Domesticity at War - Colomina PDF

Domesticity at War Author(s): Beatriz Colomina Source: Assemblage, No. 16 (Dec., 1991), pp.
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Beatriz
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Domesticity
War
Professor of Beatriz Colominais Assistant Architecture at Princeton University.
16 January1991. We are, we seem to be, on the edge of war. At the threshold. A line has been drawn. Literally.A deadline. In crossing that line we go to war. We go outside. We leave the homeland to do battle on the outside. But there are also always lines in the interior,within the apparentlysafe confines of the house. As we all know but rarelypublicize, the house is a scene of conflict. The domestic has always been at war. The battle of the family, the battle of sexuality, the battle for cleanliness, for hygiene . . . and now the ecological battle. With recycling, even the waste of the house is subjectedto classification. Domesticated. People are reminded of life during World War II, and not just because that was the last time they had to recycle. "Waris no longer identifiablewith declaredconflict, with battles,"writes Paul Virilio, "Nonetheless, the old illusion still persiststhat a state of peace means the absence of open warfare."'War takes place today without fighting. The battlefieldis the domestic interior:the war cabinet. A "cabinet,"in English, means, in common use, a "cupboard or case with drawers,shelves, etc., for storingor a "piece of furniturecontaining a radio displayingarticles"; or television set";and, in the terms of politics, a "groupof ministerscontrolling government policy."The cabinet is a space. In the firstdefinition, this space is associatedwith the traditionaldomestic interior, the house;2in the second, it houses the media; in the third, it has been displacedinto the media itself. While cabinet members derive their title from the space where their meetings take place, that space,
15
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that cabinet, exists, above all, in the media waves, it is housed by radio, television, and newspapers.The cohabitation of these apparentlydisparatemeanings indicates that the house is a military weapon, a mechanism within a war where the differencesbetween defense and attackhave become blurred. An instance of this blurringof limits between war and peace was offered by CBS news on 15 Januarywhen the of the question most insistentlyput to the multiple "guests" What should to the war "experts" was, signs program we be looking for in the next two or three days, what signs will indicate to us that we have really entered war?The media, charged with making visible the war, was at a loss in the moment of identifyingwhat would constitute evidence of its advent. The guests, who are, after all, guests in the home of the viewer, were unable to anticipatethe image of war. The image, therefore, might arrivein the house before it was recognized. The house is already mobilized. (During the War in the Gulf, in fact, CNN would advertiseitself with the line "CNN brings the front line to your living room," to what we used to call the "frontroom." Outside space, then, is collapsed into this line, this front, but because the line is unclear, the war also speaksof the difficulty of establishingthe limits of domestic space.) 1964 (two years after the Cuban Missile Crisis). The New YorkWorld's Fair. Its architectureis dismissedat the time (and still today) as "too commercial," "too vulgar,"lacking unity," and, perhapsmost symptomatic,"the "architectural mastersare missing":"Whereare Kahn, Neutra, Mies, Gropius, Yamasaki,BuckminsterFuller, Kiesler . . . ? asks Interiors,a professionaljournal.3While the institutionsof high culture (if one could consider Interiors,Progressive Architecture,or ArchitecturalRecordas such) lament their inability to comprehend the fair, only a reporterfor Holiday, a popular travel magazine, seems able to provide an adequate responsewhen he writes, "Most of these charges are true; none of them matters. . . . Too commercial?As I see it, commerce is the point of any fair. . . . It is precisely the chaos of architecturalstyles that lends to Flushing Meadow the nightmarequality any properWorld'sFair should strive for. . . . As for the vulgarityand the triviality
I would grieve to see an iota of them blotted or canceled

