not be shipped out.

Instead, they will find a permanent address in the local dump with the rest of Kangerlussuaq’s junk. Past the bridge over Watson River, from the top of the sandy slope, the scrapyard appears in curious contrast to the surrounding scenery. Amidst the ancient landscape of sculptural hills dressed in low shrubbery, sliding into steep gritty banks of the fjord, such a sight of industrial culture has an anomalous presence. Approaching the area, one can start to tell apart items from the patchwork of shapes and colours, glimmering under the shy arctic sun. Not until entering the realm of discarded objects, can one begin to comprehend the vastness of the area.

Most of the contents of the dump are material that cannot be burned: old vehicles, empty oil canisters and fire extinguishers, building parts and domes tic appliances, chiefly out of metal. There is a large stack of old electric poles with wires and beautifully glazed ceramic knobs and an entire staircase with walls and a roof ripped off maybe from the airport, and brought to the dump in one piece. There are old toys from the children’s playground and countless of smaller objects and unidentifiable mechanical parts. Here and there you might find musk ox and reindeer bones, some of them grinded into a heap

Approaching Kangerlussuaq junkyard with Kangerlussuaq fjord in the background. Photographed in August, 2021.

Objects in the junkyard: Oil canisters, boxes full of brushes, old vehicles.

of morbid gravel. This is the ending point of the linear economic system, a mirror image of Kangerlussuaq. But like the portrait of Dorian Gray, this image contains a violent presence of history. As lines on a face grow deeper with time, the scrapyard expands.

Much of this stuff has been here for years, even decades. The array of ob jects can be read as an archive of the settlement’s past: Airplane engines, with fans spinning gently in the wind, bright orange industrial washing machines first imported, and finally discarded in large quantities. The American occu pation and aviation history still linger in their leftovers. However, reminders of the past are only partially preserved. In the corner of the dump, right next to the sandy bank sloping steeply into the stream and the fjord, there is an area for burning household waste. During our stay in Kangerlussuaq, it is lit up in open fire every few days, filling the air with a toxic stench.

Amongst the shambles of junk there are pristine leftover materials, some of which are carefully packed as if waiting for future use: steel roofing, timber planks turned silvery grey exposed to weather, unused screws and nails, old shipping boxes filled with thousands of identical cogwheels. By the side of

the driveway, there are neatly packed steel elements, that seem rather to be stored than left behind. As locals drive in with their pick up cars, after emp tying the cargo bed of unwanted material, perhaps they fill it up again with useful stuff. A couple of tourists have found the dump and are scavenging for souvenirs. Judging by the tags on oil canisters and cars—saying things like “gangster shit”—the place has been used as a hangout by at least some generation of local youth. But members of the animal kingdom have settled in permanently: a family of arctic foxes is living behind the canisters with the text “explosive” on them, and a flock of ravens is circling around for fresh garbage near the incineration site.

As we get used to rummaging around the dump in search of something useful, we too start to form a relationship with the place. We remember the locations of interesting objects and the easiest routes to them. There is a short age of useable wood material and we have to spend a lot of time scavenging and taking apart palettes, boxes and electricity posts. In this work, we learn to be aware of creosote, asbestos, sharp edges, unstable structures, and flam mable substances. The familiar objects start to lose their magical appeal. They become mere landmarks or obstacles and potential hazards. Tons of worthless stuff you have to pass to find what you are looking for. I remember the words of my colleague who, on the second day of finding inspiration in the dump, burst out: “I find it hard to see anything interesting in trash.”

Surely this is a normal response. After all, waste is by definition some thing that has departed the realm of functioning society as useless and valueless. Even to call an object waste reveals that its initial function and material qualities are less important as defining features than the fact that the object is or should be discarded. And the dump is, by definition, the burial ground of these objects forsaken by human society. The stuff here signifies nothing but a void of meaning and potentiality. Left behind, the turquoise beams, the aluminium sheets, the oil tank, and the Volvo truck are reduced to anonymous heaps of material that occupy space.

Rarely does one come face to face with the extent of human wastefulness as concretely as by paying a visit to a dump. In our everyday lives, throwing things out is so customary that it does not require much thought. Back home, I scrape the burned surface of my toast to the sink and flush it down the

drain. I slice pieces of cucumber on top but dump the dried end. Coffee is ready, so I pour it into a cup and toss the used grounds in the compost with the cucumber. I add the rest of the milk and fold the cartoon into a paper bag with other cardboard waste.

We all recognize waste when we see it. But despite being so mundane, waste is difficult to approach—perhaps because so much is done to hide it. Waste travels between enclosed spaces, avoiding attention. Even in clear sight, waste remains elusive. My photos from the Kangerlussuaq dump reveal very little of their subject. The contents of the scrapyard is reduced into a collection of aesthetic objects, their idleness translated into obscure beauty. Where this stuff came from, the picture does not tell. Nor does it tell much about the material qualities of the objects, such as their chemical contents (possible toxicity) or physical structure. The surrounding dump seems to explain all there is to it. Outside its native context, the sight of waste becomes more striking: stranded on the beach, as litter on the streets. Or straying down the sandy bank of Kangerlussuaq fjord, on the way to escape into the ocean.

Waste comes about as a question of logistics and management. Instead of asking “what?” the more proper question considering waste seems to be “where?”. The everyday understanding of waste is so deeply linked with prac tices of disposal, that it seems difficult to conceive waste without relation to removal. But disposal is no simple task. The quantity of waste produced yearly is continuously growing. Simultaneously, the material diversity of dis card has increased. Practices of disposal have become so complex, most of us

The gritty banks of Kangerlussuaq fjord in August 2021.

can no longer tell what happens to waste after it leaves the domestic realm. When it is taken out, household waste makes a transition from the private sphere as a public responsibility. In a sense, the bin becomes a gateway between private and public and a means of social control. Rather than a place, the bin can more accurately be understood as a practice.1 It is one small step in the waste management system with immense importance to the functioning of the whole.

Waste is mostly visible to most of us as household waste but in fact, in 2018 only 8,2 % of the waste produced in Europe was discarded by households. The majority of waste is produced in industrial processes and never reaches the average consumer. This is one of the reasons why Max Liboiron, a researcher and founder of the website dischardstudies.com, argues that it is not possible to truly understand waste through everyday experience. In the article Why Discard Studies (2014) Liboiron points out several common misconceptions about waste. For example, it is not the litter from the streets infesting our oceans, but most ocean plastics escape from infrastructure; fac tories, cargo ships, and landfills.

Increased awareness of the human impact on the environment has led to more attention being focused on waste in a variety of fields. Research can be roughly divided into two main streams: waste management and studies of waste in social sciences and humanities. Waste management is essentially problem-solving. It approaches waste in legal terms, as ”any substance or object which the holder discards or intends or is required to discard,” along the lines of the EU Waste Frame Work Directive. Waste management strives towards mitigating the harmful effects of discard by developing more so phisticated ways of dealing with it within the existing societal framework. EU waste policy is founded on a five-step “waste hierarchy” that depicts the preferred order of waste management practices. Disposal into landfills is on the bottom as the last resort, after re-use, recycling and energy recovery are ruled out. The preferred option is to prevent waste from being produced in the first place.2

Despite increased interest in recycling and reuse, most scholarly attention is still directed towards different means and methods of disposal. The least amount of research is done on preventing waste.3 If the culture that produces

waste is taken for granted, there is a risk that what is being addressed is the symptom instead of the underlying structures behind it. Approaching waste as mere heaps of physically defined and mathematically quantifiable material can have a neutralizing effect. Social scientists and humanists engaged in the study of discard do not accept waste as a natural category. Instead, it is un derstood as socially constructed and relative. Along with the waste object, researchers are interested in the cultural conceptions and practices where waste is defined. Waste is put into a broader context by examining the “hidden sys tems of infrastructure, economics, and social norms”4 behind the production of waste. Industrialization, capitalism, and global economies become central as the “engines of waste”5.

In this chapter, I will provide an introduction to critical approaches to waste through a reading of seminal works and review of contemporary dis course. I will discuss different ways waste is defined, provide a historical perspective to waste, followed up by contemplation on the social and economic aspects of waste. It is hardly possible to provide a ‘big picture’ of the subject but this chapter introduces some key concepts and ideas put forward in the source literature.

2.2 Rubbish metaphysics

In this thesis, ‘critical waste studies’ is used as an umbrella term for research on waste in social studies and humanities. Sometimes referred to as discard studies or rubbish theory, critical waste studies does not form an organized or consistent field of research. It could be more accurately characterized as a collection of multidisciplinary thought.6 While practices of waste management do not escape the critical outlook, the distinct approaches to waste are not to be understood as contradictory but rather as parallel exercises of prob lem-solving and problem-finding. Where waste management addresses the problematics of waste and disposal based on current political will and tech nical capabilities, critical waste studies has the potential to relate problems to context and make hidden systems apparent.7

To move beyond an everyday conception of waste, it will be helpful to compare the different ways waste has been theorized in critical waste studies.

In a review of recent literary contributions, geographer Sarah A. Moore (2012) illustrated the variety of notions of waste in social studies by dividing them into four groups. She conducted the categorization based on two basic questions: “how is waste defined” and “how is waste related to society”. The first question refers to the degree in which a given approach presumes waste to be defined by its own characteristics. On one side, waste constitutes a natural category defined by its own qualities, and on the other side, waste is understood to be relative and defined as an opposition to something else. The second question reveals weather waste is perceived to be a part of society or separate from it. Or, in other words: “Do certain social processes pre-exist objects and subjects or do objects and subjects, together, help to constitute society and space”.8

The traditional perspective to waste is that it is defined by its own characteristics and must be externalized from society not to threaten its functions. This conception aligns with the approach of waste management: the focus is on disposal, not on finding theoretical grounds for avoidance. Taking the hazardous quality of waste as starting point also forms the basis for studies on the uneven geographical and social distribution of environmental and health detriments of waste. Besides negative characteristics, waste can be considered to carry material or economic value, for instance in relation to waste trade. Regardless of what attributes are attached to waste, what these essentialist perspectives have in common is that the nature of waste is not questioned. Instead, attention is placed on practices related to waste. Waste is viewed as a ‘hazard’, ‘commodity’, ‘resource’, ‘object of management’, or ‘archive’.9

An alternative way of understanding waste is as the residual category of cultural categorizations. Like the previous approach, this position situates waste outside the sphere of organized society. But instead of classifying waste based on its intrinsic qualities, waste is defined in opposition to culture. This line of thought was established by anthropologist Mary Douglas in her seminal work Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo that has had a profound influence on the study of waste ever since its publication in 1966. Douglas argued that purity in a spiritual sense cannot be discussed apart from physical cleanliness. Dirt is what falls between cultural categories: What cannot be fitted inside the order of things is understood as disgusting or dan gerous. Maintaining order demands excluding these anomalous elements.10

Hazard, resource, commodity, object of management, archive – or matter out of place? Kangerlussuaq, 2021.

The final two groups consist of conceptions that do not posit waste out side the realm of society. Instead, it is understood to contribute in forming society. In the third group Moore identifies definitions of waste as ‘filth’, ‘risk’, or ‘fetish’, characterized by its affective qualities. Here, the power of waste lies in its sensory attributes; Waste becomes active through its profound ability to disgust, forcing people to develop systems for its removal. For instance, human excrement shapes the city by forcing people to build sewage systems to manage it. Thus, refuse does not represent an “outside” but active ly contributes in shaping society. 11

Finally, Moore recognizes approaches where waste is expelled by the socie ty as the “(often) unvalued and indefinable other” in order to enforce individual and societal boundaries. Waste is perceived to have the capacity to transform society but less stress is put on its inert qualities. Instead, waste becomes defined in relation to other things. To this group Moore includes approaches that view waste as a ‘governable object’, ‘actant’, or ‘abject’.12 I will continue to expand on these concepts as they are represented in my source literature.

Various theorists have drawn from Foucault’s idea of governmentality in examining how waste is classified as an object of management. Historically, scientific conceptions of disease and contagion have legitimized practices of management and control of certain populations. The transformative power of the discarded object could also be theorized in terms of the ‘actant’. In the work of Bruno Latour and several other writers, some of whom might be categorized as ‘new materialists’, the power to act is not understood to be ex clusive to humans. Instead, humans are links in a network of “actants”, things that act. Together, all objects form a complex non-hierarchical network where each object is connected to other objects. Humans do not act alone: the tools we use, the buildings we live in, as well as the air we breathe are our accom plices. Many writers describe waste as ‘vibrant’ or ‘living’, contradictory to the conventional idea of waste as a passive object of management. Recogniz ing the interconnectedness of all actors on a non-hierarchical plane also leads to questioning the divide between human society and nature.

Julie Kristeva and Georges Bataille are the most notable theorists of “ab jection”. In her book Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (1980) Kristeva gives a psychoanalytical account of the ‘abject’ as something that is simulta neously constitutive of the subject and expelled by the subject. For Kristeva, abjection means exclusion as opposed to identification. The survival of the subject depends on ruling out the abject that “threatens one’s own and clean self.” 13 However, abjection is never complete and the abject remains a con stant threat to the subject. Kristeva follows Bataille in linking the abject to the weakness of the prohibition that is necessary in constituting social order.14

Although the relationship between waste and society is less dualistic, some theories of the last group are akin to Mary Douglas’s work. Her definition of dirt as “matter out of place” is frequently quoted when pondering the metaphysics of waste. The key idea of Douglas’ work was turning her attention from the object to the process that labels it dirty. In doing this, she followed the line of thought initiated by Émile Durkheim’s analysis of the term ‘sacred’. According to Durkheim, sacredness cannot be traced back to any physical features of an object. Instead, it is defined by the act of worship, that entails sustaining the line between sacred and profane.15 Similarly, Doug las theorized dirt as a outcome of the order making practice. Dirt is never

“unique” or “isolated” but comes into being in relation to its context: “Dirt is the by-product of a systematic ordering and classification of matter, in so far as ordering involves rejecting inappropriate elements.”16

Some authors have criticized the theoretical contributions that build on Douglas’s thought on their ambiguous use of terminology. Waste and dirt have been used as metaphoric categories under which a wide range of topics are discussed all the way from stains to otherness and gender issues. For in stance, philosopher Olli Lagerpetz states that the level of abstraction is too high and as a result the borders between different forms of abjection become blurred. Dirt is discussed parallel to waste, along with faeces, and even mi nority peoples without distinguishing terms. Instead of precision, questions of cleanliness and dirt become metaphoric. Furthermore, theories tend to overlook the everyday usage of the terms.17

Lagerspetz criticizes current dirt-theory of reductionism. He calls the insistence to find hygienic reasoning behind ruling out certain objects from the cultural sphere ‘hygienic reductionism’, an equivalent of what Mary Douglas calls ‘medical materialism’. According to this line of thought, cultural habits have evolved historically through the avoidance of pathogens. For example dietary restrictions in different cultures are thought to have a rational med ical basis. As opposed to the medical explanation, Douglas reduces dirt to a cultural order making practice. Lagerspetz calls this ‘anthropological reduc tionism’. The focus is shifted from the physical world to the human subject who colours the neutral reality into dirty and clean.18

Contrary to Mary Douglas’ definition, in his book Dirt (2018) Lagers petz views dirt as a very distinctive phenomenon, that cannot be reduced to anything else. ‘Dirt’ is a secondary quality of a ‘dirty’ object, a contaminating additive that only comes to be defined through its contact with the master object.19 The word ‘dirt’ is used to describe a very particular kind of contamination. An object thus soiled, however, does not automatically become waste. Neither does a waste-object necessarily have to be ‘dirty’. Waste and dirt are two different things.

Lagerspetz approaches waste or rubbish as a historical concept related to our contemporary way of life.20 Waste could be described as something that no longer fulfils its given function. It might still be working, but replaced by a

more ideal object. Perhaps nothing changed in the object itself, but perceived needs changed rendering the object useless. Many materials and objects are designed to be used and thrown out. For example, chewing gum, tissue, or food packaging are intended to go directly into the bin after use.

In this thesis the term ‘waste’ does not point exclusively to material that has entered or is about to enter the domain of waste management. Outside the legal framework, it is hardly possible to provide an exhaustive defini tion of waste. Ruling something out as waste is a matter of subjective judge ment founded on sociocultural categorization as well as material facts. As the upcoming chapters will reveal, categorization is not a simple or clean cut process. Instead, it is messy, dynamic, and relational. Apart from disposable items and packaging, few things turn into waste overnight. Instead, they wear out and loose value gradually. Furthermore, there are other ways of giving things up besides discarding them. What is no longer ideal to one person might be desirable to another. Calling waste ‘relative’ is an alternative way of saying that one man’s trash is another man’s treasure. But simultaneously it is evident that there is a lot of material that no one wants.

Household waste in Kangerlussuaq dump, 2021.

2.3 The waste problem

The current ‘waste problem’ in its material and social complexity and geographical magnitude is a relatively new phenomenon. It is epitomized by occurrences such as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch: a collection of plastic debris, mostly broken down to microparticles, floating in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. It is sometimes said, that only humans produce waste. Schol ars in critical waste studies tend to avoid such claims. It is true, that what we call waste is a human concept, defined by humans for human purposes. However, all processes in nature produce excess material. Within millions of years, other processes have evolved to make use of this excess. Plastics have only been produced since the 1950s and since then, they have accumulated on an unprecedented scale. There is something exceptional in the way the contemporary human population extracts material from nature only to discard it later.

Studies in anthropology show that all societies have practices of organiz ing the environment and ruling out unwanted material. This also applies to historic human populations. However, not all waste survives the test of time.

Nomadic hunter gatherers would frequently abandon their camps in search of better hunting grounds and more fertile lands.21 Yet there is little left of their lifestyle besides tools and arrowheads made out of stone. It is not likely that accumulation of waste would have been an issue for nomadic popula tions since their discard consisted largely of organic materials and was not produced on such a scale for it to pile up. In fact, in Rubbish!: The Archaeology of Garbage Willian L. Rathje and Cullen Murphy write that it was not until the Neolithic Revolution when human beings started forming agricultural settlements that “our species faced its first garbage crisis”.22 According to the authors, of the four basic methods of garbage disposal—dumping, burning, recycling, and source reduction—human beings have always been inclined to dump.23 This only became an issue when the population started growing and forming larger communities.

It is a common misconception to read history as movement towards a higher standard or cleanliness. Throughout history, dense urban settlements have developed waste and sewage management systems. For instance, Rome’s

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Right: the entrance of Rome’s sewer, Cloaca maxima in 2022.

Left: Google ngram viewer data of waste terms.

sewer, the Cloaca maxima, was as important for the functioning of the city as its famous aqueducts.24 In Rome, the accumulation of waste is constant ly present. Old buildings have been dumped on the spot and fragmentally reused. The eternal city is literally built on the debris of past epochs.

In the medieval period, lack of waste and sewage infrastructure only became a major problem when agrarian villages grew and densified into urban centres. Lewis Mumford writes about measures that were taken to improve the hygiene of cities in 16th century England. For instance, digging waste underground was prohibited inside the city limits, along with carrying waste during the daytime. Also keeping pigs, that had been maintaining streets clean by consuming garbage, was banned.25

One way of examining changes in waste behaviour is by studying the history of waste-related terms. The English word ‘waste’ and its counterparts in other Germanic languages have original meanings referring to barren or uncultivated land.26 For people dependant on agriculture, areas unsuitable to sustain human habitation must have appeared vast (lat. vastus) and empty.

