architecture of immaterial labour
DESCRIPTION
By Andreas Rumpfhuber — An investigation into (workplace) architecture that deals with a contemporary concept of work – a concept of work that increasingly diffuses, and increasingly penetrates all aspects of human activity, in which work-time and spare-time merge, and the actual job becomes indistinguishable from education or vocational training.TRANSCRIPT
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English Summary
Architecture of Immaterial Labour
English Summary:
Architecture of Immaterial Labour
206
The following text is a radically abbreviated
adaptation of the original German version. It
seeks to introduce the reader to the topic of my
dissertation by focusing on the main arguments,
but still keeping the arrangement of the
chapters of the book. For the time translations
are mine for quotes in German, possible existing
English translations notwithstanding. Only if a
source was available in my own library – and, of
course, quotes are originally in English – are
quoted from the English-language references.
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Introduction The world is labour. [Die Welt ist Arbeit.]
Antonio Negri, Michael Hardt
Regardless of the discourses on the end of
labour, and in contrast to diverse models of
feasible utopias like the twenty-hour week or
basic social security for everyone, life in our
societies is all about work. Particularly in
Western industrial nations, work is becoming
increasingly diffuse. Labour penetrates all
aspects of human activity, work-time and spare-
time merge, and the actual job becomes
indistinguishable from education and vocational
training; nowadays private life and vita activa
are becoming commingled. With its
organisational as well as juridical constructions,
accompanied by popular (neo-liberal) discourses
and under pressure by the imperative of global
capital, existing labour legislation, as well as
pension- and insurance-models of post-war
Europe get radically challenged and
aggressively re-structured. The old dictum of
spatial and temporal simultaneity and
concurrence of work processes, as well as the
functionally distinct, well-defined attribution of
spaces of production disintegrates with current
organizations of a labour concept that is
becoming increasingly diffuse and becomes
more and more immaterial. Today modes, as
well as means of production, require different
spatial figurations for work that are permanently
and continuously manifest in new and
unprecedented formations and figurations. This
book is about these kinds of increasingly
immaterial organizations of spaces.
Spaces
of
Production
From time immemorial, architecture has
organized spaces of production. It framed a
structural as well as a symbolic order that
affected the inner assembly as well as radiated
to the outside. The Royal saltworks of Chaux
(1771-1779) by Claude-Nicolas Ledoux, the
social-utopian workers project New Harmony
(1825-27) by Robert Owen and his architect
Stedman Whitwell, but also Boodle’s (1762) or
the Athenæum Club (1824) in London constitute
the ideal type of exemplary modern models for
spaces of labour. They exemplify modes of an
architecture of labour: it encloses an assembly
of men and women, as well as their machines
and composes an ordered and controlled
interior. Architecture of work constructs and
marks out a space for production, regardless of
the mode of community building – be it the
quasi-transcendental sovereign that marks the
working community or be it a community that
authorizes itself.
Architecture efficiently arranges humans and
machines in an exclusive interior. The
exclusiveness of the production-spaces is
thereby conceived in a multitude of modalities,
however always regulated by rules of conduct
and codes. Furthermore the architecture of work
has always been defined in relation to life – to
living and free time. Initially its inner logic
comes about in dissociation from life, but it
simultaneously establishes aspects of life within
its boundaries. Thus, great spaces of production
are always designs that modify working
conditions of assembled workers and create a
difference to existing living conditions.
The disparate spaces of work are instruments of
subjectification and problematize the structures
of power of the subjects – be it the worker, be it
the architects, be it the entrepreneurs – who are
enmeshed within manifold processes of
rationalization, discipline and subjectification,
become produced and are not able to step
outside, to flee. To paraphrase Foucault,
subjects are formed by various powers, are at
once subordinated and are subordinating, they
have the power over something and the power to
something.1
As the sociologist Andreas Reckwitz2 points out,
the production of subjects explicitly delimits
itself from a liberal idea of two disparate and
opposing forces – on the one3 hand of a
continuously liberating individual, versus an
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inevitable limitation and control of the subject
through society. Rather, it understands the
forces that operate on and through the subject
as cultural forms in which each individual as
subject – in other words, as a rational, reflexive,
socially oriented, moral, expressive, etc.
instance and authority – must needs shape itself
and desires to shape itself.4
The
Societal
Factory
Considering experimental projects of the 1960s,
one gets the idea that, already then, the
regulated framework which accompanied work
had disappeared from the concept of living
altogether and that pure life orders the world:
spare time and play is ubiquitous in self-
adapting, fluid forms, or in mobile plug-in-
designs for living … Labour, but also new modes
of production that arise within an ever
increasing automation are not depicted or
represented by neo-avant-garde projects for a
new leisure society, even though labour is an
immanent part of the postulated creative life of
the homo ludens.
Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt describe
alterations of work conditions in the 1960s in
transition from the mass worker to the labourer
of society. Negri and Hardt are using – in the
tradition of, yet keeping a distance from the
Italian philosopher and operaist Mario Tronti –
the term factory of society. In doing so, Negri
and Hardt expand the traditional Marxian
concept of labour with a multitude of social
productions – a value-creating form of practice
that broaches natural requirements, artificial
desires, and social affairs, thus also
incorporating the sphere of the Marxian non-
labour (Nichtarbeit).
It is this concept of immaterial labour that
broaches a contemporary condition in Western
industrialized societies, that today becomes
more and more significant. It points out
alterations and changes in the very construction
of the concept of work – its attributes and its
conditions. A transformation that disengages
from formerly fixed spaces of production, a
changeover that makes obsolete5 a distinction
between work, manufacturing and action
(Arbeiten, Herstellen und Handeln).
Still, immaterial labour is not a new concept that
replaces old concepts of labour, as some post-
workerist or post-modern literature would have
it.6 Immaterial labour has no monopolistic
position. Its modes of production coexist with
other forms of production. Luc Boltanski and
Eve Chiapello describe this practice as The New
Spirit of Capitalism, composed on the one hand
by management discourses that modify
identities of labour towards the ideal of the
creative artist, and on the other hand, by an
material frame of new communication
technologies. Such a new cultural practice is a
new and general “ideology […], that justifies the
engagement with capitalism”7 that is closely
linked to the emancipation movements of the
1960s and its critique of capitalism.
Thus, immaterial labour is invoked here as a
political concept that allows me to question
significant forms of production of a value-
adding, symbol-producing activity within the
Western industrialized countries. It is a form of
production that increasingly marginalizes an
economy of physical products and fosters an
immaterial economy of information that goes
hand in hand with a constitutive modification of
capitalism. It is a mode of production – as the
concept of the factory of society already
proposes – that no longer is fixed to closed,
mono-functionally determined spaces.
Architecture
of
Immaterial
Labour
The title of the book is the hypothesis of my
investigation: Do we find, parallel to a dominant
cultural practice of immaterial labour new forms
and orders of architecture? Which forces are
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composing these spaces? How is an
architecture of immaterial labour being
discursively constructed and how is it being
produced? Which forms does it take on? As
means of subjectification and as part of an
organization and of representation, architecture
does offer a research subject that is directly
connected to the disparate forms of capitalism.
In its outstanding examples, dominant discourse
formations crystallize: the idea how people shall
assemble, how people are being made
productive and how such an assembly can be
controlled and steered.
The spatial aspect of a form of production that
diffuses into society, that corresponds with no
traditional manufacture of physical products but
defines itself through communication opens up
the problematic of an architecture of immaterial
labour. From there I deduce questions that are
bound within a political field of the concept of
immaterial labour. Every postulated
improvement towards more life, every
movement that tries to emancipate labour from
capitalism is always and already utilized within
prevailing discourses – in this case the capitalist
system.
So I want to ask, if and how architecture of
immaterial labour only portrays the orderly
appearance of works in a space of production
that is rigorously defined by wage
compensation? Thus: does architecture design –
in the words of the French philosopher Jaques
Rancière – the employment and the attributions
of the spaces, onto which workers activities are
distributed. Or: does the practice of architecture
order new (labour) relations, in relation to
society?8 Are architects therefore consultants,
hosts and agents of a capitalist order, or … do
architects affect familiar orders and
distributions with the means of architecture and
therefore alter its status?
Precisely because architecture is directly linked
to a political, social and societal discourse and
since architecture is shaped by a multitude of
different discourses, I want to propose an
analysis of the diverse framings in which
architecture, but also working subjects, are
being produced. Thus I hope to be able to show
the conflict and frictions that are immanent in
an architecture of immaterial labour.
Projects of the 1960s, projects that are bound to
the above-mentioned discourse on automation
and leisure society, make it possible to identify
and analyze contours of an architecture that
mirrors tendencies of altering modes of
production and labour conditions of a value-
adding immaterial practice. Partly reactive,
partly – seen from today – prophetic, the projects
that I discuss deal with two things: firstly, the
sheer endless extension (both in terms of time
and of space) of workplaces in society, and
secondly, the modes of assembly and the modes
of living together.
This duality of the problem I take up in the two
parts of the book. In the first part I write about
effects of mobilization of formerly closed and
static spaces of production. With the first ever
built office-landscape Buch und Ton for the
media corporation Bertelsman (1960/61) its
architectonic antithesis, the office-building
Centraal Beheer (1968-71), as well as the
emancipatory spare time project Fun Palace
(1962-66). I show the necessity, after the Second
World War, to give form to a new social and
economic hypotheses – namely cybernetics. In
the second part of the book I will discuss
strategies of furnishing (einrichten): I refer to the
experimental project Mobile Office (1969) by
Hans Hollein, a project by Haus-Rucker-Co., and
finally to the performance Bed-In. All three
frame miscellaneous strategies to deal with a
new concept of life and work. Simultaneously,
the projects I discuss formulate a variety of
architectonic practices that comply with a
concept of labour, a labour that converges with
life and diffuse into society.
As hybrid examples, that happen parallel to and
linked with movements of emancipation in the
1960s, every sample encloses in its peculiar
mode, an assembly of people, constitutes an
order and controls its interior, organizes and
marks a space for production.
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Part 1 To Mobilize
Nimm dir einen Regelkreis
Und tu dich mittenrein
Schnell erhältst du den Beweis
Besser kann die Welt nicht sein
//
Take a control circuit
Put yourself in
Immediatly you will have the proof:
Better the world can’t be
Thomas Meinecke/FSK: “Lob der Kybernetik”
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Irregular Rhythms Brothers Eberhard and Wolfgang Schnelle: Buch
und Ton office landscape, 1960/61
In
the
landscape
The two images show the customized open-plan
office for the Bertelsmann commision-house
Buch und Ton [Book&Tone]. This company was
responsible for the mail-order business of the
German publishing house & and media group
Bertelsmann. The office space was built from
1960 to 1961 and was conceptualized and
designed by Wolfgang and Eberhard Schnelle, a
management-consultant team.
This office landscape – as the Schnelle brothers
would call it – is a pragmatic experiment to
create an open, pluralistic and self-organizing
space for work. A space designed according to
strict mathematic descriptions, designed
through the analysis of all ascertainable
functional and environmental aspects
(Schnelle). In other words, it was designed
through the particular assessment and analysis
of communication-flow and document
circulation within the organization.
This office landscape claims, on the one hand,
to suffice a human scale of an intimate
architecture, and on the other hand, to be a
space that is efficiently organized to allow a
dynamic alignment of ever modulating work
processes for ever-evolving requirements. The
ultimate aspiration when designing and
organizing such a space ultimately seeks to free
all workers from work through full automation.
To quote Eberhard Schnelle: “[D]oing away with
work, insofar as working people consider it to be
a burden.”
Here some hard facts:
2540 sqm gross floor area, 2947 sqm secondary
rooms on other floors. Room height: 2.95 meters.
Average acoustic level between 49 and 53 Phon
(which is comparable to the noise exposure of a
VW Beetle [1960] at a speed of 50km/h). Floor
covering: nylon-carpet. Ceiling: suspended
aluminium acoustic panels, square and
coloured. Artificial lighting: fluorescent tubes.
Light colour: Wight de Luxe, controllable
illumination level. Air-conditioning: low pressure
facility with maximum six times air change
(renewal), serves also as heating and humidifier,
additionally: de-dusting, sterilising and odour-
neutralising.
This office space is the direct result of a
scientific planning method: Organisations-
kybernetik [cybernetics of organisation]. It had
been developed since 1956 by a trans-
disciplinary team of German computer and
information scientists, mathematicians and
philosophers close management consultants
Eberhard and Wolfgang Schnelle. The method
initially claimed to be a comprehensive, holistic
method to organize, plan and design office
spaces. Later on the method was applied on a
broader scale to organize – amongst others – the
German bureaucracy at large.
The ambition was twofold:
(1) to create an office space as a flexible and
adaptable instrument for corporations – to
conceptualize space that is easy to arrange to
new formations of work-processes, and (2) to
design a workplace as an all-embracing
environment for living – an environment that,
due to an anticipated automation of
administrative work would dismiss people into
an everlasting spare-time.
A New Paradigm
of Governance
and Control
The planning-method explicitly refers to
cybernetics. In the late 1950s – due to a new
epistemological precondition of information-
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theory9 – cybernetics marks a new model for
governance. A model that applied to “living
creatures, as well to machines and apparatuses,
to economic as well as to psychic processes, to
sociological as well as to aesthetic
phenomena.”10
Cybernetics presupposes the compatibility of
information-exchange of human beings and
machines through digitality. In doing so the
human is less understood as a machine. Rather
he and she, like machines and automats are
modelled as autonomous, self-directing
individuals, whose behaviour (within the
cybernetic system) is understood as coded and
thus as being able to be re-programmed.
The cybernetic model of control is based on
circular feedback loops – it is understood as a
universal paradigm of order that can be vividly
explained with the different levels of cybernetics
of the ship’s crew:
The following four points classify the cybernetic
modes of operation of the human being: (1) to
set goals, (2) to plan [in the sense of developing
methods to efficiently aim for the goal], (3) to
allocate (in the sense of steering), and (4)
physical labour.11 These four points are
equivalent to (1) the captain of a ship, (2) the
pilot, (3) the steersman, (4) the oarsmen.
To quote from an article of Eberhard Schnelle:
“The pilot is the scientist, or, in a company he is
at the executive level; it is the planner who, by
means of rationalization, searches for an optimal
way of reaching the goal, i.e. the index-value.”12
The steersman orders the information into
distinct, unambiguous instructions and
commands for the oarsmen – who might be the
clerk but also, as Schnelle states: “[the]
managers who only sign those papers which
they themselves did not dictate”.13
The cybernetic model of control cannot be
reduced to a central (supervising) power, since
every single instance, every level of cybernetics,
is already spread out as a network. Every
function within the organisation is not being
represented by one person, but by a team of
experts and its automats. The chain of
command is precise and clearly assigned, but
due to the formation of the organization as a
network, the power is no longer traceable to an
origin.
Political Hypothesis,
Pragmatic Experiment
Understood as a political hypothesis,
cybernetics promises a society on equal terms, a
pluralistic community and a self-organizing form
of governance. The French authors’ association
known as tiqqun insists that “the cybernetic
hypothesis is a new narrative, which replaces
the liberal hypothesis at the end of the twentieth
century.”14 For tiqqun, the cybernetic image of
steering has become the main metaphor that
not only describes politics, but every human
agency. As an ideal it translates a stable society
into objective, controllable mechanisms of
society. Thus cybernetics justifies two types of
scientific and social experiments: (1) an
experiment that is aligned to render all human
beings as mechanisms and (2) an experiment
that aims to emulate all living creatures, which
leads to the development of automata, robots
and artificial intelligence, then to mimicry of
collectives, to creation of networks and the
circulation of information.