out. "4
The accusations of commercialism, vulgarity,disunity, and absence of masterywere not simply a rejection of mass culture. The attackon the kitsch of the fair, the bad taste of its forms of mass culture, constitutedan elaborate defense (with antiquatedartillery)against a major disruption of the traditionalstatus of architecture.Architectural magazines were defending themselves againsta threatto their own foundations. The fair presentedto the viewer, in the wordsof the Holiday reporter,"a world computerized to the teeth, a pushbutton world": At the Better to tell you what LivingCenterthereis a computer colorsto use in decorating Cash yourhome. . . . At the National a computer feedsout factsto helpchildren with Register pavilion theirhomework. At the Parker Pen pavilion,a computer will find in the world. . . and at the Clairol you a pen pal somewhere a advised pavilion, computer my wifewhatcolorshe shoulddye her hair: 'Don'tbe a sissy,'a soft,electronic femalevoicewhisperedin her ear,'go ahead,do it!'5 Not only were the computers (descendantsof the first computer developed to decode enemy messagesduring World War II) "concerned"exclusively with domestic issues (displacinginto themselves traditionalforms of domestic relations in areas as crucial as decoration, homework, companionship, and fashion advice), but moreover, domestic space itself was deeply disturbed.Within the popular kitsch of the 1964 World'sFair very elaboratepropositions were being made about the status of the modern interior(something that architecturalmagazines could not recognize). One such propositionwas the UndergroundHome, a traditional suburbanranch house buried as protectionfrom the new threat of nuclear fallout.6 It was the projectof Jay Swayze, a Texan military instructorturned building contractorof luxury houses, who during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 had been commissioned by the Plainview (Texas)City Council to build a demonstrationfallout shelter to specificationsby the Departmentof Civil Defense.
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In a promotionalbook published in 1980, he discussedthe project in the following terms: I sawthe meritof utilizing the earthas protection radioagainst in chemicalwarfare, activefallout.As a former instructor military I knewthatthe threewaysman coulddestroy himselfwereby nuclearfission,nervegasor germwarfare. DespitePresident assurance thatthe threat of warwasonlytemporary, Kennedy's one thingwasclear.The nuclear age wasuponus, andlongwasnecessary to protect frompossible humanity rangeplanning ill effects.7 Swayze quickly turned the militaryprojectfor a shelter into a domestic project for a house: a It seemedmorelogicalto makethe homeand its surroundings in comfortable, safeharbor wherethe familywouldbe protected withtheseideas,I movedto familiar surroundings. ... Armed
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tain top, the exhilaratinghigh pressurefeeling of a Spring day can be created at will. ... The clamor of traffic, jets, noisy neighbors- all are gone with a turn of a switch and you are free to rest in silence, or experience for the first time the full range of sensationsthat today'ssensitive stereo systems are able to produce."9 As "windowsto the outside world seemed impossible"in an undergroundshelter, Swayze developed a survey"to learn how much value people actually placed upon windows." He concluded that although windows might be of psychological importance, they were, in fact, rarelylooked through. Moreover, "with traditionalhomes we must take what we get for views. After looking outside, I decided an artistcould do a thousand times better."'0 In the Underground Home traditionalwindows were superimposedon "dial-a-view" murals. Every room in the house looked out onto a panoramic landscape that could be changed at will. (In the prototypeof this house, completed in Colorado before the World'sFair, the outside views spanned a continent, with San Francisco'sGolden Gate to the west and New York'sskyline to the east.) The time of day or night could also be "dialed"to fit any mood or occasion. A publicity brochurenoted that rheostats"permita rising sun effect in the kitchen, while a star-fillednight blanketsthe 'outdoor'patio." That is, simultaneously!
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the 'better or uncomfortable war,storms way'must temperatures, offerprotection fromsuch.8 This equation of war with weatherwas symptomatic.The "betterway"- Swayze'sslogan for the Underground Home - restedon two "obviousadvantages": "constant from natural or man-made and "security temperature" hazards."The house offered a controlled environment in which one could create one's own climate by "dialing" temperatureand humidity settings:"the breeze of a moun-
