Quest of Debris

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Mattias Hageård

Handledare/ Ulrika Knagenhielm-Karlsson, Cecilia Lundbäck

Supervisor

Examinator/ Per Franson Examiner

Examensarbete inom arkitektur, avancerad nivå 30 hp Degree Project in Architecture, Second Level 30 credits

8 juni 2017

Quest of Debris

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Quest of Debris

Mattias Hageård

Diploma Project spring 2017 Studio 5 Imagine Realties

Supervisors:

Ulrika Knagenhielm-Karlsson

Cecilia Lundbäck

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Quest of Debris

- a journey to the unchosen

Background

For me there is something intriguing and important with the not chosen; with the rejected and discarded. It’s an obscure shadow of ideas, living conditions, norms, life, expectations. It can also be something sad and miserable, like the person being picked last when selecting a sport team in school. The not chosen, the rejected, a negative often scary connotation.

Another actual concern regarding the discarded is the total amount of waste the human produce. Globally approximately 2.12 billions tons a year (United Nations report: UNEP Yearbook 2009, p. 45) which can be recalculated to a line of filled trucks going 24 times around the world. This matter has neatly been called the garb-age referring to the former material categorized time periods such as stone age and bronze age.

In an sociological and architectural context I think the most interesting is a discussion about establishing a new subdivision to the geological time line epochs named Antropocene. In short it means that for the first time the humans affect the geological changes with their actions such as pollution and environmental issues.

This means that the space that human have been used or sometimes exploit has shrunk. The oceans for example that earlier been seen as an endless source for dumping unwanted things now wash ashore tons of marine debris that fills the beaches. Even the closest area around the earth, the orbit, is affected spatially by debris from spacecrafts and satellites.

In an urban and architectural point of view the past hundred years have changed the premises of space in a dramatic way. Where planning of houses and urban systems earlier often could count on a endless or borderless ”free” space to dump unwanted material, wastewater, air pollution and such. Now, as discussed, there seems to be limits due to the increasing population and exploding production of things and material.

For me it’s easier to picture it in a smaller scale. It’s like being a spoiled kid refusing to clean the room, and just throw out the boring toys out of the window, certain that there will come new all the time. The Antroposcene make this pile outside the window so high so the toys fall back into the room. The imagined space and freedom the kid have had is suddenly taken away, and worse; if it still coming toys from the door all the time, he is facing a disaster. I can have that claustrophobic feeling when reading and working with these kind of questions. And I am glad that there are people working and fighting for a change, like principles as the cradle-to-cradle design, especially in the field of architecture and construction, which is a heavy material and resource user.

In my research I will partly leave question regarding recycling, cradle-to-cradle etc. to the huge amount of research there is to be found about these questions. I will focus on the aesthetic, theoretical and architectonic discourse regarding the discarded and then the discarded by all means, in processes, workflows, digital overflow etc. But I wanted to point out the question of a shrinking earth, a shrinking space, because I think it will affect architects both physically and mentally in their profession. And mentally I hope my discussion of the discarded might be inspiring and a help to approach these issues.

I see my project named Quest of Debris also as a narrative journey. I have set up some academic distinction and parameters, but I also been creating a persona, a character for the project and to myself, and a world or set design to really lose and question my own conceptions and ordinary working process. An important part in this investigation. This method has been used by many artists and creators before but I want specially to name artist Linnéa Sjöbergs work with the persona ”Business woman” which I think both illustrates the impact of such of research but also how strong the narrative and character can be and effect a person's work and personal life. The text Architecture in Extremis, by professor Sylvia Lavin (Director of the Critical Studies and M.A./Ph.D. programs in the Department of Architecture and Urban Design at UCLA) has also been an important reference that I will point out later.

Research

Somewhat, I was thinking overtly of Barry Le Va’s scatter pieces. When I look at his work I think about system and anti-system. The enclosing architecture could be the system that contains the anti-system, the scatter. As in the Allan Kaprow work where he threw tires around, the Le Va pieces seem to be in a pattern that you can’t understand by just looking at it. In my work, the system and anti-system aren’t about architecture versus the material contained by it, they’re more about social systems. There are certain things you come to and say, that’s random or that’s not random. The placement on the floor makes you think of certain historic formal discussions. Yet the materials themselves deny that discussion because the materials related to hearth and home, and developmental kinds of issues. Of all my works, they are the most about categories, about confusion of category. You strive to categorize them.