With their planning method, the Schnelle
brothers and their team broached the
construction of a new, self-organized society in
post-war Germany. As an enterprise of subjects
acting autonomously it constantly aligns itself to
new goals. Thus the planning team enforces a
tendency that aims to shape society as a whole
and to produce a new kind of workspace – one
which functions on different assumptions than
traditional workspaces do.
(1) An enclosed space of the organization is
being marked. It is an abstract, horizontal plane,
that is preferably extensive and within its
compounds accessible, barrier-free. The interior
is (2) regulated by artificial climate, acoustic and
light design, and (3) moveable elements, like
tables, chairs, room dividers, and plants, but
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also personnel and automata are ordered in
various constellations on the plane.
A catalogue of precise requirements controls the
visually loose arrangement and configuration of
interior space. The furniture is arranged
according to the workgroups. Similar to the set
theory, it is positioned in space. Entrance and
circulation routes are marked by plants and
never run through a working unit. Special
emphasis is placed on intimate the working
conditions of every single workplace: through
lighting, orientation of every single table, etc.
The loose arrangement of the cybernetically
organized workspace resembles a chaotic,
extensive landscape of subjective places – as
Eberhad and Wolfgang Schnelle would call it.
Here is a description of the office landscape
Buch und Ton:
“A transparent and generous effect is produced
through the furniture design. The irregular
rhythm of the arrangement and its chromacity
structure the perception of the space: it is only
the close-up range that is perceived, so that
each workplace produces a subjective place that
creates intimacy. Moveable room dividers and
plants provide visual protection, as well – they
delineate circulation routes and work group
areas.”15
The paradoxical phrase irregular rhythms – a
rhythm which knows no symmetry, follows no
regular motion, no regular repetition, but is
instead irregular and non-cyclical – accurately
articulates the hypothesis of the planners, and
gets to the point.
To put it in positive terms: it postulates an
intended fusion of two divergent movements, as
Roland Barthes would contrast (1) a self-
rhythmical mode of life – a mode of life that does
not follow any kind of organization and in which
no institutionalized, reified and objectified
authority of mediation exists between the
individual and the group, with (2) a confined –
both spatially and societally – life that
accompanies the imminent emergence of a
bureaucratic apparatus.16
Every single working individual in the
cybernetically optimized administration space
needs to realize himself or herself not as
crowded cattle (Marx), but as the autonomous
subject, which is on equal terms with everyone
else. A working subject that needs to come
across a familiar atmosphere, being on the same
hierarchical level and in spatial proximity to the
boss.
Although the office landscape looks chaotic and
irregular,a strict, meticulous, virtually
totalitarian order operates within the
arrangements. An order that is bound to a
conceptually autonomous but interdependent
individual and strict rationalism.
Formation of
a Society of
“Cybernetics of Organization”
It is the organization as enterprise that the team
of Wolfgang and Eberhard Schnelle aims at, as
Wolfgang Schnelle puts it: “Organizations with
the aim of carrying out visible performances
(businesses, authorities, but also political
parties and trade unions).”17 The general
purpose of an organization is thus the alteration
of the environment.
Cybernetic organizers distance themselves from
organizations like schools, churches, prisons,
but also from factories. These are organizations
that aim to influence their members through a
centralized power.18 Architecturally speaking,
they dissociate themselves from the
organizational typology of the factory, which has
been prolonged in the hierarchical model of the
American open-plan office:
Widely considered to be the paradigm of such a
hierarchically organized office building is the
Larkin Corporation (1903-06) in Buffalo.
Designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, it houses the
world’s very first mail-order enterprise. As a kind
of ancestor to the Bertelsmann Buch und Ton
enterprise, it accommodated 1800 employees
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214
who were organized in 10 state groups on four
floors. Significant for the building is the four-
storey high central space – the light court –
which accommodates the management and
board of directors.
The Larkin Building is oriented towards the
centre and establishes a closed society, where
no vista of the outside disturbs the
concentration of the workers. Clearly apparent is
the vertical hierarchy that is organized around
the central light court. It is a central, hierarchical
power that operates from within: from the centre
towards the outer ring of the layout.
It is certainly an automated power that Michel
Foucault assigns to light and permanent
visibility that operates here, a power that tears
out the workers from protective darkness. It is a
diffuse but gloomy light that commences
through the light court and the overhead light at
the workplaces. There the workers are fixed at
the heavy metal furniture (custom-designed by
the architect): “In use these chairs allowed only
a limited arc of movement and may have been
uncomfortable over the course of a full work
day.”19
The rejection of such a hierarchically organized
space of production – of such a disciplinary
space, that only works through a central point of
surveillance and control, does not liberate the
work-place from a subjectifying architecture-
machine. Only the figuration of the space of
production of the office landscape takes on a
different form. Only the boarders have been
deferred and are put into different relations to
each other.
The figure of the central space of the
management has been extended with the design
of the Buch und Ton office landscape. The inner
organization follows a spatial scheme of a
horizontal network. It is network whose
paradigm is communication between the
workers and the things (the machines, the
automata, but also the chairs and tables). It
establishes a space that equates all relations
conceptually. It is a space in which all relations
are indifferent. Seen ideally, this space includes
ALL as authorized managers. And there is no
longer an outside.20
The problem of the arrangement of such an
organization is to control and coordinate a big
group of workers and their automata. The
assembled collective needs to be gently
synchronized and directed. The following lines –
which greeted employees at the two entrances
to the Larkin Building – could be considered a
motto for the office landscape per se:
HONEST LABOUR
NEEDS NO MASTER
SIMPLE JUSTICE
NEEDS NO SLAVES
FREEDOM TO EVERY
MAN AND COMMERCE
WITH ALL THE WORLD21
Work
of the
leisure society
In the cybernetically organized Weltbild,
informatics machines and automata take over
the work and send the human race off to an
everlasting, care-free existence. At first they
need to take over all the repetitive and
exhausting work: regressive work-processes, as
cybernetics of organisation would call it – work-
processes that are based on known information
and routines, work-processes that can be
precisely coded – are being taken over by
automats. For the time being employees resume
to work as specialists and skilled workers in
progressive work-processes – work processes
that are based on a high degree of choice, and
are based on unknown information. For
example: experimental work in research, or
creative work, akin to advertising strategies, are
based on progressive work processes.22
But this creates a problem for a cybernetically
organized enterprise: since the decisions within
such progressive work processes are not
controllable, and since such specialized singular
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decisions are not normative nor objectively
comprehensible, such decisions pose a risk to
the enterprise: Each deciding and specialized
subject becomes an opaque black box.
For the goal-oriented enterprise such singular
decisions are neither predictable nor calculable
and complicate an exact and secure solution.
Thus, specialists and skilled workers are being
insured for the enterprise as follows: (1) team-
building, (2) obligation to work with an exact
defined planning-method and (3) detachment of
skilled authority and disciplinary authority.
In other words: every single specialist is
arranged in a group and becomes dependent on
other specialists. At the same time every single
one has to become active and take on
responsibility for his or her decisions. The
disciplinary function is furthermore detached
from the group of specialists.23
In such a way the given goal is being assessed
and objectified by a multitude of specialized
perspectives. The inner dependency of the work-
groups reduces the possibility of wrong
decisions and levels every approach of
radicalism that might harm (in the positivistic,
rational logic) the system itself. In such a way
the team of specialists and skilled workers
allows a high degree of variety in decision
making processes. Due to the obliged use of a
mathematically precise planning-method that
allots a regularized decision process, the
established risk factor becomes calculable.
Parallel to this, a feedback loop is established
that cares for the values of the enterprise.
The space
of Information
Flow
The network of information that constitutes the
space of the office landscape is controlling body
and infrastructure of the self-regulating and self-
organizing society. Like a dynamically wobbling
formation whose frame of reference constantly
changes the arrangement and figuration, the
office landscape needs to be modified
continually. Like the organization itself, which
reacts to changing parameters of the
environment that constantly compares actual
value with index value, aiming at an instable
balance, the arrangement of the space itself
needs to reconfigure the whole time.
Workers, information-processing machines,
automata, and furniture are conceptualized
within the office landscape as programmable
nodes of a network – as flickering signifiers. The
material shell of the office space itself is a
container. It marks distinct borders of the
organization: within its borders information shall
freely float. But every border-crossing is
precisely controlled:
The point I want to emphasize hereis: The office
landscape is not a space as network or
infrastructure (as the 1960s architecture utopias
would conceptualize it). The office landscape is
not the architectural representation of a
cybernetic model, but rather the direct and
literal translation of a cybernetic organization in
space. The outer limits of the organization
coincide with the building’s surface. Workers,
machines and furniture are dimensionless
points and the information flow connects them.
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216
Episode #1: An Incubator for Spare Time Joan Littlewood with Cedric Price, Frank Newby,
Gordon Pask and others: Fun Palace, 1962-196624
The World’s First
Mighty
Space-Mobile
“Arrive and leave by train, bus, monorail, hovercraft, car,
tube, or foot at any time YOU want to – or just have a look at it
as you pass. The information screens will show you what’s
happening. No need to look for an entrance – just walk in
anywhere. No doors, foyers, queues or commissionaries: it’s
up to you to know how you use it. Look around – take a lift, a
ramp, an escalator to wherever or whatever looks interesting.
Choose what you want to do – or watch someone else doing
it. Learn how to handle tools, paint, babies, machinery, or just
listen to your favourite tune. Dance, talk or be lifted up to
where you can see other people make things work. Sit out
over space with a drink and tune in to what’s happening
elsewhere in the city. Try starting a riot or beginning a
painting – or just lie back and stare at the sky.
What time is it? Any time of day or night, winter or summer –
it really doesn’t matter. If it’s too wet that roof will stop the
rain but not the light. The artificial cloud will keep you cool
or make rainbows for you. Your feet will be warm as you
watch the stars – the atmosphere is clear as you join in the
chorus.
Why not have your favourite meal high up where you can
watch the thunderstorm?
[...]
We are building a short-term plaything in which all of us can
realise the possibilities and delights that a twentieth-century
city environment owes us. It must last no longer than we need
it.”25
Fun Palace never got built. In a brochure
though, written by the initiators, the theatre-
maker Joan Littlewood and the architect Cedric
Price, Fun Palace is described as a boundless
thing. A building that no longer is a house. An
infinite traffic junction, if you will, a boundless
hub. As space for activity, it is space for traffic.
One can reach it by land, by water, by foot or
with the tube or by car, …. It is a limitless thing
without borders and has no distinct form. This
thing is space for all and its program is learning
and playing. Its object: self-determination – a
kind of do-what-you-want-autonomy. The goal:
Join in, and synchronize with a new society and
its atmosphere of leisure-time.
Fun Palace is a piece of cybernetic workers
architecture for a leisure society. It is a
subjectification machine that activates the
visitors for spare time according to cybernetic
premises. In its programmatic conception, it
expounds the problem of a new leisure society
and the expedient use of the time (Price,
Littlewood) that increasingly is won through the
soaring automation of production.
As architecture, Fun Palace is the representation
of its cybernetic conception – its supporting
structure is systems boundary. Within its
borders, countless machines – based on
feedback loops – organize the building. To quote
Stanley Mathews: “Virtually every part of the
structure was to be variable, with the overall
structural frame being the fixed element.”26
According to Mark Wigley,27 the vast open
scaffold is the most elaborate version of a
networked incubator for leisure time that is
associated with participatory democracy,
individual creativity and self-actualization. To
Wigley, the load-bearing structure has almost
disappeared and the building only exists due to
zones of activity and zones of a distinct
atmospheric intensity. Fun Palace is a building
that avoids being a building: “[A] new network
architecture emerges, a delicate ghostlike trace
that operates more as landscape than
building”28
Leisure-time
architecture
In the course of planning29 Fun Palace advances
to become a programmable cybernetic theatre,
as Gordon Pask would phrase it: a theatre in
Architektur immaterieller Arbeit
217
which guests would actually need to play
themselves. Studded with communication
systems and programmable control systems to
efficiently script a dramatic performance (“the
present methods of dramatic presentation are
not very efficient ...”) the architecture itself shall
foster an open-ended theatre.
Indeed Fun Palace is a cybernetic machine for
leisure time, a revolutionary apparatus that
produces spare-time as learning, an architecture
that prepares people temporarily for a new life.
Fun Palace is not passive space in which spare
time just could happen. No. Its explicit goal is to
usher people into a new life: it activates people
and aims to enlighten them. Cedric Price and
Joan Littlewood’s intention was that Fun Palace
be a space in which people would be awakened
from their apathy. It represents an experiment to
imagine a new life:
“Automation is coming. More and more machines do our
work for us. There is going to be yet more time left over, yet
more human energy unconsumed. The problem which faces
us is far more that of the ›increased leisure‹ to which our
politicians and educators so innocently refer. This is to
underestimate the future. The fact is that as machines take
over more of the drudgery, work and leisure are increasingly
irrelevant concepts. The distinction between them breaks
down. We need, and we have a right, to enjoy the totality of
our lives. We must start discovering now how to do so.”30
Versus Container:
Anti-Building
The variety of activities in the building is not pre-
determined. The immense structure of the
palace needs to permanently adapt to new and
unprecedented ideas and new technologies. It
needs to suit permanent change and renewal, as
well as destruction. To Stanley Mathews the
architecture of Fun Palace is like the hardware
of a computer that can be programmed in any
new and conceivable way:
“A ‘virtual architecture’ like the Fun Palace, had no singular
programme, but could be reprogrammed to perform an
endless variety of functions. By providing methodologies for
coping with indeterminate systems evolving in time,
cybernetics and game theory established the groundwork for
information and computer technologies as well as for virtual
architecture.”31
Thus Fun Palace’s programme is like software
that controls the figuration of all temporary
processes within the palace by algorithmic
functions and logic interfaces. For Mathews, Fun
Palace’s architecture is like an operative space-
time matrix. It represents its immanent
cybernetic conception. A set of autonomous,
self-organizing enclosures that are constantly
connected with each other are hooked into the
structure as zones of activity, that are able to
adapt and take on every single identity,
depending on its use, […], creating an
architecture that produces, in the words of
Cedric Price an “extremely definitive range of
requirements and aims in the determination of
means of access, site, structural system,
materials, servicing and component design of
the whole.”32
Price intends an architecture that is never
completed, a building that is never a building:
without a specific form, without a specific
programme and without a fixed layout. It is a
becoming anti-architecture (Price) … or in the
words of Rem Koolhaas: “Price wanted to
deflate architecture to the point where it became
indistinguishable form the ordinary...”33
English Summary:
Architecture of Immaterial Labour
218
Structuring Islands Herman Hertzberger with Lucas & Niemeijer,
Centraal Beheer, 1967-1972
The
Architect’s
Reasoning
Both images depict employees in 1974. They
work in the newly built headquarters for the
insurance company Centraal Beheer in
Apeldoorn, the Netherlands. Shot by the
architect Herman Hertzberger himself, they are
part of a series of portraits that depict the
architecture after it had been appropriated by
employees and workers. “Only when the users
have taken possession of the structures through
contact, interpretation or filling in the details, do
the structures achieve their full status, after the
architecture reached its full-fledged condition.”34
Two years after the building’s opening, it
seemed the right time to follow the traces of its
inhabitants. Thus the portraits explicitly show
the design’s intended use of the spatial
structure. They document the built hypotheses,
as Hertzberger would call it.