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The displacementof time and space producedwithin this house problematizestraditionalspatialdistinctionssuch as that between inside and outside. But these distinctionsare not simply abandonedhere. They are made strange. Inside the "protectiveshell" a clear division is kept between "interior"and "exterior" areas. The definition of terms at the of book clarifiesthat "out-of-doors, Swayze's beginning backyard,front yard, patio, courtyard,garden, swimming is pool" are "all areas inside the shell." "Outer/outside" in not the shell."" enclosed By internalizing "anything even the inside/outsidedistinction, the Underground Home offered, again in the words of the Holiday reporter, security- peace of mind - the ultimate in true "greater And the publicity brochureread:"A few feet privacy!"'2 undergroundcan give man an island unto himself; a place where he controls his own world - a world of total ease and comfort, of security, safety and, above all, privacy." "Peace"is achieved in this war by environmentalcontrol, control over "the exterior": temperature,noise, air, light, view. The publicity does not insist so much on nuclear danger as on intruders,dangersof the street, insects, impuritiesof the air. In the 1970s, with the oil crisis, emphasis turned towardenergy saving, and in the 1980s, ecological concerns. The descriptionof the battlefield are only terrifyingfor changes. "Ecological catastrophes civilians,"writes Virilio, "For the military,they are but a simulation of chaos, an opportunityto justifyan art of warfarewhich is all the more autonomous as the political State dies out."'3 The traditionaldomestic ideal of "peace and quiet"can only be producedby engaging the house in combat, as a weapon: counterdomesticity. The sponsorof the UndergroundHome was General Electric, who also commissioned Walt Disney to produce the Carousel of Progress,a series of theatricalsets that exhibited the history of the interiorfrom 1880 to 1964 by tracof the house through electricity. In ing the transformations the General Electric pavilion a demonstrationof thermonuclear fusion took place every fifteen minutes. So that nuclear power, a by-productof militarytechnology, was of presentedas both a mass spectacle and a transformation the interior.
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The transformations of interior/exterior were not isolated moments within the 1964 Fair but its main theme: IBM offered the InformationMachine, where "fourteensynchronized projectorsuse nine screens to show you how lucky you are to have a brain, how your brain works, and how a computer does its mechanical best to emulate your cerebration."The Bell pavilion exhibited the Picturephone." And the Coca-Cola pavilion promotedthe simulation of countries:"The visitorexperiencesnot only the sights and sounds of five foreign countries but also their smells and their temperaturechanges. He goes from a crowdedstreet in Hong Kong (pasta fish store whose smell was so overpoweringly authentic that it had to be deodorized before opening day), to the Taj Mahal, to a perfumed rain forest in Cambodia, to a bracingski resortin the BavarianAlps, to the slowly canting deck of a cruise ship At the just off Rio de Janeiro. It is an amusing journey."'5 Kodakpavilion the visitor could see, outside, the largest possible color printsand, inside, how the day'snews pictures came in by wire, just as they were being receivedby newspapersand television stations all over the country. The Kodakpavilion also offered itself as a stage set from which to take pictures of oneself and one's family in the backgroundof the fair or in such unthinkableplaces as the moon (there was a "moondeck"on the roof). At the 1964 Fair Kodakintroducedits new "Instamatic" camera. With it, the camera, this window into the world, which still in the 1939 Fair was contemplated(like the television) with amazement, as a technological object, 20
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became an object of mass consumption. Moreover,these objects were no longer seen as discrete. The television was everywhere,part of every space. The camera instamatic was not a technological object of awe, but a cheap piece of plastic:$8 with a built-in flash. And with the mass conof the sumption of the camera came the "privatization" view, that is, of the "exterior." People constructedtheir own histories in photographs,in snapshots, just as they of their (underground) houses as constructedthe "exterior" images of cities. This is consistent with the idea of the city presentedby the World's Fair in the Futuramaexhibits. Futurama 1, at the 1939 Fair, could still offer a coherent, unified image of the city - a modernistproposalof steel and glass towers, an object, over which the visitor, a detached, amazed viewer, had no control. But Futurama2, at the 1964 Fair, could no longer provide a unified urban idea. Instead, it offered a collection of "improbable" places where people would live in the future:on the moon, in the jungle, below ice, under the sea, and in the desert. The