Buckner Companies HQ in Graham

A new article in the Chapel Hill Herald regarding the Buckner Companies Headquarters in Graham left me puzzled. The article's title emphasizes the award that the Carrboro-based firm received but it never in fact even mentions the name of the award. The article itself is entirely based on the benefits the building has for Buckner Companies' owners and staff. However, and this may be where journalism differs from anthropology, the entire article is based on one interview done with the owner of the building, Doug Williams. Not one other individual is quoted throughout the entire article. That is astonishing to me! As an anthropologist, the thought of an article that is based on one interview alone being acceptable to my professors is totally unheard of, unless you are explicitly stating that it is, in fact, based on one interview (which this article does not).

With this in mind it is almost impossible for me to agree with Williams or not. If his staff in fact agree with his comments and the comments of the author of this article, that the building is "a haven for employees, a favorite gathering place for community groups, an alluring recruitment tool for prospective employees and a draw for client firms who now want to meet here while staying in Chapel Hill instead of bringing Buckner associates to their states" then this building seems to have, in fact, been designed for the user. However, in actuality there is no telling from the article whether this is truly the case or not, as none of those users have been interviewed or any of the members of the aforementioned groups.

If one is as curious as I am about why the building received the award, which is not discussed in this article, ArchDaily discusses some of the reasons why it might have received the award. From the Herald's article one would think that Buckner Companies received the one and only architecture award (which of course there is many). The award itself is discussed in another article, it is entitled Specialized Carriers & Rigging Association Environmental award and Buckner Companies is the first winner of the award along with another building for a NY company entitled Skanska USA Building, Inc.

Cute Architecture Joke

A nice little architecture joke to brighten your morning. I do wonder where female architects fit into the picture though.

Mansueto Library

The person across from me just excused himself to leave and go sit elsewhere in the new Mansueto library, due to the fact that he was being blindsided by the sun reflecting off the whiteness of his pages. The woman sitting in that same seat before him had her sunglasses on. Yet I have decided to continue squinting at my computer screen as the black of my laptop becomes hotter and hotter. This place was not designed for the user. I am a mere 5 foot 2 inches, on a good day, and yet, in order to type on my keyboard in a way that is comfortable and typical for my hands, I have to sit slouched in the chair. This place may look cool, and indeed it does look very fancy. However, I would personally prefer to sit in the older part of the library where I can see without squinting, or wearing sunglasses and do not ultimately end my time with a massive backache from slouching. This may sound like a complaint, and indeed it is. In order to design a fully functioning space that works for the user these are issues that need to be addressed from the beginning, so one does not end up with these kinds of problems.

It seems from this video that the architects for this particular space did a wonderful job with it as far as technology goes, and even as far as the library's needs are concerned. However, once again the user was left out of the equation. Fortunately there are few users for this space, only the first floor of the dome actually has space for users to study or work.

Why not get your MArch?

Yesterday I met with an architect who works for the Chicago Architecture Foundation. During our meeting she asked me a question that took me by surprise. "Why not just get your MArch?" She continued to explain that by getting my MArch I would have all the practical knowledge of an architect and be able to teach with this knowledge. At the time the only answer I had was with the gut reaction that it was impossible for me to do everything. However, now that I've thought about it more there's more to it than that. It's not just that in order to teach architects I would have to get the MArch, on top of the MA I will already have, followed by a PhD. In fact it has little to do with the length of time. Practically speaking I think it extremely important to work in a firm and/or organization that works with architecture (like the Chicago Architecture Foundation). On the other hand I don't think it necessary to become an architect in order to teach architects. There are architect professors who are highly respected that have just gone out and gotten their PhDs.

Aside from this I think it extremely important for architects to be able to work with people with ideas from other fields in order to embrace their ultimate interdisciplinary goal. As the profession stands right now, architects are taught just this exact point, if you don't have an MArch then you don't understand enough to contribute to the overall goal. I think this is extremely problematic, to say the least. I think, in fact, that having some people at the table who aren't architects forces those who are architects to put things in simpler non-design terms which the client and user understands. However in addition to this after getting my PhD in architecture I will not be just an academic anthropologist with no understanding of architecture. Finally I think it important to note that this idea that non-architects have nothing to teach or contribute to architects may be one of the reasons for some of the complications the field is currently facing.

Maybe this is also a reaction coming from the gut but being an architect already requires one to work with many who known very little about architecture (interior designers, engineers, industrial designers, etc.). What's the addition of one more, who hopes to gain much of that knowledge about architecture?

I think in the end there's one last key to why I shouldn't get my MArch, that is that I want to teach other architects. I don't just want to work for one firm and make that one firm more user-friendly in the way they do architecture. I want to help architects in general and the only way to do that is to teach. The only way to teach architects is to get a PhD, anything that stops short of that will not allow me to teach or will further prolong the time it will take for me to teach.