Enlightenment philosophy theorised a split between the human subject and natural space. Moreover, rational principles strengthened human authority over nature. Around the same time, the term ’waste’ started to gather moral baggage, pointing towards an ideal of proper use that is not attained.27 John Scanlan searches grounds for the altered meaning in the writings of seventeenth-century philosopher John Locke. Locke’s work relied on a Calvinist ideal of stewardship of the land that placed humanity as the care keepers of

nature appointed by God. In Locke’s interpretation, the idea of stewardship entailed working the land to its full potential. Leaving land to nature was a waste: to fulfil ”God’s will” it must be made efficient through human labour.28

Changes in terminology echo changes in the way of life. Many of the waste-related terms that are now used synonymously originally had more specific meanings indicating the process in which they were produced. For instance the ‘trash’ originally meant branches or twigs and the word ‘rubbish’ is derived from the word ‘rubble’.29 Historian Susan Strasser follows the ex ample of H. De B. Parsons in distinguishing between garbage (food waste) and other kinds of refuse materials since “the offensive odor of decaying meat scraps, fish heads, and banana peels; their commercial value as fertilizer, hog feed, and marketable grease; and the high water content all distinguished them from other kinds of refuse.”30 Along with its affective qualities, garbage was set apart from other kinds of refuse based on how it could be used. A blanket term for refuse material would have been unnecessary, since households did not produce ‘waste’ in general but different materials for secondary use.31

Industrialization altered practices related to waste gradually. In her book Waste and Want (1999), Susan Strasser recounts the changes in waste be haviour of American households from pre-industrial culture to modern consumer society. While early industrial production continued to rely on second ary materials such as rags that were used to make paper and hog fat that was used as raw material for soap, recycling these materials moved out from the household. Initially, the same distributors that delivered goods to consumers took recyclable materials back to factories. But by the end of the 19th cen tury, the two-way trade between producers and consumers was replaced by specialized wholesalers and waste dealers: “a separate, highly organized trade built on a foundation of industrial waste, supplemented by scraps collected from scavenging children and the poorest of the poor.”32 Strasser notes, that this was “the first time in human history, when disposal became separate from production, consumption, and use.”33

This was a significant distinction since production and repair had been integrally connected in the pre-industrial society. Strasser refers to Claude Levi-Strauss’s description of the French bricoleur, “an odd-job man who

works with his hands, employing the bricoles, the scraps or odds and ends.” The bricoleur considers every project with respect to what he has on hand, engaging in a “sort of dialogue” between the toolbox and the junk box.34 The separation of disposal and production broke this dialogue. Throwing things out became easier still when cities took responsibility for the collection and disposal of household waste. Municipal waste management was part of the late 19th-century sanitary reform movement, connected to new ideas of hygiene (more in section 3.1). The introduction of municipal waste manage ment had the effect of encouraging disposal, as people got accustomed to the new kind of model of ruling objects out from the domestic sphere. Organized collection and sophisticated equipment promoted the notion of waste as a “technical concern, the province of experts who would take care of whatever problems trash presented.”35 In giving up their discard as a responsibility of the collective waste management, people unwittingly participated in breaking the circulation of material.

The twentieth century saw cities and households transform from relative ly closed circulation to open systems, where the flow of material is one way: materials are extracted from the earth, manufactured into industrial prod ucts, used, and thrown out incapable of returning to ecological cycles.36 New ways of expanding the market of consumer goods became an essential feature of the ‘consumer society’, in which “the growth of markets for new products came to depend in part on the continuous disposal of old things.” According to Strasser, Americans were made to buy more by improved marketing strategies and making changes in products themselves. For instance, introducing fashion to new realms of consumption encouraged consumers to purchase new products before using up the old ones.37 Disposability revolutionized the post-war market. Disposable paper and plastic products promised effortless cleanliness and convenience instead of “the drudgery of old-fashioned life.”38 They increased consumption through design, but also by marketing, which succeeded in infusing disposable products with a promise of a new and im proved way of life.

Several writers have exemplified changes in production and marketing with developments in early 20th-century car production.39 Henry Ford’s in vention of the moving assembly line is often remarked as a necessary con-

dition of economic progress and symbol of the mechanization of human work. Ford Model T was the poster child of industrial thinking of its time: “a product that was desirable, affordable, and operable by anyone, just about anywhere; that lasted a certain amount of time (until it was time to buy a new one); and that could be produced cheaply and quickly.”40 Ford offered basic transport in a market that was not yet saturated. Savings in manufacturing costs lowered the cost of the product, making it accessible for a wider group of consumers.41

However, in the 1930s, General Motors overthrew Ford’s market position by taking up annual model changes. The event is a classic example of ‘obsolescence’, the physical equivalent of ‘creative destruction’. Obsoles cence means a product becoming outdated through changes of technology, fashion or lifestyle, even though it is still physically functioning.42 Planned obsolescence refers to a conscious strategy of making the consumer buy the same product over and over again. Nowadays many products are consciously designed not to last physically. Designing with built-in obsolescence forces the consumer to discard the old item and purchase a new one sooner. 43 These strategies make it evident that waste is not only something that follows indus trial production: It exists already in the making of a product.

Besides the quantity of waste, the quality of waste has changed drastically in a short time. This is evident with ocean plastics, and not least with cars. Contemporary products consist of materials that did not show up in the surface of the earth in such large quantities before they were extracted and processed by humans. Their toxicity and the fact that they cannot be returned to ecological cycles has shifted the meaning of ‘waste’ towards something permanent, hazardous, and anthropogenic.

Popular discourse tends to place responsibility of solving the ‘waste prob lem’ in the shoulders of individuals and consumer choice. The general focus on household waste is symptomatic of the individualization of waste production. However, we all act and transact within the limited set of options on market, and our choices are backed by limited knowledge distilled through advertising images. The narrative of the power of the ‘conscious consumer’ is itself a historical creation, that has the effect of shifting focus away from the underlying structures behind the production of waste. Several writers have

Abandoned cars in the Kangerlussuaq dump, photographed in August, 2021.

A concrete factory in Viikinranta, Helsinki, 2019. Litter in Kyläsaari, Helsinki, 2021.

noted, that consumers had to be educated to get accustomed to disposable products and buying new instead of mending.44 Strasser gives accounts of people engaging in downright protest against the new culture of throwaway consumption.45 This leads to questioning whether the greed and indifference that presumably makes people consume and discard unsustainably are, in fact, biological human traits, or culturally transmitted modes of behaviour.46

2.4 Waste and value

Waste is commonly portrayed a something with low or no value or exclud ed from the value system altogether. But this conception of waste is under transition. Contemporary waste management no longer aims at physically eliminating waste (and what use would it be when sheer quantity has made it impossible to hide). Instead, the current strategy is to reappropriate waste. Transition into circular economy has even been regarded to render the whole term ‘waste’ useless.47

Circular economy is described by Ellen Mac Arthur Foundation as a “sys tems solution framework” with the potential to tackle global environmental challenges. It is based on developing more efficient use of material resources by maintaining materials and objects in circulation for as long as possible. In practice, this is done by extending the life cycle of objects by strategies of repair and reuse and recycling materials at their highest value. When prod ucts and materials are kept in circulation, the need for new raw materials will decrease, and ideally, there will be no waste. Circular economy is predicted to provide long-term resilience by combining “business and economic opportu nities” with “environmental and societal benefits”.48

Transition to circular economy requires a comprehensive re-orientation of all actors involved in production and consumption. Consequently, the concept has been picked up in various disciplines as a direction for future development. Perhaps because of its wide use, circular economy has become an ambiguous concept with countless definitions varying particularly on whether the emphasis is on economic growth or environmental factors.49 What definitions do share is a common understanding of the goal of circular econ omy: decoupling the connection between economic growth, use of natural

resources and production of waste.50 In a circular future, economic activity will no longer be proportional to the amount of finite resources extracted from the earth’s core.

The circular ideal has already altered practices related to waste. The culture of excluding and hiding unwanted material appears to be coming to an end: “Waste is no longer approached as useless material to get rid of, but nowadays waste is above all material that calls for use and application”, so ciologist Olli Pyyhtinen writes.51 Circular economy renders waste a technical problem and a question of design. To achieve closed material circulation, the entire life cycle of objects has to be taken into account already in the design phase. Materials that evade repurposing signify an error that can be fixed by optimizing processes of production and consumption.52

However, there is still a long way for circular economy to become reality. In 2021, a Finnish broadcasting company news article revealed that only a third of the plastic collected in Finland is successfully recycled into further use. Due to rapid growth, the volume of separately collected plastics exceeds the current recycling capacity. Furthermore, the wide variety of different types of plastics used in production complicates the recycling process. Most of the plastic collected to be recycled end up being burned with energy re covery instead.53 Similar difficulties are apparent in textile recycling. There is a growing market for second-hand clothes but limited options for discarding worn-out items. Several technologies for textile recycling exist, but materi al variety causes difficulties. Most fabrics are blends of different fibres that can only be separated through an energy-intensive chemical process. Textiles made out of a single material can be recycled mechanically, but the quality of the fibres suffers in the process, and a lot of the fabrics recycled are made out of poor quality material in the first place. Dirty or mouldy material could spoil the entire batch of textiles and should thus be disposed of with mixed waste. In practice, this is where most textile waste ends up at present.54

There is hardly anything revolutionary in returning the value to waste from the histrical perspective. According to Strasser, our period of an open-ended economic system appears to be more exceptional.55 Yet, scholars in critical waste studies are sceptical that circular economy will succeed in the total elimination of waste.56 Replacing rubbish bins with recycling facilities

does not intervene in the underlying issue of excessive consumption. Recycling may have the effect of making discarding items morally justifiable: “It seems, that the belief in a functioning recycling system acts as absolution for intensifying consumption.”57 While recognizing a need for increased material circulation, Valkonen & al. question the political ideology behind leaving current consumption habits unquestioned: “Looking from the level of a political program it (circular economy) can be seen as an ideological attempt to solve the problems of the consumer society without interfering in consump tion itself.”58 Circular economy does not problematize the “continuous production of new needs and promise of abundance” in the core of the contem porary ‘Western’ way of life.59 On the contrary, moving waste back into the economic realm and redefining it as a raw material justifies its production.

As a resource, waste is subject to the laws of supply and demand and charac terized by scarcity. Hence, the logic of circular economy does not seem to be directed towards the highest goal of the waste hierarchy: preventing waste. 60

Current waste policy both defines and solves the waste problem within the economic framework. But in everyday practice, waste is defined through

Sport equipment in the Kangerlussuaq dumpsite, 2021.

several parallel and overlapping classification systems besides economy, such as ideas of health and hygiene, social norms and customs, aesthetic prefer ence, and subjective feeling. The same can be said about other value judgements. Exchange may be a “universal feature of human social life”,61 but not all objects can be characterized as commodities, no more than all value judge ments reduced to economy.

Anthropologist Michael Thompson combined discourses of waste and value in his book Rubbish Theory (1979 / 2017). According to Thompson, rubbish is a category of no value and as such, an essential feature in social practices of classification. He writes that objects are culturally labelled into two distinct categories: transient and durable. “Objects in the transient cat egory decrease in value over time and have finite life-spans. Objects in the durable category increase in value over time and have infinite life-spans.”62 Objects with no value at all form a third category: rubbish. The rubbish state is what follows at the end of the life cycle of transient objects, at the low point of a gradual decrease in value. In Thompson’s theory, an object can move from the transient category through rubbish and eventually be rediscovered as durable. Unlike durable and transient commodities, rubbish is not subject to mechanisms of social control and thus provides a path for this “seemingly impossible” transfer.63

The key insight of Rubbish Theory is recognizing that an item can regain value after being classified as rubbish. Following Mary Douglas, Thompson’s theory is based on the idea that nothing is essentially waste, but rubbish is an effect of sociocultural classifications, that in themselves are dynamic. A shift between different categories of value reflects the status of whoever is in possession of the object: transforming rubbish to durability is a way of producing social distinctions and acquiring cultural, social, and economic capi tal. Thompson’s theory is about social control and the way social hierarchies are built and maintained through commodities. Valkonen & al. note that in the light of the contemporary discourse on waste Rubbish Theory shows several weaknesses. First, seeing rubbish as a state of zero or negative value is misleading since both waste and value are relative. Besides, Thompson’s anthropological reductionist approach completely ignores the materiality of waste in portraying rubbish as passive material on which social classifications

are imposed. Furthermore, the life cycles of objects are far more varied and complex than Thompson’s model shows.64

Anthropologist Igor Kopytoff elaborates this point in his article about the social biographies of objects. According to him, the commodity status of an object is not stable or absolute. Shifts and differences reveal “a moral econo my that stands behind the objective economy of visible transactions.”65 Each object is subject to opposite forces of commodification and singularization. While the exchange system strives toward homogenizing value, on the other side items are singularized as unique and thus impossible to transfer. In small scale societies, the classification systems of culture and economy have been in relative harmony, but in complex modern-day societies, they are less con sistent. While sophisticated exchange technology has opened up the world for broad commodification, the homogenizing effect of commodification is contrasted with an increasingly variegated area of private valuation: “The peculiarity of complex societies is that their publicly recognized commoditization operates side by side with innumerable schemes of valuation and sin gularization devised by individuals, social categories, and groups, and these schemes stand in unresolvable conflict with public commoditization as well as with one another.”66 Thus, a social biography of a thing consists not only of visible transactions but various singularizations of it, imposed by individuals and social groups.67

Economic thought pursues a model where everything is reduced to a single unit of value. The more widely the world opens up for commoditization, however, the further the specific individual and sociocultural evalua tions of value depart from the supposedly objective valuation of the market price. Interaction and crossings of the market sphere with sociocultural classifications lead to anomalies and contradictions and “conflicts both in the cognition of individuals and in the interaction of individuals and groups”68 For instance, a favourite item of clothing might be priceless for its owner, even if it is next to rubbish as a commodity. In the same way, differ ent social groups value objects differently. There is a broadly shared cultural understanding of the importance of national landmarks, causing them to be singularized and escape the forces of commodification. But when singu larizing values are held by more restricted groups without the capacity to

affect popular opinion, the singularized object may end up being treated as a commodity anyway. Conflicts are apparent in cases of historic pres ervation, when groups with a strong emotional bond to a building (such as residents and locals) or specialized knowledge of its qualities (such as heritage professionals) singularize a historic building, while others evaluate it through its profit-making potential.69

Kopytoff and Thompson make it evident, that it is the valuations of those in power that are realized in visible transactions of commodities. Thus, there is a link between marginalization and the economic value of things. This is evident in processes of segregation and gentrification. Thompson gives an insightful description of the way a “rat-infested slum” of Victorian terraced houses in North-London is transformed into “glorious heritage” once middle-class occupants move into the area formerly housing a working-class and immigrant population.

Sociologist Zygmunt Bauman has written an entire book about the ways modernity draws lines between us and them, excluding those who do not conform to the dominant ideals. Often enough, dirty work falls in the hands of marginalized people and, on the other hand, dirty work marginalizes people. This applies to lower income groups, as well as gender and ethnic minorities. Furthermore, the ideological paradigm of progress of modernity has a tendency to overlook local and indigenous practices. People who have not internalized the modernist standards of hygiene are easily judged and undermined.

Intercontinental flows of refuse material draw out a global geography of value. For decades, leftovers of the ‘Western’ lifestyle have been shipped to developing countries. Besides discard, second-hand goods leave Europe to lower-income countries. According to an UN report, 1,9 million used cars were exported from the EU in 2018, chiefly to North and West Africa.70 A case study from the Netherlands reveals that the majority of the cars exported to Africa did not have a valid roadworthiness certificate. Regular inspections and strict emission standards are named as reasons for the relatively frequent renewal of the European vehicle stock. Additionally, the disposal of used ve hicles is controlled by environmental protection regulations, making export to lower-income countries a viable option.71

Replacing the existing fossil-fuel-powered vehicle stock with electric transit is high on European climate policy. As the proportion of cleaner and more energy-efficient electrical vehicles increases in Europe, a part of the obsolete vehicle stock making way for cleaner transit gets a second life in the streets of the “third world”. In total, the global vehicle fleet is growing, and used vehi cles make up a majority of this growth in developing countries. While used cars may be safer and more energy-efficient than the existing vehicle stock, issues concerning environmental performance and disposal still apply when the vehicles are shipped to Africa. In short, saying that value is relative reveals little of the problematics of global trade of waste and second-hand materials. Like Michael Thompson puts it:

It is clear that one man’s rubbish can be another man’s desirable object; that rubbish, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. Yet it would be wrong to explain away this distinction …To say that one man’s meat is another man’s poison is not to explain anything, but simply to pose the next question, which is: what determines which man gets poisoned? 72

A Volkswagen Transporter T4 (manufactured between 1990–2003) parked outside a store by the main road in Conakry, the capital of Guinea in West-Africa. Photo taken in December 2019.

Approaching waste through the economic framework without broader cultural and material considerations is not likely to provide technically feasible, let alone environmentally and socially sustainable solutions to the current waste problem. Simultaneously, such an approach evades questions of ethics and social justice.

Like this chapter has revealed, beyond everyday practice, waste anything but easily defined. It is not enough to perceive waste solely through its negative qualities, no more than branding it simply as a resource. As a by-product of order and as such a “necessary condition for society,”73 waste is going nowhere. People will continue to categorize the world based on various overlapping systems of classification and rule out unwanted material. If the waste problem with its environmental and social implications is to be taken seriously, besides technical solutions, critical scrutiny of these systems is re quired. In the following chapter, I will make an attempt to trace the systems of cultural classification that define waste within the architectural discourse of modernism.

1

Valkonen & al, 2019, p. 53–79.

2 European Union, 2008.

3 This observation was made by Prof. Iris Borowy, 2020, in Shanghai University & University of Helsinki online workshop The Development of Waste; the Waste of Development.

4 Valkonen & al, 2019, p. 13.

5 Liboiron, Why Discard Studies, 2014.

6 Valkonen & al., 2019, pp. 25–26, who in their own work use the term ‘social scientific waste studies’ to ”describe approaches that are inter ested in waste as a societal and cultural phenomenon.”

7 Liboiron, 2014: “As more attention in popular, policy, activist, engineering and research areas is being focused on waste, it becomes crucial for the humanities and social sciences to contextualize the problems, materialities and systems that are not readily apparent to the invested but casual observer. Our task is to trouble the assumptions, premises and popular mythologies of waste.”

8 Moore, 2012, pp. 781–783; Moore’s classification is also covered by Valkonen & al, 2019, pp. 26–27.

Moore, 2012, pp. 783–787.

Douglas, 2002; Moore, 2012, pp. 787–788.

Moore, 2012, pp. 788–790.

Ibid., pp. 790–792.

Kristeva, 1982, p. 65.

Ibid., p. 64.

Lagerspetz, 2018, p. 83.

Douglas, 2002, p. 44.

Lagerspetz, 2018.

Ibid., p. 72.

Ibid., p. 48.

Ibid., p. 187.

Rathje & Murphy, 2001, p. 33.

Ibid.

Ibid., p. 34

cf. Laporte, 2000, p. 14.

Mumford, 1961, p. 292.

Harris, 1989, as cited in Scanlan, 2005, p. 22.

Scanlan, 2005, pp. 22–24.

Ibid.

Lagerspetz, 2018, 188.

Strasser, 1999, p. 29.

Lagerpetz, 2018, p. 187.

Strasser, 1999, p. 109.

Ibid.

Ibid., p. 11.

Ibid., s. 113.

Ibid., p. 15.

Ibid., p. 188.

Ibid., p. 268.

e.g. Strasser, 1999; Slade, 2006; Braungart & McDonough, 2009.

Braungart & McDonough, 2009, p. 24.

Slade, 2006, p. 31.

Strasser, 1999, writes on p. 192: “Many writers have tried to make a distinction between technological obsolescence and style… In practice, stylistic and technological obsolescence have gone hand in hand throughout the twentieth century… Americans have been tempted to replace many products because new ones worked better and looked more up-to-date.”

Slade, 2006.

e.g. Strasser, 1999; Liboiron, 2014.

Strasser, 1999, p. 177.

Frugality would most likely be a more beneficiary trait for the survival of a human being in an evolutionary sense.

Because inducing circulation transforms waste into raw material, e.g. Valkonen & al, 2019, p. 33.

Ellen MacArthur Foundation.

