On Discomfort

Moments in a Modern History of Architectural Culture

David Ellison, Andrew Leach, David Ellison, Andrew Leach

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781472455338
• eBook ISBN: 9781317085867
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

Examining discomfort's physical, emotional, conceptual, psychological and aesthetic dimensions, the contributors to this volume offer an alternate, cultural approach to the study of architecture and the built environment. By attending to a series of disparate instances in which architecture and discomfort intersect, On Discomfort offers a fresh reading of the negotiations that define architecture's position in modern culture. The essays do not chart comfort's triumph so much as discomfort's curious dispersal into practices that form 'modern life' – and what that dispersion reveals of both architecture and culture.

The essays presented in this volume illuminate the material culture of discomfort as it accrues to architecture and its history. This episodic analysis speaks to a range of disciplinary fields and interdisciplinary subjects, extending our understanding of the domestication of interiors (and objects, cities and ideas); and the conditions under which – by intention or accident – they discomfort.

1

Thinking through discomfort

David Ellison and Andrew Leach

Comfort did not originally refer to contentment. Its root – the Latin confortare – suggested consolation in both the affectional and theological senses. It was not until the late eighteenth century that the word began to indicate the realm of physical satisfactions.¹ Throughout the nineteenth century, the term cleaved ever more closely to the experience and expectation of bourgeois, middle-class domesticity – and the Anglo-American model above all – with its foundations laid firmly in the consumption of mass-produced goods. In the 1920s, the now-familiar concept of a ‘comfort zone’ was introduced in engineering, where it referred to ‘conditions under which a person can maintain a normal balance between production and loss of heat at normal body temperatures and without sweating’.² While a comfort zone might emerge spontaneously from given environmental conditions, it is primarily the object of an artificially controlled, thermally stable construction.

This heat-balance model is consistent with other forms of comfort that rely on achieving equilibrium. At home, for example, we might distinguish the superlatively comfortable chair from lesser versions by the degree to which it reduces consciousness of the body – and, by extension, its labours, stresses and incapacities. In other words, upholstery of proximate elasticity and density to the body it supports is comfortable to the degree that the line between sitter and seat grows increasingly indistinct – comfort being a null state of extension.³

While comfort is a highly conditional state, the chair in which it is experienced might be regarded as more or less permanently comfortable, where comfort both inheres and persists as a durable characteristic – a translation of affect between bodies and things. Yet, just as an individual’s efforts to fine-tune the surrounds by which they can live out life in comfort can be subverted by matters of health and circumstance, just as financial comfort can be jeopardised through fluctuations in the market that strip away the security of a nest egg, and just as bones and muscles grow weary of a posture that in youth one imagined maintaining forever, discomfort lurks at the edges of the kind of physical and emotional security comfort would seem to offer. This is despite the common possibility that the modern world offers its inhabitants of living in comfort, being surrounded by life’s comforts, being comfortable (even comfortably well off) and, eventually, dying in comfort. Comfort is something that sets the modern age apart from its predecessors.

We can write the history of comfort as the history of technological, social, cultural and economic advances, tracking the path of modernity, whereby we use lavatories rather than chamber pots, drive cars rather than walk or ride in wooden-wheeled carts, adjust the dimmer switch rather than risk our eyesight by reading in the candlelight. The ever-greater numbers of objects held within, and contributing to, the homeostatic comfort system thus become a key index of modernity and one of the ways in which histories of the present may be traced.⁴

But what happens when we turn from comfort to its apparent opposite? A history of discomfort – could such a thing exist – might choose to follow comfort’s seemingly inexorable advance through the home and, more broadly, through modern life. It would observe the outlines of inconvenience and disutility vanishing under the manifold technical improvements to domestic ventilation, insulation, plumbing and sprung upholstery.⁵ Only those improvements would displace, not dissolve, discomfort, which inevitably would reappear under the auspices of some other form of disequilibrium: an arthritic pang; the dawning awareness of a fashion misstep; a trapped rat scratching behind the wainscoting; the broken sash cord condemning sleepers to an airless night; or a moment of awkwardness resetting a room’s emotional thermostat. In this sense, discomfort is more than comfort’s opposite: it is its complement, throwing comfort into relief and recalling that which comfort strives to have us put to the back of our minds.⁶

These few examples stand in lieu of the mortifying boundlessness of discomfort’s variety, persistence and capacity to both emanate from within and infuse from without. If to think about discomfort were simply another way to describe the multifarious experience of dwelling itself, with its project to render the domus the site of comfort par excellence, then any claim we might make to pay special attention to discomfort would substantially weaken. On the face of it, discomfort’s ubiquity – an ever-present dimension of the comfortable – paired with its largely endurable quality produces nothing like the distinctively grave and lofty canon we associate with the extremity of pain, chronic illness or the lingering deathbed.⁷ Arguably, pain is dramatic, discomfort is, at best, mildly comic. Indeed, certain comic forms – the practical joke, for example – are made out of the whole cloth of discomfort. Yet, despite this apparent triviality, discomfort warrants notice precisely because it brings malfunctions, faults and minor crises to an appreciable surface – and because its endurance amplifies the limitations of certain sureties in the comfort that might otherwise figure in our world view as a condition of fulfilment.

