Building/Object

Shared and Contested Territories of Design and Architecture

Charlotte Ashby, Mark Crinson, Charlotte Ashby, Mark Crinson

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Visual Arts
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781350234024
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architettura
• Subtopic: Storia dell'architettura

Building/Object addresses the space in between the conventional objects of design and the conventional objects of architecture, probing and reassessing the differences between the disciplines of design history and architectural history Each of the 13 chapters in this book examine things which are neither object-like nor building-like, but somewhere in between – air conditioning; bookshelves; partition walls; table-monuments; TVs; convenience stores; cars – exposing particular political configurations and resonances that otherwise might be occluded. In doing so, they reveal that the definitions we make of objects in opposition to buildings, and of architecture in opposition to design, are not as fundamental as they seem. This book brings new aspects of the creative and experiential into our understanding of the human environment.

PART ONE

Grey Zones

In Part One, Grey Zones, we find those things which are themselves in some conceptual inbetween zone – neither the conventional objects of design nor those of architecture. These entities are often neglected or not given much attention, either because of the disciplinary differences that have developed between design history and architectural history, or because they have simply not been regarded as worthy of attention as a result of their lowly status or ubiquity. They exist in the spaces of the ignored and taken-for-granted, the contact points between differently categorized zones of culture, neither one thing nor the other.

The first chapter by Swati Chattopadhyay explores interrelations in form and scale as they play between language and inscription, or printed word; from volume or manuscript to chest or bookshelf; from Royal Treasury to Oriental Repository and on to the emblematic function of the private library in the English-style house of an Indian intellectual. The chapter places the bookshelf in the context of its relationship to the colonial public sphere. Object acquisition and display is repeatedly reframed as an articulation of authority, and architecture plays a key role in making this visible and legible. At the same time, small objects retain their power. The preference for a wooden sandal over a leather shoe may function to bar the threshold to an institution. In this way, the chapter serves to remind us of the significance of the small-scale.

In Chapter Two by Meltem Ö. Gürel, we encounter an example of the way a now-ubiquitous object transformed domestic space and spatial practice in Turkey in the 1970s. The new technology of television engendered a new form of sociability within the home. Rather than being peripheral to the architecture, the popularity of television viewing made the object a centre of gravity that drew the occupants of the house together and reconfigured the surrounding furniture and architecture. Radiating out from this, privately owned televisions transformed the wider city, both through the infrastructure of individual aerials and satellite dishes and through a preference for entertainment within the home.

In Chapter Three by Louisa Iarocci, we are invited to consider the convenience store as a building type shaped, at a fundamental level, by developments in food and transport technologies. The advent of product branding was immediately absorbed into the architectural form, blurring the boundary between building and commodity. Both buildings and objects were shaped by the same forces: the development of food preservation technologies, refrigeration, electrification, and the rise in private automobile ownership. As such, the convenience store can only be understood as part of this wider consumer ecology. Rarely designed by professional architects, it is an example of the sort of building that has no place in the canon. Unlike the department store or the petrol pump, its evolution from nineteenth-century grocer’s shop denies it a moment of emergence as a new form.

In Chapter Four, Jiat-Hwee Chang explores another overlooked form of domestic technology: the air-conditioning unit. Like the television, the air-conditioning unit had profound repercussions for the development of architectural form and spatial practices. Not just a new technology that needed to be accommodated within apartment design and the accompanying framework of legal regulation and utilities provision of the public housing authorities, air-conditioning altered the ambient environment of the home. This transformation had knock-on effects, as the design of homes in Singapore shifted from a dominant principle of airiness and porosity to one of enclosed cosiness, and from responsiveness to the external environment to reactions to the mechanically cooled interior.

In the last chapter in Part One, Richard J. Williams explores the ways in which automobile driving prompted a reconceptualization of public space in the 1960s. The focus here is not on vehicle design but on the transport infrastructure of the road network, particularly the freeway or motorway and its impact, transforming both the physical and the immersive landscape. The chapter explores how Reyner Banham and other thinkers were propelled by their experience of driving to understand the relationship between people, objects, urban infrastructure, space and time in a new way, as a design ecology or environmental category.

The grey zone is a blurring of boundaries. It reminds us of the knock-on effects that reverberate back and forth between people, things, buildings and their environment, and further to the wider infrastructure, transportation networks, utilities, legal frameworks, new forms of media and political systems within which all these effects take place.