visitorto the 1964 Fair could only achieve "unity"through a "frame,"a collage of images assembled as s/he moved through the fair. This visitor, unlike that of 1939, was given the illusion of control (control over the images both "inside"the house and "outside"on the fairgrounds).This "frame" became that of the television screen. Virtuallyevery exhibit in the fair involved television. Indeed, the fair itself was read at the time as a big television screen:"The biggesttelevision set in the world,"wrote a reporter,"It will have everything on the 'screen' except the Beverly Hillbillies, the top-rated networkshow."'16 But, in fact, the 1964 Fair never achieved the popular appeal of the 1939 Fair. Television itself was more appealing. The time of the fairs had alreadypassed. (The 1939 Fair is now said to have been "the last fair on earth.")The mechanism of the World's Fair, the capturingof everything, was no longer operatingoutside, in the traditional public space, on the fairgrounds,but within the domestic interior.The public domain has been displaced indoors. Or as PatriciaPhillips has written, as a civicsite, Justas the publicspacehas becomediminished the home has become,in manysenses,a morepublic,open
forum.The publicworldcomesinto eachhome as it neverhas before So that television,radioand personal through computer. rituals thatwereonce shared in a group arenow conspicuously still shared - but in isolation. An example of thisambiguous condition is the annualcelebration of the New Year's Eve in TimesSquare.Whichis the morepublicevent- the throng of at Forty-second Street to watcha lighted peoplegathering apple this condropor the millionsof peopleat home, each watching on TV?17 gregation One thinks also of the televised spectaclesof the 1960s: Kennedy'sassassination,the moon landing, the Vietnam War. In fact, many Americans bought their firsttelevision set to "attend" Kennedy'sfuneral. 1987. Room in the City, an exhibition organizedby Susana Torre in New York. Several projectsaddressed,in the words of the curator,"the self-conscious public character of privatelife by envisioning the room as a stage for the privateperformanceof public rituals."In the project for this exhibition by Donna Robertsonwith Robert McAnulty, this stage is "fullydematerialized,transformed into video screens circling around a single chair for the actor foreverturned spectator."'8 The apartmentis divided into two partsby a diagonal wall that slashes through the space. At one end, the wall is punctuatedby a dining-room table, the traditionalscene of domesticity, and, at the other, it passesthrough the building's faCadeto supporta satellite dish and broadcast antenna. On one side, the living area, five video monitors are hooked up to the satellite dish outside the window. These screens show random images of the city, creatingan ethereal glow of collaged information. This flickeringlight is reflected in a mirrorand sent outside through the window, which is partiallyblocked by the satellite dish. On the other side, the sleeping and bathing area, is another television set, but one not connected to the dish. Here a small opening replacesthe original window. The blue light of the television set glows behind this wall. Both windows have been compromised. They are not intended to let light in but to let light pass out. Yet what kind of light is this? Robertson'sproject can be read in terms of what Virilio calls a "new form of visibility":
22
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I thinkwe arewitnessing I thinkthat a new formof visibility. electronic the electrification of townsandof imagesare replacing the countryside in the late nineteenth and earlytwentieth cenin a certain Automatic cameras and are monitors tury, way. street replacing lightsand neon lightsin towns.Whenyou move aroundin a modern townyou noticethateverything is conceninto a videomonitor whichis not merelythe videomonitrated tor of the prefecture but the of policeor of traffic circulation, videomonitor of supermarkets, the videomonitor of interactive blocksof flatsin a closedcircuit,and so on. Andherewe areno withan imageat all in the representational, longerconcerned illustrative of artistic, meaningof the term;it is a question another light, an electronic lighting,and I thinkthatone can no it'slivingspace,townspace,or longerconceiveof space,whether eventhe spaceof the entireterritory, without this new lighting.19 This new "lighting"that is producedby a new desire for control displaces traditionalforms of enclosure. One of the primaryreferencesof Elizabeth Diller and RicardoScofidio's Slow House, begun in 1989, is a photographby Len Jenshel in which a security guard in the desert watches a television set that has been placed in the trunk of his station wagon. No-man's-land:Here there is only a car, a surrogateenclosure. Yet, precisely, the guarddoes not sit in the car, but outside it, looking in. The television occupies the