Akira Ikeda Gallery/Berlin, Barry Le Va ”Disentangle", 1968, Grey felt, Dimensions variable

Barry Le Va Untitled 1983 ink and spraypaint on paper 23 x 35 inches 58.4 x 88.9 cm A computer-generated image representing space debris as seen from high Earth orbit (HEO). The two main debris fields are the ring of objects in geosynchronous Earth orbit (GEO) and the cloud of objects in low Earth orbit (LEO).

NASA Orbital Debris Program Office, photo gallery

The United States Strategic Command tracked a total of 17,852 artificial objects in orbit about the Earth, including 1,419 operational satellites. However these are just objects large enough to be tracked. As of July 2013, more than 170 million debris smaller than 1 cm (0.4 in), about 670,000 debris 1–10 cm, and around 29,000 larger debris were estimated to be in orbit.

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This is said by Mike Kelley in an interview in BOMB magazine in 1992 (http://bombmagazine.org/arti- cle/1502/mike-kelley). Kelley points out two things here that I was interested in, both the formulation of an anti-system referring to Barry Le Va’s scatter pieces but maybe most of all his own work and play with social systems, material hierarchy and confusing in categorization. This lead me to think about the south American author and poet Jorge Luis Borges essay: The Analytical Language of John Wilkins, from 1942, and the passage Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge. This passage claims to be taken from a Chinese Encyclopedia where animals are categorized in fourteen different categorize:

1. Those that belong to the emperor, 2. Embalmed ones, 3. Those that are trained, 4. Suckling pigs, 5.

Mermaids (or Sirens), 6. Fabulous ones, 7. Stray dogs, 8. Those that are included in this classification, 9. Those that tremble as if they were mad, 10. Innumerable ones, 11. Those drawn with a very fine camel hair brush, 12.

Et cetera, 13. Those that have just broken the flower vase, 14. Those that, at a distance, resemble flies This unusual categorization breaks down the interpretation and differentiation of things and assemble them in front of you in a new way. Expose the arbitrariness and cultural specificity of any attempt to categorize the world which also is further developed by philosopher Michel Foucault in his Post structural text Order of Things, where he question the categorization of knowledge and develops the notion of episteme. Arguing that these conditions of discourse have changed over time, from one period's episteme to another.

I find architecture an interesting platform to apply these questions of knowledge and views of the world.

There are different reasons to this, first of all, architecture relates to living. This mean a very close relationship between the discourse and the practical world. Even if it not have to be practical at all, it still can have a relation to that basis, which I think give experimental and theoretical questions a tension and relevance.

Another interesting thing with architecture is its relatively long lasting that make it’s history visible for us both in the discussion as well as in the material world with fragments and buildings still in use from different epochs and traditions. Specially the fragments and reuse of architectural remains, spolia, is something I looked into during my investigation. With the use of spolia material, for example a stone from an ancient pillar in a fortification wall juxtapose the value, categorization, and function of this architectural piece. A cultural artefact can serve as a load bearing block during a period of time and finally end up in a museum.

In Reuse Value - Spolia and Appropriation in Art and Architecture from Constantine to Sherrie Levine (Ashgate, 2011) the art history and archaeology professor Richard Brilliant develops the notion with the subcategories spolia in se, and spolia in re and archaeologist Paolo Liverani adds spolia in me. The first, spolia in se, referring to the reuse of actual elements and the second, spolia in se, to the use of older images, motifs or styles without the material reuse. Liveryman’s third category is for me a bit obscure described as: has to be subjec- tive, dictated by a convention accepted by the observer or reader. But used with my interpretation as a way to subjectively inform and convey an fragment with a meaning, which becomes relevant later in my method. An inspiration for me and reference of spolia in re is the assembled architectural drawings by Andrew Kovacs, whose work and drawings I have studied and even tried to copy (but with fragments of trashed students drawings instead of pieces from the history of architecture, as in Kovacs work.

What Kelley, Foucault, Brilliant and Kovacs strive to accomplish I say is connected to how we categorize, see, and build up our world. And with their architecture, art and theories helps us to also question given standards and norms. But different from Kelley who claims his building blocks to be a play with social systems and material categories, or Andrew Kovacs who works with spolia in re by mixing existing architecturally motives I wanted to work with the debris of everything. I wanted to see what happens if you never clear the drawing board? If nothing really should be abandoned, what will that mean? Spoiled material, ideas, fragments, duplicates, rubber marks, traces, what are they and how do they affect and interact in architectural processes?

