The initial approach of the proposal focuses on the current reinterpretation of the London Pleasure Gardens, playgrounds dedicated to the entertainment of the aristocracy and high bourgeoisie of the eighteenth century. The study seeks to explore the current public space and the human behavior arising from the constant scrutiny and video surveillance in London.
It is a speculative proposal that focuses its study on the ambiguity of those spaces not belonging to the public sphere nor the private one. A space to explore post-publicness where alienation can be exacerbated in an arena of experimentation.
How can alienation be performed in a collective way? Should this public space be used as a rehearsal of the future ways of taking part in politics escaping from the dead neoliberalism? How can speculative architecture from the future and new ways of citizenship be envisioned in the context of a dead-end neoliberal hegemony which is determinist as far as it is programmed and works on its own through algorithms and relational technologies?
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Welcome to London Pleasure Gardens, the ultimate activist experience. Throughout this journey you will witness the materialization of a new era. The youth who has grown up to the decadence of economic liberalism, who have decoded the dynamics of mass control hiding behind pop superstars, Hollywood backdrops and lip-gloss, have to organize and build our agendas for the construction of the xeno and the plotting of a revolution.
Throughout this journey you will have to decide whether to take an active role or the role of the voyeur. If you decide to take path one, you will go through the gate, enter the inside of a glory hole ground-stand and enjoy the pleasure of the relaxing lounges. Lose yourself in the static dungeons. Path two will guide you through a landscape of halfpipes, vip balconies, trapdoors and cocktail lounges to finally enter the filming tower where the action takes place.
London Pleasure Gardens is like nothing you have witnessed before…
The project was developed at the Akademie der bildenden Künste Wien.
KOOZ What prompted the project?
PRLG | PMH London Pleasure Gardens was the theme for the design studio carried out during the Winter Semester 2018-2019 by guest professors Cristina and Efrén, a.k.a. amid09 at Akademie der bildenden Künste Wien. This seminar dealt with the notion of public space through the reinterpretation of the famous London Pleasure Gardens, prominent in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.
These spaces were conceived as public gardens for the joy of London’s citizens. The study led to a series of thoughts regarding the current status of public space and its potential as a catalyst of liberating spaces in an otherwise surveilled and rigid city center.
Our quest for legal gray areas, urban wormholes, and subversiveness in the City of London started off with an effort to map cartographies of surveillance (CCTV cameras or drone-controlled areas among others) and of resistance (the abandoned underground infrastructure, public bathrooms, squats etc.). However, there was a huge turning point in the project at this stage; we came to the conclusion that the search for emancipatory spaces could not ignore the neoliberal hegemony. By thinking in a romanticized way about publicness, participation and revolution, we were actually engaging a concept that we had previously deemed as unproductive, that is, Folk Politics.
We defined Folk Politics through the ideas set by Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams in Inventing the Future, Post-capitalism and a World Without Work; here it is defined as the collective and historically constructed political common sense that has become out of joint with the actual mechanisms of power. Folk politics is reactive; it responds to actions initiated by corporations and governments, rather than initiating actions. It mobilizes around single issues, rather than creating a long term strategic goal. It is inherently fleeting, instead of enduring, voluntarist and spontaneous, instead of articulated and structural, and privileges the particular over the universal.
To overcome falling into nostalgia and strategies that rely on particularism, we started exploring the possibilities of xeno-architecture. This buzzword works with building a concept which is both capable of structuring an ideology that can overcome the universality of capitalist ways of authoritarian control, and help itself with the postmodernist stance, which is capable of exposing contradictions of power structures through locality, but fails to be strong enough to act upon abusive conditions of institutional power structures. It works as an opening for speculation, advocates for a ‘bottom-up universal’.
KOOZ What questions does the project raise and which does it address?
PRLG | PMH In a broad sense, the project dealt with the idea of resisting power structures and empowering citizens through public space. The question eventually came to be if that resistance was even possible, if the answer could be found in the framework of accelerationism and particularly how design and architecture tools could be reassembled for a politicization of society and public life.
Addressing the idea of how accelerationist theories could be implemented in this quest for liberation, we concluded that the only way to build a space for new ways of performing politics, collectivism and resistance against authority, had to be by appropriating the strategies of neoliberalism, accelerating them and building a stage for debate and insurrection that would work through pre-mediation, shock value, slacktivism and spectacle. So to navigate a post-factual context, twitter rants and proxy warfare, the moralist view on socialism has to be substituted by a structured revolt with enough magnitude to achieve real change. In words of Chantal Mouffe from her essay For a Left Populism:
"[...] the process of recovering and radicalizing democratic institutions will no doubt include moments of rupture and a confrontation with the dominant economic interests, but it does not require relinquishing the liberal-democratic principles of legitimacy. Such a hegemonic strategy engages with the existing political institutions in view of transforming them through democratic procedures and it rejects the false dilemma between reform and revolution. It is therefore clearly different both from the revolutionary strategy of the ‘extreme left’ and from the sterile reformism of the social liberals who only seek a mere alternation in government. It could be called ‘radical reformism."