space. It is the only thing comfortablyplaced. Its light passes out. The blue glow illuminates the man's face. He is, in fact, bathed in the light of the television. The man finds security in the television. He warms himself up in the light of the electronic fire. But in so doing he is alienated, detached from traditionalspace. The car windshield and the television screen are both twentieth-centuryapertures.The picture window is another. But unlike the other two, it is usually understood as unproblematicallyarchitectural.The Slow House problematizesthis distinction between architectureand systems of communication. The deployment of the windshield, in the words of Diller and Scofidio, "the framed transitthrough vehicular space," and the television screen, "the framed transitthrough electronic space," questions the status of the picture window.20 The picture window speaksabout control and transparency, but, above all, at issue is the commodification of the visual field. The New YorkTimes Real Estate section distin-
guishes between "ocean front, ocean view, bay view, cove view, water view." As Diller and Scofidio have noted, this is a complex "realestate nomenclature developed to subtly distinguish value in a marketthat feeds on the desire for optical possession."On the site of this house, the view has a very precisely establishedmarketvalue. An ad in the New YorkTimes reads:"Spectacular views. Just like Big Sur. With better sunsets. We didn't want anything less for our beach house." In their project, Diller and Scofidio and juxtaposethis view with its electronic representation explore the gap between these two systemsof representation. This is a rereadingand transformation of the rearview mirrorsuperimposedonto a car windshield. But here, a front view is juxtaposedonto another front view, that is, juxtaposedonto itself. The Slow House makes problematic the very status of the view:alienation is producednot between one view and another, but within the view itself. The whole house is set up as a spatialtransitionbetween the car and the view. The structureof the road is transformed upon arrivalinto that of the garage, so that one does not simply leave the road, the line, for enclosure. Instead, the windshield is telescoped into the picture window, the zone of transitionoccupied by the traditional markersof domesticity. The front door confrontsa knife edge that splits the passage:one half, remaininglevel, deviates to the left (to the sleeping and bathing areas);the other half, ascending, deviates to the right (to the cooking, eating, and living areas). The living room is the site of a dialectical play between the television and the fireplace. The television set is suspended in the space so that its image is superimposedonto that of the window. The image on the television screen comes from a camera mounted on a long pole, a transformation of the traditionalchimney. The chimney points upward,the camera pole points forward.One is concerned with getting something out of the house, the other with pulling something in. One removes pollution. The other brings in visual pollution, images that, suspendedwithin the antiperspectival curve of the house, contaminatetraditional architecturalorder. The window is a clearly establishedframe but this frame has no stable context. It is as free-floatingas the frame of
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the television screen. The slight displacementof the horizon marksa deeper affinity between the two systems(picture window and television screen). The television is no longer simply outside of architectureor some kind of furniture within it. The limits of architecturehave been disturbed. This is an architectureon, in, and after television: the television cabinet. With Michael Webb's Drive-In House project, which has evolved over the last decade, the car plugs right into the house, even more, it literally turns into a house. The car, that "most luxuriously appointedcomponent of vita domestica [which, however] wasteful and sad, sits in the driveway unused for most of the day"is here recycled, separated into parts(the stereo system, the seats, the windows, the television, the cocktail cabinet, the air-conditioning,the telephone).21 The waste is thus classified, domesticated. Reversingthe cycle of consumption, the Drive-In House becomes an ecological alternative,or as Webb puts it, a type answer to mitigate the coming disaster "try-anything homo-not-so-sapienshas cooked up - namely, the atmospheric warming."His is a strategythat furtherconvolutes inside and outside. "When the penultimate Glad trashbag is full of trash and has been taken out," Webb writes, "I remove the ultimate bag from the packet and place inside it . . . the packet. Whenever I do this I come over feeling the contained becomes the container, the all architectural: container the contained." In the Drive-In House the car body, a container of media equipment, a cabinet