AA Summer School 2020 - Unit 2 - Tightness

360° AA Summer School 2020 “London” from home July 16th - 22nd

“TIGHTNESS” Jett Demol in collaboration with Dipan Gandhi

Unit 2: The Planetary Household: Biocontrol, Microclimates and the Hacking of Domestic Machines Lydia Kallipoliti Brief excerpts:

“This workshop will examine the pandemic household as both a scientific and ontological project. We will theorize and interrogate in words and drawings containment and interiorization, as well as the idea to design the house as an inhabitable digestive machine of ingestion and excretion.”

“Our households have become spaceships, while urbanity has transformed into a constellation of demarcated “essential” locations, while everything else has obscured in a newly formed mental desert. The outside has turned to a vast array of disconnected bedrooms, microcosms that come together in an abstract digital space, physically enabled by data farms.”

“In the workshop, we will look at the drawings of British cartoonist William Heath Robinson and his concepts of mechanization and absurdity as visually narrated in his contraptive domestic machines... The objective is to hack Robinson’s devices and reinvent the house -in parts- as a world of metabolism and digestion. We will discuss and critique the idealization of comfort, the fear of disease, the obsession for biocontrol and operate as a collective to assemble a catalog and an archive of pandemic narratives and drawings for the hysteria of containment.”

saturday, 9:12 am, 1936, London

Mr. & Mrs. have just woken up after a late dinner party the night before. Mrs. works on breakfast, while Mr. turns on the radio and prepares a hot bath. They’re staying in bed as long as possible today, as both are quite tired. They direct the other rooms from their narrow bedroom with their domestic machines. They’re squeezing out every extra second in bed, before they have to head out into the city for sunday lunch.

Lighting

9:12

Heating Feed Produce Showering

Breakfast

Waste Music/Radio

Bathroom Bedroom Comfort in How To Live In A Flat? (1936)

Bedroom

W. Heath Robinson

The three rooms are all connected through the domestic machines and small cycles are created. All are controlled from a single comand center, the bedroom, by humans.

Kitchen

The narrow rooms in the WHR drawing remind of small and tight spaces. During the COVID-19 lockdowns around the world, many people might have experienced how tight spaces can feel when no allowed to go outside. While exploring architectural ways to visualize these confined spaces, the section was chosen as a starting point.

Based on the original room sequence, a new interpretation of the original drawing was created. Combining all the actions of the first drawing, with new domestic machines, the boundaries between the rooms are slowly faded and the absurdity is incorporated.

YSIZE XSIZE

Scenes from Brazil show how furniture can potentially break through boundaries (walls) and simultaniously interact with different people/activities/spaces.

Brazil, 1985, Terry Gilliam

1864

3000

1378

683

722

1750

1031

1300

1210

2000

When working on the section we realised that almost as a reflex, we started filling up the room with objects and more domestic machines to enclose the users. After a while, the space seemed to be in a steady-state, and adding more objects lost its initial effect. Only when we layed out everything that was included in the section, a real feel for what was taking up space, was achieved. In a way, emptying the room and looking at its contents truly reveals the space someone is living in. As the objects start defining the space once they’re introduced into it.

Things Come Apart, 2013, Todd McLellan

After focussing on the spaces and its contents, the final pieces are the actual figures that need to be put in. These figures have been standardized over the years. Looking at their evolution throughout the years, they went from a focus on body proportions, to including more genders/shapes/.. to completely disconnecting with any physical measurements.

But which figures do you use when you want to show how cramped a space is?

c. 1490 The Vitriviuan Man Leonardo Da Vinci

Representation of the ideal body proportions according to Da Vinci.

1936 The Universal Man

Peter and Ernst Neufert The ‘standard’ body depicted in Architect’s data 1936 is the one of a young and able male.

1948 The Modular Man Le Corbusier

The architect’s version of the ideal body. He uses a quite tall and non-exisent body type for his depiction.

1955 Joe

1955 Josephine

Including percentiles in the standardized measurements shows a consideration for outliers.

Women are finally depicted, accompagnied by children.

Dethroning the man as the only standardized measurable.

Henry Dreyfuss

Henry Dreyfuss

1966 Body Types

Henry Dreyfuss Leaving behind only percentiles, actual differences in body shapes/types are depicted.

1981 People with disabilities

Alvin R Tilley Henry Dreyfuss Associates People with weelchairs or other dissabilities are shown the same standardization rigour as the ‘able young man’ of 1936.

2011 Physiological Reactions of the Body Philippe Rahm Catherine Mosbach

Disconnecting from any genders, shape or class, the environmental effects on the body are considered. Categories such as pollution, radiation and humidity are valued.

But which figures do you use when you want to show how cramped a space is?

This question proved an opportunity to play around and critique the way we could show humans (or any other living organisms or objects) in our section. As switching between figures, drastically changes the perception of the space. The absurdity of putting a bear or an elephant is more than just a provocation.

It depicts how difficult it can be to estimate spacial relations, when we dare to deviate from standardized practices, symbols, figures or ratios.

Alternative Space Users

(Dipan Gandhi)