Kirchehherr, Reike, Hekkert, 2017, as cited in Valkonen & al., 2019, p. 36; Corvellec & al., 2020.

Valkonen & al., 2019 s. 37.

Pyyhtinen, 2020, p. 32.

Valkonen & al., 2019, p. 49.

Yle Uutiset, 2021.

Helsingin Sanomat, 2021.

Strasser, 1999. p. 136.

e.g. Valkonen & al, 2019; Pyyhtinen, 2020.

Pyyhtinen, 2020, p. 35.

Valkonen & al., 2019, p. 50.

Ibid., p. 49.

Ibid., p. 42.

Kopytoff, 1986, p. 68.

Thompson, 2017, p. 25.

Thompson, 2017.

Valkonen & al., 2019, pp. 85–89.

Kopytoff, 1986, p. 64.

Ibid., p.

p.

p.

Kopytoff, 1986.

2020, p. 21.

UNEP, 2020.

Thompson, 2017, pp. 106–107.

Ibid., p. 29.

SORTING ARCHITECTURAL DISCARD

3.1 Ornament and grime

Although the formation of Avant-Garde modernism in architecture is con nected to parallel movements in the arts at the beginning of the 20th century, most theorists seek its roots in earlier developments of the 19th century, when industrial production first began to transform the art of building in Europe and North America. Instead of recounting the early stages of modern architecture through the evolution of construction technology, or as a series of changeful styles, this chapter provides a brief history of modern architec ture through its relation to waste. I will start by examining conceptions of hygiene and dirt and the way they were shaping the construction practice.

The 19th century is commonly depicted as an era of progress shadowed by the pains of industrialisation: crowded cities, inhuman working conditions, dirt and disease. While culture continued to seek stability from the monumental forms of classical antiquity, revolutions in the built environment happened through the construction of railways and municipal infrastructure. In an analysis of two London plumbing stations, Paul Dobraszczyk draws attention to the contradiction between their rational construction technology and dream-like architectural ornamentation. In completion of the buildings, the public responded with awe and horror in the face of their industrial might and the incredible amounts of excrement passed through them.1

Perhaps nowhere was the paradoxical quality of the era more explicit than in the British Empire, the leading political and economic power whose advanced industry was held up by an infamously debilitated working class.

London, the heart of the Empire and the most populous city in the world was made known by Charles Dickens as “the great (and dirty) city”. According ly, industrial towns Manchester and Liverpool gained notoriety through the fervent descriptions of Friedrich Engels in his Condition of the Working Class in England (1845).

The cottages are old, dirty, and of the smallest sort, the streets uneven, fallen into ruts and in part without drains or pavement; masses of refuse, offal and sickening filth lie among standing pools in all directions; the atmosphere is poisoned by the effluvia from these, and ladened and darkened by the smoke of a dozen tall factory chimneys. A horde of ragged women and children swarm about here, as filthy as the swine that thrive upon the garbage heaps and in the puddles…The race that lives in these ruinous cottages, behind broken windows, mended with oilskin, sprung doors and rotten door-posts, or in the dark, wet cellars, in measureless filth and stench, in this atmosphere

penned in as if with a purpose, this race must really have reached the lowest stage of humanity.2

Architecture historian Leonardo Benevolo notes, that Engels is portraying the worst cases, not the average. Problems were particularly evident in crammed industrial settlements. While the living conditions in the countryside may not have been much better than in the city, high population density made sanitation harder to manage in urban areas. As long as there was enough room to take care of refuse disposal, it did not get in the way of everyday life—domestic activities, children’s games, and traffic. But space was precisely what was lacking in the working-class districts, making waste management almost impossible: “open sewers ran along beside the roads, every available corner was piled high with rubbish. Carts and pedestrians, animals and playing children jostled one another in the fight for space.”3 Additionally, the proximity of workers’ quarters and factories meant that there was no way of escaping smoke and industrial residue that polluted the water.

In his book The origins of modern town planning (1967), Benevolo traces the roots of the situation to the economic and social changes in the early de cades of the 19th century. Focusing on England, he describes the era when the

working-class population was settling around the emerging industry. Liberal reformers had taken over the political establishment, seeking to replace old hierarchies with democracy and the rule of law. Reformers were shaking up the foundations of the old social order based on hereditary rank and divine rights by appealing to science and reason and promoting free trade and mar ketisation. Guarding the citizen against the abuse of authority, liberalists were wary of any interference in the daily life and dealings of the people, including matters of land use and construction. Consequently, managing the growth of towns and countryside was left for laissez-faire developers.

Before the industrial era, towns had altered so slowly that from the per spective of an individual life they could be regarded as permanent and static. Structures would wear out physically with time, but fast and comprehensive transformation only occurred with catastrophes such as fires, which were avoided at all cost.4 Industrialisation and market-driven development made the change more rapid. According to Engels, contractors were building worker’s cottages on rented land. At the expiration of the lease, the plot would fall back to its original holder, who would not compensate for improvements made upon it. Thus, contractors would use minimum expenses on construc tion and maintenance. The result was poor quality: Engels reports witnessing newly constructed buildings, with outer walls “but one half brick thick, lying not sidewise but lengthwise, their narrow ends touching.”5 Such buildings could not last, not even if contractors had invested in maintenance. Conse quently, at the period when design celebrated monumental form, the temporality of the urban environment became increasingly transient.6

According to Benevolo, it was only when the situation had “crystallised sufficiently not only to cause the discomfort but also to provoke the protest of the people involved” that the state was forced to take action.7 Epidemics were drivers of urban reform, as they had the effect of hastening improvements in municipal infrastructure and passing new regulations.8 In Great Britain, the recurrent cholera epidemics after 1830 were a culminating point, as they triggered a national investigation on the causes of the ill health of the working class. The work was conducted by Edwin Chadwick, who published the  Report on the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population of Great Britain in 1842. Chadwick’s report concluded that improving public health

would require the state to invest in urban infrastructure, particularly sewage and freshwater systems, along with proper waste disposal.9

When causes of epidemics were studied, it became evident that they would not be stopped by fixing one single thing. Problems were vast and entangled; hence preventive measures “would have to be various, yet coordi nated.”10 As opposed to utopian visionaries, specialists were trying to patch the individual defects of the industrial town by technical and legalistic means. Intervening on the physical framework of the city required special legislation. Along with infrastructural improvements such as building drainage and water supply, standards were set for private developers to improve the quality of the built environment. If a neighbourhood was not up to standard, it threatened to face demolition. Thus conducting sanitary improvements meant a comprehensive extension of state control over private property. Sanitary legisla tion was subject to the general framework of town-planning legislation and, according to Benevolo, its forerunner, as “it soon diffused the idea of compulsory land acquisition by extending its use from public works to include the whole body of a town.”11 In fact, Benevolo recognises the efforts of sanitary reformers as the first precursors of modern town planning.

Nevertheless, improvements of municipal technology did not stop ep idemics for good: advances helped to mitigate cholera outbreaks, but other diseases, especially tuberculosis, occurred frequently towards the end of the century. This forced the public health movement to widen its repertoire. Where the mid-century reforms had been municipally led and focused on technical improvements, the 1890s and 1900s campaigns were targeted at the hygienic habits of individual citizens.12 Issues related to the health and moral effects of the urban environment and housing were merged in the concept of ‘social hygiene’.13

New scientific conceptions dictated the appropriate measures to be taken in the fight against epidemics. Since the 16th century, medical theory had recognised bad air as the culprit of illness. Dirt and filth were believed to release toxic fumes that transmitted disease. These unidentified, foul-smelling substances were called miasma.14 In the 1860s, Louis Pasteur and his colleagues discredited the miasma theory by proving that diseases are caused by living microbes. The findings of bacteriologists had a profound impact on notions

Microscopic image of bacteria.

of hygiene, shifting the focus of health reformers from bad air to anything that might carry germs: “to flies, dirty clothing, unwashed hands and, above all, to dust; everything that might be described as dirt was now linked with the transmission of disease.”15 Relocating the source of disease meant that new kinds of measures had to be taken to prevent illness. To fight the invisible enemy, people were to eliminate all visible forms of dirt.16

Across the Western world, systematic educational campaigns were taken up to popularise new medical theory and its implications on everyday prac tice. Together with schools, media outlets had a central role in spreading information about the causes and prevention of disease. Hygienic knowl edge was propagated through books, magazines, and exhibitions; special hy giene exhibitions were organised in Great Britain and Germany, among other places. Architecture historian Adrian Forty describes the hygienic movement as being “strongly middle-class in character”, led by professionals and social reformers and extending into various departments of life.

New hygienic ideas were of interest to architects, too, who’s role was gradually shifting from artistic expression towards accommodating for the masses. According to architecture historian Beatriz Colomina, early 20th century medical conceptions had a strong influence on the formation of the modernist style. In her book X-Ray Architecture (2019) she questions the tendency to view modern architecture through functional efficiency, new con-

struction materials and technologies, and machine aesthetics. Instead, she recounts the whole story of modernism through its relationship with disease and health care technology. According to Colomina, “we are still living in the architecture shaped by a specific disease, tuberculosis, and its primary diagnostic tool, the X-ray.”17 Instead of the machine, the central motor of modernism was the fragile human body—troubled by disease, neurosis, and depression.

Drawing from Susan Sonntag’s  Illness as Metaphor, Colomina examines the way ideas of disease were used to justify design decisions and to diagnose buildings. According to her, “the symptoms, if not the principles” of mod ernism share resemblance to medical writings on tuberculosis.18 Progressive architects adapted the medical gaze of a doctor to design spaces that were meant to heal and prevent illness. Modern architecture was promoted as an antidote to the disease that was troubling old neighbourhoods. Especially tuberculosis was linked with the physical features of the built environment: foul air, darkness and dampness. Contrary to the cramped nineteenth-cen tury quarters, modern buildings were light and airy, with proper ventilation, lots of sunlight and balconies.

Sanatorium buildings became the forerunners of 20th century function alist architecture. Like bacteria, they belonged to the world of science and reason. Tuberculosis sanatoriums were built like a machines to fulfil one goal—to cure disease. For architects, sanatoriums became test laboratories of new materials and technologies. Modernist sanatoriums were streamlined and rational, with big windows, simple furnishing, and hard surfaces. Everything was easy to clean and non-absorbent, with minimal dust-traps. The layout of the sanatorium building exemplifies the compartmentalisation of space that became a typical feature of functionalism. Each function was carefully placed based on its special requirements such as lighting conditions and the relation to other spaces. Solar terraces dictated the massing of the building. Directed towards the sun, the space for the patient’s curing helio therapy treatments simultaneously became the defining architectural feature of the building type.19

In light of the critical waste studies framework, however, the architectural expression of health and cleanliness cannot be reduced merely as rational med-

ical behaviour. According to Mary Douglas, our dirt avoidance is not primarily an activity driven by anxiety to eliminate disease. On the contrary, cleaning is a positive exercise of re-ordering the environment – “making it conform to an idea”. Even though it is not motivated solely by fear of disease, Douglas thinks our dirt avoidance is perfectly reasonable: “it is a creative movement, an attempt to relate form to function, to make unity of experience.”20

It is interesting that Douglas is quoting the functionalist credo, “form (ever) follows function”, attributed to American architect Louis Sullivan. The phrase has often been read as a rule, that leads to a certain kind of design outcome. Architecture historian Adrian Forty questions this notion and the whole idea of design as a neutral activity, grounded on the practicalities of use. Forty states that the logical conclusion of the phrase “form follows function” would be that all objects with the same use should look the same. Nev ertheless, objects with the same use have come about in countless different designs. He uses ceramic cups as an example:

If the only purpose of a cup was to drink from, there might well be only one design, but cups do have other uses: as articles of commerce, they serve to create wealth and to satisfy consumers’ craving to express their sense of individuality, and it is from the conjunction of such purposes that the variety of designs results.21

The same applies to buildings. While in the 19th-century technical innovation used to be hidden within archaic forms, by the 20th century new build ings started to adapt utopian designs. Perhaps the most notable aesthetic change happened in ornamentation. First the national romantic styles broke the historical continuum of classicism by inventing entirely new aesthetic languages. Later the modernist styles shed ornament altogether. These changes cannot be explained merely through changes in technology and use. To explain form by function requires understanding function in a comprehen sive way, containing the sociocultural and aesthetic as well as the medical, technical and economic.

I will exemplify this by another canonical text, Ornament & Crime (1908) by Austrian architect Adolf Loos. In his polemic, Loos attacked the Viennese

Secession movement on their use of ornamentation. Loos states that the revival of ornament in the national romantic styles has caused enormous damage to aesthetic development. According to him, ornament on things “that have evolved away from the need to be ornamented” is “a crime against the national economy that it should result in a waste of human labour, money, and material.”22

Loos criticises ornament on economic grounds. He blames ornament for causing obsolescence since changes of fashion in ornamentation “lead to a premature devaluation of the labour product”,23 whereas the form of the object lasts as long as the object lasts physically. According to Loos, the busi ness of ornamentation depends on fast changes in fashion: consumers who replace their furniture every ten years bring more profit than those who wait for the old furniture to wear out first. If quick change is viewed as a source of prosperity, to Loos, one might as well set fire to a town to achieve the same effect. Good quality makes ornamented objects only worse, because it signifies more ruined material and wasted labour. 24

Furthermore, Loos condemns ornament as immoral. To him, being modern means moral superiority that manifests itself in behaviour and archi tectural style. He makes crude references to primitive cultures, distinguishing between the spiritually superior “modern man”, such as himself and his readers, and the mundane masses that lag behind development. “No ornament can any longer be made today by anyone who lives on our cultural level. It is different with the individuals and peoples who have yet not reached this level”,25 he writes. By portraying ornament as degenerate and linking it with sickness, Loos intends to convince his readers of its distastefulness. To Loos, ornament represents bad taste and economic waste, but he parallels it with other forms of abjection, for argument’s sake.

Ornament & Crime  later became influential with the 1920s generation of modernists and was re-printed in Le Corbusier’s magazine L’Esprit Noveau.

By this time, the upper classes had gotten acquainted with the minimal style of the tuberculosis sanatorium that was now being adapted to hotel rooms as well as fashionable homes. If the aesthetic of cleanliness ever had a medi cal basis, with the advent of functionalism at the latest it became a point of representation. It is thus safe to say that ornament did not become crime

simply because it harbours dust. Medical argumentation may have been used to justify design decisions, but modern architecture never was a rational vessel in the fight against disease. Instead, the borders between health, social problems, and questions of style were obscured in architecture and urban planning discourses.

Besides medical behaviour, the movement for greater hygiene was a social movement striving towards order in a transforming world. Examining the hygienic movement in light of Mary Douglas’s theory on dirt, Adrian Forty connects anxiety about hygiene with the rapid cultural and economic changes of industrialisation that had unsettled the former societal order. He finds a parallel between “the middle-class preoccupation with bodily, domestic, and public cleanliness” and the “rapid social change and disintegrating social boundaries that came with the increasing political power of the working class.”26 By setting standards of hygienic conduct, the working class was made subject to a new kind of social control. Not only did cleanliness represent the absence of disease, but it was also visible evidence of moral higher ground.

Forty’s depiction of a societal “regimen of cleanliness and order”27 is reminiscent of Freud’s three requirements of civilisation: cleanliness, order, and beauty.28 In a collection of polemic essays tilted  Historie de la Merd (1968), psychoanalyst Dominique Laporte elaborates on Freud’s idea by connecting the creation of the western individual to the development of the sewage system. According to Laporte, a civilisation striving for cleanliness, order, and beauty invariably rules out waste.29 He states that it was this very politics of waste that created the modern subject:

To touch, even lightly, on the relationship of a subject to his shit, is to modify not only that subject’s relationship to the totality of his body but his very re lationship to the world and to those representations that he constructs of his situation in society.30

Through hiding the residue of the human metabolism, citizens of modern societies have managed to separate themselves from the olfactory aspects of the body. At the same time, however, their subjectivity has become depen dent on institutional management: “Civilisation…is the spoils: the  cloaca

A hospital bed in Alvar Aalto’s Paimio sanatorium.

maxima”,31 Laporte quotes Lacan. What Laporte seems to be saying is that to understand the modern subject and our relation to society, perhaps we should be looking at the practices of abjection that constitute cultural order. Besides formal laws, such order making practices are built in the mundane workings of our infrastructure, conceptions of cleanliness and aesthetic ideals. Establishing official procedures for urban development in the 19th cen tury cut town planning adrift from political discussion. Rather than balancing between the interests of different individuals and social groups, town planning became seen as technical problem-solving.32 But following Laporte, striving for cleanliness, order, and beauty is never politically neutral. On the contrary, the more a state institutionalises Freud’s triad of cleanliness, order, and beauty, the more totalitarian it becomes.33 In the introduction to the English edition of History of Shit (2000), architect Radolphe el-Khoury notes that the effects of the “olfactory economy” portrayed by Laporte are evident “in the transformation of the built environment, of such things as domestic furnishing and public squares, into segregated and rationalised milieus.”34 The same institutionalised control, that formed the modern subject, trans formed buildings and the city. Technical, scientific, and rational; the political grounds of development became obscured.

3.2 Cancer will stifle the city

In November 1922, Le Corbusier, an emerging architect in the Paris Avant-Garde scene, participated in the Salon d’Automne exhibition with a scheme for a city of three million inhabitants. Ville Contemporaine was an abstract model of a metropolis based on the requirements of its contemporary functions. The city was situated within an endless field of greenery and was itself an “immense park”.35 At the centre of the plan, there was a transport hub with bus and train stations and highway intersections, clad by a landing platform for aeroplanes. Around it, a group of identical sixty-story skyscrap ers designated for work and habitation were arranged sparsely within vast green plots. These were surrounded by horizontal apartment blocks for the lower-income groups. The urban structure followed a grid pattern composed with the rigour of a Roman castra; different functions separated to their designated quarters. A geometric network of highways connected external limbs of industry, recreation, and garden suburbs to the centre.

The Ville Contemporaine was received by “a sort of stupor”, the architect later wrote—“the shock of surprise caused rage in some quarters and enthu siasm in others.”36 This was hardly an unexpected or even an undesirable re sponse to the provocative display. The ideal city was an attempt to construct a formula for modern town planning that could be applied to developing exist ing cities in the future.37 In its mechanical rigidity, the plan was “rough” and “completely uncompromising”.38 Nevertheless, or precisely for this reason, Ville Contemporaine and its later adaptations cemented their creator’s name in urban-planning history.

At this point, Charles-Edouard Jeanerette had become known in his homeland Switzerland as a designer of exquisite villas that had a tendency to lead their commissioners into financial difficulties.39 After settling in Paris in 1917, he started a joint architectural practice with his cousin Pierre Jeanneret and took up painting in the purist style—an artistic movement he established with the painter Amade Ozenfant. In the first issue of the magazine L’Esprit Nouveau, founded with Ozenfant and poet Paul Dermée in 1920, he had adopted the pseudonym Le Corbusier. During the depression years, Le Cor busier spent much of his time developing his ideas on urban planning. Urban

theorist Peter Hall has interpreted the Ville Contemporaine as a reaction to the state of affairs in Paris—a city whose history Hall describes as “constant struggle between the forces of exuberant, chaotic, often sordid everyday life and the forces of centralised, despotic order.”40

In France, the consequences of industrialisation had escalated slightly later than across the canal, but to similar effects. Passed after the 1849 cholera epidemic, ‘Melun’s bill’ set standards for the management of unsatisfac tory urban areas. The core substance of the bill lay on its thirteenth article, which stated that “when this unwholesomeness is the result of external and permanent causes, and when these causes cannot be removed without basic alterations, the Commune, following the forms and procedure set down by the law of 3 April 1841, may acquire the sum total of the property included within the limits of the relevant works.”41 This law made clearance of resi dential quarters possible, and consequently, Paris entered an era of extensive renewal led by Baron Haussmann. During the following decades, overcrowded medieval neighbourhoods were replaced by a network of wide avenues aligned with monumental apartment buildings, new parks and squares, together with an improved system of aqueducts and sewers.

