Infra-thin Destabilisation

This work is a plea to rethink the standard, the norm within architecture, the many guidelines and exactitudes that lead everything to a streamlined process. Putting efficiency and lower costs above anything else.  Everything needs to be simplified. Everything is safe, all is well. We smooth and we crumple. Unevenness is wiped away as we find our way through our own clutter. Slowly, but systematically, we started considering things and the materials that shape them as homogeneous. Our things are deployed without the appreciation of their material properties. 

We are such messy creatures, yet we must maintain control over our order. Categorised, compartmentalised, boxed, clarified, separate. Incredibly understandable, of course, because otherwise things wouldn‘t get done, yet so oppressive. We have put the same limitations on ourselves and on the objects we use and produce. But where can we find nourishment for dreams when the distance between everything keeps increasing? If imagination is shoved away, and when practicality takes over? When everything is drifting apart, we cannot help but look for a grip that stabilises. But in the search for stabilisation, haven‘t we fallen into a pattern of slowing down? Aren‘t we a bit stuck in the familiar that gives us something to hold on to? We will stop reflecting, the search for value weakens, and everything is replaceable, because nothing is unique anymore. 

We don‘t want to dwell on the unexpected. As if it doesn‘t happen to us regularly. And we keep looking for a predictable future to foresee what will surprise us. So we push away the unevenness in smooth versions of reality. Flattened spaces are made for flattened users. Whoever they are. Generalised out of convenience.

Architecture is complicit in endlessly drawing lines, classifying, regulating and eliminating discomfort. One could call it a kind of radicalisation of the creativity and human dimension it could hold. The playfulness that materials and objects can carry within them provides a prelude to finding the playfulness within ourselves as human beings, too, because with the simplification of everything, we, too, are slowly becoming jaded. 

We are unprotected in the fire of the immoderation of the absolute standardised norm. We cannot temporarily turn on and off the traits we have to behave according to, and, as a result, we always have to be those traits, everywhere, at all times of the day, always. Even when showering and on the toilet, even when sliding away and waiting for the other person. Even if we are in a private space, we must behave as if we are in public, without any compromise to the preconceived image. Inhuman, rigid, almost divine. The absence of imagining about aspects of identity in a public space leads to a spatiotemporal radicalisation of aspects of our identities.

tandardisation suffers from an inability to differentiate itself from the absolute and perishes as a result. While the imaginary itself is no longer given a place in imagined space. Each object is similar to the other, and may or may not be the same. Imagination dies with each simplification carried through. It is clear how to behave, because it is expected, but what if there is space for doubt?

Suppose fraught destabilising properties arise in public space. In that case, it can be socially regulated by those material reimaginings, and a new rhythm, distance and relationship emerge in relation to the properties that standardisation absorbs, without betraying the expectations linked to those properties. This involves a thin space between norm and non-norm, where the boundary of uncertainty is located. The moment when doubt just arises and when the imagination is unleashed to explore further options. The public space becomes an invitation to take into the private.

Materials lose meaning, as they are easily replaceable and produced in ways that make them interchangeable with anything else, and the architecture that emerges from them is reduced to an empty form, a functional standard.

We attach less and less value to the materials themselves, to their origin, their resistance, and their story. We create spaces that merely do what they are supposed to do. Architecture must never be made without a specific function in mind, but this statement is more a thought about the additional things a building can facilitate. That a kitchen is never designed for just cooking, a bathroom for just bathing, an office for just working, a theatre for just watching a performing artist. Spaces are interchangeable as well, and the function of things can be reinvented by simply reimagining what we know so far. Because now, very often, in the Western way of building, spaces are almost indistinguishable from one another. The kitchen has the same surface finish as the bathroom, and a bathroom with its white glossy finish, whether public or private, strangely resembles a white wine bar. 

This begs the question of the revaluation of our standards and regulations. Have we categorised matter to such an extent out of a fear of disorder and discomfort that everything has become the same? Aren’t we as humans messy creatures ourselves that are very prone to find comfort where perhaps there was deemed to be none? Aren’t we full of displacements ourselves?  Not always going forward but moving sideways, making slippages as we go? Have we locked ourselves up in our own architecture to such an extent that we are slowly becoming alienated from all the things that make us human? We should explore the boundaries, transgress and blur them to find the difference between mind, body, material and space.

Imagining the uncertainty

This project is a research by design into the revaluation of uncertainty. A thought exercise to break free from a preconceived standard. A standard that requires everything to be easier to produce, to be bite-sized, barrier-free and flattened, one always similar to another, and so incredibly quick to replace.  The project imagines the embodiment of doubt, like a play of what comes next, by seeking dialogue between spaces where we render ourselves vulnerable. It is a non-existent space manifesting itself in temporary imperfection, and between the user, play can be sought, pulling us loose from routine. By destabilising, can we open up a new form of stability? So this project sets up a play between fragile forms of yourself, myself, perception of texture and feeling and the revaluation of materials. A reflection on what makes us so distant and into the honesty of it all. And it does so on the scale of a public bathhouse.

To facilitate the imagining of the design process, a specific focus was put on clay and its deployment in a dialogue with the earlier-mentioned dominant standard. 

The work I have produced still contains boundaries, because what is a boundary? Where in the quest from A to B does one say: I think I have passed it now, I have left the in-between and have found it. So this work remains in the infra-thin a place between boundaries, where a boundary was found and pushed a little further. Perhaps even a bit further than that. I created fragments and moved on to larger fragments of the public bath, while formulating a philosophy, making sense of my own reflections and thoughts of others. All this was a process of making and unmaking, resulting in a series of prototypes and images that visualise the margin of uncertainty I kept looking for.

Where the body is naked, perception also becomes unfiltered. One becomes aware of the smallest shifts in routine: the imprint of a surface lingering in the skin, the subtle shifting if one slides away on a slippery finish, the slight prodding of a surface. 

There, a language emerges that is more nuanced than any word, a play of repetition and variation - a little this, a little that, and then again.

Proximity to another, initially uncomfortable, can become a foothold. Lines of sight create security precisely through the inevitability of gazes crossing. The others become a landmark, experiencing the same, but reflecting in their own way, and making the same walk-through. Making an individual, yet collective sense of things as they proceed. 

While everything starts from a ubiquitous standard, symmetrical, recognisable, and, for years a secure base for both designer and user. But then, through subtle destabilisation - infra-thin - attention is pulled away from the automatic, without forcing it.

The gaze is pulled towards the now, the detail of the immediate surroundings: to surfaces, objects, actions, perceptions. Toes curl in an attempt to find hold of a destabilising floor, before getting used to the small landscape beneath one’s feet. 

A series of tiles is designed by reworking and reconfiguring scans of existing bathroom floors. A public floor consisting of a formerly private one. A recognisability changed by the imperfection with which it was captured. It guides a walk throughout the bathhouse, forming pools of water as more and more people walk by and the water drips off their bodies.

The project is a result of speculation and an invitation to take this public space into the private. To think about why we do what we do, and why it might never be enough. It formulated a way of thinking that can now live further in the minds of others and proceed to grow, until the destabilisations don’t seem so uncomfortable anymore and we move on to others.