The portraits are observations inspired by
ethnology and anthropology. They narrate what
the observer knows and thinks about the
situation. But it is not – as traditional ethnology
would have it – an observation of a world far
away, outside Europe, but the ordered interior of
a modern office building. To Hertzberger, they
are not artefacts that represent historic facts,
but are a form of feedback of a situation, that
happens simultaneously, a situation that the
architect himself orchestrated. They show
aspects of a contemporary social life in 1974 and
Hertzberger’s interpretation of the
interpretations and appropriations of inhabitants
and users of Centraal Beheer. In the words of
the French anthropologist Marc Augé:
“It is important at least to know what one is talking about; and
it is enough for us here to note that, whatever the level at
which anthropological research is applied, its object is to
interpret the interpretation others make of the category of
other on the different levels that define its place and impose
the need for it.”35
The pictures show employees and users who
share a laugh, communicate happily with each
other and work diligently, and how they have
furnish their work-places, which were designed
as the antithesis to office landscaping. Ten years
after the first office landscape, Centraal Beheer
succeeds with similar organizational criteria, but
arrives at a strikingly different solution.
Managerially it is no longer the single instance
(human labourer or machine) but a team of
about four members, that constitutes the
smallest entity for the organization. Thus a
completely different explication of the space for
the goal-oriented society is being designed. It is
a concrete construct, small in scale, that forms a
fixed structure which is seen a series of neutral
containers that can be optionally programmed
in various ways.
Architectonic
Provocation
Hertzberg claims that the work of the architect is
to propose spaces that can be appropriated by
its users for active living. An architect should
animate people to think of new possibilities of
living – an act which causes, of course, various
problems for all parties involved, but is needed
in order to achieve a better future. Thus he
writes about Centaal Beheer:
“This building is a hypothesis. Whether it can withstand the
consequences of what it brings into being depends on the way
in which it conforms, with the passing of time, to the
behaviour of its occupants. The building should be responsive
to people, to their evaluations and their inner worth; it should
provide everyone with the conditions that enable him to be
who he wants to be, and especially who he wants to be in the
eyes of others. It should clarify the relationships, involvements
and responsibilities of its users; patterns and processes are
based in such a way that everyone can evaluate them himself;
Architektur immaterieller Arbeit
219
the building should reveal the extent of the space everyone
can freely use, and pinpoint where and by whom oppression
is being exercised. A building might in this way lead to less
oppressive and less oppressed behaviour.”36
The building is a built – for the time being
scientifically unproven – assumption of a new
and self-organized life at work. It is an
experiment that the series of portraits seeks to
verify:
“However, the architect can still take advantage of the
reorganization that moving into a new building always
necessitates anyway, to try to exert some influence on the
reappraisal of the division of responsibilities, at least in so far
as they concern the physical environment. One thing can lead
to another. Simply by putting forward arguments which can
reassure the top management that delegating responsibilities
for the environment to the users need not necessarily result in
chaos, the architect is in a position where he can contribute
to improving matters, and it is certainly his duty to at least
make an attempt in this direction.”37
To Hertzberger, architecture is a means to
challenge traditional concepts and traditional
ways of living. Thus Centraal Beheer is a
catalyst or, as Hertzberger would call it, a
provocation for the re-structuring of society, that
addresses every single person.
Polyvalent
Appropriation
Hertzberger explicates the office building
Centraal Beheer – the workplace for about 1000
people – as a kind of dwelling of the insurance
company, a dwelling in which actually all
employees shall live to work. Hertzberger
intends the shift in meaning from office building
to residential building. For him it is even
necessary to be able to activate employees:38
“[T]hanks to the differentiation into more or less independent
small blocks separated by arcade-like passages (i.e.
essentially publicly accessible space).
And since there are exits and entrances throughout the
complex, it looks more like a piece of a city than like a single
building – most of all it resembles a kind of settlement.”39
The goal of this specific workplace architecture
is to create a solidly united work community.
Architecture is intended to foster a society in
which people – though in need for taking on
more and more individual responsibility – are
connected to each other. Architecture therefore
is understood as the invisible helping hand.
Thus, Hertzberger claims that Centraal Beheer is
not like traditional architecture, like pyramids,
temples or cathedrals or palaces, which are – in
terms of Hertzberger – only instruments of a
prevailing apparatus that only manifests an
existing order and thus affects people from
above. On the contrary, the spatial structure for
labour at Centraal Beheer aspires to be an
instrument that everybody can play and thus
offering a liberal and liberated life. Structuralist
architecture situates all colleagues – as
performers – at the very centre of the design.
The permanently inevitable changes in the
internal organization of the company implicate
frequent adaptation of teams and departments
within the corporation. Therefore the
architecture needs to absorb and contain every
single reconfiguration, every single re-
programming, without disturbing the actual
work flow, as Hertzberger claims with his
concept:
“The only constructive approach to a situation that is subject
to change is a form that starts out from this changefulness as
a permanent – that is, essentially a static – given factor: a
form which is polyvalent. In other words, a form that can be
put to different uses without having to undergo changes itself,
so that a minimal flexibility can still produce an optimal
solution.”40
With his concept of polyvalency, Hertzberger
delineates a concept of space that fosters
flexibility. A flexible architecture is constantly
adapting itself to new uses. But, as Hertzberger
points out, the flexible plan starts out with the
assumption that a right solution does not exist,
since the problem that requires a solution is ever
changing and can only be temporary. Even with
a flexible set-up that adapts itself to change, will
never able to offer the adequate solution. In
contrast to this, a neutral form, a form that exists
through the absence of identity, through the
English Summary:
Architecture of Immaterial Labour
220
absence of distinct attributes, offers a different
space for solution. The problem of adaptation
therefore is lesser a problem of modification of
specific attributes, like it is offered by a flexible
architecture, but its inherent quality itself.41
Hertzberger conceives an architecture that has
not yet an identity, and thus cannot loose
identity or become chaotic, just because
something unprecedented happened to the
programme. Hertzberger’s architecture is an
utterly neutral container that, in background
spans as infrastructure, and which allows any
use.
“In the case of this office building, it proved that the single
square spatial unit as ultimately chosen, simple as it is, would
be capable of meeting virtually every spatial requirement.
Thanks to their polyvalence, these different spatial units can
moreover, if necessary, take each other’s roles, and therein
lies the key to absorption of change.”42
In clear opposition to functionalist architecture,
whose form is derived from the idea of efficiency
and that which represents efficiency, but is not
categorically efficient in and of itself,
Hertzberger and his colleagues propose a space
that wants to integrate and wants to breed a
society. It is an architecture whose identity is
not yet given, and which the users can
appropriate with their use of the building.43
Factually, one thousand employees of Centraal
Beheer were allowed to choose their own
lighting and the type of table from a list that was
collectively put together by members of staff
and the architects. In addition, they were invited
to furnish and decorate their own islands with
flowers, plants, posters and other items and thus
– as in line with the idea of the architect – to
take possession of the corporate architecture, to
make it a home.
“[To] make it a home-away-from-home. It is the fundamental
unfinishedness of the building, the greyness, the naked
concrete, and the many other imposed (but also the
concealed), free-choice possibilities, that are meant to
stimulate the occupants to add their own colour, so that
everyone’s choice, and thereby his standpoint, is brought to
the surface.”44
The concept of polyvalent spaces is not, as
Hertzberger points out, a participatory process,
that would leave parts of the design to the users.
Polyvalence is rather the quality and
competence a space has: the architecture can
be interpreted in manifold ways. […] All the
modulations and additions to the polyvalent
space are thus autonomous decisions of the
users and inhabitants, without any intervention
of the architect whatsoever.
“The architect can contribute to creating an environment
which offers far more opportunities for people to make their
personal markings and identifications in such a way that it
can be appropriated and annexed by all as a place that truly
‘belongs’ to them. The world that is controlled and managed
by everyone as well as for everyone will have to be built up of
small-scale, workable entities, no larger than what one
person can cope with and look after on his own terms.”45
Insular
Open-Space
Centraal Beheer was developed beginning with
the inside – from the smallest possible space of
a socially ordered group that would ultimately
organize the vast open space. [...] The formerly
horizontal and homogenous space of the office-
landscape is established by islands that are
stacked 3-dimensionally. At the same time the
formerly hermetically sealed and controlled
envelope of the office-landscape is perforated.
Hertzberger and his colleagues create a spatial
building-block of 3 x 3 x 3 metres, which – as a
grid – defines the whole structure of the house
that contains all installations for telephone,
electricity and data-transmission. The cubic
building-block equals one Team with up to 4
persons. Four of these building blocks plus
additionally needed aisles and walkways make
one island with a dimension of 9 x 9 metres.
Along the 3 x 3 metre grid, islands are
horizontally and vertically arranged to become
one big mega-structure. The system is strictly
defined: height between floors: 3.5 metres,
ceiling height: 3 metres, upper edge of ceiling
truss: 2.17 metres.
Architektur immaterieller Arbeit
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A catalogue of primary variants of how to use
and furnish the islands is developed. It includes
all possible constellations of collaboration
within the corporation and meets the
requirements for working together in a team. In
a similar way, a concept is developed for the
common rooms and rooms for recreation, as
well as variations of the in-house restaurant. In
regard to community building the arrangement
of chairs and tables is being planned by
improving communication with the assumption
that creating distance = NON
COMMUNICATION46
The flat and horizontal space of the office
landscape is thought through with architectural
means:
“In simple terms, you could say that building order is the unity
that arises in a building when the parts taken together
determine the whole, and conversely, when the separate
parts derive from that whole in an equally logical way. The
unity resulting from design that consistently employs this
reciprocity – parts determining the whole and determining by
it – may in a sense be regarded as a structure. The material
(the information) is deliberately chosen, adapted to suit the
requirements of the task in question, and, in principle, the
solutions of the various design situations (i.e. how the building
is interrelated from place to place) are permutations of or at
least directly derived from one another. As a result there will
be a distinct, one could say family, relationship between the
various parts.”47
The City
in the City
The new headquarters for the insurance
company was planned to be the first element of
an ample re-structuring of Apeldoorn’s
periphery. It was conceived of as a closed
building without any formal reference to its
direct neighbourhood. Still the building was
conceived of as a city in the city and not just a
part of the city. In this respect it is similar to the
prototypic model of the cooperative workers-
community New Harmony, which was a self-
governed and self-organizing colony initiated by
the socially engaged entrepreneur Robert Owen.
Centraal Beheer has no decided main entrance.
One could enter and leave the building at
various points, depending if you were by foot, by
train, by bus, or with your own car or by taxi. The
reception zone was placed at the centre of the
building, at ground floor level.48 A connection
from the planned (but never realized) railway
station to the city centre was conceived as an
interior public street, as a kind of backbone to
which all islands and thus all workplaces where
oriented to.49
Seen from the inside – seen from the islands –
this backbone conveys a domesticated exterior,
a kind of complementary element to the
individual islands, it is the collective space for
all.50 Hertzberger reflects on the street, following
discussions of the Team X and in direct
reference to the Provos in the Netherlands as an
original place of social contact between the
locals and the passer-bys. In that sense the
street becomes a kind of municipal place for
living, a living room for all.51
“Wherever individuals or groups are given the opportunity to
use parts of the public space in their own interests, and only
indirectly in the interest of others, the public nature of the
space is temporarily or permanently put into perspective
through that use.”52
The vista from any work-place in Centraal
Beheer becomes a vista from a corner office, the
most desired location in conventional US-
American office buildings – one of the most
prevalent images in idealising the working
subject (subjektidealisiert) in US-American
commercials of the 1920s and 1930s.53
Between the islands and the bridges, the aisles
in the offices, the public street within the
building and the public urban space outside of
the office building, the boundaries start to
become diffused and blurred. This is not only
due to the porosity of the building itself, but also
due to its materiality – grey, untreated concrete.
As Hertzberger puts it: “It is part of my strategy
to have the same material inside and outside in
order to be able to overstate or understate their
nature, their relativity and interpretation”54
English Summary:
Architecture of Immaterial Labour
222
Hertzberger’s concern to create a meaningful
architecture for work, that would emancipate
itself from traditional constraints and
restrictions, that – as a kind of fundament or
basis – would offer people a real alternative, is at
the same time related with a concept of
efficiency and control, that turns itself towards a
sociologic concept of the working subject – the
enterprising self: he or she is an artist of the
everyday, one who must continuously master
the situation and be self-enacted, no longer
working well-behaved at his or her assigned
desk …
This new architecture frames the pro-active
employees through:
(1) an work-space that is conceived as a place
for living, (2) architecture integrates and invites
all to actively use and to actively appropriate the
building for his or her own personal needs, and
(3) a pseudo-public consume- and spare-time-
oriented programme is being established in its
vast interior, that opens up the building towards
the city. Thus, conditions of working got
upgraded, at the same time as a new order, a
new spatial organization is being established. As
Hertzberger would end his programmatic text in
Domus:
“The building goes from being an apparatus to an instrument
that should be played. The instrument has capacities which
the performer knows how to extract, and the way in which
that happens defines the freedom which it can generate for
each of its performers.”55
Non-spaces for Labour
Office landscapes and Fun Palace are
immediate, Centraal Beheer indirect, reactions
to a newly established conceptual model that,
after the Second World War, replaced the liberal
hypothesis as dominant formation of discourse.
As a form of governance, in the 1950s
cybernetics postulated a new form of living-
together that promised to help to overcome the
trauma of the devastating war. In the post-war
economic climate in Europe, a situation that
was, on the one hand, marked by reconstruction,
and, on the other hand, was placed within the
area of conflict of a hegemonic, US-American
capitalism and a communist form of economy of
eastern-European nations, cybernetics
represented – for both sides – a conceptual
instrument of control. It was an instrument that
allowed a universally applicable, consensual
democracy, or better, a governance of the self
that could be applied to machines as well as to
human beings.
As political hypothesis the cybernetic utopia
was and still is highly influential and diffused
into a multitude of scientific disciplines.56 Not
only in economy or management-sciences,
cybernetics is a paradigm to the present day,
now however as modulations known in other
names (systems-theory, cognition, artificial
intelligence, …). In the popular discourse
cybernetics was very prominent very early.
Especially the utopia of full-automation,
accompanied with the promise of a leisure
society, through the technologic revolution, are
part of a power diagram, in which the above-
mentioned projects on an emergent form of
labour – namely immaterial labour – came
about.
Linked to a prevailing discourse, all three
projects, – Buch und Ton, Fun Palace, but also
Centraal Behher – form reactive manifestations
of an architecture of immaterial labour. To this
Architektur immaterieller Arbeit
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very day these projects affect – in their spatial-
organizational solutions – work place
architecture as paradigmatic examples. They
mirror the mechanisms of a cybernetic
hypothesis and produce spaces for work, that
unfold – in diverse ways and modes – their own
power and construct their own worlds and inner
logics. In doing so they impressively exemplify
the power relations in which designers and
architects are embedded and which they need to
affirm in order to be able to act upon it.
By no means are these examples singular. Two
experimental projects – New Babylon by the
Dutch artist Constant Nieuwenhuys and the
Ville Spatiale by the architect Yona Friedman –
also relate directly to cybernetics. Both projects
are ordered by small and manageable,
horizontally organized communities, small
teams whose members are strongly dependent
on each other. They also mirror the cybernetic
discourse and postulate an innocent society
beyond all conflict through levelling out of
hierarchies, team building and feedback loops –
in other words, through the re-modelling of
society from a disciplinary regime to s a
controlling one.
Architectonic and spatially speaking: the
network is the formative concept for all of these
projects, a network that extends itself infinitely,
that represent a holistic, complete world; a
concept, that – for the architects – promises to
deliver the demand for total flexibility and
permanent change.