Work on Haussmann’s projects still continued in the 1920s, but the metropolis was slipping towards disorder. Behind the uniform facades of its grand avenues, “the city was racked by slums and disease.”42 In his book Urbanisme (1925), Le Corbusier demonstrates the sorry state of Paris with aerial photos of the old quarters where “tuberculosis, demoralisation, misery and shame are doing the devil’s work among them.”43 The organic forms of the congested blocks were far from his geometric ideal set by the great cities of classicism and renaissance—although he does have respect for the work of Baron Haussmann under Napoleon III: “the magnificent legacy left by a monarch to his people.”44

Le Corbusier shared Haussmann’s idea of the city as a technical problem and admired the unscrupulous manner the reconstruction of Paris had been conducted. He recognised Haussmann’s boulevards as an achievement, without which modern motor traffic would not be possible.45 Nevertheless, there was a new problem: motor traffic was polluting the air and suffocating urban dwellers. Haussmann’s reform remained a symbol of industrial progress, but

the realisation of the new quarters was no longer up to the urban planning ideal. Particularly problematic was the way in which different functions were intermingled. The tenement houses combined housing and work right next to the noise and pollution of traffic. It was not enough to bring order to the city if different functions would not be separated. Not only was this a prob lem of Haussmann’s Paris, but 19th-century planning overall.46

Dissatisfaction is evident in this dramatic excerpt by Le Corbusier:

At the present moment, vast masses of dilapidated houses are being demolished at strategically important points in Paris and replaced by multistorey buildings. This is being allowed to happen. A new city is being permitted to spring up over the old that murdered life, and this new city will murder life all the more infallibly because it forms positive knots of stasis, without any modifying the street-plan. These fruitless operations on the land in the centre of Paris are like a cancer that is being allowed to overgrow the heart of the city. The cancer will stifle the city. Simply to let things happen here represents an incomprehensible unconcern in the hour of danger, through which big cities are at present passing.47

By “cancer”, the author refers to the prevailing practice of demolition and reconstruction without reconsidering the urban scheme. According to Le Corbusier, the “profitable speculations” on the plots of out-of-date buildings were establishing fixed points in the centre of the city, around which the 20th-century metropolis would be forced to grow.48 This would not do: Le Corbusier saw the only possible solution in a completely new urban typology. By building up, the city centres could be decongested while at the same time increasing the population density. Tower blocks could be placed loosely, leav ing plenty of room for improved transport networks and greenery. The new urban structure could only be executed on a completely bare site. Consequently, implementation in existing urban areas would require demolition. In his following scheme, Le Corbusier applied the ideas of Ville Contemporaine directly to the centre of Paris. The Plan Voisin (1925) was named after the car manufacturer Voisin that had sponsored the proposal.49

According to its author, the purpose of the plan, exhibited in the l’Esprit

Nouveau pavilion at the International Exhibition of Decorative Art held in Paris, was to raise discussion and to provide standards for urban development. “It sets principles as against the medley of silly little reforms with which we are constantly deceiving ourselves”,50 he wrote. The plan consisted of a commercial city of eighteen 60-story tower blocks and a residential city built of massive vertical blocks, with an underground transport station in between. A hundred-meter wide highway would cross the area, including elevated lanes for high-speed traffic.

Although new buildings would take up only 5 % of the total surface area, the old urban fabric would be cleared out entirely—with the exception of ancient churches and some other fragments of the old city that would be left as remainders of history “as the result of their falling into the architectural composition of the scheme.”51 It seems almost like this coincidence has made the rationalist sentimental, as he writes of the preservation of these “pages out of history” and imagines how in the midst of greenery one might find “an exciting and delightful relic such as, say, some fine Renaissance house, now to be used as a library, lecture hall or what not.”52 But when it comes to the existing residential quarters, “those terrible districts with which we are so little acquainted”, 53 Le Corbusier is remorseless: “…imagine all this junk, which till now has lain spread out over the soil like a dry crust, cleaned off and carted away and replaced by immense clear crystals of glass, rising to a height of over 600 feet,” he envisions.54

The exhibition at the l’Esprit Nouveau pavilion was received with an expected startle. At the time, Le Corbusier’s radical views were not represen tative of the general opinion of architects but rather belonged to a progressive minority. His enthusiasm for progress echoed the sentiments of the Italian Futurists, who had published their manifesto before the war. The Futurists, too, saw that embracing the modern reality required an entirely new urban form: “We have lost the sense of the monumental, of the heavy, of the static; we have enriched our sensibility by a ‘taste for the light, the practical, the ephemeral and the swift’”, Antonio Saint’Elia and Giuseppe Marinetti write in their manifesto.55 The authors no longer perceived a need for “cathedrals”, “palaces”, and “assembly halls” but instead for “big hotels, railway stations, immense roads, colossal ports, covered markets, brilliantly lit galleries, free-

ways, demolition and rebuilding schemes.”56 Some members of the group deemed the time of stylistic evolution to be over. Instead, the built environment would undergo constant renewal: “…the fundamental characteristics of Futurist architecture will be obsolescence and transience. ‘Houses will last less long than we.’ Each generation will have to build its own city.”57 A similar detachment from both history and the future is present in Le Corbusier’s Con temporary city – “contemporary, because tomorrow belongs to no one.”58 Yet, Le Corbusier did not like to think of himself as a Futurist.59 Perhaps this was because, like Daniel Abramson alludes, he believed he would be resolving the city for good.60

Le Corbusier found the l’Esprit Nouveau pavilion a success: “the International Exhibition of Decorative Arts in Paris finally demonstrated the pointlessness of backward glances. There was to be a complete revulsion; a new page was turned,” he rejoiced. 61 Although no one took to implement his

Le Corbusier’s Plan Voisin for Paris. The scheme was named by the car manufacturer Voisin and is characterised by great roads.

SIEFKINDR,

plan, he had succeeded in drawing attention and was gathering a following.

In 1928, Le Corbusier and his fellow modernists took a step forward in formalising the principles of modern architecture by founding the International Congresses of Modern Architects (CIAM). The group organised their first meeting in La Sarraz, Switzerland. As a result, a declaration was pub lished, calling for an architecture based on economic realities, demanding rationalised and standardisation in planning and construction. But it was the fourth meeting of the group in 1933 that produced “the most Olympian, rhetorical, and ultimately destructive document to come out of CIAM.”62

The meeting was held under the theme ‘functional city’ on a cruise ship trav elling from Marseille to Athens. Onboard, the group drafted ground rules for modern urban planning. The resulting Charter of Athens was published only in 1943 after it had been heavily edited by Le Corbusier.

The planning principles of the Charter resemble Le Corbusier’s earlier work. The document is divided into three sections: The City In Its Regional Setting, The Four Functions of the City, and Conclusions. The four func tions are separated into dwelling, recreation, work, and transportation, where dwelling is prioritised as “the prime centre of all urban planning, to which all other functions are attached.”63 Functions are discussed by first outlining the problematics of the current situation and then giving recommendations for future measures. Under the four functions, The Legacy of History follows as a fifth headline. The content can be considered noteworthy in understanding the modernist approach to the existing urban structure. Firstly, it is instructed that “fine architecture” should be protected from demolition, even if this means compromising the most practical design solution. But preservation should not mean that people are left in insalubrious conditions: “The demolition of slums surrounding historic monuments provides an opportunity to create new open spaces.”64 Furthermore, the re-use of past styles of building in new construction is strictly condemned. New construction must portray its times.65

The Charter of Athens pictures the city as a technical problem, to which there is an universally applicable solution. It became an influential set of guidelines for post war urban planners. Like architecture historian Rayner Banham reminds, however, despite its general tone the charter is based on

a narrow conception of architecture and urban planning: “At a distance of thirty years we recognise this as merely the expression of an aesthetic pref erence, but at the time it had the power of a Mosaic commandment and effectively paralyzed research into other forms of housing”, Banham writes.66 To Le Corbusier, his was a “critical and objective point of view” that when implemented, would lead to better health and higher moral.67 In his book Urbanisme, Le Corbusier repeatedly emphasises the architect’s role as being “technical”.68 Reacting against picturesque notions of the city, he was pro moting the exact opposite: straight lines and right angles. However, he gives little “technical” foundation for this preference.69 This makes one interpret his glorification of geometry as primarily aesthetic, if not spiritual.

The whole of the modern age is made up above all of geometry; it directs its dreams towards the joys of geometry. After a century of analysis, modern arts and thought are seeking something beyond the random fact and geometry leads them towards a mathematical order, an attitude of mind that is increas ingly widespread.70

If Le Corbusier had based his plans on neutral and objective principles, one would not be able to recognise a change in his political views between the early Ville Contemporaine and Ville Radieuse published in 1935. Ville Contemporaine was based on a hierarchical organization of society: the elite would live in skyscrapers and luxury apartments whereas the workers would be segregated into more modest, mass produced apartments in the garden suburbs. But by the time of publishing Ville Radieuse, Le Corbusier had lost his faith in capitalists and become a believer in centralised planning. In the Ville Radieuse everyone became equally collectivised. All the families would be inhabited in similar units designed according to minimum spatial requirements based on family size.71

Between the two proposals Le Corbusier had a brief period of collabora tion with the Soviet Union which ended in disappointment when he lost the competition of the Palace of the Soviets in 1931. The Ville Radieuse plan was developed from his proposal for the rebuilding of Moscow. This, like most of his urban schemes was never implemented. In fact, his only major urban plan

that was ever realised was Chandigarh in India (1949). But Le Corbusier’s influence internationally exceeds his built work: His ideas travelled rapidly via the printing press and were picked up both in the east and the west.

Marius af Schulten published a review of new French architecture literature in the eight issue of the Finnish Architectural Review in 1926, focusing especially on Urabnisme. The writer gives a brief summary of Ville Contemporaine and its implementation in Paris, evolving from Le Corbusier’s ideas to a description of the plans. He concludes that the intention of the proposals is not to define the final organization of the city, “but just to bring the question up-to-date and to demonstrate clearly that only comprehensive renewal can lead to true and lasting results.”72 As such, he finds Le Corbusier’s work an important reference for urban planners in other countries, struggling to modernise their cities and transport networks. Another keen reformer of the period, P. E. Blomstedt, warned the readers of adopting the “Corbusier style” only as an aesthetic trend without regard to its progressive content: “It will certainly not be healthy for the future development of Finnish architecture if functionalism will be accepted here as a mere form and fashion style without seriously comprehending its true and lasting values.”73

Le Corbusier made his first trip to the United States in 1935. The early decades of the 20th century had seen a transformation in American cities. Growing urban population, thriving real-estate market, favourable legislation together with new construction technology had led to rapid and even cha otic urban development. The rebuilding of Chicago after the 1871 fire had been break for steel construction, and the effects of the steel frame were soon visible in other big cities as well: America was growing upwards. Cities such as Chicago and New York did not, however, represent Le Corbusiers urban ideal. In Urbanisme, he criticises the American metropolis of too much den sity. Besides, when asked what he thought of the New York skyscrapers, he replied that they are “much too small”.74

Like Le Corbusier, American architect Frank Lloyd Wright was convinced that what America needed was an entirely new kind of urban form. But his solution was different. According to Wright, the realities of modern life would eventually cause the city to disperse. Motor traffic would allow habitation to spread from condensed urban centres to the countryside, where everyone

could have their share of land. His urban ideal, Broadacre city, was based on a Ebenezer Howard style rejection of the big city controlled by the govern ment and capital. Instead, he believed in the liberating power of technology that would allow a new kind of country living. However, Wright’s intention was not to connect town and country but to merge them into an endless suburbia. Similarly to Le Corbusier’s, Wright’s vision was based on transport via “great roads”. But instead of providing quick access to the city centre, the network of highways would spread across a uniform suburban landscape. 75 Wright’s version of the American dream was criticised of naivety and wasteful use of resources—as an ideal dictated by the architect’s preference for designing single family houses.76 As Le Corbusier’s urban ideal, Wrights vision of ‘Usonian culture’ was constructed with a lack of consideration of social dynamics. But what both Wright’s and Le Corbusier’s urban visions ex press, is that from the point of view of modernist ideologists, the machine age had made the existing urban structure hopelessly obsolete. What this would mean for the future of the city, however, was a point of dispute. In Space, Time and Architecture (1938), historian Sigfried Giedion writes that unless the cities are not adapted to the needs of modern life, their entire existence is contested:

Clearly, small means are no aid; they serve merely – and in this Frank Lloyd Wright is quite correct – to prolong its existence artificially without any real hope of recovery. Nothing can be really accomplished by sowing the streets with more and more traffic lights or by clearing slums and simply erecting new buildings on the same sites. Destroying all the slums in existence will not make the city any less unworkable instrument it is today.77

The new century had changed the temporal dynamics of the built environment: younger and younger buildings were demolished and replaced by new ones. In his book Obsolescence: An architectural history (2016) histo rian Daniel M. Abramson reveals that the word ‘obsolescence’ was used in the United States already in the beginning of the 20th century to depict the short life-times of buildings in urban centres.78 The term was initially used by economists and the real-estate industry to describe the phenomenon that

was unsettling the former logic of the market. But as it entered the popular discourse in the 1920s, ‘obsolescence’ started to be understood as a univer sal condition of change.79 According to Abramson, the American tax code worked in favour of normalizing obsolescence, as it allowed obsolescence-related losses of value to be deducted from the income tax.80 The 1930s federal tax tables based allowances on estimated life-times of different building types. Thus, the complex process of devaluation of buildings became translated into pre-determined life-cycle predictions, interpreted like a natural law.81

The term ‘obsolescence’ was picked up by urban planners, too, who used it to describe neighbourhoods and cities. ‘Obsolescence’ summed up social issues, unsatisfactory economic performance and the poor physical condition of buildings or entire areas into a simple diagnosis. Antipathy towards the existing urban structure led to a situation where the poor condition of existing urban areas was recognised, but there was a reluctance for repairing. Instead, the negative aspects of the old built environment were thought to demand comprehensive renewal. Like historian Vilhelm Helander writes about 1930s urban renewal projects in Finland: “In order to reverse unsatisfactory living conditions, the most radical voices proposed simply to demolish the physical framework where the problem lay.”82 Problem areas could be located, for in stance, by examining tuberculosis statistics.

Although there were some who celebrated ceaseless change, a majority of the 20s and 30s generation of architects still believed in permanence. Archi tects were generally not looking forward to seeing their buildings demolished at the age of thirteen years, as was the faith of the Gillender Building in New York (1897–1910) that had once been “the world’s loftiest office block.”83 Instead, the initial reaction of most architects was to deny obsolescence.84 Rayner Banham writes, that despite toying around with “the idea of a fairly high rate of scrapping” Le Corbusier did not visualise the renewal of the urban environment as a constant process, “but merely as stages in the evolution of a final type or norm”.85 This was the essential contradiction within modern ism—simultaneously appealing for change and emphasizing timelessness. As Abramson writes: “The past might be obsolescent in modernist formulations. But the new, with its updated certainties, would not be. The modern would endure.”86 New and lasting ideals would surpass the old and the obsolescent.

The unsatisfactory condition of the existing environment justified creating afresh—starting from a clean state, carte blanche, tabula rasa. Certain remnants of the past might be preserved, but selectively, based on dictatorial classification. Yet, the grounds on which Le Corbusier based his urban designs muddled up rational order with the appearance of rational order. The feebleness of this logic can be read from the very language that was used to justify design and demolition. The ‘objective’ reasoning came dressed into metaphors of the body. Baron Haussmann called the underground galleries of the Paris sewer system the “organs of the city” and used the word “disembowelling” to describe cutting his boulevards through working-class neighbour hoods.87 Similarly, the body metaphor is constantly present in Le Corbusier’s work, who called his parks “lungs”, roads “veins”, and speedways “arteries” that had to be cut into the urban body through a “surgery.”88 The emphasis on the flow of air, traffic, and people in the modern metropolis fit well with the idea of blood circulation. Depictions of disease justified expert measures to “heal” the city. However, sometimes there is no remedy: after all, the body is mortal. The vast parks of Plan Voisin with the preserved fragments of history Le Corbusier calls “cemeteries”, for “material things too must die.”89

In this chapter I have used Le Corbusier’s urban planning schemes to exemplify the modernist pursuit towards a clear organization of the city. The fact that few of his urban schemes were ever realised, does not make his work irrelevant: his ideas got unforeseen global publicity and continued to impact the work of others through the articles of the Charter of Athens. But regardless of what his actual imprint was, his writings and plans provide easy access to the friction between the progressive culture and the urban environment that no longer corresponds to the goals set for it. The issue is not merely the preference for geometry, the motor car, of new scientific conceptions of disease. The city is thoroughly obsolete, and in need of a comprehensive rebuilding according to a new and more permanent ideals.

3.3

Convenient homes for standard people

The most critical design task for modern architects was the apartment—in the words of Le Corbusier, the basic “cell” of human habitation. Function-

alists believed that it would be possible to find an optimal solution for the human “cell” based on the biological needs and physical measurements of the human body. This “cell” would provide a universal standard, the minimum requirement and the maximum necessity of the modern home.

Bauhaus in Germany had had a significant influence in the creation of the modern domestic environment in the pre-war years. According to the head of the school, Walter Gropius, Bauhaus intended to develop modern housing from everyday items to the building scale. “Modern man, who no longer dresses in his torical garments but wears modern clothes, also needs a modern home appropriate to him and his time, equipped with all the modern devices of daily use,”90 Gropius wrote. He perceived “the creation of standard types for all practical commodities” as a social necessity: “On the whole, the necessities of life are the same for the majority of people. The home and its furnishings are mass consumer goods, and their design is more a matter of reason than a matter of passion.”91

The functionalist home was characterised by light, air, and economical use of space. It was based on the idealised modern family, whose needs were translated into functions: socialising, dining, cooking, sleep, hygiene. Designers went to great lengths to define and differentiate residential functions and place each function in its designated room. Members of the household were separated from each other by partition walls. Along with the kitchen, the sanitary spaces were removed from other, cleaner activities. Signs of human bodily functions, including sleep, were carefully hidden.