CHAPTER ONE

A Good Shelf:

The Material Culture of Reading in Colonial India

Swati Chattopadhyay

The Bangyia Sahitya Parishat Library in Kolkata is home to a collection of books that once belonged to Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar (1820–91), a luminary of the nineteenth-century public sphere of Calcutta (Kolkata). The books are housed in twenty-four bookshelves that Vidyasagar had custom-made for his Sanskrit, Hindi, Bengali and English books as well as his collection of puthi (manuscript scrolls).¹

A renowned Sanskrit scholar, social reformer, educator, author and publisher, Vidyasagar had intended his book collection to be donated or sold after his death. According to the instruction in his will, he wanted the person or institution acquiring his book collection to take the books with the bookcases in which he kept them. Those bookshelves ultimately arrived at the Bangiya Sahitya Parishat Library with much of the original collection still intact.²

Perhaps Vidyasagar anticipated that his heirs would not understand or heed the integrity of his book collection, and that is why he put in the clause about bookshelves in his will. He did not want his book collection to be dispersed, scattered and forgotten. Perhaps they were bequeathed to future generations of literary Calcutta as a mark of his scholarly range and taste. The books, he hoped, would acquire real value in transmission. Perhaps we would get to know him by the company of books he kept. We do not know why he made this decision, but it is evident from contemporary sources that he went to great lengths to accommodate those bookshelves. He had a new residence built to house this large collection.³

FIGURE 1.1 One of the bookshelves that once belonged to Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar, presently in the Bangiya Sahitya Parishat Library, Kolkata. Copyright Swati Chattopadhyay.

I stood in front of one of these bookshelves on a dimly lit stair-landing at the Bangiya Sahitya Parishat Library, hoping to find something extraordinary (Figure 1.1). The dark varnish of the solid wood spoke of age. The stout legs of the bookshelf made room for a few inches of space between the bottom shelf and the floor, making it convenient to clean underneath. The frame itself was unadorned. The clear glass door-leaves of the bookshelf were locked. I peered through the glass to see the titles of the volumes inside. Nothing appeared exceptional about the object, except a solemn presence.

Rather than consider the bookshelf as an isolated object of historical significance, I use Vidyasagar’s bookshelf as an entrée into the nineteenth-century material culture of reading. It helps us unfold the relation between architecture (the building) and the object (bookshelf) as a set of practices – economic, social, political – that shaped the culture of empire. My focus is the relation between the bookshelf as a spatial container of books and the space in which the bookshelf was located. This relation accrued peculiar meanings in the nineteenth-century colonial milieu. Here I bring together a few historical strands that created such spatial specificities.

The changing practice of storing books – specifically, the gradual obsolescence of the practice of storing books in chests, hampers and wall niches, and the emergent practice of keeping books in rows of horizontal shelves either set inside a wall or as free-standing furniture – is key to this story. While the use of wall niches and cupboards for storing books continued, the widespread use of the shelf specifically meant for books was coeval with the rapid growth of the print industry in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that transformed habits of reading, collecting and keeping books. It was also a consequence of global ‘bibliomigrancy’ – the movement of books from one language to another and across the world, made possible by modern colonialism.⁴

The social significance of bibliomigrancy exceeded its literary content. An entirely new set of social relations of race, class and caste – between colonizer and colonized, Indians and Europeans, intellectual elites and the barely literate – was created around the mode of storing books. The bookshelf, first as a tool of display and second as an emblem of knowledge acquisition and transmission, emerged as a central reference in calibrating power relations.

The location of the collection – in a secluded space as opposed to a public space, in the domestic realm or oriented towards a public sphere – was paramount to the attribution of meaning.⁵ As a fragment linked to the public world of letters and of colonial collecting, the bookshelf in the colonial milieu framed the contentious relation between public and private spheres. Viewed in relation to an intended user/audience, it helped articulate both a new public display of colonial power and a new idea of literary space within domestic confines. The bookshelf in this sense emerged as a new figure of space that mediated relations of power.

By figure of space, I mean the constitution of space around a social role – when a space is attached to a social role and thus becomes connotative of an expected performance of power relations, and through this linkage becomes tropic. This is the case of the housewife and the drawing room in nineteenth-century literature on domesticity, the veranda as a site of European authority in the colonies, and the salon in the space of bourgeois domesticity that negotiated ...