Similar to Fun Palace New Babylon as well as
Ville Spatiale are representations of the
cybernetic discourse as networks – this time
above the existing city. As Yona Friedman
postulates: there is no global society, but a
global infrastructure, that, as material basis is
available for a multitude of immaterial
organizations.57 The world has become
infrastructure that one can adjust at will, as
Constant Nieuwenhuys claims for his vision of
New Babylon:
“And in the enormous sectors of New Babylon I have
eliminated daylight altogether, because people are breaking
free more and more anyhow, especially from the rhythms of
nature. Man wants to follow his own rhythm. Because
usefulness has less of a grip on life, the whole rhythm of day
and night will disappear.”58
The vision of the enormous sectors of the leisure
city above the clouds that creates its own
artificial climate and finally implements the
abolition of day and night,59 is something that
nowadays Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas calls
Junkspace:
“Architects thought of Junkspace first and named it
Megastructure [...]. Like multiple Babels, huge
superstructures would last through eternity, teeming with
impermanent subsystems that would mutate over time, beyond
their control.”60
Koolhaas talks about an endless interior that
abandons architecture. For him this
contemporary interior space is so extensive, that
one barely sees its limits. It consists of the
appliance of a nearly seamless infrastructure:
elevators, hot air curtains, …, and most of all air
conditioning. It is especially the air-conditioning
that allows the sheer endless interior: “Air
conditioning has launched the endless building.
If architecture separates buildings, air
conditioning unites them.”61
In doing so Junkspace explicates work as spare
time; it is labour of the factory of society, as Rem
Koolhaas would circumscribe it:
“Junkspace is space as vacation; there once was a
relationship between leisure and work, a biblical dictate that
divided our weeks, organized public life. Now we work
harder, marooned in a never-ending casual Friday…. The
office is the next frontier of Junkspace. Since you can work
at home, the office aspires to the domestic; because you still
need a life, it simulates the city. Junkspace features the office
as the urban home, a meeting-boudoir: desks become
sculptures, the work-floor is lit by intimate downlights.
Monumental partitions, kiosks, mini-Starbucks on interior
plazas: a Post-it universe: ‘Team memory’, ‘information
persistence’; futile hedges against the universal forgetting of
the unmemorable, the oxymoron as mission statement.
Witness corporate agit-prop: the CEO’s suit becomes
‘leadership collective’.”62
English Summary:
Architecture of Immaterial Labour
224
Junkspace extends the concept of the French
anthropologist Marc Augé, the non-places, the
modern transit spaces, the shopping mall, the
motorways, railway stations and airports – all of
them, as I want to add here – are becoming
increasingly molded into our contemporary
work-places:
Cut off from context, spaces without history,
without relation and identity. The non-place
seems to be a space that gets promoted and
classified as place of memory; a space in which
temporary residences are either luxurious or
inhuman conditions. A space, for Marc Augé in
which a dense network of means of
transportation develops that – at the same time
– also get inhabited. It is a world – for Augé – in
which the nomadic user communicates
wordlessly with an abstract, unmediated world
of commerce.63
In that way the contemporary working-nomad is
connected to automata and machines, and
communicates with them in these transitory
non-places. There a universal concept of
information and its transmission operates “as
kind of bodiless fluid that could flow between
different substrates without loss of meaning or
form.”64 To Negri and Hardt these are
increasingly complex networks of work co-
operations,65 in which the body is extended by
cybernetic interfaces that exemplify the
transition towards immaterial labour.
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Part#2 To Furnish When work becomes home and home becomes work
Arlie Russell Hochschild: “The Time Bind”
English Summary:
Architecture of Immaterial Labour
226
225 x ø 120 cm Hans Hollein, Mobile Office, 1969
1:06 Minutes
on Television
The Mobile Office was part of a TV-series sequel.
Das österreichische Portrait – so the name of
the TV-series – portrays famous Austrians. The
sequel about Hollein was produced in summer
1969 and broadcasted on a Sunday evening in
December the same year. The project Mobile
Office is a 1:06 minutes segment in the 30-
minute portrait of Hollein. With help of TV
cameras Hollein would delineate an exemplary
nomadic, cosmopolitan workers- and
architecture future.
The Mobile Office is an architecture of
information and its message is being
transported via television. Analyzing it in more
depth it is an ironic answer to specific parts of
the architecture, neo-avant-garde boy groups in
Austria and England, about their naïve,
sometimes regressive association with political
themes of the time, that would, with their
gadgets, plug-ins and add-ons, distance
themselves from a politically motivated activism
of that time.66 Inasmuch as Hollein stages the
transparent bubble as an envelope for working
he makes architecture visible, as a specific part
of a palpable situation. In its presentation via
television he relates significant and typical
conditions of a nomadic living- and working-
formation to architecture and its specific quality
and materiality.
The entrepreneur
and virtuoso
The half-hour show depicts Hollein’s
sentimental relationship to tradition-steeped
Vienna and to Austria as a whole. It constructs a
proximity of his revolutionary Ideas, as they
would be called, to the history of Austria and its
architecture, but also to a cosy way of living of
the former metropolis Vienna, to the horse
carriages, to the Riesenrad ferris wheel, etc.
Hollein lives with his wife in the fourth Viennese
district … He was born and raised there … He
went to school there and then he studied
architecture at the Academy of Fine Arts at
Clemens Holzemeister’s masterclass … After
studying he worked in Sweden and did his
master’s degree in architecture in California …
With the refurbishment of the candle shop Retti
he became famous … He is now a professor in
Düsseldorf … He is about to build a bank in
Vienna, a gallery on 79th Street in NYC. He is
working on a project for the world fair in Osaka,
Japan and on a project for Olivetti in
Amsterdam.67
He stages himself as a kind of hybrid working
subject: He is the cosmopolitan entrepreneur
and a creative subject. He is goal-oriented. He
works on a multitude of projects around the
world. But he also works in teams, works, for
example, also with his wife, who is a haute-
couture designer, and designed the costumes
and suits for the Triennale exhibition in 1968.
Hollein works not only as an architect, he also
does design, commercials and art …
At the beginning of the sequel he presents
himself as the creative architect who thinks
beyond the norm: “I am not the kind of architect
who only builds. I am interested in
miscellaneous … Also commercials and things
like that. I present products. I am something of
an idea man.” (0:39)68 In other words he is a
virtuoso, always a bit crazy, visionary, but still
pragmatic, always interested in solutions. One
needs to go beyond building and set
architecture in relation to new technologies. “I
think that building alone is no longer the
answer. When one starts doing a catalogue of
requirements a building nowadays needs to
fulfill, a space suit serves the purpose much
better than any house that I know.” (0:54)
The workplaces of the young architect are “his
flat […], on the way to his building sites, the
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airplane, and his third work-place is his atelier.”
(12:55). His workplaces are without boundaries:
His office is not only everywhere and mobile but
also extended – living and working become one.
The atelier, the airplane, and his flat need to
allow all different programmes, a multitude of
functions, they are all workplaces and places for
living at the same time. Hollein lives and works
anywhere, be it in his rocking chair or in his
transparent pneumatic construction.
This kind of staging can be described and
deemed a post-democratic practice, that, since
the early 1970s advances to become the new
avant-garde of workers’ culture at the margins of
big corporations. Charles Heckscher defines the
general model of such a post-bureaucratic
organization-type as a system “in which people
can enter into relations that are determined by
problems rather than predetermined by the
structure.”69 It is based on creative project- and
team-work and comprehends activities in a new
culture-industry that produce symbols:
consulting, information-technologies, design,
advertising, tourism, finance, entertainment,
research … 70
In this new practice it is not so much about
knowledge and information work in its original
meaning, where knowledge would present a
kind of product, but rather labour in which the
productive manipulation of signs and symbols in
itself is the aim and the object.71 It is a kind of
work that calls for performativity – virtuosity – of
the workers. For the Italian philosopher Paolo
Virno, this kind of work – that he would call post-
Fordist – takes on the traditional characteristics
of political acting. To Virno, virtuosity becomes
labour for the masses and the spectacle
becomes an instrument for understanding. The
spectacle – in contrast to Guy Debord – becomes
a production process in which the relation to the
other forms the basis for a new kind of work that
needs to get along without any scripting.72 The
Mobile Office is thus a significant design, in a
double sense a prototypical model of a post-
bureaucratic/post-Fordist way of living and
working.
An Everyday Situation,
an Architecture Prototype
The pneumatic bubble is an architectonic
prototype of a new paradigm of a creative,
entrepreneurial subject: the soft and cuddly
sphere isolates the architect from his or her
immediate surroundings. It produces an insular
indoor climate73 in which the architect is
immersed and thus – no matter where –
becomes active, is only then able to work. In
other words the bubble is – as design – the
precondition for nomadic working, modulating
itself from place to place.
As a kind of outstanding element, the iconic
design affects in a double way: on the one hand,
the bubble is its own metaphor. It is its own
thought bubble and represents the absolute
monadic enclosure of the working subject.74 The
bubble is not functionally determined; it is not a
production space for a group of people but
decidedly an ironically over-subscribed
prototypic single-work-place of a boundless
daily grind.
It is a technologically feasible and socially
conceivable vision that Hollein presents in
television. The above-mentioned one-minute clip
that represents the Mobile Office is part of a
series of utopias at the end of the 1960s that, as
the art-historian and art critic Helmut Draxler
states, are composed by technological and
social utopias. Draxler argues that the pre-
condition of these projects had been a stable,
secure economic prosperity attributable to
Keynesian economic policy. Next to
technological and constructive innovations, this
was accountable for conceiving feasible utopias
for the near future – not so much utopias of
hope and salvation.75
The Mobile Office is decidedly a vision of a
workers’ society. In contrast to a number of
other pneumatic experiments of the late 1960s
and early 1970s that would basically affirm a
popular discourse on the leisure society, Hollein
uses the new material to visualize with his
design a worker’s day. In doing so he uses
English Summary:
Architecture of Immaterial Labour
228
everyday objects that are – more or less – trivial
and petty items accompanying a modern life in
1969, emphasizing and demonstrating the
normalcy and actuality of the project. In using
these objects in a twisted way, he then also
asserts the difference: the Hoover as
compressor, the airplane as everyday vehicle,
the suitcase to transport one’s own dwelling, or
the mobile phone … the portable bubble in
which Hollein sits and works is introduced on
television as something that everybody is
familiar with in a more conventional form: the
trailer, the caravan.
Artistic
Means of
the Architect
Mobile Office is not architecture in a
conventional sense, but is part of a series of
early projects of Hollein that deal with the
radical extension of the concept of architecture
and design. By using and adopting artistic
means and strategies, Hollein reacts to various
social, but also technological, developments to
make them, on the one hand, visible, and on the
other hand, to make it possible to pursue it and
research it, to extend it and radicalize it with
means of architecture and design.
The Extension to the University of Vienna (1960),
the architecture capsule series Nonphysical
Environmental Control Kit (1967), or the space-
spray Svobodair (1968, with Peter Noever) deal
with media and immaterial aspects of a man-
made environment as architecture. Instead of
real built architecture Hollein conceives an
immaterial architecture of pure affect – a kind of
exceeding atmospheric simulation: the TV-set as
extension to the university, the drug to construct
a non-physical environmental control, a villa in
the countryside, or, in collaboration with the
Austrian office-furniture producer Svoboda, a
spray that changes the environment
immediately, as a revolutionary and new way to
change and improve office environment.
These projects illustrate Hollein’s approach to
architecture, which is always about architecture
as system and therefore go beyond the three-
dimensional object by extending the concept of
architecture and design that Hollein also
emphasizes in his famous manifest-like text
Alles ist Architektur. The Mobile Office traces
Alles ist Architektur in its full radicalism. In
doing so it takes up a moment that Craig
Buckley observes in his discussion about Alles
ist Architektur:
“Between these images one begins to pick up an alternate
repetition present in the manifesto, one that shifts from the
image of the body to its extensions. Citing the ‘telephone
booth’, the ‘helmets of jet pilots’, and the ‘development of
space capsules and space suits’, the expansion of the human
environment proceeds by becoming smaller, departing from
a ‘building of minimal size extended into global dimensions’
to approach the contours of the subject. The dynamic of
extension and contraction stretches the paradoxically
inclusive logic of the manifesto, which expands architecture
to be identified with all things but regrounds this manifold in
one thing: architecture.”76
The Mobile Office takes up the postulation, that
everything could be architecture, and returns to
architecture. In contrast to all immaterialized
experiments, the Mobile Office is tangible
architecture. The pneu is a radical design of a
nomadic work-life that is able to modulate itself
from place to place. It is a hybrid object between
the arts: it is architecture, it is installation. And,
most importantly, it is being broadcast on
television.
Minimal
Environment,
Insulating
In his texts, Hollein stresses the effects of
architecture, the impact that the environment
has on people. For him this environment is
always already man-made, in his sense an
artificial environment. In Alles ist Architektur he
would describe a topologic situation: men and
women are part of an environment that they
themselves construct, but it conditions every
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single one of them, and society as well (the
individual is always and already part of a group,
a society). At the same time, people would act
on this environment; they would extend it and
re-create new artificial environments. Thus
Hollein writes: “Again and again, physically and
psychologically, the human being extends his
physical and psychological area, affects his
environment in the broadest sense.”77
Thus, the vast plane on which the bubble is
staged, is already as environment constructed
by people and implies already all infrastructure.
The field is an open, extensive plane that is not
yet functionally determined. Furthermore, it
neither follows a visible grid, nor has a
quantitative observable order. The infrastructure
and its knots are just there, they are assumed,
do not require highlighting, or even definition.
They are just there, as Hollein would relate: “…
and everywhere […] I can blow up this thing.”
(09:35)
The bubble is the extreme version of an
enclosed minimal-environment. It is, in terms of
Hollein, a better contemporary dwelling, an
architecture, that goes beyond mere function
that assures physical protection, but also
psychic shelter and at the same time is symbol.
It is a kind of architecture that is, on the on
hand, an apparatus that isolates from
inhospitable (man-made) ambiances, as do the
space suit and the space capsule, at the same
time it also allows communication with others
far away. Besides that it is an architecture that
adapts itself to every single place.
Instantaneous
Programming
As an envelope conceived for an individual, the
pneumatic construction actualizes itself in each
and every situation and with each new program.
It is, in a two-fold way, programmatically open.
Firstly, it is its relationality towards the outside.
Secondly, it is in itself a functionally open
interior. Depending on its use, the portable
house – as Hollein would call his design in the
television broadcast in 1969 – becomes a
nomadic dwelling or a workplace, finally
becoming the Mobile Office. Similar to simple
objects of minimal art – as the German
philosopher Juliane Rebentisch points out – that
are continuously readable as thing and as sign,
that addresses the observer not only as producer
of meaning, but at the same time always already
subverts the production of meaning,78 the
bubble of the Mobile Office allows a constant
programming of the functions of the space.
The dwelling becomes what one uses it for. In
the specific case it becomes workplace, it
becomes Mobile Office. If Hollein had slept in it,
it would be probably known today as ‘Mobile
Bedroom’. The bubble’s distinct quality is to
adapt itself to every situation. The design takes
up the dictum of a continuously required
adaptability of an architecture of maximized
flexibility. But the design does not simply
produce a flexible object that adapts itself to
functions that are assigned in advance, but,
more in the spirit of structuralism, it produces
an object without attributes, that, depending on
use, is in the process of becoming.
Hollein affirms with his design of the Mobile
Office a specific situation in which the modern,
flexible working nomad is torn out into the
inhospitale, sheer endless spaces of non-places
(Augé) that is part of a even larger infrastructure
that guarantees the same standards worldwide.
Hollein’s design, however, withdraws from an
idea of efficiency that would describe the space
by a dense catalogue of requirements, and thus
creates a place, that is – due to its material
qualities and due to its figuration – able to house
a multitude of programmes. In doing so the
design of the minimal-environment withdraws
as well from any (moral) order: it does not want
to affect anyone to appropriate or actively take
part in a better (?) life. One can use it, but is not
obliged to use it, neither as workplace nor as
home for living.