Although the home had lost its ceremonial function and was now thought of as the private realm of the family, what happened behind its closed doors had become an increasingly public concern. New norms and standards applied by designers were not just transforming the home but reordering everyday life. Standard homes came with standard furniture. In fact, Le Corbusier envisioned his mass produced apartments in the Ville Contemporaine each containing the same mass produced furniture.92 Alvar Aalto showed similar eagerness to direct the way inhabitants use their apartments by organizing a “furnishing experi ment” for the inhabitants of Turku standard rental house in order to “illustrate how affordably the apartment could be furnished and what are the aspects the ‘layperson’ should consider.”93 German architect Hugo Häring portrays the question of furniture in the following excerpt written in 1927:

“Our living rooms have become empty. They now contain only the essentials. Cupboards have been swallowed up in the walls; beds, at least during the day, are beginning to disappear. The architects of the Stuttgart Werkbund Housing

Project had the greatest difficulty in finding tables and chairs for their rooms, to say nothing of cupboards, although in Stuttgart and elsewhere thousands and thousands of tables and chairs were standing about in furniture stores and these tables and chairs would undoubtedly have satisfied the objective demands made upon them. The only drawback was their appearance. Inter national society clings resolutely to its old furniture and continues to furnish its rooms in the antique manner. Antique shops multiply daily – proof that the products of modern industrial design are less than ever able to satisfy the demands of customers with the money to buy.”94

According to Häring, modern consumers demanded “utilitarian objects” instead of decorated furniture that indicated social status. The word of the day was practicality: “We have working and sports clothes, serviceable sports equipment, serviceable tools, weapons, instruments, ships, cars – but we do not have tables, chairs, furnishing fabrics, etc. to go with them.” Rooms would no longer be decorated according to the rules of any specific style, but “but according to the culture of their occupants”. He illustrates the matter by envisioning a modern bank manager driving home with his Maybach car. Häring complains that workshops do not yet produce furniture à la Maybach and proposes that one might start by minimising and simplifying designs as much as possible without destroying the object.95

While his fellow modernists must have shared this view, not everyone was eager to become standardised. In a 1928 text, Häring’s countryman expressionist artist Bernhard Hoetger protested against the attempt of rationalist architects to colonise all aspects of life with their “objectivity”:

“We do not want to throw the pictures out of our rooms because they are ‘irrelevant,’ we want rather to draw them into the great joyful rhythm of our house. We want to look at sculpture just as we want to read books, we don’t want to ban carpets because they are ‘dust traps’…We want the individu al room, not the factory-made product; we want personality, not norm, not

schema, not series, not type. We want no violation of our creative feeling, not even by architecture, we want to live our life.”96

According to Adrian Forty, the turn of the century shifted the notion of the home from a source of moral welfare to physical wellbeing. The transition was evidenced by its turning “from a place of beauty into one of efficiency”.97 A rationalised pursuit for a healthy and smoothly functioning home replaced ideals of beauty and moral virtue. Forty finds the increase of attention directed on the kitchen particularly revealing. In replacing the drawing-room as the core of the house, the kitchen signifies an emphasis on health and physical wellbeing. Moreover, early 20th-century efforts to optimise the kitchen depict the faith in science and reason as the solution to all problems of domestic life.98

In the book Asunnon Muodonmuutoksia – Puhtauden estetiikka ja suku puoli modernissa arkkitehtuurissa (Apartment transformations – Aesthetics of cleanliness and gender in modern architecture) Kirsi Saarikangas examines the formation and founding ideas of the modern home, focusing primarily on its relation to hygiene and gender. According to, Saarikangas, Michel Foucault’s ideas on normalisation and productive power are essential in how time and space were controlled in the modern living environment.99 Housing design was based on defining the residents and their relationships. Saarikangas writes that the functionalist apartment became “the means and the measure of social change and aesthetic upbringing”.100 According to Beatriz Colomina, the new age demanded an entirely new kind of body:

“The body was no longer a stable point of reference around which an architec ture could be built. It was a construction site. Architects such as Le Corbusier and his colleagues in the architectural avant-garde actively redesigned the body with their architecture, rather than housing it or symbolizing it.”101

Where sanatoriums were designed to cure disease, homes became pre venters of disease and moral degradation. But regardless of the metaphoric connection to hygiene, both Forty and Saarikangas depict cleanliness pri marily as an aesthetic norm with pre-war modernism. Forty emphasises the effect of design and advertising in creating the ideal. Products were designed

to embody ideas of cleanliness and health, and advertisements to warn of the consequences of neglecting these aspects. Unhygienic habits could harm not only the individual but their loved ones and even the nation.102 As imagery of extreme hygiene spread, the ideal became normalised as the way a proper home should look like. Besides, the emerging consumer culture brought a growing market of cleanliness related products.103 These were marketed particularly to women since it was the mistress of the house who was responsible for its cleanliness, in the words of domestic scientist Helen Campbell: “To keep the world clean–this is one great task for women.”104

The second world war left in many European cities the clear sites prewar urban planners had been hoping for, and across the Atlantic, a similar effect was produced through urban renewal. This meant a breakthrough for modern architecture, matured as ‘international style’ during the decades of economic growth after the war. The post-war home was a descendant of the functionalist house-machine, with slight modifications. After the war, inte-

Hospital staff examining X-ray images in the early decades of the 20th century.

HELSINGIN KAUPUNGINMUSEO

riors became less formal, and unified furnishing gave way to a more freely composed combination of different elements in spaces characterised by open ness, transparency and light. Boundaries between different rooms became less fixed, and movable furniture enabled a flexible use of space. For instance, the kitchen became forming a spatial unity with the living room. However, the appearance of freedom did not mean indifference towards the presentability of the interiors. Formality was merely replaced by “rules of informality”.105

Adrian Forty recognises a paradox in the ideal of individuality, that actually was limited to the options provided by the market: “It is the fact that the home is both a factory of private illusions and a catalogue of ready-made tastes, values and ideas that makes all design for the home so extra ordinarily revealing about the conditions of modern life.”106

When cars started to be available in new models and colours, a similar de velopment occurred in furnishing. Strasser writes of the introduction of colourful bathroom fixtures to American homes: “The same thrill women have always had over new clothes, women are now obtaining over replacements, changes, reconstructions, new colors and forms in all types of merchandise”, Christine Fredrick wrote in Selling Mrs Consumer (1929).107 After the war, the selection became virtually endless. Additionally disposable products were introduced on the market, which ensured that there would always be a need to buy more. The general trend of mechanisation spread from factories to domestic chores. Domestic appliances that started to be mass-produced in the 1930s had brought the machine age to homes. Factory aesthetics influenced the design of early appliances. The factory stood as a symbol for efficiency and fit well with the rationalised attitude towards housework.108 However, as this risked confusing domestic chores to actual work, designs soon became lighter and more streamlined.

The selling point of domestic appliances was ‘convenience’—the household version of factory efficiency, with the difference that convenience came with the promise that products could liberate housewives from the burden of labour.109 Convenience offered freedom, ease, and leisure. According to Strasser, it became the selling point for “so many products that it became one of the goals of modern living, an attribute of the new lifestyle and of the entire panoply of consumer goods that contemporary experience required.”110

But despite promises of convenience, freedom, and comfort, it is not clear that domestic equipment and disposability actually liberated the housewife. According to Forty, new appliances and the time they saved merely led to higher standards of cleanliness.111

Domestic appliances introduced technological obsolescence to homes.112 Initially, machines replaced traditional equipment used for cooking and housework. But eventually, new models would be introduced and replace them. Strasser exemplifies the mechanisation of homes by garbage disposers. The device that leads garbage from the sink to the sewer was not marketed directly to consumers. Instead, disposers were purchased and installed by plumbers, builders, and electrical contractors. People would buy houses and new kitchens with disposers installed.

Garbage disposers illustrate how mechanisation was not pursued directly by the inhabitant, but new features were designed and introduced for them. The same applies to the standardised spaces and aesthetics of cleanliness in the modern home. For the designer, minimalism and transparency may have symbolised freedom from the burden of tradition. But for the occupant, it was not always so, as exemplified in this quote from Edith Farnsworth depict ing her home designed by Mies van der Rohe:

“I don’t keep a garbage under my sink. Do you know why? Because you can see the whole “kitchen” from the road on the way in here and the can would spoil the appearance of the whole house. So I hide it in the closet further down from the sink. Mies talks about “free space”: but his space is very fixed. I can’t even put a clothes hanger in my house without considering how it affects everything from the outside. Any arrangement of furniture becomes a major problem, because the house is transparent, like an X-ray.”113

I have used the modern home to illustrate how the modernist design paradigm led to broad standardisation and normalisation of homes and their occupants. Cleanliness and rational organisation were essential features of the functionalist home. During the decades of economic growth after the second world war, the home increasingly became a place of consumption and mechanisation.

U.S. DEPARTMENT OF HOUSING AND URBAN DEVELOPMENT, 1972

The demolition of Pruitt Igoe housing estates in 1972 has been described as the the moment when modern architecture died.

It was not the luxury houses of Mies van der Rohe, but mass housing projects of the post-war era that revealed the crucial failure of the modernist apartment and urban space. A classic example is Pruitt Igoe in St. Louis, Missouri, a complex of 33 apartment blocks up to 11 stories high: “a triumph of slum surgery” that provided homes for 10000 people. However, Pruitt Igoe started to gain notoriety soon after its completion in the 1950s and by the late 60s, it had become a symbol of racial segregation, poverty, and crime. Pruitt Igoe’s demolition in 1972 has been called the moment modern archi tecture died.

3.4 Spaceship earth

By the 1960s, architects could no longer rely on permanence. Whether they liked it or not, the built environment was constantly changing. Mass building projects could quickly be taken down by mass demolition; new urban forms would eventually replace the old and the obsolete. Yet, according to Daniel Abramson, the architectural discourse of obsolescence remained disparate, and reactions contradictory. Some embraced change and sought to exploit its effects. Others looked for ways to mitigate and contain obsolescence by extending design into the fourth dimension—time.114

Buckminster Fuller’s 4D Dymaxion house (1928) was the materialization of obsolescence. It featured a crane that could expand the building with new modular units and replace old modules with more advanced versions.115 This way, the building would always keep up with the times. Fuller was an inventor and an ideologist who dedicated his career to envisioning techni cal solutions to global problems. He had little faith in politics; instead, he believed technology had the power to bring about social change. Fuller criti cised the ‘International Style’ architects of superficiality. To him, the Bauhaus innovator’s lack of technical knowledge made their rationalism formalistic. According to Fuller, International Style “peeled off yesterday’s exterior em bellishment and put on instead formalised novelties of quasi-simplicity, permitted by the same hidden structural elements of modern alloys that had permitted the discarded Beaux-Arts garmentation…”116 In his own material and structural experimentations, Fuller did not conform to any conventional

forms. This is made evident by his most recognizable work, geodesic domes, with which he proposed to cover the entire Manhattan.117

In the post-war period, Fuller’s ideas were picked up on the other side of the Atlantic. His futuristic approach appealed especially to the young gen eration of British architects, revolting against the strains of tradition. The Independent Group (1952–1955) infused the aesthetics of American mass culture with early 20th Century avant-garde concepts. Among the group members were architects Alison and Peter Smithson, who were particularly interested in transience and the time-factor of architecture. The Smithson’s were founding members of Team 10, a group established in the tenth meeting of CIAM in 1956. The new generation was no longer satisfied in implement ing the principles of the Charter of Athens and were finding completely new forms for the contemporary city.118 In a 1962 programmatic, the group de fined “comprehensibility, i.e. clarity of organization” as the goal of urbanism and provided a list of ways to “make the community more comprehensible”.

ENCYCLOPÆDIA BRITANNICA, 1930

The 4D Dymaxion house.

Among them was embracing the possibilities of obsolescence: making use of “‘throw-away’ technology”, developing an aesthetic to suit mechanised build ing techniques, and overcoming ‘cultural obsolescence’ that was troubling mass housing projects.119

Architecture historian and theorist Reyner Banham, also part of the Inde pendent Group and Team 10, became the leading proponent of architectural obsolescence. While many of his compatriots recognised the inevitability of obsolescence, for Banham, ”obsolescence was liberation.”120 In his Theory and Design in the First Machine Age, Banham presents a critical history of pre-war modernism. The period shaped by the contrary forces of “Futurist dynamism” and “Academic caution” had resulted in a body of architecture that, to Banham, was by now to be considered obsolete.121 To him, modernists of the ‘first machine age’ had made a mistake in “cutting themselves off from the philosophical aspects of Futurism” and denying the condition of change.122 Instead, they had created a new symbolic language that could only function within the conditions of its time. Banham did not believe that technology and permanence could coexist. To him, developments in the car industry served as proof that embracing technology inevitably meant embrac ing change and obsolescence:123

“It may well be that what we have hitherto understood as architecture, and what we are beginning to understand as technology are incompatible disci plines. The architect who proposes to run with technology knows now that he will be in fast company, and that, in order to keep up, he may have to emulate the Futurists and discard his whole cultural load…If, on the other hand, he decides not to do this, he may find that a technological culture has decided to go on without him. It is a choice that the masters of the Twenties failed to observe until they had made it by accident…”124

The British group Archigram chose to run with technology and, with it, expendability—described by group member Peter Cook as a “direct expression of a freedom to choose.” In their neo-futurist works, Archigram en visioned a glorious machine age, devoid of any conventional ideas of built form. Cook’s Plug-In City (1962–1966) depicted a city where buildings have

been replaced by an all-encompassing megastructure, constantly under transformation: cranes hoisting about living modules designed to last for three years and towers, twenty. Where Fuller advocated effective use of limited resources, Archigram did not recognise limits. Nor did they base their work on any social or environmental project. As Steve Parnell writes, Archigram focused “on the aesthetic at the expense of Buckminster Fuller’s eths of doing more with less of the earth’s finite resources.”125

Also an influential ideologist, Cedric Price was “famously against preser vation”126. On the few occasions that his projects were built, he had instructions for demolition prepared. One of Price’s unrealised projects was Fun Palace (1962–1967), an entertainment complex liberated from the restraints of per manent form. Like the Plug-In City, Fun Palace consisted of a separate megastructural framework of service towers and gantry cranes distinct from the mov able and dispensable spatial units. Price characterised his project as a “short-life toy of dimensions and organizations.”127 Abramson emphasises the contrast between Price’s illustration of the project and its industrial setting in East London: Fun Palace’s “promise of obsolescence” is heightened by the factory milieu and its “normative culture that entombs rather than empowers people.”128

A growing environmental sensibility threatened the general mood of optimism in the 60s. Published in 1962, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring had revealed the frightful effects of industrial chemicals on people and nature. The book made global audiences face the downsides of development and contributed to the formation of the environmental movement. In her doctoral thesis about ecological thought in architecture, Penny Lewis (2019) writes of the impact first images of the earth from space had on environ mental thinking. Space missions were a triumph of human power, but they also had a contrary effect: floating aloof amidst the vast blackness of space, the earth suddenly appeared limited and fragile. If nature had been thought of as something for humans to cultivate and make productive, now it no longer seemed vast and empty. The hostile nothingness of space highlighted humankind’s dependency on the ecological system. Along with ecological concern, the new perspective on earth forced politicians and economists to acknowledge the scarcity of resources, especially oil, and the rate it was being used up.129

The 1960s and 70s produced disparate responses to the environmental concern. Lewis notes that ecological thinking was influenced simultaneously by advocates of new technologies, such as Fuller, and “critics of technocracy and modernization”.130 Many people were uneasy about the continuous development of new technologies. Together with the space race, the era was defined by the formidable presence of nuclear weapons. Memories of Hiro shima and Nagasaki served as a reminder that the power to produce came with the power to destroy.

1968

Apollo 8 liftoff, 1968.

The contradiction is evident in the architectural displays of the era: while Bernard Rudofsky was exhibiting Architecture Without Architects at MoMa (11/1964–2/1965), the New York World’s Fair (04/1964–04/1965) was shaped by the space age. Technological expendability lived alongside evolving concepts of ecology. Steve Parnell examines opposing ideologies in the late 1960s and early 1970s issues of London architecture magazine AD. Under the influence of the Archgram generation, the magazine’s plastic aesthetic was in stark contrast with the awakening environmental sensibility. Nevertheless, for years scarcity and expendability lived side by side within the pages of AD. According to Parnell, year 1968, characterised by space exploration and global protest, marked the entry into the “era of paradox”. The same year when the Paris group Utopie proposed ’blow-up expendability’ of inflatable structures as a political response to the entombing power of the establish ment, the magazine was running articles on recycling. 131

Daniel Abramson describes the varied architectural responses to obsolescence. There were multiple strategies to lengthening the life-cycle of build ings. For instance, adaptable design could allow longer lifespans since it would make it possible to modify the building if there is a change in function. The “factory shed”—the fit-for-all solution of Mies van der Rohe¬–could ensure a long life for the structural steel elements by an open plan that could be divided according to function. ”The purposes for which a building is used are constantly changing and we cannot afford to tear down the building each time,” Mies wrote. Thus, the building was to last longer than its function.132 An alternative solution for adaptability was the megastructure. Envisioned particularly by the Metabolist group in Japan, these buildings combined a massive structural frame and separate, movable units that could be attached to and detached from the frame or replaced by renewed units when the orig inal ones no longer stood the test of time. 133

Alternatively, architectural form could be stabilised over time. When function was in constant flux, a building could be made to last by rejecting the association between form and function. The concept of the ‘decorated shed’ by Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown separates the “program matic function” of the generic shed structure from the “messaging form” of the symbolic façade: “If a building outlives its present use, just stick in a new

function and put up a new sign”.134 The decorated shed reduces architecture to efficient, flexible space—anonymous in its core, dressed up to portray its temporal function. The monumental architecture of Louis Kahn and Aldo Rossi separated form function with a very different effect. Instead of treating the building as an efficient core for any function, the architects prioritised form over function. By understanding architecture in monumental and symbolic terms indifferent to function, it cannot be devalued by change in use. Independent from function, built form becomes immune to obsolescence. 135 Preservationists contested the obsolescence paradigm. Much like movements for environmental protection, movements for preservation were born from dissatisfaction in the results of specialist development and mistrust in the efforts of the establishment to manage change. These movements can be characterised as “bottom-up” as opposed to development led by the in dustry and experts, although supporters often included professionals such as architects.136 In New York, the demolition of Penn Station (1900–1963) caused a public uproar. In London, the Euston station demolition (1838–1961) had a similar effect—the event was called the “Euston murder” by the Smithson’s.137 Both demolitions have later been referred to as culminat ing points for the conservation movement, as the bitterness united preser vationists and motivated them to prevent further losses of cultural heritage. Although the demolition of historic landmarks caused the biggest stir, in the 1960s, preservation was extended to younger and more mundane buildings as well.138 Their demolition was perceived as a threat to social cohesion. Jane Jacobs was among the most vocal critics of top-down urban re newal in America. She was the arch-enemy of Robert Moses, whose Lower Manhattan Expressway scheme threatened to wipe off housing blocks in her neighbourhood, Greenwich Village. Moses’s plan benefitted from the 1949 Housing Act that had provided federal funding for “slum clearance.” In her, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961), Jacobs argued that the areas branded slums were actually vibrant communities, threatened to be razed and replaced by sterile modern development.139 According to Jacobs, “cities need old buildings,” not only because of their heritage value but because they provide spaces for different kinds of activities than new buildings.