that provides a cinematic gaze through the windshield accompanied by stereo sound, is turned inside out and occupied. In the first undergroundhouse that Swayze built for his family, in 1962, only the double garageis visible outside and one enters the house between the two garagedoors. As RosemarieBletter has written, "the garageis the only sign "22To which we could of human habitation that remained. add the television antenna and the chimney (the house's exhaust pipe). A photographof another undergroundhouse built by Swayze shows the television and the fireplace occupying the same wall, very close to each other, the family gatheredaround them, warming up. But in a house where the temperatureis always kept constant, the function of the fireplace is purely visual. Since the chimney
scents or removes not only fumes but also "undesirable moisture"as part of the air-conditioning,the breathingsystem, it is actually, like the television, a window.23 The Slow House interiorizesthe problematicof the car. The house is about the transitionbetween windshield, garagedoor, front door, picture window, and television set. Five frames:the windshield and its extensions. The curve of the house producesa car vision, a continuously delayed promise of another view, another angle. When in the living room the "actual"view is superimposedonto its electronic representation,but at a slightly differentangle, a shift in the horizon, it is like travelingwithout moving. As if the house were sliding in the world, or better, the world sliding through the house. The Slow House is a second, weekend residence, accessible only by car. The Room in the City, by contrast,deals with domesticity in the context of the displacementof the nineteenth-centuryurban reality of New Yorkby the new media. The TV/VCR replacesthe outside view, the window; it is also a substitutefor travel. To returnto Virilio: "The technology of the VCR createsa day, an additional 'false-day'[that]comes into being for you alone, just as in the secondaryresidence whose heating turns on of its own accord when it gets cold. . . . The new windshield is no longer a car, it is a television screen. There is thereforea much more precise alignment to be made between the deferredday and the deferredresidence."24 The Drive-In House, finally, is a suburbanhouse at home in the new landscape of plastifiedvalleys filled with garbage, mountains made of discardedcar bodies, and rivers running with medical waste. This "automobileas a house container"is a nomad's steel-and-plastictent for a postnuclear landscape, the latest, most elusive war cabinet.
25
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Notes
This is the edited transcriptof a lecture given in the School of Architectureat the Universityof Illinois, Chicago, on the evening of 16 January1991. During the lecture, the bombing of Baghdad began. 1. Paul Virilio, Popular Defense and Ecological Struggles, trans. MarkPolizzotti (New York:Semiotext(e), 1990), 36; originally published as D6fense populaireet luttes (Paris:Ed. Galilee, &cologiques 1978). 2. Among the large amount of literatureon this theme, I would point here to Gaston Bachelard's classic text, The Poetics of Space (Boston:Beacon Press, 1969), in particularchap. 3, "Drawers, to the Chests and Wardrobes"; extended readingsof the domestic interiorby Georges Teyssot, forthcoming as The Disease of the Domicile (Cambridge,Mass.: MIT Press); and to the recent essay by Emily Apter, "CabinetSecrets:Fetishism, Prostitution,and the Fin de Siacle Interior," Assemblage9 (June 1989): 6-19. 3. "RazzmatazzAt Flushing Meadow,"Interiors(March 1964): 98. Other reviewsof the fair by professionaljournalsinclude "The Busy Architect'sGuide to the ArchitecWorld'sFair,"Progressive ture (October 1964), "Queen of the Architecture Fair,"Progressive (December 1964), "Bestof the Fair" Interiors(October 1964), and "The House of Good Taste," Interior Design (August 1964). See also RosemarieHaag Bletter, "The 'Laissez-Fair,' Good Taste, and Money Trees: Architectureat the Fair,"in the Future: The New Remembering YorkWorld'sFair From 1939 to 1964 (New York:The Queens Museum and Rizzoli, 1989).
4. Peter Lyon, "A Glorious Nightmare," Holiday (July 1964). 5. Ibid. 6. The UndergroundHome was constructedby the Underground World Home Corporation(whose presidentwas Jay Swayze), which also proposedUndergroundShopping Centers, UndergroundMotels, and and UndergroundRestaurants Night Clubs. See also Haag Bletter, "The 'Laissez-Fair,'Good Taste and Money Trees." I would like to thank Rosemariefor directing my attention to the house and Marc Miller for providingoriginal material from the World's Fair archives. 7. Jay Swayze, Underground Gardens and Homes: The Best of Two Worlds- Above and Below (Hereford, Texas:Geobuilding Systems,
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18. Underground house, 1960s, living room with television and fireplace
1980),19. 8. Ibid., 20.