English Summary:
Architecture of Immaterial Labour
230
Episode#2: Rhythmicizing Vanilla Future
Haus-Rucker-Co., Yellow Heart, easily
transportable home for nomads or just for the
weekend, 1967-1968
Presentation
at the
Building-Site
Sunday, 8 June 1968, around 2 p.m. At the site of
the new police headquarters, around the corner
from the University of Vienna. Amidst the rough
building site one sees a translucent, partly
yellow pneumatic construction. It hovers above
ground. Flexible PVC tubes are connected to the
spherical construction. This alien architecture
expands in a soft rhythm and contracts again.
People gather around the spacey object. They
stand there in groups, around the wafting thing.
In its interior a woman and man linger on a
steel-frame-supported pneumatic pillow.
This yellowish thing is the reasonably well-
functioning prototype of a project by the
Austrian architecture group Haus-Rucker-Co.
(Laurids Ortner, Günther Zamp Kelp und Klaus
Pinter). It explicates in an impressive way what
Günter Zamp Kelp would write in the Austrian
Newspaper Kurier in 1967: “Architecture is
becoming more and more the frame, the support
structure to human life.”79
The thing consists of entangled pneumatic
constructions that are supported by a steel
frame. One can access the spherical inner
bubble via a ladder, crawling through a kind of
air-lock. The inner space consists of a clam-shell
whose inner and outer spheres are inflated in
opposite directions.
The inner bubble is around 1.75 meters in
diameter; the outer one is about a meter wider.
Haus-Rucker-Co. calls it the plus-minus-cells.
The enclosing translucent material is printed
with red dots, that, when the bubble contracts
and expands, as Laurids Ortner explains, slide
form milky spots to clear patterns. One needs to
lay down on a kind of dinghy-platform, make
himself or herself comfortable and fully
relinquish oneself to the rhythm of the
architecture machine.
Mind-Expanding Programme
The presentation of the prototype was a
promotion event of sorts. The goal was to get
spectacular images of the spacey design-
object.80 Members of the group and their
girlfriends demonstrate how the apparatus
works. Pair by pair they crawl into the thing and
– one can imagine – come out of the bubble,
after a certain time span, totally happy and
relaxed.81
The Yellow Heart is part of the Haus-Rucker-Co.
object series known as Mind-Expanding
Programme that propagated an expanded
consciousness. In the brochure accompanying
the Haus-Rucker-Co. exhibition at the Museum
of the 20th Century in Vienna in 1970, all
performances and objects are presented
chronologically. Each project with an image and
a short text: Mind-Expander 1, Pneumachosm,
Ballon für Zwei, Connexion-Skin, Gelbes Herz
(Modell), Gelbes Herz, Fliegenkopf, Electric Skin,
Roomscraper, Battleship, Mind-Expander 2,
HRC–TV Show, Mondessen, Informationsstand,
Magnet-Box.
Each of the objects and performances is
intertwined within Haus-Rucker-Co.’s
conceptual world. The idea of the pneumachosm
gets scaled down to the balloon for two. This
object in turn becomes the connexion skin and
serves as basis for the yellow-heart model,
whose prototype then gets presented, as
mentioned above, on the building site. Each of
the objects is a design product or architecture
object, but is never understood as art piece. The
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performances and happenings were events of
the boy group, promoting the futuristic products.
All the presentations, all graphics and model
photos, but particularly the documentation
photos of the prototypes, are outstandingly
stylish. They are understood as product ads and
are sometimes pictured with provocatively
dressed women. The architects stage
themselves as pop or rock stars. As Laurids
Ortner would recall: “We would appear in tight
overalls and drive fast cars.”82
Haus-Rucker-Co. and their products are in line
with a series of similar architects’ practices in
Europe in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Most
prominent was, of course, the English group
Archigram, whose popular protagonist Peter
Cook would write experiments in his book in
1970. There he would spin a tale about
experimental architecture, describing a
development in architecture, where architecture
would dissolve into an everyday consumer
product, that Haus-Rucker-Co. had anticipated
with their Mind-Expanding Programme and
correspondingly, with the Yellow Heart.
“Here we are really discussing the possibility that
architecture will dissolve into being an everyday consumer
durable. The notion of the popular package or the optional
extra (added to whatever is already there) will gain ground in
the next few years. We are already familiar with many
environmental supports which are credited with the title of
architecture. These could be termed ‘gadgetecture’: they
may be tents, they may be packages, they may be things you
can knock down or fold up or unpack or combine into
hybrids. At any rate, they will necessarily involve your
choice.”83
To Peter Cook it is the extra-space that was
already being offered by prefab house producers
in the 1960s, that however as module of a series
of clip-ons and add-ons could be assembled to a
novel dwelling. Within this movement
architecture would become a service provider:
“It is in this area that furniture and
environmental development can lead to some
kind of composite series of prototypes.”84
Regulating
Intimate
Cell
The yellow heart is a dynamic-mechanic
machine. The object is enclosed and stands
static, but accelerates, simmers form within:
expands and contracts slowly again. The whole
power of the design rhythmically affects the
interior. The steel construction is the
conservative part of the machine and holds all
other parts in suspension, in abeyance. The
flexible tubes and the colourful prints on the
PVC foil are the wafting elements of the Yellow
Heart that produce the relaxing, luxurious
vanilla reality.
Contrary to a programmatically neutral
attribution in which, in general, people live, work
or sleep, this interior has a singular goal: to
produce a relaxed heterosexual couple in order
to get productive afterwards. The space itself
performs and produces, it actively affects users
who passively lay down and are affected.
With their unbridled optimism Haus-Rucker-Co.
believed in a future leisure society. They wilfully
constructed a soft cell which conditions. At the
same time, they distance themselves from a
performance that happens near by the day
before the presentation – the performance Kunst
und Revolution (Art and Revolution) by Günter
Brus, Otto Mühl, Valie Export, Oswald Wiener
and others at the University of Vienna:
“Viennese actionism celebrated such resurrection, and the
tabloids wrote about it for weeks. But Miasma would not fit
into our yellowish vanilla-future. […] We distanced ourselves
from this performance and pinned up hundreds of A4-posters
against it around the inner city.”85
Hundreds of Haus-Rucker-Co. posters against
nudism, masturbation, against whipping and
self-inflicted wounds, against smearing one’s
own excrement on one’s body while singing the
Austrian national anthem. These posters are the
logical outcome of a young and dynamic,
affirmative practice of architecture.
English Summary:
Architecture of Immaterial Labour
232
But it is a simple affirmation of a socially
popular discourse that believes in everlasting
spare-time. At the same time this very naïveté is
what makes it so powerful until today. The
yellow heart produces an exclusive interior for
the Voluntary Prisoners86 of a colourful and
happy leisure-society.
Working in Bed John Lennon, Yoko Ono: Bed-In, Amsterdam
und Montreal, March and May 1969.
Second Act:
Recurrence
Late evening on 26 May 1969: a young couple,
followed by an entourage of managers, camera-
teams, photographers and journalists, enters
their hotel-room in Queen Elisabeth Hotel in
Montreal. Both are dressed completely in white.
The young couple are the 36-year-old Japanese
artist and avant-garde musician Yoko Ono and
the 29-year-old English musician John Lennon.
For a week they will work for peace and will
repeat the format of their honeymoon two
months before at the Amsterdam Hilton hotel:
They are going to repeat the Bed-In. Originally
the second week of peace activism was planned
to be in New York. But the U.S. authorities
refused John Lennon a visa.87 So the couple
intended to stage the Bed-In first in the
Bahamas, but after a night in unbearable heat,
they decided to give it a try in liberal Canada.
They needed to take a stopover at the King
Edward hotel in Toronto, to wait for visa, but
could finally travel on to Montreal, where they
would enter room 1742 of the famous Hilton
grand-hotel Queen Elisabeth.
The king-sized bed is positioned centrally at the
huge panorama window that would frame the
vista like a theatre stage behind the big
cushions. Flowers are placed on the wooden
board at the window, both slogans of the Bed-In
are scribbled on slips of paper and pined to the
window behind the bed. Like in Amsterdam we
read: “Bed Peace”, “Hair Peace”. To the left as
well as to the right self-made posters are hung
up. “I love Yoko”. “I love John”. Drawings by
Yoko Ono’s daughter Kyoko next to drawings
done by John Lennon. A guitar leans on the wall.
A telephone is placed to the right of the bed.
Spotlights are mounted above the bed.
Additional spots are installed to the left and the
Architektur immaterieller Arbeit
233
right. The local disk jockey Chuck Chandler sets
up his studio up in the room, Canadian and
other private camera teams, photographers and
journalists are present.
From Monday, 26th May until Sunday, 1st June
1969 John Lennon and Yoko Ono work publicly
in bed. From there they are present in all of
North America, are ON AIR. They give interviews
via telephone, welcome guests from their bed
and work in dense spatial conditions for their
mission: Peace for the world. The famous
psychologist Timothy Leary and his wife
Rosmary, the Canadian rabbi and peace activist
Abraham Feinberg and others visit the two. Late
Saturday evening, the day before they leave, the
world-famous song Give Peace a Chance is
recorded in the hotel room.
The performance in the hotel bed was initially
planned to be without script, like an open work
of art. In its first version of appropriating the
hegemonic space of the hotel in Amsterdam, the
roles of the young couple were undecided and
open, thus caused confusion. Both Yoko Ono
and John Lennon gave interviews, were partners
on an equal footing, both with different opinions,
different explanations and messages.
Journalists were irritated and confused and did
not know how to interpret this kind of activism.
Headlines like “Married Couple are in Bed”, or
“They are getting up today” are clear accounts
of the disorientation. In its iteration in Montreal
the Canadian Television Corporation (CBC) took
over to choreograph the Bed-In for its TV-series
The Way It Is.
The broadcasting corporation used the format of
the Bed-In and invited guests, such as the ultra-
conservative comic-strip artist Al Capp, or the
comedian and civil-rights activist Dick Gregory,
to come and talk to John Lennon and Yoko Ono
at their bedside. Thus in the CBS broadcast, the
guests – as well as the hosts – were assigned
specific, traditional roles that ultimately became
part of the Bed-In myth: The angry, male hero
(John Lennon) – maybe a bit naïve, but still very
serious and with a lot of attachment,
campaigning for world-peace, then the devoted
and loyal wife of the hero (Yoko Ono), who
would quietly – quasi voicelessly – adore her
husband, and finally you would have – for
example – the brutal, heart-less, ultra-
conservative provocateur and bad guy (Al Capp),
who would argue that both the musician and his
artist wife only staged this performance in order
to earn a lot of money: “I write my cartoons for
money. Just as you would sing your songs.
Exactly the same reason. ... And much of the
same reason this is happening too, if the truth is
told.” 88 Entering the room, wearing a dark suit,
similar to a marine corps uniform, he
approached the bed limping, his right hand
outstretched and saying, totally self-
deprecatingly and knowing his role: “Dreadful,
Neanderthal old fascist. ... How do you do?”89
The Bed-In is a kind of entrepreneurial
performance of John Lennon and Yoko Ono that
was staged as a symbolic act. They appropriate
the grand hotel typology and – seen from today –
they would prophetically foresee a contemporary
working condition. The Bed-In is a kind of mould
for contemporary working formats, it is a foil for
a life in which working in bed and from the
hotel, as the outmost fantasy of a worker – as a
kind of extreme fiction and phantasma of
freedom and emancipation from work, is slowly
becoming reality today and is shifting its
meaning. It is a life in which work, spare time
and life are increasingly becoming one and the
same thing, in which ‘toppling’ moments come
about that span a boundless spatial claim and
its confined redemption.
In the production of the Bed-In, space for living
and space for working converge. The Bed-In is
not staged in a theatre, or in a stadium, nor was
it arranged and installed in an art museum or a
gallery. Rather it takes place in the spaces that
John Lennon and Yoko Ono live in. The spatial
framing differs constitutive form art-spaces of
Yoko Ono’s practice, it differs from the music-
studio in which both of them would be used to
work in, nor is it the stage – which are all
traditionally separated from the function of
living. Now their daily space of living, their
habitat becomes the space of work. They live in
their performance (work) space and they work in
the space they live in: next to meeting with
English Summary:
Architecture of Immaterial Labour
234
journalists, holding press conferences and
giving interviews on the telephone, both Yoko
Ono and John Lennon live in these rooms, they
sleep there and they eat there.
Hybrid Workspace:
Grand Hotel
The hotel rooms in Amsterdam, at the Queen
Elisabeth in Montreal, at the Sheraton Hotel at
the Bahamas or at the stopover at the Hotel in
Toronto, the Hamilton Palace Hotel at Hyde
Park Corner in London are home to the two stars
around the time they were married, but also the
places between London, Paris, Gibraltar, Paris,
Amsterdam, Vienna, London, Bahamas, Toronto,
Montreal, Ottawa, London, all airports,
gangways and waiting lounges, their limousines
and airplanes are part of a vast, sheer endless
spatial continuum in which both live and work.
This continuum is emphasized even more
strongly by the official imagery and all the
documentaries that are available toady. Takes
and images from Amsterdam, Montreal, Toronto
or the Bahamas – in which most of the time one
would only see a close-up of the two faces – are
used interchangeably. As if timeless and
spaceless, they are collaged in a way to tell a
specific story, i.e., tell the Lennon myth that was
coined by CBC.
“Each of our hotels is a little America”90 is the
clear and praradigmatic concept of Hilton Hotel
Corporation, in which both of the Bed-In
Performances were staged. All of the hotels that
are used by Lennon and Ono are modern Grand
Hotels, a kind of American-style luxury hotel,
which is conceived as democratic architecture
machine, and is a symbol of a free and peaceful
world in the imagination of an U.S. citizen – it is
an open, transparent and capitalist society.
These modern luxury hotels were all built in
post-war years in International Style, they are all
cool modernist buildings: clearly legible
concrete structures, big windows and
thematically designed interior spheres, exclusive
restaurants and shopping malls.
Analogous to the Clubs in London, for example
Boodle’s (1762) or the Athenæum Club (1824),
the grand hotels frame an ideal bourgeois mode
of work. They are understood as exclusive places
of spare time of the newly established
bourgeoisie, of entrepreneurs, doctors,
academics, but also artists and writers. Still,
such a reading ignores the discursive bourgeois
concept of work that is understood as a place for
the subjective pursuit for happiness. Work that
produces values91 is the application of
knowledge and the exchange of goods and
services. Clubs, but also grand hotels offer a
representative space for grouping a multitude of
productive activity, something that one calls
networking today. In this sense Boodle’s and the
Athenæum, but grand hotels also impressively
explicate a space in which people are
synchronised to become productive for a
common goal.
The American-style luxury hotels, though, are
modernist modulations of an historic type of the
grand hotel and its use as colonial outposts at
the end of the 19th century, within a global
network of railways, in order to pursue
worldwide commerce. The Hilton Hotels were
similar to the impressive grand hotels at the turn
of the century, as for example the Grand Hotel in
Singapore (1887) and the one in Bombay (1904)
that have been conceived as outposts for forging
trade, or the Palast Hotel (1897) and the Grand
Hotel (1905) both in St. Moritz, Switzerland, that
targeted an Anglophile, royal audience and a
predominantly Jewish upper class, that was
always understood as workplace for the
travelling merchant.92
The spaces of these modern Grand Hotels, in
which the Bed-In was staged, establish an
exclusively private interior for an exclusive upper
class. Access is granted to those who can afford
to pay.93 The space itself constitutes an intimate
space of personal and private relations, a kind of
second living room that offers a public character
in which all members are permanently visible.