What are the patterns, measurements, lines, tectonics of the discarded? And is there, so to speak, a "dark"

architecture, a reflection or a shadow of the wanted? Or as Kelley points out in Le Va’s scatter pieces, an anti-architecture. What if I could flip that anti-architecture, into a architecture, what would that mean and what would that look like?

To refuse to refuse material and to welcome the unnecessary, the rejected in architecture, how would I find a method for this? And also a way to as far as possible clear my mind, avoid the discourse of the present which Foucault states as the order of things. How to break down the order and hierarchy of materiality? The order of architecture. I knew I had to go to the extreme, and that’s when I looked into Lavin's text Architecture in

Extremis, to both find arguments and a persona to continue my quest. Mike Kelley, Arena #4 (Zen Garden), 1990, stuffed animals under afghan, 72 × 52 inches. Courtesy of Metro Pictures

Mike Kelley, Arena #8 (Leopard), 1990, stuffed animals, afghan, 12 × 65 × 43 inches. Courtesy of Metro Pictures CAPC musée d’art contemporain de Bordeaux

Allan Kaprow, Yard, 1961 / 2013

That’s what you suspect. It’s funny how that piece is interpreted. Because it is stuffed animals, people like to load it with psychological significance. They see the stuffed animals as hiding under the blanket; there’s some psychological crisis going on.

That’s why I called it Zen Garden; I wanted to give it this peaceful, contemplative title so that anybody who started talking about the psychology of the animals hiding under the blanket would be forced to deal with a title which calls to mind a more contemplative activity. / Mike Kelley

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Method

So I started hoarding, every debris that could be usefull or useless. Bottles, papers, wood, plastic cups, coffe filters, glue marks, receipts etc., everything, but also spam e-mails, screen dumps, trashed files, discarded photos. I documented piles, rumble, junk, measured and photographed, sketched and archived. I emptied pockets to analyse the debris. I also looked for processes using debris and search the internet for references, ideas, tips and tendencies and words. My locations stretched from the desert i Wonder Valley in California to the backyard of my apartment in Axelsberg in Hägersten as well as the trash bin under the kitchen sink and the hidden folders in my computer.

In school I collected items in the recycling bins, the floor, the trash bins, I dug through the workshops discarded wooden materials and I reused material from discarded castings. The collecting was a everyday procedure and after a while Lavin's prediction of loosing materials use and representation was fulfilled and I found myself picking up cigarette ends in the bushes, hiding to not be seen digging up an interesting package from a trash can, and taking endless of photos and notes of items nobody wanted. My gaze is still now searching the rooms for a scrap of paper, a broken baseboard.

Eventually I had three tables lumbered up in the studio, two workplaces filled up in the wood workshop and half of the spray room overdrawn with my stuff. I many times recalled the definition of compulsive hoarding:

Inability to throw away possessions (which I intended not to). Severe anxiety when attempting to discard items. Great difficulty categorizing or organizing possessions. Indecision about what to keep or where to put things. Distress, such as feeling overwhelmed or embarrassed by possessions. Suspicion of other people touching items. Obsessive thoughts and actions: fear of running out of an item or of needing it in the future;

checking the trash for accidentally discarded objects. Functional impairments, including loss of living space, social isolation, family or marital discord, financial difficulties, health hazards.

A stair of hoarding material, China, photo Reuters Lavins starting point for the essay is the story about the Collyer brothers in New York in the 1940s. How one of

the world's most famous hoarders practically hoard themselves and their building they live in to death.

Langley died by accidentally trigger a trap made of piles of newspaper, cardboard, books and other collected items. When the police and fire apartment cleared the home they through away approximately 120 tons of debris and junk from the house. Among them a baby carriages, a doll carriage, rusted bicycles, old food, potato peelers, a collection of guns, glass chandeliers, bowling balls, camera equipment, the folding top of a horse-drawn carriage, a sawhorse, three dressmaking dummies, painted portraits, photos of pin-up girls from the early 1900s, plaster busts, Mrs. Collyer's hope chests, rusty bed springs, the kerosene stove, a child's chair (the brothers were lifelong bachelors and childless), more than 25,000 books (including thousands about medicine and engineering and more than 2,500 on law), human organs pickled in jars, eight live cats, the chassis of the old Model T with which Langley had been tinkering, tapestries, hundreds of yards of unused silks and other fabrics, clocks, fourteen pianos (both grand and upright), a clavichord, two organs, banjos, violins, bugles, accordions, a gramophone and records, and countless bundles of newspapers and magazines, some of them decades old, and thousands of bottles and tin cans and a great deal of garbage .