Home: New 9. The Underground YorkWorld'sFair 1964-1965, publicity brochure (Texas:Underground World Home Corporation,n.d.). 10. Swayze, Underground Gardens and Homes, 20. 11. Ibid., 10. 12. Lyon, "A Glorious Nightmare,"
62.
13. Virilio, PopularDefense and Ecological Struggles, 65-66. 14. "The televised telephone, or the teletelephone or the video phone or whateverit may be called when eventually it is among us, slaughteringforeversuch folkways as the blind date, always in the name of Progress" (Lyon, "A Glorious Nightmare," 56). 15. Ibid., 57. 16. "A TV View of the Fair," New YorkSunday News, 12 April 1964, World's Fair section, 26.
26
Colomina
17. PatriciaC. Phillips, "Out of Order:The Public Art Machine," Artforum(December 1988): 96. 18. Susana Torre, Room in the City (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton ArchitecturalPress, 1987), 7. The exhibition took place in the City Gallery, New York, April-May 1987. 19. Paul Virilio, "The Work of Art in the Electronic Age," interview with Virilio for a French television program,Block 14 (1988): 4. 20. Quotations are taken from conversationsbetween the author and the architects. The Slow House will be published next year in Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio, Flesh (New York:Princeton Architectural Press). 21. Quotations are taken from conversationswith Michael Webb and from his notes for a lecture given at Princeton Universityin the fall of 1990. 22. Haag Bletter, "The 'LaissezFair,' Good Taste, and Money Trees," 128. Blettersees this house whose garagealone remains visible as an extreme progressionof the migrationof the garagefrom the service wing in the early twentieth century (when the garagewas treatedas a vestige of the older stable) to the front of the house in the 1930s (when it displaced the old front porch). See her article "The World of Tomorrow:The Future with a Past,"in High Styles: Twentieth-CenturyAmericanDesign (New York:Whitney Museum of American Art, 1985), 84-85: At "the Motor Home, a model house in the Town of Tomorrowat the 1939 New YorkWorld's Fair, the two-cargarage is the central focus of the front faqade. A small entry between the two dominant garage doors functions as a vestige of the old-fashionedfront door, or, as the
brochure reassures: 'The main entrance is providedwith a normal front door for the convenience of callers who do not drive in.'" 23. The etymology of the English word "window"reveals that it combines wind and eye, as Georges Teyssot has noted, "an element of the outside and an aspect of innerness." See E. Klein, A Complete EtymologicalDictionary of the English Language, cited by Ellen Eve Frankin LiteraryArchitecture (Berkeley:Universityof California Press, 1979), 263, and by Georges Teyssot in "Waterand Gas on All Floors,"Lotus 44 (1984): 90. There is a channel on American cable television, "Yule-TideLog," that around Christmastimedisplaysa log constantly burning. 24. "The Third Window: An Interview with Paul Virilio," in Global Television, ed. Cynthia Schneider and Brian Wallis (New York: Wedge Press, 1988), 187-88.
Figure Credits
1. Photographby Bruce Davidson. ? Bruce Davidson/MagnumPhotos, Inc. 2. Herald Tribune, 19-20 January 1991. 3. New YorkTimes, 19 January 1991. 4. New YorkTimes, 20 January 1991. 5, 6. The Underground Home, publicity brochure,-Underground World Home Corporation, n.d. 7, 8, 16. Rememberingthe Future: The New YorkWorld'sFair From 1939 to 1964 (New York:The Queens Museum and Rizzoli, 1989). 9, 18. Jay Swayze, Underground Gardensand Homes: The Best of Two Worlds- Above and Below (Hereford,Texas: Geobuilding Systems, Inc., 1980). 10. Press release, New York World's Fair Corporation, n.d. 11. Promotionalphotograph,Eastman KodakCompany. 12. Promotionalphotograph,RCA. 13-15. Futurama, publicity brochure, General Motors Corporation, 1940. 17. Neiman Marcus, 1991 Christmas Book. 19-25. Courtesy of Donna Robertson and Robert McAnulty. 26. Photographby Len Jenshel. 27-38. Courtesy of Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio. 30-44. Courtesy of Michael Webb.
27
assemblage 16
Donna Robertson with Robert McAnulty
Room in the City
19. Donna Robertsonwith Robert McAnulty,Room in the City, 1987, sections/elevations
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Elizabeth Diller
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26. Len Jenshel, Sterret, Texas, 1985
27. Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio, Slow House, 1989-, section cuts
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36. Slow House, view of model showing interior
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assemblage 16
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Michael Webb
The Drive-In House
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39. Michael Webb, Drive-In House, 1980s, plan showing car entering access tube
40. Drive-InHouse, four-phase sequence showing car entering, then becoming the house
AIR COLD AIR WARM
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garage a sixteen-inch-
diameter drum and a steel rackon to which the car is driven. DiagramA shows the drum and rackin position to accept entry of the car. Once the car is properlyaligned in the garage, drum and rack rotate clockwise, the latter on an eccentric orbit, until, as shown in diagram B, the car sits in the middle of the room, energizing it. Inthe departure phase, the drum rotates counterclockwiseand the rack clockwise. The drum is designed so as to prevent external air from blowing directlythrough to the interior room during rotation
and this reminds me of
the graceful surpriseof the motions of the Wankel rotary engine. 39
assemblage 16
42. Drive-inHouse, Wankel engine
43. Drive-inHouse, orbits of the rotor
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Excerptedfrom Road and Track(February1971): "Felix Wankel (a Germanengineer) had devoted much of his life to investigating rotary combustion engines, and published the first systematic classificationof them: 804 possible of which 149 are workable. In 1954 he discovered the configuration that, with the help of a Dr. Walter Froede, led to ..." the design shown here.
A pseudotriangular-shaped rotor orbits an eccentric shaft within a casing whose shape "is defined by a point on the radiusof a circlewhich is rolling around the outside of a base circle,"its motion being termed epitrochoidal. "Forthe two-lobe bore of the Wankel RCengine, the radius of the rolling circle is exactly half that of the base circle, and the point which defines the shape is not on the circumferenceof the rolling circle."I don't get this last bit.
"Therotor is in sliding contact with the eccentric shaft and impartspower to it as a connecting rod does to a crankshaft.The internal gearing merely establishes the necessaryspeed relationship between rotor and shaft - 1:3 (the rotor orbits once for every three shaft revolutions)."
An attempt to comprehend the grace of the rotor's orbits through drawing was inconclusive. I expected to discover, or uncover, latent harmonies, dimensions emerging as multiples of other dimensions. No such luckyet: for example, the curve of the engine casing appears not to be semicircular but, in fact, formed of more complex curvatures.
40
Colomina :: :
44. Drive-InHouse, top and side views of a design for a hers-and-hishouse, whose plan derives from the seating layout of their car
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OscarMadison of The Odd Couple slouches acrossthe living room floor after a hot, tough day at the office, throwing off his garments one by one, leaving them where they fall on the carpet: he transformsthe carpet into a linear, horizontal storage cabinet in a procedure to be enacted in reverse the following morning.
Sequence: arrive,get up from seat, undress, descend steps, pee or shit (toilet bowl in the middle of steps), bathe, sleep, bathe, pee or shit (toilet bowl in the middle of steps), ascend steps, dress, lower into seat, depart.
41