This dilemma got us thinking about the extent to which architecture can actually intervene in politics, getting to the conclusion that we can only stage a post-public space that can be articulated with technologies and organized in ways that will prompt collectiveness, dramatic shifts from formal to informal settings, from passive to active roles, and overall create a building which will work indistinctively with both leisure and politics to create a public space where political activities are not only called for, but almost enforced through unorthodox ways of collectivity and isolation, through consensus and dissent. (at the time we were very influenced by Markus Miessen’s views on his book Crossbenching).
Exploring the present state of things, we found ourselves as the youth that had grown up through hyper-consumerism, people living over their possibilities, the decadence of a political narrative of economic liberalism with private entities taking over the world with no thought on their impact on natural resources and the downfall of the whole economic system. But not only that, we have also grown up with technology and through a deeper understanding of its works, we have realized how concentrated power still is, how power structures operate through channels which are external from institutionalized politics and use the news as instruments for population control by infusing xenophobia, angst and fear through processes of gatekeeping (filtering information) and through shock value viral strategies. And all of it has been presented to us in the shape of pop superstars, Instagram influencers, Hollywood backdrops, teenager TV-shows, smartphones and memes. The only way these heterogeneous streams of information can be processed, organized and redirected towards action and empowerment is, as the preface of Perhaps it is High Time for a Xeno-architecture to match puts it,
"Breaking with this lawful randomness in a way that is other than random, and showing that controlled narratives can still be constructed in a world without substance […] the determined form of randomness needs to be enclosed in a case rather than dominating everything in order to initiate rational access to the notion of hyper-chaos and thus destroy the opposition between reality and imagination."
So in a paradoxically delusional way, these hyper-banal streams of information which were deemed unimportant for years are slowly emerging as the biggest infrastructure of power and influence over the world. And, It is by disseminating what makes them so influential that we can instrumentalize them for a fairer future. We envision the architecture of media as that which can help speculative architecture from the future and new ways of citizenship to be rehearsed in the context of a dead-end neoliberal hegemony which is determinist as far as it is programmed and works on its own through algorithms and relational technologies.
KOOZ How does the project approach the very notion of public space?
PRLG | PMH This project deals with trying to reshape the notion of public space, citizenship and revolution into an operative way which is attuned with contemporary times, enhancing political awareness and opening debate through confrontation and organization in architectural practices. With Post-Brexit London as its backdrop, the project emerges from three main ideas: (1) Public life has been replaced with pre-mediated private content; (2) Political awareness has been replaced with random precarious activity; (3) Only through edutainment can today’s youth build the future. Previous forms of creation and transmission of knowledge are substituted by virtual realities, immersive digital media, and technologically mediated experiences. Traditional physical interactions are deemed obsolete and so is the concept of publicness. Current social relations take place in the virtual realm. A reality filled with social and political content hidden behind pop-up ads, fake news or memes.
Appropriating the sleek style of advertising and corporate aesthetics to avoid folk politics is our first step to explore the architecture of new media and the new concept of publicness. Using contemporary ways of entertainment to raise political awareness is presented as a way of adapting political consciousness to the present time. Today’s society manages a type of language associated with entertainment. The appearance of new codes of communication reveal the emergence of a new system created by and for the internet generations. Making society aware of political issues through this language ends with the differentiation between education and entertainment to experience a twisted hybrid, the so-called: edutainment (this idea is extrapolated from Dis.art’s channel).
KOOZ What is the value of public space today? How and to what extent is this endangered by the continuous privatisation of these pockets of the city?
PRLG | PMH London’s land ownership is an example of extreme privatization of the public realm, as we discovered in our first approach to the site. Especially in the more institutional areas of the City, surveillance finds a peak, everything happens in enclosed spaces and even areas which are supposed to be public, like the Artillery Grounds, are surrounded with buildings, enclosed and privatized for corporations to use for a high price. In this context of exorbitant rents, state control and private ownership of the public realm, we quickly realized that finding voids for possible post-public activity that could serve as practice stages for new ways of citizenship was a difficult task.