Lavin states that hoarding is a direct challenge to the regimes of structural stability (building collapse or go up in flames when overstuffed), the free plan (open space is an invitation to hoard more), and the stuff can lead hygiene problems and lack of ventilation etc. But most important Lavin claims that hoarding focuses attention away from both use and representation and toward the materiality of things instead, subjecting them to a form of design that has its own techniques and logics.

By devoting myself into the hoarder I both had a method to collect debris with the assumption of losing my practical and traditional eye of things, and discover the techniques and logics of this discarded items. In this persona I also would use a kind of outsider role in the society, the bag lady, ”skrotnisse”, hoarder. I want to point out that I am truly fascinated and scared by these kind of behaviours, where I myself have light experience and tendencies of the phenomena of hoarding. But with the difference that I can shift between hoarding behaviour and total cleaning quite easy. Compulsive hoarding was defined as an mental disorder in 2013, and can cause really big troubles for the person herself as well as family and friends. But on the other hand, in a world that lives 1,6 times what the earth is capable of, who is the most strange: the one who constantly throw away her things, or the one who actually saves and see meaning in all the produced stuff? The aim however with this research is not to idealise or profiting on this matters. It’s, like I said in the beginning, a project about possibly finding more layers in architecture by investing in the debris of the discarded.

Elevation For A Building In The Form Of A Cabinet Of Curiosities, Andrew Kovacs

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But I tried my best to follow the limits and regulations of that world I created to the absurd. When cutting out an object I saved the remains. When I accidentally dropped a cast model I gathered the shivers.

To this process I then added my architectural tools to investigate in my collecting. I analysed the wrinkles of different discarded thin materials, I did section cuts, filling, drape, and various of assemble procedures with the fragments, cracks, rumble and scatter. What architectural qualities are there to be found in our debris?

How can I as an architect reflect and process these forms and informations, in models and in drawings? These investigation begun to form a kind of eclectic archive with both inner logics and confusions. The next step was to now create and work in an architectural way with my debris.

Building

During the process I had made smaller studies that I mentioned, for example with screwed up paper and using discarded cast moulds to both produce a new mould for a cast, break it and rebuild it again. I also worked with wood debris in the workshop and assembled and put together piece by piece to a mixed volume. I also did a lot of tests with plastic bottles and packages and how they practically could be melted to both attach to other items and structurally bound and hold up debris. But to find a object to test my research and process I again used Sylvia Lavin's discussion of Architecture in Extremis. Despite the hoarding tendencies to be a threat to architecture Lavin claims that it’s surprising with the lack of union between hoarding and architecture. Given the history of architecture is full of famous examples of hoarding. She mentions the phenomena of cabinets of Curiosities, filled with stuff and John Soane’s Museum in London with collection of antique fragments, books, mirrors, and buildings. In this matter I disagree with Lavin's use of the word hoarding together with collection. I think there is a distinction between collection and hoarding which is also discussed in the field of psychology according to these behaviours. The reference of cabinets of curiosities is though indeed a interesting architectural phenomena which I directly adopted to be my architectural piece to be built. But what I think a hoarders architecture does differently or at least more frequent from most of the cabinets of curiosities and John Soane is the tendencies of stuffing, piling, hiding, balancing, the structure and things. A field I am interested to explore. Both as methods, but also as a tension between where architectures meets for example a pile of rubble.

Cabinet of Curiosities, Wunderkammer, or Art Cabinets was regarded as a microcosm or theatre of the world, and a memory theatre. The Kunstkammer conveyed symbolically the patron's control of the world through its indoor, microscopic reproduction. The Kunstkabinett itself was a form of propaganda. These aspect all applied to my investigation. I had to create my microcosm of my non-chosen, unwanted materials.

To specify a reference I choose Augsburgska Kabinettet as my role model. The object is well documented and have the qualities I was looking for. What interests me and have a parallel to my project is the exposure of a large amount of objects in an architectural context (the cabinet). In that time these cabinets where the rich people's entertainment and source to the latest science and cultural world. The complex and eclectic collection, with a vary of architectural, archaeological, cultural, scientific etc. objects showed that times values and interests in a both chaotic and logical (to the time) order. A shell from Caribbean could be next to a statue from Rome forming a crown that today might be judged as kitsch. I wanted to, in the same kind of brave, pompous way formulate my debris. I wanted to show my investigation and world where a screwed paper could be a kings crown.