Discomfort occurs at the point where a given arrangement fails: an impacted cushion jabs, a decor jars, a chimney blocks, a hospitable gesture disappoints, a social more slips. Each of these failures registers as a percept; a system disorder translated into a range of physical and emotional responses that manifest discontinuities and points of resistance between environments and their inhabitants, unhousing them to greater or lesser degrees, depending on their source and duration. The resulting change of state – a shift from oblivion to attentiveness – confers an unwonted dynamism on domestic space conventionally reserved for the unremarkable expression and amplification of personal values, tastes and sexualities. Under conditions of discomfort, the language of the expressive home suffers some deformation, and is recast in inadvertently revelatory terms inviting scrutiny and judgement. Hosts are pronounced cold, rooms stifling, beds lumpy, floors noisy. Singly, and in their combined parts, such faults as these provoke restlessness. In response, and depending on the intensity of the stimulus, things move: soft and hard furnishings shift location, are restored or replaced, as are floors, walls and relationships. The object is to return to a state innocent of muscular spasm or embarrassed twinge; a steady and imperturbable form of comfort with which one can feel at home.

Pezeu-Massabuau’s Éloge de l’inconfort (2004) offers the most articulate theory of discomfort published to date. As it forms a theme at the intersection of architectural culture and culture per se, however, discomfort remains largely latent. As a rigorous theory of discomfort, the science of ergonomics perhaps comes closest, but this is clearly limited by its preoccupation with optimising efficient embodiment in the workplace, as well as by its aim – etched deeply into the original ambitions of this science – to rationalise the body and the risks to which it is subject.⁸ We therefore turn to other kinds of accounts that show the operation of discomfort in the interior, in architecture and, further afield, in psychology and the novel. These fields offer a useful view on the subject of discomfort in that they notice discomfort in light of their own pressing concerns: as practical problems seeking resolution through design, in the expression of comfortable arrangements as signs of progress, but also drawing on discomfort’s capacity to mobilise the personal and the domestic, exploring the elastic – even experimental – qualities it may confer on the home as the most immediate reflection of the self. In other words, we may turn to a body of writing that looks beyond the task of elimination to ask what discomfort may be said to ‘do’.

In The Protestant Ethic (1905), Max Weber sketches two opposing, although related, forces within Protestantism. On the one hand, asceticism acted to restrict the consumption of luxurious goods; on the other, the risk of imposing undue mortifications on the wealthy was managed through the idea of comfort – which is to say that comfort regulates and ennobles consumption, limiting, directing and shaping permissible expenditure towards the production of an expressive yet sober interior.⁹ It did not take long for authors to explore the latent potential in the middle-class refusal to subscribe to seemly comfort. In Charles Dickens’s Little Dorrit (1857), for example, the perversely calcified miseries of the Dorrit home – its dim, stained interiors – speak directly to the encrypted family history at the heart of the hostile relationship between mother and son.¹⁰ Simply put, when liberated from its habitual role as an index of impoverishment, discomfort could become a fantastically expressive medium. In a brief memoir recalling her childhood home (‘22 Hyde Park Gate’, 1921), Virginia Woolf singled out folding doors as essential to domestic life.¹¹ At one level, they materialised class distinctions, enabling the discretionary partition of living space into comfortable and uncomfortable zones: on one side, the upper-middle-class family at ease; on the other, servants at work. But beyond such divisions of class, the folding doors extend the remit of the domestic to privately contain material that it must otherwise disavow: scandal, sexual eccentricity, contention, powerful grief. She writes:

suddenly there would be a crisis – a servant dismissed, a lover rejected, pass books opened, or poor Mrs Tydall who had lately poisoned her husband by mistake come for consolation. On one side of the door Cousin Adeline, Duchess of Bedford, perhaps would be on her knees – the Duke had died tragically at Woburn; Mrs Dolmetsch would be telling how she had found her husband in bed with the parlour-maid . . .¹²

Consigning space to the expression of uncomfortable feelings enabled the domestic to participate in an eventfulness that otherwise was prohibited under conditions of comfort. These early adaptations of minimally flexible structures – such as the folding door – are one of a number of experimental approaches to domestic space that explored alternatives to the home as a cloistered retreat. In this light, Woolf’s folding doors might be seen alongside the radical discomforts of artistic and suffragette homes of the later nineteenth century. Simply put, discomfort is modern.

The factor that renders discomfort decidedly so – and one that teases at the edges of the modern idea of our relationship to our environment – lies precisely in its threat to undermine a hard-won sense of entitlement to comfort. What is domestic comfort if not the successful effort to keep at bay all that would otherwise give us cause for disquiet? The conventions of the family portrait, the favoured chair placed before the television just so, the ease of absorbing a compelling view, the welcome hum of the street being left to its own devices, even the disordered and disrupted interior, where the threat of a discomfort registered in perpetuity is most proximate – in all these, we read an attempt to keep discomfort at bay – inviting its image and effects into the home to neutralise its potency. As Maldonado suggests, comfort serves the ambitions of hygiene and control and, from the Industrial Revolution onwards, has been bound up in the aims of managing the ‘social fabric of the nascent capitalist society’.¹³

In Delirious New York, Rem Koolhaas recalls the demonstration by...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• On Discomfort
• Ashgate Studies in Architecture Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Thinking Through Discomfort
• 2 ‘Good God, Mrs Nicholson!’: Slaves and Domestic Disquiet in Eighteenth-Century Scotland
• 3 Thoreau’s Economy
• 4 Wandering Sensations: Supernatural Discomforts and Modern Domesticity
• 5 Climatic Discomforts : [sub]Tropical Climates, Racial Character and the Nineteenth-Century Queensland House
• 6 Technological Progress as an Obstruction to Domestic Comfort: Hugo Van Kuyck and the Introduction of the American Example in Post-War Belgium
• 7 Technological Progress as an Obstruction to Domestic Comfort: Hugo Van Kuyck and the Introduction of the American Example in Post-War Belgium
• 8 It’s Not me, It’s You
• 9 The Wolfers House by Henry Van de Velde, as Occupied by Herman Daled
• 10 Blind Windows : A Particularly Domestic Discomfort
• 11 Reality without restraint : Bathtime in the Villa dall’Ava