Enclosing a space for experimentation that did not fall into the claws of dead-end neoliberalism, that did not become yet another gentrifying space that would just increase the rents even more seemed like an impossible thing to do. This period of the investigation tried to use the crumbs of potentially liberating spaces – from public toilets, to the sewer system – to build a safe space for the articulation of new futures.
KOOZ How and to what extent has the way we used public space been affected by the surveillance infrastructure of our cities?
PRLG | PMH Public space as a place for political organization through leisure is nothing new for London. The rave culture of the city speaks for itself. And the constant persecution of this kind of activity is also not new, and an indicator on how law and order driven agendas try to stop anything that might destabilize the status quo. Technology at this point is blatantly collecting information from us, scanning us daily to the most specific nuances of our appearance and behaviors. So now it’s not only the government surveilling to a street level with cctv cameras but corporations surveilling through our devices.
It’s normal now to see people sharing tips to secure their phones before attending a protest. Encrypting, turning on airplane mode, using secure apps, using a VPN. Surveillance is always growing and so is the awareness of people around its extent.
KOOZ How do you imagine this shifting today as a result of the current pandemic?
PRLG | PMH When it comes to public space and the assembling of public life as politics , the situation has been dramatically worsened with Covid. Lock ups and restrictions necessary to stop the pandemic have made citizen control in public spaces peak. However, slacktivism on the other hand seems to be gradually organizing and becoming more serious. Cyber utopia has lost popularity or is at least being postponed until further notice. What we find now is a highly politicized youth revolving around “wokeness”, cancel culture and active organization but still struggling with the precariousness of media as a tool to achieve real change, as well as a rise of performative politics as virtue signaling.
KOOZ What are your critical parameters when approaching and designing public space as an architect?
PRLG | PMH At the time, when we worked on this project two years ago, our approach towards design was based around the idea that political awarness, conflict and dialogue could be sparked by ‘living in public’ (which is a reference to the title of Ondi Timoner’s 2009 documentary). What we meant by this was designing a space that would be a resonance chamber for citizens to actually engage politically off their screens. We were trying to use the same codes, mythologies and signs than the media to construct a space where one reassembles those different forms of ‘conflict’ to actually speak their minds and be active politically in public.
This made us think about ways in which architecture could simulate situations in a physical way. Not just reproducing the elements on media, but uncovering its architectural strategies to have a better understanding of how space is represented and transformed, and later using these strategies for a political spatial practice which could structure the collective future towards a better direction. These strategies that we extrapolated from media to architectural design were postproduction, sensationalism and constant recording.
First, we wanted public space to deal with a meta-understanding of post-production, where the process and the result coexist or are both visible in some way, breaking with the vertical hierarchy of the production of content. This idea would mean that all the phases from the staging and recording of a political view or demand, to its further editing and broadcasting all have to be spaces which can be accessible.
Also, sensationalism-as-tool was translated to architecture through a highlighting of emotion-driven spaces. Sound effects, light effects, monochrome, special effects, trapdoors, revolving doors, alarms, firemen poles or chroma key composing in windows were some of the elements that reinforced the users implication in the making of public opinion and the broadcasting of it in our project. The idea of constant recording that reality tv inspired us to think about when designing this project was interesting to us because it implied different levels of engagement with the project. This is why there had to be different levels of exposure, to prompt different stages for debate, from filmed spaces where webcams were moving around, where people could just broadcast themselves at any point or be filmed, to spaces where cameras or phones were not allowed and there was a bigger chance of free behavior and informal debate. These areas were connected in some way to give feedback to each other and create synergy.
At the end of the day, what we wanted to communicate was that designing public space, stretching the limits of multidisciplinary practices, experimenting with the implications of the fading of tags and separations between disciplines is key to build a politically engaged public life. In that way, doors, staircases, and windows were as important to us as sculptures, technological artefacts, wallpapers or light effects. This intersectionality when approaching design is what in our opinion makes design relatable and potentially useful to resonate peoples thoughts. Public space has the potential to counteract against the growing privatization of every aspect of life, therefore it cannot be overlooked.
KOOZ What is for you the architect's most important tool?
PRLG | PMH We feel like architecture’s biggest asset is being a field where critical thinking finds its physical form and actually has an impact on the way people live. Rethinking how people live is the real challenge, restructuring what we understand as a ‘public square’ or a ‘forum’ in this case. We think that architecture and public space in particular can take a bigger step towards organizing political life.
The final purpose was for this space to be used to voice public opinion about different issues, to be curated by artists to create immersive experiences injected with political awareness, or to just serve as a public square which could be appropriated by its users and serve as a boiling pot of public opinion through leisure, as a stage to hold and organize the counter-hegemony, the construction of the xeno, and finally lead to a REVOLUTION.