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Artistic Framing:
“To Assimilate Art in Life”94
Significant for the Bed-In is the artistic practice
of Yoko Ono. Without her, without the
conceptual framing and her idea about art, and
without the participatory aspects of her poetic
practice, without her work on and with rules and
instructions that would culminate in her
performative practice, the stagings in
Amsterdam and in Montreal would have looked
different.
In a small text, entitled To the Wesleyan
People,95 which Yoko Ono understood as a
footnote to a lecture she was to have delivered
on 13 January 1966 at Wesleyan University, she
explicitly describes her artistic strategy. To Yoko
Ono, art might offer the absence of complexity
of an everyday, of a daily grind, that would
ultimately lead to complete relaxation of the
mind:
“The mind is omnipresent, events in life never happen alone
and the history is forever increasing its volume. The natural
state of life and mind is complexity. At this point, what art can
offer (if it can at all – to me it seems) is an absence of
complexity, a vacuum through which you are led to a state of
complete relaxation of mind.”96
This artistic option, Ono writes, is an event bent.
It is an everyday experience, everyday
occurrence that art might possible bend, in
order to free the mind of a multitude of sensorial
ideas, pre-conceptions, expectations. A
liberation, as she postulates, which only each
individual is able to experience voluntarily for
herself or himself. The work of art is only the
framing of a situation that would initiate the
experience. The end of such an involvement is
thus contingent and ambiguous, since the whole
process happens without a script. In saying so,
Yoko Ono delimits her practice decidedly from a
collective experience of a happening:
“People ask me why I call some works Event and others not.
They also ask me why I do not call my Events Happenings.
Event, to me, is not an assimilation of all the other arts as
Happening seems to be, but an extrication from the various
sensory perceptions. It is not ‘a get togetherness’ as most
happenings are, but a dealing with oneself. Also, it has no
script as happenings do, though it has something that starts it
moving [...]
People talk about happening. They say that art is headed
towards that direction, that happening is assimilating the arts.
I don’t believe in collectivism of art, nor in having only one
direction in anything ...”97
To Yoko Ono the event is an act involving
oneself. She spans the frame for a solopsist
experience, that cannot be communicated in the
very moment of involvement. Her art produces a
time span of wonderment that each one can
extend or stop whenever he or she feels to do so.
“After that you may return to the complexity of
life again, it may not be the same, or it may be,
or you may never return, but this is your problem
...”98 Only afterwards, after this very specific
experience can one relate the art piece to the
everyday.
The openness of Yoko Ono’s works, that only
appears due to the participation and
interpretation of the audience, a moment that is
immanent for example in Ono’s performance
Cut Piece but as well in her Instruction Pieces,
is something that the art critic Emily
Wassermann would explain with Marcel
Duchamp’s lecture The Creative Act.99 It is a
subjective mechanism that produces art in its
raw form – no matter if bad, no matter if good or
indifferent. The audience interprets and
experiences the work of art and brings it in
contact with an outer world, like Duchamp
would end his lecture:
“The creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the
spectator brings the work in contact with the external world
deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications and thus
adds his contribution to the creative act ...”100
Yoko Ono’s Instruction Pieces,101 published in
her artist-book Grapefruit102 in 1964, challenge
our motoric abilities, question our pre-
conceptions and perceptions of the world, play
in subtle way with all of our senses, that first
come into unprecedented relations to the world
through the instructions: the conventional flow
of time, or progression of seasons become
English Summary:
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236
sabotaged, the self is duplicated or all in all
extracted. In asking, even prompting the
readers, never to read an instruction twice,
actually to burn the book after they had read it,
she questions the impossible iteration, the
obnoxious repetition of a subjective experience.
Something that comes to light in her
performance Cut Piece.
Yoko Ono asked the audience to cut off all of the
clothes that she was wearing. The
documentation of the performance at Carnegie
Hall shows Ono sitting alone on the stage. She
wears compact, dark stockings, a black skirt
and a black vest. She sits there lonesome, her
legs bent, the upper part of the body and her
head proudly upraised. She looks straight
ahead, her long hair is bound back to a bun. Her
hands brace her position. In front of her one
sees a scissor. Slowly, one after the other, the
members of the audience approach her on the
stage, taking the scissors and cutting off small
pieces of her clothes – always only small pieces.
All this happens very slowly and deliberately.
Ono tries not to recognize the people, her gaze is
directed straight ahead. At last a man cuts off
the strap of her bra, and she raises her arms
covering her breasts …
She repeats the performance a few times. First it
was performed in 1964 at the Yamaichi Hall in
Kyoto as part of the program Contemporary
American Avant-Garde Music Concert: Insound
and Instructure, afterwards she would perform it
at Shogetsu Art Centre in Tokyo (1965), then at
Carnigie Hall in New York. However, each
interaction with the audience is neither planned
nor choreographed. Instead, the audience
continuously alternates between exhibitionism
and visual desire, between masochism and
sadism, between victim and offender, as the art
critic Kristine Stiles103 would note.
The Cut Piece, as well as the Instruction Pieces
have an effect on the concept of the Bed-In. It
was the performance’s mottos – Stay in Bed,
Grow your Hair – that would act as instructions
for Bed Peace and Hair Peace. But it is also the
distinct, passive and neutral attitude of the
musician and the artist, that – especially in the
first version of the Bed-In – is not imitating life,
but integrates itself as an art form into life. As
an autonomous sphere, it changes perceptions
and conceptions that withdraw from a
production of surplus value.
Contours of an
Exhausting,
Creative,
Entrepreneurial
Practice
As a second significant attribute of the Bed-In
one needs to consider John Lennon’s practice as
an autonomous, responsible entrepreneurial
subject. In November 1963 John Lennon
performed with the Beatles at the Royal Variety
Performance – at the time still as a normal
citizen of the British Empire. With Queen
Elisabeth II in attendance, John Lennon asks –
politely and certainly rehearsed – for help: “For
our last number I'd like to ask your help: Will the
people in the cheaper seats clap your hands?
And the rest of you, if you'll just rattle your
jewellery ... ”
Some years later, after having toured around in
the world, playing in front of thousands of
hysteric fans, but also being attached to some of
the emancipation movements of the 1960s, John
Lennon considers himself self-determined. With
his attitude (Walter Benjamin104) he no longer
wants to follow traditional conventions, or even
worse, subordinate to the monarch. On the
contrary: in 1966, in an interview with the
Evening Standard, Lennon compares his
popularity with that of Jesus. At the beginning of
1969 he breaks the bounds to the English Empire
by sending back his MBE (Member of the British
Empire). Around that time he also starts his solo
career and his collaboration with his second
wife, the Japanese artist Yoko Ono.
John Lennon is not so much Working Class
Hero – in its traditional sense – who rebels
against the system, as some biographers would
have it. Instead he has the contours of a new
type of worker, who one can call (using the
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237
German sociologist Ulrich Bröckling’s term) the
enterprising self.105 John Lennon is creative and
he is entrepreneurial; he is active and self-
employed, he is innovative and he uses
imaginary chances of winning, he bears the risk
of his enterprise and he works closely with his
wife. He campaigns explicitly for the peace
movement and consciously uses his media
proficiency. In an interview Lennon would
retrospectively speak about his entrepreneurial
account of the Bed-In:
“Yoko and I, when we got together, decided, whatever we
knew, whatever we did, was gonna be in the paper. [...]
Whatever people like us to do ... it’s gonna be in the papers.
So we decided to utilize the space we would occupy anyway
by getting married with a commercial for peace”.106
Often-forgotten images of the first Bed-In in
Amsterdam show the young couple in an over-
sized bed. They lay there peaceful and somehow
lost. Here the first contours of a phenomenon
become visible that the French sociologist Alain
Ehrenberg calls the exhausted self 107 Having
pulled the blanket up to their chins amidst the
bleak Hilton decoration, both look rather
exhausted and worn out, something that also
The ballad of John and Yoko would corroborate.
John Lennon recorded the song, shortly after
returning home to London after the first Bed-In
in Amsterdam:
Drove from Paris to the Amsterdam Hilton
Talking in our beds for a week
The newspeople said
“Say, what're you doing in bed?”
I said, “We're only trying to get us some peace”
The last line of the song … to get us some peace
… could mean two things. I can read it –
following the intention of peace activism – as a
wish to get peace in the world. Otherwise the
song line might also mean that Lennon and his
wife crave for some peace and quiet. The one is
the uncontested interpretation of a prevalent
narration about the powerful work for peace
through refusal. The other interpretation
emphasizes the downside of a self-determined
acting subject: the exhaustion, the wish for no
conflicts and for harmony, as well as the
personal will for peace and quietness. Taking on
this perspective this last song line, but as well
as the forgotten images, show the other
dimension of a self-authorized, hard-working
entrepreneur.
It is the latent exhaustion which can become a
depression that Alain Ehrenberg connects to the
disappearing borderers and boundaries –
between the permitted and the prohibited,
between the possibility and the impossibility –
that challenges the psychic order of every
individual, that alters, irritates and
psychologically exhausts the subject. 108
The
Art
Commercial
During the days in Amsterdam, the initially
neutral, even the passive setting of the Bed-In
changes towards active work for their concern:
world peace. The use of the room changes
totally – both furnish and re-arrange the hotel-
room: the bed is placed at the panorama
window, flowers are brought in, Bed-In
instructions written in block-letters and – to all
visible – pinned up at the window and on walls:
Stay in Bed. Grow your Hair – Hair Peace, Bed-
Peace.
Here and a month later when repeating the Bed-
In in Montreal, John Lennon and Yoko Ono stage
their staying-in-bed as a commercial for an
alternative way of living. They appropriate the
bourgeoisie typology of the Grand Hotel, the
figure of the monarch in bed. In doing so, John
Lennon sells peace like soap: “And you gonna
sell and sell and sell until the housewife thinks:
Oh well ... Peace or war ... these are the two
products”109 Permanently and obstrusive …
“Peace, peace, peace, peace, peace, peace, peace, peace,
peace, peace, peace, .... Peace in your mind ... Peace on
earth ... Peace at home ... Peace at work ...”110
Is the Bed-In a commercial with artistic means
or an artistic performance with means of a
English Summary:
Architecture of Immaterial Labour
238
commercial? It is a commercial that uses the
framing of Yoko Ono’s artistic practice and it is
an Instruction Piece whose instruction so are
unambiguous and simplistic, that they are
understood everywhere: “Stay in bed. Grow your
hair. Bed peace. Hair peace. Hair peace, Bed
peace”111 The utopian place of such a practice is
the bed: in bed the absolutist king as centre of
the world would hold court and in bed here the
Biedermeier artist-poet Carl Spitzweg works,
dreaming up his poetic fantasies. To stay in bed
means to be free, at least not to need to go to
work every day …
Spatial
Appropriation
In its specific use, the bed is the place of utmost
convergence of work and life. Both accept the
construction of the bourgeois space and
appropriate, in a double affirmation, the space of
containment – the space of subtle control, of
prudential standards and of disciplined life.
By spatially re-configuring the hotel room, and
with their specific use of the space, they
appropriate the American-style luxury hotel, they
re-program the neutral infrastructure of the hotel
– the space receives a different direction, a new
meaning.
The spatial practice of John Lennon and Yoko
Ono is not interested in a kind of truth or in an
essence of architecture.112 In the given situation,
Lennon and Ono are interested in creating an
alternative way of living that withdraws from
prevailing ideas of how to live. To them, the
direction-less, bound-less, neutral – quasi
feature-less, property-less – space, the public
character of the hotel, the convergence of life
and work, but also their own autonomy and their
newly found responsibility in life, form a quality.
At the same time, it is a challenge that they are
attempting by double-affirmation – in terms of
Gille Deleuze’s Nietzsche – in order to design a
new form of living and being together. Even
though it fails when CBC embraces the format
and “topples” it.
Spaces of Performative Labour
In the experimental projects like Mobile Office,
Yellow Heart and Bed-In, the protagonists take a
worldwide infrastructure for granted. I even
would argue that they partly naturalize it within
their designs. These spatial practices would
furnish and arrange and rearrange transitory
spaces of information flow. They come to an
agreement with these pre-conditions and go
beyond in projects like New Babylon, Fun Palace
or Ville Spatiale and others. In the mid-1960s,
these would represent architecture as network
and would dream of a consensual society. With
each of their very specific practices, Hollein,
Ono and Lennon constitute a temporarily stable
space for the individual; they mark symbolically
a partition in micro-politics of the everyday and –
seen from today’s perspective – anticipate forms
of working modes and working conditions that
are prevalent today and which are only slowly
being discussed in architecture.
Yoko Ono, John Lennon and Hans Hollein, but
also the members of Haus-Rucker-Co., are thus
products of a new and prevailing formation of
discourse and point at the nascent contours of a
form of subjectification that is today known as
the enterprising self.113 But in this situation the
Yellow Heart is only the amplification of this
discourse and stays in its spatial design – in
spite of its flashy colours – very traditional and
old-fashioned: It is a disciplinary machine for
individuals, whose programming is done from
the outside (by the police?). It reduces life –
here: love – to become a mechanic rhythm of a
comforting love-society, without miasma,
without excrements and without any
unforeseeable thing. On the contrary, in their
projects Yoko Ono, John Lennon and Hans
Hollein affirm this situation in a different way.
They affect – in using their given means – in a
specific situation a prevailing order; they alter
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with their spatial practice – at least for the
moment of the act – the designation and the
meaning of the spaces in relation to society.
Hans Hollein is the hybrid, globally acting
entrepreneur, he is the idea man, who has an
extended understanding of architecture, who
wants to produce holistic design. Hollein opens
up architecture towards new technologies and
stages himself as the creative visionary
pragmatic without any moral impetus. With his
radical design of the Mobile Office he makes a
specific condition of living and working visible
and outlines the problems of such a new way of
living. At the same time he creates an
architecture that has all the necessary – material
and programmatic – qualities for a new life as
the individualized, nomadic worker: a climate
bubble, a psychological cover that adapts to all
situations, but also a bubble that allows and
guarantees connectibility to others.
John Lennon and Yoko Ono, in contrast,
appropriate the hybrid space of the grand hotel.
They affirm the hegemonic space of an exclusive
society, its public character, and its transparent
architecture, as well as the practice of bourgeois
production – the conversation, in order to
produce their own unsettling performance. They
refigure the familiar space of the establishment
for a moment as a utopia of retreat, as symbol
for another society.
The Mobile Office, but also the Bed-In anticipate
forms of contemporary work conditions and
uses of architecture. On the one hand, we have
the flexible, permanently mobile creative worker
who is doing projects. On the other hand, there
is the ultimate worker utopia – working in bed …
Within their time, both projects can be read to
be political – in the moment of enactment they
would order some of the relations anew. Today
the situation shifts radically … and
emancipatory attributes of the 1960s have
become the norm …
English Summary:
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240
Epilogue
The dream of a leisure society was the great delusion of the
twentieth century.
Work is the new leisure.