Michael Thompson, discussed earlier in the chapter 2.4. Waste and value, theorised the elite interest in worn-out lower-income neighborhoods in relation to his idea of ‘transient’ and ‘durable’ commodities. Thompson argues, that instead being the cause of poor living standards, slums become slums through the social process that labels them slums:

“slums are socially determined and such physical, physiological, and economic considerations as poor living standards, lack of services and amenities, poor health, dampness, inadequate light, inadequate cooking facilities, overcrowding, high fire risk, whilst real enough are essentially the by-products of a concealed social process.”140

A building that represents “our glorious heritage” may outlive the nation because it is maintained in accordance to its perceived value. But, if a building is considered a shack, it makes no sense to waste resources on its upkeeping—should there even be any. Slums are equivalent to the category of rubbish, transient objects at the end of their valuable life. According to Thompson, however, rubbish can be revalued as a durable. In the case of Victorian terraced houses in North-London, this happened when middle-class occupants moved in and took up expensive renovations. In the possession of the higher income groups, the houses turned into valuable heritage. Thompson calls this a “self-perpetuating system”: Owning durable objects benefits their owner, since they become even more valuable in time. Simultaneously, people with high status have the power to make their objects durable. 141

When the preservationist movement revaluated the obsolete, the logic of creative destruction was called into question. However, accord ing to Abramson, preservation did not change the social terms according to which the city was being developed: “Both [obsolescence and preservation] rationalised change in elite interests. Preservation provided built ideals of elite resilience in the midst of wholesale change.” 142 Demolition was no longer the only way to clear the site for capital accumulation. Instead, preservation was “coopted” into the urban renewal agenda. In adaptive reuse, investors found a way to profit without discarding past

investments. According to Abramson “adaptive reuse reversed obsolescence’s architectural logic, but not its social effects.” 143 The physical urban framework was preserved, but areas would still undergo gentrification. Urban face-lifts had the effect of elevating the socioeconomic status of the area and driving away lower-income groups, industry and small businesses:

“In the gentrified city, the fabric remains but the community is cleared out. Gentrification renders, in effect, the previous inhabitants obsolete, devalued in their worth to the contemporary city, to be replaced by higher-value set tlers. The desire, even the fetish, for a seemingly more authentic habitation came at the cost of just those people and uses that had made the place seem ”real.” Gentrification is in effect the neutron bomb of urban renewal: build ings intact, people gone.”144

In the 60s and 70s, there was a strive to open up the architectural perspective towards a broader outlook on the environment. Consequently, many architecture faculties renamed themselves “Department of the Environment,” where the environment could be understood either by social or ecological terms.145 There were those who, like Reyner Banham, made rhetorical play with ecological concepts. In his book Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies , Banham observes the distinct man-made environments of the city through the concept of ecology. At the Aspen Conference (1970), Jean Baudrillard of the French group Utopie attacked Banham in an open letter accusing him and his fellow environmentalists of naïve idealism. In Baudrillard’s view, the discourse around ecology gained popularity at the expense of social and political issues. Furthermore, the environment could be used to silence political protest and normalise the prevailing conditions by turning the focus from the “ugly reality of social relations” to an idealised conception of nature. 146 Baudrillard wrote that generating a “sense of collective guilt” was a convenient way to unify people at a time of political disarray. Additionally, he criticised the medi calising approach to society: 147

“It is not true that society is ill, that nature is ill. The therapeutic mythology which tried to convince us that if things are going wrong it is due to microbes, to viruses or some biological dysfunctions, this therapeutic mythology hides the political fact, the historical fact that it is a question of social structures and social contradictions, and not a question of illness or deficient metabolism which could easily be cured.”148

In short, the 1960s and 1970s generation of architects were attacking the modernist legacy in multiple fronts, from their universal solutions to the underlying worldview. The wider dispersion of culture in the 1960 paral leled the emergence of a ”more nuanced approach to urban change”149 that contested the former idea of wiping off the old urban structure and solving the city for good. Yet, the theorists of obsolescence before them, the 1960s generation of architects emphasised the quantitative aspects of building performance detriment to “affective values of fashion and taste, desire and memory.” Furthermore, they made predictions of future patterns of change based on the past dynamics of the urban environment.150 The consciousness of limited resources contested visions of expendable architecture. However, the post-modernist emphasis on individual liberty was in contrast with the realization of scarcity. *

By the mid-1970s, the status of obsolescence as the naturalised mode of change became defeated by preservation. The term ‘sustainability’ became common in the architectural discourse in the 1980s.151 Lewis characterises the period from the 70s to the 90s as a time when sustainability was integrat ed into mainstream politics. As a policy concern, there was less critical debate around sustainability. It affected building practice but was discussed less in architectural theory.152

Abramson finds similarities between obsolescence and sustainability. Both are ”simplified models of change that attempt to discipline time and idealise its shape”. Each model is based on measurable performance: “archi tectural worth is reduced to expert numbers.” It is not clear that obsolescence

and sustainability are mutually exclusive. Contemporary visions of sustainable architecture are fused with new technologies: “capitalism, which sired ob solescence a century ago, generates profits today from sustainability’s technophilia.” These technologies make the built environment increasingly subject to technical obsolescence. Thus, obsolescence prevails as the “subordinate” of sustainability.153

Abandoned 1960s office building in Kera, Espoo, 2020.

Dobraszczyk, 2007, p. 359.

Engels, 1844, as cited in Benevolo, 1967, p. 30.

Benevolo, 1967, p. 23.

e.g., Abramson, 2017, p. 12–14.

Engels, 1844, as cited in Benevolo, 1967, p. 29–30.

Benevolo, 1967, p. 12–13.

Ibid., p. 32.

Epidemics had similar effects in other countries as well. For developements in Finland see Saarinkangas, 2002.

Benevolo, 1967, p. 85–104.

Ibid., p. 89.

Ibid.

Forty, 1986, p. 159.

Saarikangas, 2002, p. 49.

Ibid., p. 51.

Forty, 1986, p. 160.

Saarikangas, 2002, p 52; see also: Forty, 1986.

Colomina, 2019, p. 10.

Ibid., p. 16.

Colomina, 2019, who writes on p. 64–65: “Tuberculosis helped make modern architecture modern. It is not that modern architects made modern sanatoriums. Rather, sanatoriums modernized archi tects.”

Douglas, 2002, p. 3.

Forty, 1986, p. 12.

Loos, 1908, as cited in Conrads, 1970, p. 21.

Ibid., p. 22.

Ibid., p. 23.

Ibid.

Forty, 1986, p. 159.

Ibid., p. 160.

Laporte, 2000, p. 13.

Ibid., p. 14.

Ibid., p. 29.

Ibid., p. 56.

Benevolo, 1967, p. XIII: ”This was the expla nation for the uncommitted and dependent nature of main experiments in town planning after 1848, behind which loomed the political paternalism of the new right.”

Laporte, 2000, p. 56.

El-Khoury in Laporte, 2000, p. X.

Le Corbusier, 1924/1998, p. 176.

Ibid., p. 163.

Ibid., p. 164.

Ibid., p. 163.

e.g. this was the case with ‘Maison Blanche’, the house Le Corbusier designed for his parents in La Chaux-de-Fonds (1912) which ended up being more expensive than he expected.

Hall, 2007, p. 220–222.

As cited in Benevolo, 1967, p. 104.

Hall, 2007, p. 220–222.

Le Corbusier, 1924/1998, p. 284.

Ibid., p. 93.

Ibid., p. 257.

Giedion, 1938, writes about Haussmann’s achievements but criticises the mixing of different functions, e.g. on p. 495: “Tenement houses artificially bring together functions which, in an industrial society, should be kept strictly separate. It is absurd in an age of industrial production to permit residence, labor, and traffic

to intermingle. It is not merely the endless streets that are inhuman but the units that go to make them up as well.”

47 Le Corbusier, 1925, as cited in Conrads, 1970, p. 93.

48 Le Corbusier, 1924/1998, p. 254.

49 According to Le Corbusier, 1924/1998, p. 277–278, he had told the heads of three car companies that “The motor has killed the great city. The motor must save the great city.” and asked them to finance his efforts to concentrate public notice on urban planning and improving living conditions “which have been so profoundly affected by machinery”.

50 Le Corbusier, 1924/1998, p. 288. 51 Ibid., p. 287 footnotes with a clarification that “This was not the object of the plan.” 52 Ibid., p. 287. 53 Ibid., p. 281, adding in footnotes an encouragement for readers to take a walk in these districts both in the day time and at night: “They would be surprised!”

Ibid.

Saint’Elia & Marinetti, 1914, as cited in Conrads, 1970, p. 35–36.

Ibid., p. 36

Marinetti & Cinti, 1914, as cited in Conrads, 1970, p. 38.

58 Le Corbusier, 1925, as cited in Conrads, 1970, p. 91.

59 Le Corbusier, 1924/1998, who writes on p. 193: “It bores me more than I can say to describe, like some minor prophet, this future City of

the Blest. It makes me imagine I have become a Futurist, a sensation I do not at all appreciate.”

Abramson, 2016, p. 63.

Le Corbusier 1925 in Conrads, 1970, p. 91.

Banham, 1963, as cited in Frampton, 1992, p. 270.

CIAM, 1943, § 78.

Ibid., § 69.

Ibid., § 70.

Banham, 1963, in Frampton, 1980/1994, p. 270.

Le Corbusier, 1920, as cited in Conrads, 1970, p. 62.

Le Corbusier, 1924/1998, p. 301: “I have been very careful not to depart from the technical side of my problem. I am an architect; no one is going to make a politician out of me… Economic and social progress can only be the result of technical problems which have found a proper solution.”

Instead he backs it with his famous metaphor of the man’s road and the donkey’s road: “a man walks straight because he has a goal…”

Le Corbusier, 1925, as cited in Conrads, 1970, p. 89.

Hall, 2007, pp. 224–225, suspects that this is because during the Great Depression capitalists lost the capacity to fund him.

af Schulten, 1926, pp. 152–153.

Blomstedt, 1928, pp. 26–27.

General Research Division, The New York Public Library, 1935.

Hall, 2007, p. 312.

Ibid. But in a way, Wright had anticipated the

direction American urbanization would take after the second World War.

Giedion, 1938, p. 547.

Abramson, 2016, p. 16, writes that the English word ’obsolescence’ was applied to the built environment for the first time in American cities around 1910.

Abramson, 2016.

Ibid., pp. 20–21.

Ibid., p. 29.

Helander, 1972, s. 21.

Abramson, 2016, p. 1.

Ibid., p. 63.

Banham, 1960, p. 329.

Abramson, 2016, p. 63; see also Saarikangas, p. 237.

Byles, 2005, p. 111.

Le Corbusier, 1924/1998, pp. 253–276.

Ibid., pp. 287–288.

Walter Gropius, 1926, as cited in Conrads, 1970, p. 95.

Ibid., p. 96.

Hall, 2007, p. 224.

Aalto, 1929, p. 97.

Häring, 1927, as cited in Conrads, 1970, p. 104.

Ibid., pp. 103–105.

Hoetger, 1928, as cited in Conrads, 1970, p. 108.

Forty, 1986, p. 108.

Ibid., pp. 114–115.

Saarikangas, 2002, p. 12.

Ibid., p. 21.

Colomina, 2019, p. 26.

Forty, 1986, p. 170.

Strasser, 1999.

Campbell, 1897, as cited in Forty, 1986, p. 122.

Saarikangas, 2002.

Forty, 1986, p. 119.

Strasser, 1999, p. 190–191.

Forty, 1986, p. 216.

Strasser, 1999, p. 183.

Ibid., p. 187.

Forty, 1986, pp. 210–212.

Strasser, 1999, p. 173.

Farnsworth, 1953, as cited in Colomina, 2019, pp. 145–146.

Abramson, 2016, p. 105.

Ibid., p. 64.

Fuller in Banham, 1960, p. 326.

Lewis, 2019.

Jencks & Kropf, 1999, p. 218–219.

Smithson & Smithson, 1962, as cited in Jencks & Kropf, 1999, p. 218–219.

Abramson, 2016, p. 67.

Banham, 1960, p. 12.

Ibid., p. 327.

Ibid., p. 329.

Ibid., 329–330. (Parnell, 2012)

Parnell, 2012, 132.

Ibid., p. 133.

Price, 1968, in Abramson, 2016, p. 102.

Ibid., p. 103.

Ibid.

Lewis, 2019.

Parnell, 2012, p. 133.

Mies van der Rohe, 1958, as cited in Abramson, 2016, p. 85.

Abramson, 2016, p. 93.

Ibid., p. 125.

Ibid., p. 122–124.

Ibid., p. 127.

Ibid., p. 110, p. 130.

Ibid., p. 111.

Ibid., p. 109.

Thompson, 1979/2017, p. 50.

Ibid., p. 26.

Abramson, 2016, p. 111.

Ibid., p. 117.

Ibid., p. 117–118.

Lewis, 2019, p. 151, pp. 156–157.

146 Baudrillard in Abramson, 2016, p. 151: “nothing better than a touch of ecology and catastrophe to unite the social classes…Social relations with their conflicts and history are completely rejected in favor of nature.”

147 Lewis, 2019, p. 154.

Utopie Leaflet in Banham Archives Banham, 1970, as cited in Lewis, 2019, p. 155.

Abramson, 2016, p. 96.

Ibid., p. 78.

Ibid., p. 132.

Lewis., 2019, p. 159.

Abramson, 2016, p. 139.

4.0

RECYCLE, REUSE, REDUCE, REFUSE

4.1 Post mortem

One autumn Tuesday, I took a tram with my friend to the Eastern part of Helsinki downtown. We had arranged a tour at a construction waste management facility. The site was located next to a new urban neighbourhood, marked by three brand new skyscrapers towering 40 stories. It was a rare sight in central Helsinki: a vast open area, divided by metal fences—construction site, concrete factory, waste depot. Trucks coming and going, leaving behind piles of debris for other trucks to collect. We were surprised to find the waste management facility of the environmental services company Delete occupy ing a narrow plot, only about half a hectare large. Each day, an average of 70 tons of waste from Helsinki’s construction sites enters this area. The heaps of wood, metal, plastic and mixed junk pile up at day and are loaded into con tainers at night. Then they are shipped off to different destinations, some to be used as new raw material, some for energy recovery. Leftovers will enter a shredder, and transform into unrecognizable light fractioned material which can be capsuled into landfills. In the morning, there is room for more stuff.1

Companies like Delete operate under the Finnish waste law that follows the standards set in the EU Waste Framework Directive.2 The Directive was last updated as part of the 2018 Circular Economy Package. The central goal of the new legislation was to reduce the amount of waste produced in member states by increasing reuse and recycling. The Commission is steering Europe from the “take-make-consume-throw away” pattern of linear economy towards circularity. Waste will be minimized by maintaining the value of

products and materials as long as possible. The Union is counting on Circular Economy as a means to “create an optimal business environment for sustaina ble growth, job creation and innovation” in the age of depleted resources and the environmental crisis.3

In 2018, 35,9 % of all waste produced in the EU resulted from con struction and demolition activities.4 New legislation sets a goal of recycling a minimum of 70 % of the total volume of construction waste, excluding major mineral waste, as material. “The updated waste law will have a major effect on Delete’s operations,” says Henri Pesonen, Delete’s head of environmental services. Our meeting with Pesonen and Juha Mitro, the area man ager in Helsinki, takes place in a blue construction booth with a view to the junkyard. As they tell us about the company and the functioning of the site, outside the window, an excavator is sorting out larger chunks from the stack of mixed waste into their appropriate piles.

The waste brought here is not representative of the entire variety of discard materials produced by the construction industry. The most substantial waste stream is, in fact, soil. It is collected separately at construction sites and mostly ends up in landfills. Concrete and brick are transported directly to the company’s own waste management plants. The debris is crushed into aggre gate that can be used in civil engineering projects, such as road construction. Chemical waste and hazardous materials like asbestos are also collected sepa rately and treated elsewhere.

Sometimes pristine leftover materials are brought to the waste depot, but they have to be treated like everything else that enters the site. We are told that companies that receive waste materials for recycling have high standards as to what they accept. Material recyclable on paper may be disqualified and end up burned or landfilled instead. For instance, in theory, gypsum board is recyclable, but if the material is painted or otherwise contaminated, it will not be taken in.5

Afterwards, we take a closer look at the junk heaps. The largest mound on the yard consists of mixed construction waste. Closer, we distinguish pieces of wood, toilet seats, domestic appliances, and plastic tubes. “Judging by the amount of furniture, this probably comes from some rental apartment scheme,” Pesonen says. We watch a truck empty another skip, filled with

Waste generation in the EU in 2018 according to Eurostat statistics.

Waste hierarchy as stated in the EU Waste Framework Directive.

skirting boards and kitchen cupboards. “These here,” Pesonen says, pointing at a stack of colourful plastic pipes, “will be taken in to be recycled.” But the pile of wood towering next to it is a trickier issue. At present, there is a lack of alternatives in Finland when it comes to reusing wood, not least because of the high supply of virgin material. The current practice of burning waste wood for energy is not in line with the EU waste hierarchy that favours reuse and recycling over energy recovery.

We are here to talk about waste, but eventually, the discussion turns towards demolition. If buildings would undergo a less violent process of unbuilding, wouldn’t it increase the number of construction elements that could be reused? Of course, it would require more work and more time, but historically there would be nothing new in favouring deconstruction over demolition. Jeff Byles gives a lively account of the history of the demolition trade in his book Rubble: Unearthing the History of Demolition (2005). According to Byles, before the modernist period, demolition was practically “construction in reverse”:

A structure would be stripped of its fixtures and appliances; its wood trim and flooring pried up, studiously denailed, and tied in bundles; plaster pulled down; then lath popped off of each wall and ceiling; non-load-bearing studs uprooted; and finally bricks lopped away and cleaned by fiendish characters (sometimes called Klondikers) known to knock the mortar off five thousand bricks a day. Laborious, yes. Wasteful, no. It was an elegant way to wreck.6

The development of construction materials and techniques altered demolition strategies. Byles gives the example of cement replacing lime mortar as the binder in brick structures. While lime mortar was soft, Portland cement that became popular in the late 1920s was “an industrial strength superglue that drove wreckers to despair”. Instead of breaking into neat pieces that could be cleaned and stored for further use, new brick structures broke into chunks that were dumped as useless.7 Around the same time, speed became the prime measure of success in the wrecking trade. An early exemplar is the Gillender Building in New York. After its short life of 13 years, the skyscraper was taken down in 1909 with an accordingly unprecedented pace in just 45

Delete waste depot, 2021.

days. The job was done in such haste that there was not enough time to sort out all the materials fit for resale.8 Neither was this possible after demolition techniques became more aggressive. Explosives increasingly became a part of a wrecker’s toolkit by the mid 20th century. Building impositions are carefully planned and controlled but leave little more than heaps of rubble for dumping.

The transition to circular economy is already effecting demolition practice. A demolition guide published by the Environmental Ministry of Finland in 2019 emphasizes the role of demolition in increasing the circulation of construction materials. 9 As their operation produces waste, demolition companies are obliged to follow the waste law that is based on the waste hierarchy. Accordingly, the guide places special attention on the importance of reuse and recycling, along with safe removal of hazardous substances. A significant part of the work that makes construc tion material circulation possible is done already at the demolition site: detaching components that are fit for reuse and sorting waste materials for recycling.

The waste hierarchy favours building component reuse over material recycling, but its realization contains many challenges. Harvesting building parts for reuse is labour intensive and time consuming. Until 2021 Finnish waste law stated that waste materials should be kept separate to the extent that it is “necessary and technically and economically possible”10 for the purposes of preventing environmental or heath damage, applying the waste hierarchy and otherwise organising proper waste management. The article was updated in 2021 to a more specific and stricter form to promote mate rial circulation in its highest value. Yet, exceptions are allowed on technical and economic grounds.11 For demolition and waste management compa nies, financial realities dictate the feasibility of increased recycling. In prac tice, the idea of returning value to waste has not yet actualized in Delete’s operations. While metals have a positive value, and the value of scrap wood is somewhere around zero, overall the company still pays for getting rid of waste.12 Current legislation is not in favour of building component reuse, either. Speaking of some concrete sandwich elements we saw at the Delete waste depot, Pesonen says that already the requirement of CE marking13 for building products practically prevents their reuse. There are grounds for regulation, too, as legislators need to ensure the safety of the products entering the market.

Viewed from the dumpsite, the idea of ever achieving perfect material circulation seems downright utopian. Along with technical challenges, what appears to be at play here are the conflicting interests of ecological sustainability and the market. As circular economy has become the magic word within disparate disciplines involved in waste management as well as sustain able building, it has become increasingly difficult to trace its exact meaning. The term has even been called an “empty signifier”14—loaded with promises of a better future under which contrary outlooks on how exactly this future will look like are buried. In the introduction to a special issue of the journal Culture and Organization on the contested realities of the circular economy Corvellec & al. write that despite its radical origins, circular economy has lost its critical potential and become the child of “neo-classic economic theory and ecological modernization paradigm.”15 This is evident in the emphasis on economic growth in the way EU frames circular economy.16

This is not to deny the importance of circular practices, but rather to remark that they should not escape critical consideration. The more hope we place on vague concepts, the more their content and use needs to be scrutinised. It makes a massive difference whether circular economy is understood first and foremost as a way to ensure continuous growth in spite of the de pletion of natural resources, or as means to make human lifestyle compatible with the ecological systems of the planet.