Housing as Habitus

Known throughout the world as the largest and most luxurious of hotel suites, the Royal Penthouse Suite covers a grand 1680 m2 surface area of the hotel's highest floor. It is unique in terms of luxury and comfort and guarantees a maximum security level. The suite is complete with 12 rooms, 12 bathrooms, Billiards, Steinway grand piano, Fitness center, private elevator and private terrace. Moreover it is one of the first suites in Europe to feature a Bang & Olufsen BeoVision 4-103 flat screen and audio installation. (Royal Penthouse)

Entrance through the kitchen from the back porch of the building, the latter room equipped with an old-fashioned and battered coal range, a bare kitchen table, dirty sink, soiled shades, and dingy curtains . . . floor bare of any covering at all. Off the kitchen an equally dirty bedroom with little in it but a bed swathed in dirty sheets and quilts. The room small and crowded, even with its single pieces of furniture. Second bedroom also crowded . . . combined living-room and dining-room barely affords space for standing when the day-bed is opened, since the rest of the space is taken by a dilapidated duofold, a small table, and two chairs. These four rooms house two parents and five children. (Drake, 580)

These two descriptions are so sharply distinct that it is almost difficult to understand that they are both describing living situations. The first for someone who can afford to pay for this kind of room while on vacation and the second of a family that can barely afford a house at all. In the following paper I wish to first lay out descriptions of what Pierre Bourdieu refers to as the pure and popular aesthetic, respectively. I then will explain how, through experience, memory, time and reinforcement, habitus is learned with regard to housing. Finally I will take a brief detour to show ways in which the family and the economic class itself reinforces habitus through Goffman’s terms of front and face.

As we saw with Drake’s description above, for lower class housing fulfills a dire necessity, it is a part of the popular aesthetic. Despite the fact that lower class individuals living in Bronzeville during the Depression through to the Second World War were only renting tiny kitchenettes for $8 a week or even as cheap as $8 a week for three rooms, they often lived with a large number of people for “the larger the household the greater the chance that somebody might find a job” (Drake, 581). This obvious lack of finances allows us to see the functional role these kitchenettes fulfilled. There was no understanding of these kitchenettes as art. In fact, quite the opposite, individuals were often living in “squalid, crowded housing conditions” (Drake, 560). As we can see from these circumstances, “it is as if the ‘popular aesthetic’ were based on the affirmation of the continuity between art and life, which implies the subordination of form to function” (Bourdieu, 4). This subordination comes with an equal desire for quantity over quality. One particular lower class resident comments on the desire for increased quantity when commenting, “their flats are better than ours, but they pay three and four times as much as we do” (Drake, 579). Those of the popular aesthetic desire more space and privacy, but they simply do not have enough money to pay for the larger spaces.

On the other extreme, those of the pure aesthetic are clearly far from concerned about money. Instead of quantity these individuals are looking to housing as art, form and quality. Even though upper class Bronzeville church buildings in this same time period tended to be small, they were still “very well cared for and artistically decorated” (Drake, 538). By embracing art in structures, indeed embracing architecture, the elite root themselves in “an ethos of elective distance from the necessities of the natural and social world” (Bourdieu, 5). An elective distance away from quantity and towards quality, away from the reality of housing as a necessity, to design as a surreal and more abstract understanding of structures.

This distinction between popular and pure aesthetics is so clear that it forces one to ask the question of how such a difference was formed. As I discussed in the beginning, there are four distinct ways of, in the words of Bourdieu, internalizing habitus. The first way in which we internalize habitus is through experience. Learning habitus through experience of housing is different than learning habitus for a particular kind of art. As Bourdieu explains, taste for artwork is “acquired simply by contact with works of art” (Bourdieu, 4). However, the idea of “contact” with a house is one that is much more complicated than “contact” with a painting, or any other form of art. To come into contact with a house, one must either live or visit the house, as opposed to the viewing of a painting that is much less experiential. Either way one is experiencing the house “in its reality” (Bachelard, 5) more than anything else. The experience of building as art is one which is reserved solely for the elite. This is due to the fact that in order to live or visit an artistically decorated home or structure one has to belong to the elite circles. Thus habitus is inscribed in an individual once they are born, into a family who already owns such a home or has friends who do, often both. Specifically, as Gaston Bachelard explains, it is the experience of our first house which teaches us the most. All other houses we inhabit are simply “variations on a fundamental theme” (Bachelard, 15).

The reason that this first house teaches us the most about the aesthetic of housing for Bachelard, is that it is the first space which we experience, in reality and in memory. It is this memory which is key to habitus in two distinct ways. First of all, memory is how we learn, “by means of thought and dreams” (Bachelard, 5). Secondly, memory allows the aesthetic which we have learned to remain with us. In the words of Bourdieu,

“The schemes of the habitus, the primary forms of classification, owe their specific efficacy to the fact that they function below the level of consciousness and language, beyond the reach of introspective scrutiny or control by the will” (466).

Bachelard explains this in a slightly different way, by showing how our dwelling places themselves stick with us. As Bachelard explains, “it is because our memories of former dwelling-places are relived as daydreams that these dwelling-places of the past remain in us for all time" (Bachelard, 6).