J.G. Ballard: “Super-Cannes”
Somewhere in the hills northwest of Cannes,
you find the business park Eden-Olympia. It is
the ideal workers’ paradise for an elite group of
skilled workers: luxurious mansions with
swimming pools, private high-class medical
care, ideal tax conditions and, most of all, a
climate like that of northern Californian attracts
a dozen multi-national firms. At first sight, the
dream-palace of J.G. Ballard’s novel Super
Cannes, is the perfect place, a softened design
vision – a mix of Richard Neutra’s modernity
combined with the fantasies of Frank O. Gehry, a
humane version of Villa Radieuse of Le
Corbusier. The real social life happens at the
office. And at night, people only want to mix a
Martini, have a swim in the pool and be alone for
a while, as Wilder Penrose, psychiatrist of Eden
Olympia explains. Work is the better game. Real
fulfilment is to be boss of an investment bank,
design an airplane, or to introduce a new line of
antibiotics. When work gratifies people, they
won’t need spare time any longer. And there is
no longer time for an affair, nor for a fight with
the partner, the friend, and no time for festive
gatherings. Then there will no longer be social
frictions, and no energy for anger, jealousy, or
prejudices … But the people will suffer
sleeplessness, have respiratory problems,
migraines, or skin rashes … and one sunny
morning a doctor will run amok …
Not everything is invented in J.G. Ballard’s
novel. No. Super Cannes is not only a fiction of a
space that is about to topple, a fiction of a
calculated, managed society. At least the
territory and the spaces of the novel, but also the
symptoms of employees, are part of a today’s
reality we are not able to neglect. Super-Cannes
is the luxurious enclave in the hills above
Croisette, as J.G. Ballard points out in the
foreword to the novel. It is the territory of all the
Science Parks along the French Riviera, far
away from the casinos and the Belle Époque
hotels, the predecessors of the Hilton Hotels,
and far away from a nostalgic Riviera with Alain
Delon and Cathrine Deneuve.
But Super Cannes is also the campus of Google
in Mountain View, California, but also numerous
developments in the Unite States or Europe that
dominate the real-estate market.114 Super-
Cannes is also the hotel room in Montreal in
which management guru Tom Peters stages his
portrait.115 Tom Peters stays in hotels 200 nights
a year. He lives and works there in king-sized
beds, works about six hours a day, writes e-mail
and prepares for his next lecture.116
The portrait shows the youthful-looking, older
gentleman sitting on an oversized hotel bed.
Thirty-five years after John Lennon and Yoko
Ono’s stay in the Queen Elizabeth around the
corner, he is at the St. James Hotel, working on
his laptop, surrounded by books, newspapers
and design magazines.
The image refers to the utopian moment of the
Bed-In, displacing its goal: now it is only about
the working subject without a defined
workplace. A living environment which
establishes a homogenous, seamless interior
envelope, it constitutes a circular, self-referential
production space for the creative entrepreneur.
It is a workplace that was declared a space for
retreat, whose inner organization leaves nothing
to chance and tries to keep out everything which
exists beyond its confines. Uncoupled from time
and space, this room is circularly oriented
around the subject in bed. It is a nightly
headquarters of a creative entrepreneur: a self-
referential space.
Hotel bed – hotel and bed – have become, so to
speak, symbolic places of an architecture of
immaterial labour. The bed – and not the garage
– is a new production place, in which not only
Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple Computers
– got inspired to invent his Apple I, while
working in his bed, doing his enterprise Dial a
Joke in the early 1970s. Bound to his bed – then
Architektur immaterieller Arbeit
241
becoming the High-Tech apparatus – was also
the overweight and thus immobile entrepreneur
Walter Hudson. Architecture critic Michael
Sorkin would report about him, how he became
famous in the late 1980s, connected to media
and to technology, becoming a permanent guest
in talk-shows. Today the bed-room producer
becomes the Utopian figure of the Piracy
Movement: Due to a radical convergence of
technology, young musicians start not only to
produce all sounds at home in bed at their
laptop, but also distribute it via internet, as the
story goes – forgetting that this figure had
already been embraced by the majors.
But it is also the hotel. First in the 1980s, the
extensive office-complexes replace the grand
hotel of the turn of the century – i.e. in England
where privatized railroad real estate, namely the
rail stations, started to become gentrified. A
paradigmatic example here is Liverpool street
station in London’s East End. Here a major
development, the biggest Office Development
for times in London – Broadgate (1985–90) – was
built around and above the existing rail station
and its hotel: 129,499 m2. Fifty times larger than
the Buch und Ton office landscape,117 it is still
built following basically the same rules, even
has the same density. Under the aegis of Arup
Associates and SOM, market and trend analysis,
as well as international user studies, would be
integrated as feedback into the design. It was all
about the most efficient utilization of the
quarters – an extensive neutral interior that is
equipped with modular office furniture systems,
such as Knoll International’s Powerflex, Herman
Miller’s Action Office or Ethoscape, Steelcase’s
Stratus, or Westinghouse Furniture Systems,
etc. All designed to be ergonomically perfect.
They are – all in terms of cybernetics of
organizations – flexible and promise, like it was
already done by the Brothers Schnelle in the late
1950s, an efficient work-flow and a subjectively
easing, comfortable space for working.
And finally hotelling got implemented in the
early 1990s. Ernest&Young opened their first
hotelling office in Chicago’s Sears Tower. To
reduce real-estate costs, but also to adapt to
technological and juridical transformations and
developments an office was furnished that was
organized like a hotel: people could call in and
book a room if necessary. This takes up a trend
that culminates in a paradigmatic project of
workplace-consulters DEGW and their Dutch
counterpart Twynstra:118 the Shell Learning
Center for Senior Consulters. They would make
a contract with a Holiday Inn in proximity of
Amsterdam’s Shipol airport. During eight weeks
in summer and during weekends, the building
was used as hotel for tourists. The rest of the
time, Shell would use it. Minor adaptations
needed to be made – a small auditorium was
built that houses the learning sessions during
the week and is a cabaret stage on weekends;
the Shell emblem was projected onto the
façade, …
These examples exemplify a situation, that again
today require architects and designers not only
to be mere agents of an predominant discourse,
but also to affirm life, to propose architectures
and designs, that – for the moment – re-arrange
workplaces in relation to society, to produce
better workplaces. In the words of French
philosopher Gilles Deleuze: “Creating has
always been something different from
communicating. The key thing may be to create
vacuolws of noncommunication, circuit
breakers, so we can elude control.”119
English Summary:
Architecture of Immaterial Labour
242
Notes
1 Cf. Olov Wallenstein: Foucault and the
Genealogy of Modern Architecture, in:
ibid.: Essays, Lectures. Axl Books: Stockholm:
2007, S 361-404, Sven Olov Wallenstein workes
on the double-structure of the Foucaultian
concept of the subject that Foucault himself
developes most of all at the Collège de France
between 1977-78 and1978-79 and concludes (S
362): “Power is always both ‘power over ...’
(application of an external force that moulds
matter) and ‘power to ...’ (the work of shaping a
provisional self as a repsonse to external forces),
and its operations are always connected to a
certain knowledge that is formed of the self.”
Cf.: Michel Foucault: Die Geburt der Biopolitik,
Geschichte der Gouvernmentalität II. Suhrkamp:
Frankfurt/ Main, 2006 (French original edition:
2004, lecture: 1978) 2 Cf. Andreas Reckwitz: Das hybride Subjekt,
Eine Theorie der Subjektkulturen von der
bürgerlichen Moderne zur Postmoderne.
Velbrück Wissenschaft: Göttingen: 2006 3 4 Andreas Reckwitz: Das hybride Subjekt, Eine
Theorie der Subjektkulturen von der
bürgerlichen Moderne zur Postmoderne.
Velbrück Wissenschaft: Göttingen: 2006, S 10 5 Cf. Hannah Arendt: Vita Activa, oder Vom
tätigen Leben, Pieper, Munich: 2007 (English
original version: 1958) 6 E.g.: David Harvey, The Condition of
Postmodernity: An Inquiry into the Conditions of
Cultural Change. Blackwell Publishers, Oxford:
1989, pp. 125-188. 7 Luc Boltanski, Éve Chiapello: Der neue Geist
des Kapitalismus, UVK Verlagsgesellschaft
mbH, Constance: 2006 (French original version:
1999), p. 43 8 Jacques Rancière: Das Unvernehmen, Politik
und Philosophie, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt/Main:
2002 (French original version: 1995), p. 44 9 Cf.. Joseph Vogl: Regierung und Regelkreis,
Historisches Vorspiel. In: Claus Pias (ed):
Cybernetics – Kybernetik, The Macy-
Conferences 1946-1953, Diaphanes, Zürich-
Berlin: 2004, pp. 67-79. Vogel zeichnet in dem
Text historische Konturen einer Kybernetik als
Regierungskunst anhand des Policeylichen
Regulierung seit dem 17. Jahrhundert nach. 10 Cf. Claus Pias: Zeit der Kybernetik. Eine
Einstimmung. In: ibid. (ed.): Cybernetics –
Kybernetik, The Macy Conferences 1946-1953,
Diaphanes Verlag, Berlin-Zürich, 2004, pp. 9-41,
here: p. 14, my translation into English 11 Müller, A. (Eds.): Lexikon der Kybernetik,
Verlag Schnelle, Quickborn bei Hamburg, 1964,
pp. 73-74 12 Eberhard Schnelle: Organisationskybernetik,
in: Kommunikation Nr. 1, September 1965,
Verlag Schnelle, Quickborn,
p. 10 13 Eberhard Schnelle: Organisationskybernetik,
in: Kommunikation Nr. 1, September 1965,
Verlag Schnelle, Quickborn,
p. 11 14 Tiqqun: Kybernetik und Revolte. Diaphanes,
Zürich-Berlin: 2007 (French original version:
2001), p. 13 and subsequently: pp 13-24, own
translation 15 Brochure “Beschreibung der Bürolandschaft
des Hauses Bertelsmann in der Firma
Kommisionshaus Buch und Ton”, keine
weiteren Angeben erhältlich, Archiv of
Quickborner Team, Hamburg. My translation
and emphasis. 16 See: Roland Barthes: Wie zusammenleben,
Frankfurt/Main, Suhrkamp, first edition, 2007, p.
90 17 Wolfgang Schnelle: Organisation der
Entscheidung, in: Kommunikation, Nr. 2, 1965, p.
60 18 Cf.. Wolfgang Schnelle: Organisation der
Entscheidungen, in: Kommunikation, Nr. 11,
1965, Verlag Schnelle, Quickborn, pp. 59-74,
here: p. 60 19 Jack Quinan: Frank Lloyd Wright’s Larkin
Building, Myth and Fact, The Architectural
History Foundation New York, The MIT Press,
Cambridge, Mass., and London, England: 1987.
p. 62
Architektur immaterieller Arbeit
243
20 Such a perfection of the network is
something that the Mark Wigley also states: “It
is a landscape without an exterior. [...] When the
space suit, space craft, and space station are the
architectural models, it is understood that to
leave the system is to die.” Cf. Mark Wigley: The
Architectural Brain, in: Anthony Burke, Therese
Tierney (eds.): Network Practices, New
Strategies in Architecture and Design, Princeton
Architectural Press, New York: 2007, pp. 30- 53,
here: pp. 31 & 36 21 Jack Quinan: Frank Lloyd Wright’s Larkin
Building, Myth and Fact, The Architectural
History Foundation New York, The MIT Press,
Cambridge, Mass., and London, England: 1987.
p. 92f 22 Cf. Eberhard Schnelle:
Organisationskybernetik, p. 21 23 Eberhard SchnelleSchnelle:
Organisationskybernetik, p. 22 24 All of the publications that I know of and
which I quote in this chapter date the beginning
of the Fun Palace with 1961, sometimes even
earlier. Stanley Mathews, whose dissertation is
published as “From Agit-Prop to Free Spce, The
Architecture of Cedric Price”, tells that Joan
Littlewood and Cedric Price first meet in spring
1962, and then only in summer 1963, where
Cedric Price presents sketches of an
architecture that would eventually become Fun
Palace. Mathews dates the end of the project
with December 1966. 25 Fun Palace brochure design, Cedric Price
Archiv, quoted in: Stanley Mathews: From Agit-
Prop to Free Space, The Architecture of Cedric
Price, Black Dog Publishing, London 2007, p.
136 26 Stanley Mathews: From Agit-Prop to Free
Space, The Architecture of Cedric Price, Black
Dog Publishing, London 2007, p. 81 27 Cf. Mark Wigley: The Architectural Brain, in:
Anthony Burke, Therese Tierney (ed.): Network
Practices, New Strategies in Architecture and
Design, Princeton Architectural Press, New York
2007, pp. 30-53, here: p. 40f 28 Cf. Mark Wigley: The Architectural Brain, in:
Anthony Burke, Therese Tierney (ed.): Network
Practices, New Strategies in Architecture and
Design, Princeton Architectural Press, New York
2007, pp. 30-53, here: p. 42, my emphasis 29 Planning is done in teams directed by Joan
Littlewood, Cedric Price, Frank Newby and
Gordon Pask 30 Fun Palace brochure, Cedric Price Archive,
quoted in: Stanley Mathews: From Agit-Prop to
Free Space, The Architecture of Cedric Price,
Black Dog Publishing, London 2007, p. 70 31 Stanley Mathews: From Agit-Prop to Free
Space, The Architecture of Cedric Price, Black
Dog Publishing, London 2007, p. 74 32 Cedric Price: Fun Palace, in: Cedric Price,
catalogue accompanying the Cedric Price
exhibition at the AA, London, June 1984, pp. 9-
16, here: p. 20, first published in Link, June-July
1965 33 Rem Koolhaas: Introduction Re: CP, in: Hans
Ulrich Obrist (Ed): RE:CP, Birkhäuser –
Publishers for Architecture, Basel, Boston,
Berlin, 2003, pp. 6-9, here: p. 6 34 Arnulf Lüchinger: Strukturalismus in
Architektur und Städtebau, Karl Krämer Verlag
Stuttgart: 1981, p. 57. 35 Marc Augé: Non-Places, Introduction to an
Anthropology of Supermodernity, Verso,
London-New York 1995 (French original version:
1992), p. 23 36 Herman Hertzberger: An Office Building for
1000 People, in Holland, in: Domus, 522/5,
March 1973, pp. 1 & 7, here: p. 1 37 Herman Hertzberger: Lessons for Students in
Architecture, Uitgiverij 010 Publishers,
Rotterdam 1991, p. 25 38 Herman Hertzberger: Baudokumentatie,
University of Technology Delft, 1971, I-2: “Dat
het kantoorgebouw tot woongebouw wordt is
daarbij een noodzakelijke
betekenisverschuiving. De andere vorm komt
voort uit de poging om dit nieuwe mechanisme
toegankelijk te maken.” Übersetzung: Dass das
Bürogebäude zum Wohngebäude wird ist dabei
eine notwendige Bedeutungsverschiebung. Die
andere Form [im Sinne von diese
Bedeutungsverschiebung] ergibt sich aus der
Notwendigkeit, den neuen
Mechanismus zugänglich zu machen.
English Summary:
Architecture of Immaterial Labour
244
39 Herman Hertzberger: Lessons for Students in
Architecture, Uitgiverij 010 Publishers,
Rotterdam, 1991, p. 80 40 Herman Hertzberger: The Public Realm, in:
A&U, Architecture and Urbanism, April 1991
Extra Edition, E9194, p. 22, der in A&U unter dem
Titel “The Public Realm” publizierte Text besteht
aus Ausschnitten von Texten die Hertzberger in
der holländischen Architekturzeitschrift
FORUM, zwischen 1962 und 1973 erstmals
publizierte. 41 Cf. Herman Hertzberger: The Public Realm, in:
A&U, Architecture and Urbanism, April 1991
Extra Edition, E9194, p. 18 42 Questionnaire to Herman Hertzberger, in:
A&U, Architecture and Urbanism, 8312, 1983, p.