Critical waste scholars have pointed out, that the evolving practices of circular economy effect the way objects come to be defined waste. Recycling may even encourage disposal by making throwing things out appear ecolog ically sound and morally justifiable.17 As long as things are produced and consumed in excessive amounts, a society excluding its leftovers to recycling centres is no radical evolution to one that externalises its residue to organized waste management. Whether it is shipped to dumps or for recycling, with rubbish out of sight, we may happily go one with our lifestyle of excess. According to Valkonen & al., closing material circulation even to some extent requires reconsidering the culture of consumption. The total flow of material extracted and consumed will have to be reduced to make human lifestyle environmentally sustainable.18

If circular economy of the built environment is understood primarily in terms of ecological sustainability, the preference of reuse over disposal makes it work towards the same goals as preservation.19 After all, approaching buildings through the waste hierarchy means avoiding demolition at all cost. The reuse of old buildings in their highest value means seeing them as spatial reserves rather than material reserves.20 In her doctoral thesis Building ‘Post-Growth’: Quanti fying and Characterizing Resources in the Building Stock (2016), Satu Huuhka examines the resources embedded in the Finnish building stock. According to her, Finland, like most European countries, is shifting from a growth-oriented construction sector to one where new construction is surpassed by repairing and adapting the existing stock to changing needs. She envisions a ‘post-growth’ building culture that operates on the first three levels of the waste hierarchy: prevention, reuse, and recycling.21 The waste hierarchy favours renovating old buildings and adapting them to new uses. Component reuse and material recy cling are only secondary options when demolition is inevitable.

Eventually, we come back to the question of demolition. In this thesis, demolition has been conceptualised as a waste management practice. De fining something waste, however, precedes the act of disposal. Huuhka has taken this into account in her research: in addition to demolished buildings, she examines the vacant and thus underperforming part of the build ing stock. Although she cannot unambiguously show a correlation between demolition and vacancy, disuse and disrepair are regularly used as arguments to justify destruction.

Building stock researchers have made attempts to theorise the reasons behind demolition. For instance, writers have distinguished between prob lem-driven demolition intending to solve issues in the existing built envi ronment and product-driven demolition, motivated by the need to clear a particular site for another use. Furthermore, a distinction has been made between profit- and quality-driven demolition: demolition motivated by financial gain or, on the other hand, to improve the quality of the built environment.22 Huuhka follows Hassler (2002) and Thomsen & van der Flier (2011) in distinguishing between functional, formal, economic, and social causes for demolition. Sometimes demolition follows changes in the use of a building or its ownership structure. A rise in land value can provoke the dem olition of unprofitable buildings, or alternatively, urban decay or segregation can result in demolition.23

These divisions can be read to imply that there is a simple and ration al cause behind each demolition decision. This is hardly the case, as one cannot understand the dynamics of the urban environment purely from the perspective of a single denominator such as economic value or physical condition. Models that portray the dynamics of the building stock tend to reduce the incredibly complex cultural, social, economic, and materi al factors that dictate the faith of each building into a simplified form. Nevertheless, analysing different motives for demolition is a step towards a more comprehensive understanding of the phenomenon that has been ap proached rather mechanistically in quantitative research. Since the 1980s, population mortality models have been applied to theorise demolition patterns.24 Huuhka criticises the continued use of the “life-table method”, which assumes the entire building stock to be subject to similar dynamics,

even though the mortality of the building stock is more accurately portrayed as dynamic aka varying between different cohorts of the stock and also in time.25

Thomsen and van der Flier (2011) connect demolition with obsolescence, defined broadly as the “process of declining performance resulting in the end of the service life” of a building.26 The writers recognise building obsolescence only partly as a physical phenomenon: “It is essentially a function of human action or disregard.” Besides problems in the building itself or its surround ings, obsolescence can be related to the social context or maintenance of the building. The survival of a building requires ”regular reinvestments in main tenance and adaptation.” In other words, buildings live as long as they are maintained and not demolished.

In light of Abramson’s study on obsolescence, models that portray the dynamics of the building stock contain a risk of becoming normative. There is a history to building life cycle predictions making people act accordingly.27

Since “behavioural aspects” have the biggest impact on the survival of build ings,28 predicting life cycles based on former dynamics can have the effect of normalising those dynamics in the future. Furthermore, terms like ‘mor

Construction waste in the Kangerlussuaq dump, 2021.

tality rate’ and ‘life-cycle’ obscure the fact that buildings are not biological organisms that age physically until they die. From an economic perspective, buildings may be conceptualized as capital that gradually loses value through physical decline before invariably becoming obsolete. Yet, if all buildings were subject to the same logic of devaluation, there would not be such a thing as “our glorious heritage”.29 Building performance can be quantitatively measured to some extent, but qualifying buildings inevitably comes down to “sub jective valorisation”.30 This valorisation takes place in the messy socio-cultural realm and cannot be quantified.

Although there have been attempts to scrutinise the grounds of demoli tion, quantitative research has not succeeded in producing a comprehensive theory of the dynamics of the building stock. However, some general findings have been made: older buildings usually live longer than younger buildings, and the function of the building along with its ownership structure has a significant impact on demolition. For instance, owner-occupied apartment buildings appear to have longer lifespans than rental buildings.31 In light of this thesis, Satu Huuhka makes an interesting revelation: According to her, new construction was the most common reason for demolition. 32 The old and obsolete gave way to the new and ideal. In the context of the environ mental crisis, this is particularly ironic, as the ecological performance of new construction is usually presented without reference to the old building that was demolished to make way for the new.

The current dynamics of the building stock manifest the same contradiction that is evident in waste production in general. Growth means more construction and demolition, while at the other end, there is an endeavour to minimise waste. Design and architecture are conventionally problem-solving activities, and thus inclined to adapt a managemental approach to waste: Building component reuse and material recycling are proposed as solutions to the waste problem. However, approaching construction waste merely as a technical challenge shifts focus from the systems that produce waste in the first place. Evolving practices of circular economy also affect the way buildings are defined waste. Developing feasible alternatives for construction ma terial recycling may lead to a situation where it is easier to justify demolition, even though repair and reuse would be more ecologically sustainable options.

Circular economy does not allow us to continue business as usual: Instead, prioritising ecological sustainability means questioning the grounds of con struction and demolition. Otherwise, waste is reduced only semantically by calling it a by-product instead.

4.2 Living in a material world?

The dominant scientific worldview relies on a materialist understanding of reality. Behind our everyday experience, the world consists of material and energy. All events, including our thoughts and feelings, can be reduced to material facts. Science provides access to information about the world. This knowledge about physical reality has enabled us to control natural processes and transform the environment according to human needs. Human beings are simultaneously a part of nature and governed by its laws—and set apart from it as subjects capable of reading, interpreting and controlling reality.

The ability to know the world has been believed to distinguish humans from other species. Enlightenment philosopher René Descartes and his fellow rationalists deemed consciousness a feature unique to humans alone. Descartes believed that, unlike other animals, humans have a non-physical mind. While other beings are mechanically living out their species-specific behaviour, only humans are capable of rational action.

Rapid developments in science and technology in the last three centuries have given legitimacy to the scientific method. We have learned to look at things through a feeling of control: built in our language, drawn on our maps, and launched into orbit. As long as our conception of the world appears con sistent with the reality around us, the illusion may persist. Mostly things and events that are not significant to us simply pass unnoticed and ignored. But sometimes, we come face to face with the blind spots of our reasoning system— such as waste, that refuses to disappear, however much we try to hide it.

Besides its ontological meaning, the word ‘materialism’ is used for de scribing the contemporary lifestyle, where material possessions and comfort have surpassed spiritual values. Here, the word carries a negative connotation and refers to a change of mentality that has occurred at some point in near history. Habits such as compulsive shopping or competing over who has the

fastest car can be read as markers of a materialistic lifestyle. The desire to possess these objects hardly correlates with their functional value. Neither do new possessions stop the materialist from desiring more. Many people are surrounded by so many things that they are starting to become a nuisance. So many that rather than identifying them as individual objects, it is more convenient to talk of them in mass terms: stuff, clutter, junk.

What drives modern consumers to work day in day out to fill our apart ments with an excessive amount of stuff—and to buy new, bigger apartments that can be filled with more stuff? According to sociologist Turo-Kimmo Lehtonen, it is not material in itself. In fact, he claims that the notion of con temporary consumerism as materialism is flawed. We are not interestde in material, but consumption is driven by ideas.33

Think of advertisements. They do not provide technical data of the material consistency or measurements of products. Instead, they portray the cultural context: an entire lifestyle, an ideal depiction of who you would become if only you purchased this particular object. But the creation and distribution of ideals is not the realm of advertising professionals alone. To a great extent, the job of producing new needs has been outsourced to social media users. The Instagram image stream offers an endless sea of possibilities to like and identify to.

The most comprehensive yet naturalised idea of our time is money. Commodification reduces all things to the single quantifiable idea of monetary value, overriding a multitude of meanings with a universal currency.34 Lehtonen refers to Simmel’s essay on money. Simmel stated that in the modern society, everything has functional value to the extent that money, the measure of value, actually be comes the ultimate object.35 And wealth has its own aesthetic of brand names, exquisite materials, minimal hi-tech transparency, not to forget fast cars.

Buildings, too, are places of representation. This is evident in the history of the modern home.36 Adrian Forty wrote how the home has served as an extension of the female identity, a canvas upon which she may inflict her feminine mystique and unique personality, constructed by the objects available on the market.37 Susan Strasser depicted how fast fashion was introduced to American homes in the form of colour-coded towels and bathroom fixtures.38

Homes have always been carriers of cultural symbolism, but the features as pired for in a home have varied with place and time.

In his book Culture and consumption: New Approaches to the Symbolic Character of Consumer Goods and Activities (1988), Grant McCracken gives an in-depth projection of a relationship to the home that has become atypical in the modern era. Lois Roget is an elderly lady in charge of a humble estate that has remained in the family for several generations. The house and the objects are the remnants of her family heritage. Each item has its unique history—the “pretty little plates” belonged to an aunt from England, and the oil lamp in the living room brings back memories from Lois’s childhood. Together, the items form a sort of an archive to which Lois, as the one in possession of both the articles and the stories behind them, has a curatorial role. McCracken stresses the significance of memories as the basis of how Lois values the items:

When asked to describe her possessions, she made a strong and consistent dis tinction between the pieces that were family pieces and those that were not. She tended to dwell on the family pieces and to recite the family members and stories associated with them. The other non-family pieces, on the other hand, were often dismissed as being “of no significance” and “just a chair.”39

It is the family connection that makes items valuable for Lois. She has no particular interest in acquiring antiques. She likes to look at them but cares not about possessing objects for their age, style, beauty, or historical associations. One might say that it is not the items that form the actual content of the collection. The objects merely serve as memorabilia of past events and late relatives, materialising the history of the family. McCracken calls such a pattern of consumption “curatorial consumption”, defining it as “a pattern of consumption, in which an individual treats his or her possessions as having strong mnemonic value, and entertains a sense of responsibility to these possessions that enjoins their conservation, display, and safe transmission.”40

The way Lois values the objects in her home reveals the way she positions herself to society: through her heritage. In the modern world, the transfer of items down multiple generations has become rare. Instead, most people choose their furniture and decorate their homes according to their individual tastes. Consumer choice is not merely a utilitarian decision but simultane

ously an act of identity construction. Where Lois’s family handed down their possessions to her along with the meanings they convey, an average modern family “is called upon to select from a range of possible consumer goods and the range of quite different cultural meanings these goods carry.”41 Instead of taking charge of the stories of previous generations, modern consumers are both free and compelled to reinvent themselves.

In many European countries, modernisation institutionalised social relation ships and decreased the significance of the family, replacing it with the ideal of a free individual. The decline of the former societal order based on rank and its replacement by one based on wealth produced entirely new languages of social distinction. In the current consumer culture, this is visible in the rapid change of fashion and the striving to invent ever new technologies, materials, and products. Social media makes trends spread faster and wider than ever before. And when ideals change, the real becomes unsatisfactory: It is the material world that needs to conform to ideals and not the other way around.

Modernism brought with it an aesthetic of hygiene and order. Instead of family heirlooms and elaborate ornamentation, bare surfaces and empty space became the measure of luxury in a modern home. Dirt philosopher Olli Lagerspetz compares the pioneering functionalist with the contempo rary house-cleaning apostle Marie Kondo,42 both advocates of a minimalist disposition quite the opposite of how Lois Roget relates to her possessions. One might say that Le Corbusier is the original declutterer. In Decorative Art of Today (1925), he laments over the prevailing cult for memorabilia and bric-à-brac. He writes that by making our homes into museums, we are being false to our destinies: “instead of leaving the mind free to explore the vast continent before us, we confine it in manacles, in the traps, dungeons and ditches of memory.”43 The functional home, on the other hand, is based on the biological realities of the human body and the mechanical realisation of its needs.44 Grant McCracken is interested in Lois Roget’s opinion on how the rest of us live and shows her a picture of a modern living room:

LR: Well, of course that is not my idea of home at all. That’s modern.

GM: How do you feel about a place that looks like that?

LR: I haven’t any feeling for it, none at all.45

For Le Corbusier, the disposal of the past signifies freedom and self-expression. But for someone like Lois Roget, the modern home is alienating and devoid of meaning. What the modernist minimalist and the collector of memorabilia have in common, however, is that neither seems to be particularly interested in the material in itself. Objects are viewed through their functional or mnemonic value as status symbols and materialisations of social connections. The value of material lies in its significance to the human sub ject. Lagerspetz finds it interesting that both the minimalist and the cura tor give a moral justification of their relationship to objects: “On one hand, keeping things represents loyalty, on the other hand it signifies unwillingness to take responsibility.”46

We are so used to measuring all things against ourselves and perceiving things first and foremost through their use-value that there is a tendency to forget that the world is in no way dependent on our existence. In recent decades, social sciences have seen a ‘material turn’ as scholars have started to criticise how the world is perceived through the subject-object divide. The disperse theories of ‘new materialism’ and ‘speculative realism’ share a notion of a ‘flat ontology’ where humans are displaced from the privileged position over other beings and objects. When human is reduced to the same level as non-human beings, human categorisations of the material world lose their authority. Things are not defined by human labels such as waste. In essence, waste is not a category of objects at all.

In her book Vibrant Matter, political theorist Jane Bennett makes an attempt to rethink the dialectical relationship between life and matter. According to Bennett, our utilitarian gaze prevents us from taking the vibrancy of matter seriously. While the current political discourse focuses on blaming individuals for environmental harms, to really understand social practices, it would be nec essary to understand the non-human practices that work within them. Seeing things as passive objects that can be formed according to our will prevents us from taking up ecologically sound politics: “my hunch is that the image of dead or thoroughly instrumentalised matter feeds human hubris and our earth-destroying fantasies of conquest and consumption.”47 She contests the traditional notion of the environment with a less human-centred idea of ‘vital materiality’ to depict the interconnectedness of all material substances, including humans.

Armchair in Mustamäe, Tallinn, 2020.

Bennett thinks that it is time to move away from the concept of objects towards a perception of things or vitality of matter in order to open up the possibilities of a non-human world. This is challenging, of course, because we can only view the world from our own subjective standpoint. In her lecture Art istry and Agency in a World of Vibrant Matter (2011) Bennett used hoarding as an example of a non-utilitarian relationship to material. While most people discard those objects that no longer serve our needs, hoarders do not view the items in the hoard primarily through their use-value. According to Bennett, the relationship between hoarders and the hoard differs from the conventional subject-object relationship between people and things. This is evident in how the hoarders in the reality TV show Hoarders deny responsibility for the hoard. Instead, most of them imply that the pile just accumulated. Bennett suggests that hoarders could be viewed as persons with a particular sensitivity to the “call of things”, who have truly internalised the spirit of capitalist accumulation. Not only do these people follow the urge to purchase things, but they like the stuff so much that they refuse to discard it like everyone else.48

Bennett makes use of Bruno Latour’s term ‘actant’. Like Bennett, sociologist Latour finds the subject-object divide problematic. Instead, he concep

tualises the world as a collective network of people and things that act. These actants form hybrid combinations of human- and non-human entities, where it is impossible to pinpoint whether it is human, nature or perhaps technol ogy acting. For Latour, the paradox of modernity is maintaining an idea of a distinction between human and non-human even though we are constantly dealing with hybrid concepts. Regardless of attempts of purification, it is im possible to separate nature and culture: the foundational division of moder nity remains conceptual. Rather than having obtained control over nature, the period we call ‘modern’ is characterised by an incapability to understand hybridity. Thus, we have never been modern.49

Industrial production and technological development may not have succeeded in separating the social and the natural, but modernisation has un doubtedly made our contact with material more hybrid and less direct. Contemporary urban dwellers may live their lives without giving much thought to the walls that surround them or the services and infrastructures they use—at least as long as everything functions as it should. Lehtonen writes that a basic notion in science and technology studies is that machines are mostly noticed when they do not work.50 Technical gadgets tend to be taken for granted as ‘black boxes’ that fulfil a particular function but exactly how the average user cannot quite comprehend. One only pays attention to the mechanical composition when a device does not work correctly. On such an occasion, a functioning whole is revealed as the complex assemblage of parts that it is.51

Chairs in Kilo, Espoo, 2020.

Without direct contact with production and repair, people have started to take the material reality for granted and become ignorant of the concrete challenges and physical labour behind images and ideals. According to Susan Strasser, industrialisation and mass production reassigned making things to “machine tenders with limited knowledge” compared to craftsmen.52 The val uation of handwork has suffered after people stopped making things themselves.53 Also, the amount of labour and time it takes to make something is quite impossible to grasp without first-hand experience.

Handwork came with the skills to fix things: the same material understanding and craftsmanship that goes into making a product is required for its repairing. As objects have become more complex and technical, their mend ing and maintenance have transferred from the owner to experts. One might be able to fix an old car, but newer models that are increasingly automated have become more difficult to repair. Furthermore, visions of a circular future shift primacy from objects to services. Things are only important as carriers of value. Instead of owning a car, the need to move around can be fulfilled by a car-sharing platform or bike rental app. Correspondingly, contemporary real-estate companies conceptualise homes as services marketed to given pre-defined target groups.

One might ask, will not infusing the built environment with technology make it increasingly prone to obsolescence? And will not institutionalising care and maintenance shorten the lifespan of objects? After all, the value of an item with significance to its owner does not necessarily correspond to its value in the market: One does not count the hours used to repair something dear. In this respect, replacing the mnemonic and sentimental meanings people project on their possessions with the service provision of anonymous objects may work against the environmental agenda.

It appears that the contemporary consumer is trapped between opposing ideals. We live in an endless stream of new and improved products and fashions that not only promise to surpass the old ones but to change lives and raise individuals to higher levels of existence. On the other hand, there persists an ideal of neatness and order, simple functionality that does not bear the refuse of bygone trends. Both the mechanisation of the urban environ ment and envisioning buildings as services leads to a growing detachment of

their materiality. The alleged de-materiality of contemporary reality is in stark contrast with the amount of material waste produced. Waste reveals that the services hidden inside our walls, underground, into factories and data-centres are, in fact, as solid as the gypsum boards, soil and steel frames that cover them. With the difference that people may live their lives blissfully unaware of their complex materiality.

4.3 Architecture of junkspace

In this chapter, I have given a brief overview of the problematics of contem porary construction waste management along with critically reviewing the theoretical foundation of management practices. Furthermore, I have introduced a philosophical framework for our relationship to the objects we use and the buildings we occupy. Next, I will bring the story back to architec ture and critically review the hyper-commercialized spaces of our time as the product modernist pursuit to order.

In an essay published in 2003, Rem Koolhaas conceptualised the con temporary built environment as Junkspace: the “apotheosis, or meltdown”54 of the rational paradigm of modernisation: “If space-junk is the human debris that litters the universe, Junk Space is the residue mankind leaves on the planet.”55 In Koolhaas’ depiction, the world has become an endless airport terminal—streamlined, international, pleasant, sterile. Instead of structure, the architecture of Junkspace celebrates the surface, and instead of rhythm, it immerses into infinite flow. Junkspace is the “product of an encounter between escalator and air -conditioning”56—facilities have become central pieces in spaces dictated by the laws of comfort and entertainment. 57

In what follows, I will examine the contemporary urban space through Koolhaas depiction of Junkspace for two reasons: First, because I found the essay hauntingly accurate and secondly, because the author’s way of relating to Junkspace is particularly revealing. As Koolhaas writes, our spaces are simultaneously unique and standard.58 They are the thoroughly designed products composed from a limited selection of standardized elements and materials. While pre-industrial cultures replicated traditional forms locally, our generation is no longer bound to the constraints to history. Sociologist

Zygmunt Bauman calls modern a “compulsive state of designing”.59 But instead of producing uniqueness, this designing results into homogenous urban form and architectural expression.