Like memory, time also plays a particular role in learning habitus. Only with time can one make enough money to pay for or inherit a home. Inheritance has a special way of teaching habitus, in the act of inheriting a home one inherits habitus along with it, like an heirloom. With the pure aesthetic comes yet another envisioning of time, as leisure time since time itself is a luxury. The more leisure time, the more time one is able to spend daydreaming within the home as well as playing “the games of culture with the playful seriousness” and maintaining “a child’s relation to the world” (Bourdieu, 54). Similarly the less time one has the less one is able to understand this child’s relation to the world through material objects like large homes and the wonders they house.

With time comes the final way of learning habitus, through reinforcement in the family. The family itself works ultimately to evaluate a child’s performance by “reinforcing what is acceptable, [and] discouraging what is not” (Bourdieu 85), in this way the family reinstates the value of a large family home. To take a fictional example, if fifth grade Billy wanted to go to his friend’s house for a playdate, but his friend lived in Bronzeville, Billy’s mother might suggest that Billy not befriend that kind of person. This might happen if, similarly, Billy’s mother went to pick Billy up from his friend’s house after school and saw that his friend lived in a shack. Billy’s mother’s response to a specific house or neighborhood would teach Billy where it was and wasn’t safe to go and socialize. In this way, by the time Billy grew up he would understand through his learned memory of habitus what kind of family he was supposed to marry into and what kind of house he should own.

Once this habitus is inscribed in us through experience and dreams, it is then expected of us by our economic class. Having a nice home allows one to do that which is expected of us by an upper class and in this way “keep up ‘front’” (Drake 668). Goffman describes front as “part of individual’s performance which regularly functions in a general and fixed fashion to define the situation for those who observe the performance” (1959, 22). Those who observe the performance of a well mannered woman in a fashionable expensive dress out at a fancy restaurant expect that person to have an equally nice artistically decorated home. If they, on the other hand, have a poor dilapidated home then they have not succeeded in keeping up their front. This idea of front is understood by Drake in Bronzeville since one way to determine one’s class is through the involvement and membership one has in particular clubs. These clubs often meet in members’ homes. If one were to lose one’s home one may ultimately lose one’s membership to a particular club and thereby lose face. Face is another term from Erving Goffman which can be understood as an instance when an individual is not keeping up front or when “information is brought forth in some way about his social worth which cannot be integrated, even with effort, into the line that is being sustained for him” (1967 Goffman, 8).

In conclusion, housing is just one of the areas of practice which Bourdieu describes when he states that, “There is no area of practice in which the aim of purifying, refining and sublimating primary needs and impulses cannot assert itself” (6). As we have seen throughout this paper, ultimately experience, memory and time create the habitus, which is reinforced by language of Goffman in the family as well as the economic class to which one belongs. This reinforced habitus orients itself in the form of two aesthetics, the pure and the popular. This can be seen one final time in the photos below.

Bibliography

Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space. Translated by Maria Jolas. Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1958. 

Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Translated by Richard Nice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984.

Drake, St Clair, and Horace R Clayton. Black Metropolis : a Study of Negro life in a Northern City. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1993.

Goffman, Erving. Interaction Ritual: Essays on Face-to-Face Behavior. New York, NY: Pantheon Books, 1967.

Goffman, Erving. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York, NY: Anchor Books, 1959.

"Royal Penthouse." Hotel President Wilson. Accessed April 25, 2011. http://www.hotelpwilson.com/en/rooms-and-suites/royal-penthouse-suite/.

Architecture Film Festival

Tonight was the first night for me at the Architecture and Design Film Festival and I have to say by the end I was feeling kind of let down. I think this is ultimately due to my expecting too much from the field of architecture. There were two things that contributed to my coming to these conclusions.

First, we watched a really great film called The Art and Science of Renzo Piano. Unlike several of the other films of the night this film itself was very well done. However it did not live up to my expectations of including the user. Renzo Piano did an amazing job creating a green building that wouldn't surprise me if it went way past LEED standards, or was completely unable to compete on LEED level. This is in reference to his California Academy of Sciences building. He also did a fairly good job of including the clients and their ideas on how to sell the museum to its new audience. Unfortunately as I was getting more and more entrenched in his environmental design I was realizing that, in the end, he did not speak to the user themselves.

On a similar note coming back to Bjarke Ingels, I, along with the majority of the audience, was amazed by his film My Playground. This film was extremely insightful regarding a new type of extreme sport called parkour. I had never heard of this sport before a few months ago and now there are a number of people interested in it! I was also happy to hear that he is thinking of incorporating this idea of using the exterior of his building as a social space into his next building. For his next building he will be creating a power plant with a sort of ski valley down one side. This inclusion of the exterior is far beyond the ideas of many architects. Once again my expectations were only let down in that I wished for him to bring this idea of creating social spaces and including the user into the interior as well as the exterior for I felt that the user of the interior space was left out of the equation.

As a friend of mine commented to me, these individuals are, after all, designers. We as social scientists can only expect so much of them. This is where I think I differ from her for I do expect more, this is why I want to teach. So that I can help make my expectations come true!