In the same way Sir John Soane show very unique and intriguing architectural rooms. By collecting different architectural objects and organize them in his former home (now a museum) he both let the viewer interact with how his ornaments, pillars, statues, drawings, vaults, etc. changes the space, and layers the viewer's gaze through the room. But also all the references from different times and different styles make the viewer evaluate and think through what expectations and values, architecture, forms and art have. And tension is created between both the physical architectural experience as well as the imagination of the worlds of architecture.

This was exactly what I wanted to do with my hoarded debris. To embrace and enhance it to the context of Augsburgska kabinettet and filter it in a John Soane like architectural world, but my world and collection as a hoarder, bag lady, and architect, building a museum under the stairs in an unused, unwanted spot. By doing that I show a different way to relate to what could be called and named as trash, and especially how we as an architect can benefit, develop and position ourselves to this very actual material and concern.

Section of the same situation above, by me

"Musei Wormiani Historia", the frontispiece from the Museum Wormianum depicting Ole Worm's cabinet of curiosities.

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Discussion

To go through this process has been both exciting and frustrating. To mess up with aspects of choosing, evaluating, applying instead of reducing, I was many times feeling like a coach that can’t top her team.

Everybody must be playing and have a place. To do this in a creative process was harder than I thought, and I know that in many ways I have cheated and failed, swiped down materials in the trash bin again. I think it lead to dead ends a lot of times, but instead of turning around I tried to break that wall or just ignored it. Close to the finalization of my project I discovered that I actually alsa had a fully discipline discussing exactly my questions. Max Liboiron, a scholar, activist and artist and director of Civic Laboratory for Environmental Action Research (CLEAR), is main contributor of a discipline called Discard Studies. She describes it as: an emerging interdisciplinary subfield that takes waste and wasting, broadly defined, as its topic of study. We use the

“discard studies” instead of “waste studies” to ensure that the categories of what is systematically left out, devalued, left behind, and externalized are left open.

I was somewhat relieved when I at this point in my work with debris and the discarded found this platform that points out the necessity of framing this question in many different aspects. They are working on a compendium (https://discardstudies.com/discard-studies-compendium/) to expose this questions. Guy Schaffer, Science and Technology student, advance the formulation in relation to queer theories and further to the theories that goes under the name camp. Like queer theory, discard studies is interested in uneven remainders, things that don’t fit neatly into categories. Both concern themselves with the strange and imperfect construction of divisions (in discard studies, that between waste and not-waste; in queer theory, those between hetero/homosexual, between male and female) that do violence to humans, cultures, and environments, while still attending to the fact that these divisions have meaning for people, that they are strategic, and that they structure our thought in ways that are almost impossible to escape.

Jack Halberstam, Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity Gender Studies and Comparative Literature at USC, takes the discussion even further in her book The Queer Art of Failure. This book is dedicated to all of history’s losers - it brushes the dust from the forgotten archives of those who seemingly do not write history celebrates forgetfulness, spectacular failure and outlawed absurdity. In this sense it is rather an anti-archive manifesto that looks for a political alternative in low theory and what she calls silly archives. (Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure, 2011, p.19) In a witty style, Halberstam dismantles the overwhelming logic of success that is inevitably linked to the capitalist mode of production and heteronormative hegemony.

In my research I have tried to avoid a sort of tabula rasa process where the ideas and architectural choices comes from fragments and ideas in your mind. Which in my and many others world is a hetero- west and male dominant mind. During my research fragments at least comes from a non-chosen, failed, forgotten, process and whether it breaks free from these boundaries may be up for discussion, but at least it takes on a track to assemble the weak, dirty, misfits, cracked and to see the potentials in those objects.

David Gissen, a historian and theorist with a specialty in environmental histories of American and European architecture is also an voice I want to lift with his work with establishing a different or more realistic, non-ide- alistic, view on the nature. In his book Subnature, he defines a kind of under category of nature and how this relate and affect architecture. The book is divided into Dankness, Smoke, Gas, Exhaust, Dust, Puddles, Mud, Debris, Weeds, Insects, Pigeons, Crowds. By doing such a definition I think he both fall into my discussion of breaking up standard categorizations and also works in the field of the unwanted, unchosen, undocumented debris that, as he clearly show in his book, still plays an important role in the architectural space.

John Soanes Museum, London Section Augsburgska Kabinettet,

Uppsala, Anna Berglund 1906 Augsburgska kabinettet, foto John Böttiger

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DESERT DEBRIS

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