41 43 Cf. Herman Hertzberger: The Public Realm, in:
A&U, Architecture and Urbanism, April 1991
Extra Edition, E9194, p. 18, the text in A&U “The
Public Realm” is a compilation of parts of texts
Hertzberger initially published in the Dutch
architects magazine FORUM, between 1962 und
1973. 44 Herman Hertzberger: An Office Building for
1000 People, in Holland, in: Domus, 522/5,
March 1973, pp. 1 & 7, here: p. 7 45 Herman Hertzberger: Lessons for Students in
Architecture, Uitgiverij 010 Publishers,
Rotterdam, 1991, p. 47 46 Herman Hertzberger: Baudokumentatie,
University of Technology Delft, 1971, I-16 47 Herman Hertzberger: Lessons for Students in
Architecture, Uitgiverij 010 Publishers,
Rotterdam, 1991, p. 126 48 Cf.: Herman Hertzberger: Baudokumentatie,
University of Technology Delft, 1971, I-19 49 Cf.: Herman Hertzberger: Baudokumentatie,
University of Technology Delft, 1971, I-2 50 The program of the street is as follows:
newspaper kiosks, a bar, a bank, a hair-dresser,
an insurance agency, a travel agent’s and a post
office, but also a kindergarten, break-rooms and
cafés are being arranged in the building and
along the street. Moreover a restaurant and, in
its proximity, a space for the workers’ council.
51 Herman Hertzberger: Lessons for Students in
Architecture, Uitgiverij 010 Publishers,
Rotterdam, 1991, p. 48 52 Herman Hertzberger: Lessons for Students in
Architecture, Uitgiverij 010 Publishers,
Rotterdam, 1991, p. 16 53 Cf. Roland Marchand: Advertising the
American Dream. Making Way for Modernity,
1920-1940, Berkeley: 1985 und Andreas Reckwitz:
Das hybride Subjekt, Eine Theorie der
Subjektkulturen von der bürgerlichen Moderne
zur Postmoderne. Velbrück Wissenschaft:
Göttingen: 2006, p. 355f 54 Questionair to Herman Hertzberger, in: A&U,
Architecture and Urbanism, 8312, 1983, p. 41 55 Herman Hertzberger: An Office Building for
1000 People, in Holland, in: Domus, 522/5,
March 1973, pp. 1 & 7, here: p. 7 56 Cf. Claus Pias: Zeit der Kybernetik. Eine
Einstimmung. In: (ed.): Cybernetics –
Kybernetik, The Macy Conferences 1946-1953,
Diaphanes Verlag, Berlin-Zürich 2004, pp. 9-41 57 Cf. Yona Friedman: Machbare Utopien, Absage
an geläufige Zukunftsmodelle. Fischer
alternativ, Frankfurt/Main: 1977 (French original
version: 1974), pp. 136-139 58 Constant Nieuwenhuys: the City of the Future,
HP-talk with Constant about New Babylon. In:
Martin van Schaik, Otakar Máčel (ed.): Exit
Utopia, Architectural Provocations 1956-76.
Prestel, Munich, Berlin, London, New York: 2005,
pp. 10-12, here: 11, originally published in in:
Haagse Post, 6 August 1966. 59 Cf.: Mark Wigley: Mark Wigley: The
Architectural Brain, in: Anthony Burke, Therese
Tierney (eds.): Network Practices, New
Strategies in Architecture and Design, Princeton
Architectural Press, New York 2007, pp. 30- 53:
here p. 40: “Constant [...] defines his 1956-74 city
of the near future as a ‘wide world web’ for
spontaneous play. All the technical
infrastructure is buried below the surface so that
the open framework above can be endlessly
reconfigured.” 60 Rem Koolhaas: Junk Space, in: AMO/OMA,
Rem Koolhaas, &&& (Simon Brown, Jon Link):
CONTENT, Taschen, Cologne: 2004, pp. 162-171,
here: 164; my emphasis
Architektur immaterieller Arbeit
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61 Koolhaas, Rem: Junk Space, in:
AMO/OMA/Koolhaas/&&& (eds.): Content,
Taschen, Cologne: 2004, pp. 162-171, here: p. 162 62 Koolhaas, Rem (2004): Junk Space, in:
AMO/OMA/Koolhaas/&&& (eds.): Content,
Taschen Verlag, Cologne, pp. 162-171, here: p.
169 63 Cf. Marc Augé: Non-Places, Introduction to an
Anthropology of Supermodernity, Verso,
London-New York: 2000 (French original version:
1992), pp. 77-79 64 N. Katherine Hayles: How We Became
Posthuman, Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics,
Literature, and Informatics, The University of
Chicago Press, Chicago & London: 1999, p. xi 65 Antonio Negri, Michael Hardt: Die Arbeit des
Dionysos, Materialistische Staatskritik in der
Postmoderne, Edition ID-Archiv, Berlin-
Amsterdam: 1997 (original version: 1994 and
177), pp. 5 & 13 66 See chapter: Episode #2: Rhythmicizing
Vanilla Future 67 These are the biographic cornerstones as they
were presented on television. 68 The numbers in brackets depict the timecode
of the DVD I received from the Austrian
Broadcasting Company, ORF Kundendienst,
that was broadcasted on 7 December 1969. Cf.:
Dieter O. Holzinger: Das österreichische
Portrait, DVD Archivs des Österreichischen
Rundfunks ORF, 2008. “Ich bin nicht so ein
Architekt der nur baut. Mich interessiert
Verschiedenes. Auch die Werbung und
dergleichen. Ich mache Produktvorschläge. Ich
bin so etwas wie eine Idea-Man.” 69 Charles Heckscher: Defining the Post-
Bureaucratic Type, in: Heckscher, Charles und
Donnellon, Anne (ed.): The Post-Bureaucratic
Organization: new perspectives on
organizational change. Sage, Newbury Park, CA:
1994, pp. 14-62, here: p. 24 70 Andreas Reckwitz: Das hybride Subjekt, Eine
Theorie der Subjektkulturen von der
bürgerlichen Moderne zur Postmoderne.
Velbrück Wissenschaft: Göttingen: 2006, p. 500 71 Andreas Reckwitz: Das hybride Subjekt, Eine
Theorie der Subjektkulturen von der
bürgerlichen Moderne zur Postmoderne.
Velbrück Wissenschaft: Göttingen: 2006, p. 504 72 Cf.: Paolo Virno: Grammatik der Multitude,
Verlag Turia + Kant, Vienna: 2005 (Italian
original version: 2001), p. 80 73 For a extensive discussion of insular climate
and its contemporary constructions […]: see
Peter Sloterdijk: Sphären III, Schäume,
Suhrkamp, Frankfurt/Main 2004, pp. 309-500. 74 Mit dem französischen Philosophen Gilles
Deleuze gesprochen wirkt die Blase als
außerordentliches Symbol, als Leerstelle und
Konvergenzpunkt des Projektes. Cf. Gilles
Deleuze: Was ist Strukturalismus, Merve, Berlin
1992 (original: 1973), p. 41. 75 Helmut Draxler: Die Utopie des Designs, Ein
archäologischer Führer für alle die nicht dabei
waren. exhibition catalogue, Kunstverein
München: 1994, no pagination. 76 Craig Buckley: From Absolute to Everything:
Taking Possession in “Alles ist Architektur”, in:
Grey Room, Summer 2007, No. 28, pp. 108-122,
here: p. 114 77 Hollein: Alles ist Architektur, »Physisch und
psychisch wiederholt, transformiert, erweitert
[der Mensch] seinen physischen und
psychischen Bereich, bestimmt er ›Umwelt‹ im
weitesten Sinne.« 78 Cf. Juliane Rebentisch: Ästhetik der
Installation, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt/Main 2003, p.
55f 79 Günter Zamp Kelp: Bevölkerungsnahes
Planen – Beat Architektur, in: Kurier, Saturday,
29 July 1967, p. 8 80 Interview with Günter Zamp Kelp, 3 June 2008,
Berlin, by the author. 81 Faktisch waren die Mitglieder der
Architekturgruppe froh, wenn der
experimentelle Mechanismus funktionierte und
sie die doppelschalige Blase nicht händisch im
Rhythmus aufblasen und zusammensacken
lassen mussten. Auch der Lärmpegel in der
Blase war ein nicht gelöstes Detail des
Prototypen. 82 Antje Mayer: Jedem Kaff sein Bilbao. Poppig,
populär oder populistisch? Eine junge
Generation von österreichischen Architekten
scheidet die Geister, wie jüngst die Biennale in
English Summary:
Architecture of Immaterial Labour
246
Venedig zeigte,
http://www.kwml.net/output/?e=58&page=rb_A
RTIKEL&a=a945fefc&c=Architektur (20.03.2006) 83 Peter Cook: Experimental Architecture, Studio
Vista, London 1970, p. 127 84 Peter Cook: Experimental Architecture, Studio
Vista, London 1970, p. 128 85 Günter Zamp Kelp: Journal. In: HAUS-
RUCKER-CO. 1967 bis 1983. Deutsches
Architekturmuseum, Frankfurt am Maien, Verlag
Friedrich Vieweg & Sohn, Braunschweig,
Wiesbaden, 1984, p. 42 86 Cf. Rem Koolhaas, Elia Zenghelis: Exodus, or
the Voluntary Prisoners of Architecture. Thesis
project at the Architectural Association, London,
1972 and competition entry: Casabella, ‘The City
as Meaningful Environment’, also 1972.
Published in: OMA, Koolhaas, Mau: S,M,L,XL,
010 Publishers, Rotterdam 1995, pp. 2-21; and in:
Martin van Schaik, Otokar Mácel: Exit Utopia,
Architectural Provocations 1956-76, Prestel,
Munich 2005. 87 A year earlier John Lennon had been found
guilty in London of possession of marijuana. The
U.S. government used this as an excuse to deny
him a visa. 88 John and Yoko’s Year of Peace (DVD), Paul
McGrath (director), Alan Lysaght (producer),
Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, 2000,
timecode: 17:42 89 John and Yoko’s Year of Peace (DVD), Paul
McGrath (director), Alan Lysaght (producer),
Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, 2000,
timecode: 17:35 90 Conrad Hilton: Be my Guest, quoted in:
Annabel Jane Wharton: Building the Cold War,
Hilton International Hotels and Modern
Architecture, The University of Chicago Press,
Chicago & London: 2001, p. 1 91 Cf. z.B. die Arbeitswertlehre des schottische
Moralphilosophen Adam Smith, der selbst
Mitglied im Boodle’s war. 92 I discuss this issue extensively in the German
version – analyzing the space of the Clubs in
London as a bourgoise space for production that
is based on communication. 93 One only had access to some clubs if an active
member signalled his or her support.
94 Yoko Ono: To the Wesleyan People, in:
Kristine Stiles, Peter Selz (eds.): Theories and
Documents of Contemporary Art, A Sourcebook
of Artists’ Writings, University of California
Press, Berkeley, Los Angeles, London 1996, pp.
736-739. First published in: Yoko Ono: Grapefruit,
Wunternaum Press, Tokyo: 1974 95 Yoko Ono: To the Wesleyan People, in:
Kristine Stiles, Peter Selz (eds.): Theories and
Documents of Contemporary Art, A Sourcebook
of Artists’ Writings, University of California
Press, Berkeley, Los Angeles, London 1996, pp.
736-739. 96 ibid: p. 739 97 Yoko Ono: To the Wesleyan People, AaO, p.
738 98 Cf.: Yoko Ono quoted in: Emily Wasserman:
Yoko Ono at Syracuse “This is not here”, in:
Artforum, 10 June 1972, pp. 69-73 99 Cf. Emily Wasserman: Yoko Ono at Syracuse
»This is not here«, in: Artforum, 10 June 1972,
pp. 69-73 100 Marcel Duchamp: The Creative Act, lecture to
the American Federation of Arts in Houston
Texas, 1957.
http://ubu.artmob.ca/sound/aspen/mp3/ducham
p1.mp3 (30.10.2007) 101E.g.: 2Hide until everybody goes home. Hide
until everbody forgets about you. Hide until
everybody dies. (Versteck dich bis alle nach
Hause gehen. Versteck dich bis jeder dich
vergisst. Versteck dich bis jeder stirbt)” – HIDE
AND SEEK PIECE, “Stand in the evening light
until you become transparent or until you fall
asleep.” (Steh im Abendlicht bis du transparent
wirst, oder bis du einschläfst.) – BODY PIECE 102 Yoko Ono: Grapefruit, first edition,
Wunternaum Press, Tokyo: 1964; second edition:
Verlag Simon und Schuster, New York: 1970. 103 Kristine Stiles: “Uncorrupted Joy:
International Art Actions”, in: Out of Actions:
Between Performance and the Object, 1949–
1979, Paul Schimmel (ed.), MoCA Los Angeles,
New York/London, 1998, p. 278 104 I introduce the term attitude with Walter
Benjamin in the first part of the German version,
but was not able to grasp it in English without a
Architektur immaterieller Arbeit
247
proper translation – thus left it out for the time
being. 105 Cf. Ulrich Bröckling: Das unternehmerische
Selbst, Soziologie einer Subjektivierungsform,
Suhrkamp, Frankfurt/Main 2007, particularly
chapter 3.2. 106 John Lennon: Imagine (DVD), Andrew Solt
(director), David L. Wolper (producer), Warner
Home Video, 2005, timecode: 52:57 107 Cf. Alain Ehrenberg: Das erschöpfte Selbst,
Depression und Gesellschaft in der Gegenwart,
CampusVerlag, Frankfurt-New York: 2004
(French original version: 1998) 108 Cf. Alain Ehrenberg: Das erschöpfte Selbst,
Depression und Gesellschaft in der Gegenwart,
CampusVerlag, Frankfurt-New York: 2004;
French original: 1998), p. 9 109 The U.S. vs. John Lennon (DVD), David Leaf,
John Scheinfeld (Directors), 2006, timecode:
22:07 110 The U.S. vs. John Lennon (DVD), David Leaf,
John Scheinfeld (Directors), 2006, timecode:
22:15 111 The U.S. vs. John Lennon (DVD), David Leaf,
John Scheinfeld (Directors), 2006, Timecode:
23:30 112 In the original German version I discuss – in
the paragraphs above – how some architecture
critics deal with the Hilton and the issue of
searching for essential truth in architecture,
which in my opinion, does not lead anywhere. 113 Cf: Ulrich Bröckling: Das unternehmerische
Selbst, Soziologie einer Subjektivierungsform,
Suhrkamp, Frankfurt/ Main: 2007. Marion von
Osten (ed.): Norm der Abweichung, Edition
Voldemeer Zürich, Springer Verlag, Vienna, New
Yor: 2003. Gabriele Michalitsch: Die neoliberale
Domestizierung des Subjekts, Von der
Leidenschaften zum Kalkül, Campus Verlag,
Frankfurt/Main, New York: 2006. Pauline Boudry,
Brigitta Kuster, Renate Lorenz:
Reproduktionskonten fälschen!
Heterosexualität, Arbeit & Zuhause, b_books,
Berlin: 2004 (1999). In popular discourse see:
Richard Florida: The Rise of the Creative Class,
Basic Books, Perseus Books Group, New York
2002
114 Cf. David Walters: Workplace and the New
American Community, in: Chris Grech, David
Walters: Future Office. Design Practice and
Applied Research, Taylor&Francis, New York
2008, pp. 41-62 115 My in-depth analysis has been published
elsewhere: Andreas Rumpfhuber: Über-Guru-
Space, in: Gabu Heindl (ed.): Arbeits-Zeit-Raum,
Bilder und Bauten der Arbeit im Postfordismus,
Turia&Kant, Vienna 2008. 116 Cf. Tom Peters, Essentials: Design, Innovate,
Differentiate, Communicate, DK Publishing,
London, New York, Munich, Melbourne, Delhi,
2005, pp. 16-18 117 Cf. Part 1, Irregular Rhythms 118 In 1969, Twynstra developed brief and the
work organization for Centraal Beheer. Cf. Part
1. Structuring Islands 119 Gilles Deleuze: Control and Becoming, in:
Gilles Deleuze: Negotiations. New York:
Columbia University Press, 1990, here p. 175