Domesticity at War - Colomina PDF

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Domesticity at War Author(s): Beatriz Colomina Source: Assemblage, No. 16 (Dec., 1991), pp.

Professor of Beatriz Colominais Assistant Architecture at Princeton University.

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2. "U.S.Vows to Destroy ... ," Herald Tribune,19-20 January

SUITE #8024 OURSHOWROOM ORVISIT CALL

I would grieve to see an iota of them blotted or canceled

5. Underground Home pavilion, New York World's Fair, 1964-65, plan

. Because we cannot live in constant fear of

6. Underground Home pavilion, section

AI] I TAKEM AND

10. Kodak pavilion, New York World'sFair,1964-65

.... ..:: Now5

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14. Futurama,the metropolis of 1960

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1980),19. 8. Ibid., 20.

Donna Robertson with Robert McAnulty

Room in the City

19. Donna Robertsonwith Robert McAnulty,Room in the City, 1987, sections/elevations

20. Room in the City, plans

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21, 22. Room in the City,views of model showing interior

23, 24. Room in the City,views of model showing faqade

Scofidio and Ricardo The Slow House

26. Len Jenshel, Sterret, Texas, 1985

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30. Slow House, view at picture-window wall

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33. Slow House, plan 35

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35. Slow House, unfolded elevations

36. Slow House, view of model showing interior

38. Slow House, conceptual model of intent of facade

37. Slow House, section cut, detail

AIR COLD AIR WARM

41. Drive-InHouse, horizontal sections through partially underground room

The diagrams illustratetwo phases of the rotation of the

the graceful surpriseof the motions of the Wankel rotary engine. 39

42. Drive-inHouse, Wankel engine

43. Drive-inHouse, orbits of the rotor

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