Earlier in this thesis, I used Le Corbusier’s writings and projects as evidence of how modern architects have confused visual order with social order and mixed up visual purity with social morality.60 Nineteenth-century accounts of dirt and disease in cities juxtaposed dirty and low with clean and high. Yet, it would be mistaken to view the movement towards greater hy giene merely as an expression of the middle class struggle to maintain their social status. Similarly, striving for architectural purity cannot be reduced as an act of social distinction. According to sociologist Zygmunt Bauman, a more frightful alternative to order than another order is disorder. He writes that modernity emerged from the shocking revelation of the vulnerability of humankind. This revelation produced a dream of establishing a solid order— not of one ordering system competing over another, but clear organisation as opposed to chaos:

“It is a fight of determination against ambiguity, clarity against fuzziness. The other of order is not another order: chaos is its only alternative. The other of order is the miasma of the indeterminate and unpredictable. The other is the uncertainty, that source and archetype of all fear.”61

We are dependent on cognitive systems of ordering, but underneath our concepts things are less organized: nature and culture, modernity and tradi tion are fundamentally intertwined. The material world refuses to conform to our conceptualisations, and what escapes our ordering systems can never fully be erased. Consequently, order is evasive: a fantasy that continues to live on but is never achieved.62 Like architecture theorist Jeremy Till writes, order can “only really exist as a form of knowledge from which will issue a series of abstracted procedures such as design, manipulation, management and engineering.”63 These managemental practices work towards conforming the world to our conceptual framework. Whether it is garden cities we believe in, or densification and thriving urban neighbourhoods, we view the existing through our idea of the perfect and functioning whole.

Every generation comes up with slightly modified ideals that they implement diligently. The more we succeed in transforming the world in cor respondence to our ideas, the more we believe in them. Yet, underneath our “fiction of purity” the reality remains messy and contradictory.64 Apparent consistency is based on ruling out those elements that do not fit in. As Bauman writes: “where there is design, there is waste.”

If great cultures of the past are remembered by their monuments, our age surpasses them by quantity, but not with permanence.65 Contemporary environments are characterised by transience and ephemerality. Koolhaas describes aging in Junkspace as “nonexistent or catastrophic”. 66 Junkspace does not gain patina, but might “turn into a slum overnight”. Where preservation has succeeded in preventing the loss of built heritage, unprofitable environments are recuperated and re-commoditized. Capitalism has grown capable of “managing the contradictions of its own development” by adaptive reuse and gentrification.67 Think of the robust interiors of ex-industrial buildings now housing galleries and music venues, toilets inexpensive bars covered with tags before the opening. Or café chains with vinyl floors imitating worn out wood and brand new chairs with paint peeled off intentionally, furniture stores imitating second-hand style and interior design magazines that insist on placing a “flea market find” to funk up the all-white interiors of average middle-class taste.

In his architectural history of obsolescence, Daniel Abramson portrays Koolhaas as the contemporary architect engaged in a revival of sixties battles between obsolescence and sustainability, provocatively cheering for team ob solescence. Statements against conservation and pro-demolition (even of his own buildings) have equipped him with a persona of cool detachment. Yet, the writer is well aware of the political questions of social justice and environ mental pollution connected to the production of space in global capitalism:

“Junkspace will be our tomb. Half of mankind pollutes to produce, the other pollutes to consume. The combined pollution of all Third World cars, motorbikes, trucks, buses, sweatshops pales int insignificance compared to the heat generated by Junkspace. Junkspace is political: It depends on the central removal of the critical faculty in the name of comfort and pleasure.”

Tripla shopping centre in Helsinki, 2021.

Junkspace is fundamentally illusionary: Its finishes conceal the true expenses of its upkeeping. First world Junkspace is sustained by extraction, pro duction, and landfilling in developing countries. Koolhaas recognises the way we build as an environmental problem as well as a social problem. Yet he lin gers in the clumsy detailing and profligate surfaces of Junkspace like an ironic spectator at a party in the wee hours, simultaneously appalled and fascinated by what he encounters. However, Koolhaas is not only an observer but also a perpetrator in the construction of Junkspace. In appraising the oeuvre of his profession, he is defining his critical position. But whether he wants it or not, Junkspace is a part of him like Julie Kristeva’s abject, the love-child of the modernist formation, blatantly unwanted but refusing to disappear.

Timothy Morton has conceptualized climate change a hyperobject: “massively ‘distributed in time and space’”69 and impossible to grasp, yet defining our everyday lives. Mikkel Krause Frantzen & Jens Bjering combine this idea of the hyperobject with Kristeva’s notion of the abject in their article titled Ecology, Capitalism and Waste: From Hyperobject to Hyperabject. The hy perabject can be described as a “planetary infrastructure of waste”.70 It is a historical creation, “intimately linked to the logistics of contemporary capital ism to which it is enjoined as a kind of parasite traveller.”71 The hyperabject is the “nightmare version” of contemporary reality, a “utopia turned dystopia.”72

Junkspace is the architecture of the hyperabject: It is the product of a dead-end pursuit towards an ideal of a clear and rational order, an infra structure produced by the denial of the abject. We have reached a stage of

modernisation, where buildings are virtually conceived as litter. In his essay Architecture and Contingency (2007) Jeremy Till writes that the illusion of architectural order has its ethical consequences: as the creators of pure form, architects become perpetrators of normalizing control. Yet the modern reality “distances us from taking moral responsibility for our actions.”73

The fiction of pure order prevents us from seeing that things could be done differently. If, like Fredrick Jameson famously wrote, it is easier to im agine the end of the world than the end of capitalism, the same applies to technological progress. Images of the future are so congested with advanced technologies that it is easier to imagine that the planet will be blown up by an atomic bomb or that machines will take over than to envision a future where the humankind would become less dependent on technology. Thus, in the time or climate emergency we entertain ourselves by following the space exploration of the mega-rich, feeding the hubris that technology will solve all our problems, including the ones produced by former technologies. According to Daniel Abramson, the technical focus of the current sustainability paradigm distances it from the political and emotional side of the matter:

“In the 1960s affection for older urban environments overturned obso lescence’s rationalistic logic and impelled activism for the environment and obsolete architecture. The ideal of justice, prominent in other fields, like political science’s conceptions of sustainability, is presently marginal in architec ture, requiring special pleading, overshadowed by a predominantly technical discourse. Longevity may be better ensured by feeling than engineering.” 74

The progress of modernism was not pre-determined and architecture is not subject to evolutionary change. In a documentary interview architect Alessandro Petti stresses the problem of continuously defining the world into “colonial categories” of modern versus anti-modern and progress versus re gression. Architects have been trapped into a fantasy of modernisation that makes us blind to all other ways of being in the world.75 It is time to stop approaching the environment merely as a technical problem. Resilience think ing is one way of taking a more systemic approach to the dynamics of the built environment. Resilience means a system’s capability to endure adversity. Often it is not one universal solution, but multiple local solutions that make the most resilient functioning whole.

During our stay in Greenland, CNN broadcasted a report of a record-break ing melt in the inland ice sheet, with an image of meltwater gushing down to Kangerlussuaq fjord in the background. Simultaneously, a cruise ship was anchored outside the harbour, with its 660 passengers in quarantine. The boat carried the crew of Extreme-e, an electric car race with an environmental agenda, travelling around the globe and organizing races in extreme loca tions, such as the old Ford test range some way inland from Kangerlussuaq, right next to the ice sheet.

Meanwhile, we were occupied with our project on the scrapyard, taking apart wooden skips and containers, trying to avoid anything toxic or dangerous. In the aeroplane, I had leafed through Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, which contained horrid depictions of the lethal consequences of being ex posed to the wrong chemicals. In the paper about hyperabjects I read that some Greenlandic people get so many toxic substances from their native diet that when they die, their bodies can be classified as toxic waste.76 Hence, people should consume more imported foods because seal and fish are poisonous in large quantities. And the packaging probably ends up here in the dump, where it is burned, causing a smell that reminds me of the highway in Conakry, Guinea, at rush hour.

If modernity is simultaneously ordered and messy, waste is equally mul tifaceted. Waste is most approachable on a human scale: Like the objects in the dumpsite, still recognizable but clearly forlorn. But what about entire megacities approaching their death date without ever having actually been occupied? Or tiny micro particles of entropy produced by all the plastic that goes into the white paint with which we cover traces of imperfection in our modular homes? If Rome is built on six meters of ruins of ancient glory, perhaps future cities are confined to grow from light-fraction shredder waste, aka ‘fluff’.77 It is probably poisonous and harmful in multiple ways since it contains a mixture of materials left over foam recycling, but viewed from afar, all the colours blend in, and it looks harmless, like soil. In Koolhaas’s words: “The cosmetic is the new cosmic…”78

The visit to Delete construction waste management plant in Kyläsaari, Helsinki, was organized on 28.09.2021 with Juha Mitro and Henri Pesonen.

European Union, 2008.

European Commission, n.d.

Eurostat, 2021.

Delete, 2021.

Byles, 2005, p. 45.

Ibid., p. 46.

Ibid., p. 37.

Lehtonen, 2019.

Jätelaki, 2011, 15 §.

Jätelaki, 2021, 15 §.

Pesonen & Mitro, 2021.

According to European Commission, n. d., the CE markings “signify that products sold in the EEA have been assessed to meet high safety, health, and environmental protection requirements.”

Valenzuela & Böhm, 2017, as cited in Corvellec & al., 2020, p. 97.

Corvellec & al., 2020, p. 98.

Corvellec & al., 2020, write on p. 97: “Turning the CE into a pathway for a transition to sustainability would require aligning it with the degrowth agenda, as Schröder et al. (2019) argue, which is quite the contrary to how the European Commission (2018) frames it as a mechanism for economic growth.”

e.g. Pyyhtinen, 2020.

Valkonen & al., 2019, p. 50.

Huuhka & Vestergaard, 2019, write that an “ideal” circular economy is not contrary to, but works towards the same goals as heritage protection,

even though the disciplines are based on different values.

20 Huuhka, 2016, p. 75: “A focal aspect in shifting to a more sustainable building stock management is the overall deceleration of urban metabolisms, that is, decoupling the service provision of buildings from the use of materials (Pauliuk & Müller, 2014). Therefore, already existing buildings should not be seen as deposits of materials or components, but as reserves of possibly usable space (Kohler & Hassler, 2002; Thomsen & van der Flier, 2011)”.

21 Huuhka, 2016, p. 13.

22 Mallach, 2011; Thomsen & van der Flier, 2009, as cited in Thomsen, Schultmann & Kohler, 2011, p. 330.

23 Hassler, 2002; Thomsen & van der Flier, 2009, as cited in Huuhka, 2016, p. 33.

Huuhka, 2016, p. 35. 25 Ibid. 26 Thomsen & van der Flier, 2011, p. 354.

Abramson, 2017.

Huuhka, 2016, p. 32.

See Thompson, 2017. Thompson’s theory of transient and durable commodities is discussed in the chapter 2.4. Waste and value of this thesis.

Huuhka, 2016, p. 32.

Ibid., p. 34.

Ibid., p. 49.

Lehtonen, 2008, p. 16–29.

See Kopytoff, 1986, as discussed in the chapter 2.4. Waste and value of this thesis.

Lehtonen, 2008, p. 11.

More about the modern home in chapter 3.3. Clutter of the past of this thesis.

Forty, 1986, p. 104.

Strasser, 1999, p. 190.

McCracken, 1988, p. 46.

Ibid., p. 49.

Ibid., p. 50.

Lagerspetz, 2020, p. 49.

Le Corbusier, 1925/1998, p. 189.

Ibid., pp. 69–79. Le Corbusier begins the chapter Type-needs, type-furniture by portraying anatomical drawings of the human body, using the biological mechanics of the body as justification for a technical approach to furniture design.

McCracken, 1988, p. 53.

Lagerspetz, 2020, p. 49.

Bennett, 2010, p. IX.

Bennett, 2011.

Latour, 1993; Lehtonen, 2008, p. 113.

Lehtonen, 2008, p. 101.

Ibid., pp. 118–119.

Strasser, 1999, p. 10.

Ibid., p. 12.

Koolhaas, 2013, p. 3.

Ibid.

Ibid., p. 4.

Koolhaas, 2013, writes on p. 26: “Junkspace is authorless, yet surprisingly authoritarian…The chosen theatre of megalomania—the dictatorial—is no longer politics, but entertainment.”

Koolhaas, 2013, pp. 9–10: ”At the exact moment that our culture has abandoned repetition and regularity as repressive, building material have become more and more modular, unitary and standardised…With enormous difficulty—budget, argu–

ment, negotiation, deformation—irregularity and uniqueness are constructed from identical elements.”

Bauman, 2003, p. 30.

Till, 2007, p. 122. Le Corbusier’s urban planning schemes are discussed in chapter 3.2. Cancer will stifle the city of this thesis.

Bauman, 1991, as cited in Till, 2007, p. 127.

Till, 2007, p. 127.

Ibid.

Valkonen & al., 2019, pp. 130–131.

Koolhaas, 2013, writes on p. 4: “… we have built more than did all previous generations put together but somehow we do not register on the same scales. We do not leave pyramids.”

Koolhaas, 2013, p. 15.

Abramson, 2016, p. 137.

Koolhaas, 2013, p. 21.

Morton, 2013, as cited in Frantzen & Bjering, 2020, p. 88.

Frantzen & Bjering, 2020, p. 89.

Ibid., p. 99.

Ibid., p. 99–100.

Till, 2007, p. 131, in relation to Zygmunt Bauman’s ideas on the holocaust.

Abramson, 2016, p. 153.

Petti in Nango, J. & Are Bongo, 2020.

Liboiron, 2013, as cited in Frantzen & Bjering, 2020, p. 101.

Ligt fraction shredder waste is mentioned in the chapter 4.1. Post mortem of this thesis.

Koolhaas, 2013, p. 37.

CONCLUSIONS

This master’s thesis set out to examine the ways in which the contemporary building culture produces waste. The question was approached by combining the theoretical frameworks of architecture history and critical waste studies in social sciences and humanities. The aim was to map the space between the disciplines and to build up a critical history of modern architecture and waste. The thesis starts by providing a brief introduction to the multidisciplinary discourses on waste through a review of selected source literature. Next, the ideas arising from the waste literature are applied to the architectural history of modernism through four historical snapshots. Finally, the question is brought to the present by juxtaposing contemporary construction waste management with philosophical discourses on materiality and the architectural pursuit for order.

The work reveals that buildings and urban environments become defined waste through multiple overlapping practices. Firstly, there is the material side of things: buildings are subject to the law of gravity, extreme weather conditions and physical deterioration with time. However, the valorisation of building performance happens in the cultural sphere. Demolition is the result of a human assessment of physical reality. It may be justified by poor physical condition, problems in functional performance, or poor economic performance. However, these are all partly cultural judgements. The faith of buildings depends on people: built heritage makes it evident that buildings live as long as they are maintained and not demolished.

Ruling out elements from the urban sphere is often justified by physical danger or disease. The sanitary movement of the 19th century brought an emphasis on health to the urban planning discourse. The resulting aesthetics of hygiene later became an essential feature of modernist architecture. New scientific conceptions of the 19th century connected disease with dirt, which was to be avoided at all costs. However, the anthropological tradition of dirt and waste studies emphasises that dirt avoidance should not be re duced merely as a medical pursuit for greater hygiene. Instead, they stress the cultural side of our relation to the material world: we rule out those elements that do not fit the way we perceive the world.

Early 20th century modernists pursued an architecture based on objective truths of science and reason. Urban planning and architecture became viewed as technical problem-solving activities directed toward fixing the issues in the existing urban framework. In their enthusiasm for progress, however, modernists forgot the human side of things: their subjective position and the social context in which they were operating. As a result, design was grounded on metaphors of science and reason: disorder was confused with disease and social order with geometry.

This thesis states that construction waste still is, to some extent, the cul tural product of modernist ideals of cleanliness and order. Modernism is not mere history, it is still present in the way cities are understood and developed today. It persists physically in the buildings surrounding us and lingers in the institutions, practices, and legislation that drive future development. It is also present in cultural conceptions: we are quick to problematise things that are not performing in an optimal way and efficiency. Modernist design thinking continues to contribute to waste production in two ways. Firstly, it affects how we perceive and value the existing built environment. Secondly, modern architecture has already produced a generation of buildings that are physically not made to last.

Although this thesis has approached waste mainly as a reject of cul tural ideals, the institutionalisation of disposal in the 20th century made waste less of an anomaly in cultural categorisations. The modernist period was paralleled by an increase in the quantity and change in the quality of waste. This was the result of industrial production and intensified consump-

tion, propelled by new ways of extending the market for consumer products, such as disposability and obsolescence. The same trends were evident in construction: mass demolition became more common, particularly in the decades of economic growth after the second world war. The term obsolescence has been used with reference to shortened lives of buildings since the 1910s. It has often been confused as a natural phenomenon, although it is the joint result of various cultural practices such as fashion, the market, and technology.

The value of this work is introducing critical waste studies to architecture theory. While the writings of individual waste and dirt scholars, particularly Mary Douglas, have been cited by architecture theorists, a similar juxtapo sition of modern architecture and the critical studies on waste and dirt that build on Douglas’s thought has not been found in the process of writing this thesis. However, this work reveals many crossing points between the two topics. For one, the 19th and early 20th-century hygienic movement has been discussed both in theories on waste and histories of modern architec ture. Secondly, both waste scholars and architecture theorists have discussed the politics of normalisation in ordering the every day through buildings and urban environments, as well as waste management and infrastructure. Furthermore, obsolescence has been discussed in relation to buildings and waste production.

These crossing points and many others provide endless subjects for fur ther research. This thesis has only scratched the surface of the topic and drawn some very broad lines on the parallels between architecture and critical waste studies. Although it has probably introduced more perspectives to the subject than would have been advisable in the length of the thesis, many still have been neglected. The work mainly stays at a conceptual level, but each of the topics presented could be approached from a more practical and material point of view. Moreover, they could be extended by research in other fields. This thesis has discussed the ideals in construction and the causes of demo lition, but contemporary renovation and restoration practices could also be examined through waste making. Alternatively, waste could be studied in the construction field from the point of view of the changed connection to material from craftsmanship to industrial production.

This thesis calls to question the principally technological and progress-oriented approach to architectural sustainability. Furthermore, it chal lenges the pursuit of universal solutions to environmental problems. Modern spaces carry an illusion of order that conceals the complexity and hybridity of the world. The same applies to the simple diagram of circular economy. It conveys the message in an easily understandable form but simultaneously enforces the belief in clear organisation and distances us from the material reality. Instead, this thesis proposes that perhaps more tolerance to ambiguity and alternative ways of being in the world would cultivate more ecologically sound spatial practices.

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Image references

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Helsingin kaupunginmuseo. [Sairaalan henkilökuntaa tarkastelemassa röntgenkuvia Pietarinkatu 24:ssä sijainneessa Eskelinin sairaalassa (1905-1919), sittemmin Sanitas-sairaala (1919-1940)]. [Photograph].(1900-1920). Date accessed 07.02.2022. Retrieved from web site: https://helsinginkaupunginmuseo.finna.fi/Record/hkm.HKMS000005:km0000p 6bh?lng=sv&imgid=1

When the reference is not stated, the image is by the author of this thesis.

Thanks!

Greenland worshop team, The Finnish Institute in Rome and Villa Lante residents, Colleagues in Talli, Family & friends, Piirustussali ry, and special thanks for instructors

Sanna & Panu and for Joel, Anna, Sonja & Mattes for the help.