In the 21st Century, the environment that man finds himself in is increasingly a built one. This environment has been with us for hundreds, if not thousands of years, man has built since the dawn of time, but there are ever more ways in which we can experience and understand this space. We can begin to better understand our relationship to our man-made environs by asking how is the built environment seen, performed, heard, written and ultimately, experienced? The different ways of comprehending what we see around us are as myriad as the variety we find through this process of looking. There as many different types, or forms of built environment as there are ways of thinking about them.
I intend to look at a particular aspect of the built environment that has only really been in existence since after the beginnings of the ‘machine age’. In our post-modern, post-industrial landscape there exist spaces that are purely functional, global spaces of mobility - places and spaces that act as systems through which the city is/can be organised. These amount to non-spaces, areas to which we have no real relationship or connection. In his book,[1] Marc Augé describes these ‘non-places’ in contrast to ‘normal’ places.
“If a place can be defined as relational, historical and concerned with identity, then a space which cannot be defined as relational, or historical, or concerned with identity will be a non place…” [2]
Such places (and also the things that make them possible) include – supermarkets, slot machines, credit cards, petrol stations, airports, railway stations, hotel chains, leisure parks and retail outlets.
These places are a product of what Augé calls ‘supermodernity’. This is a different place and concept to Baudelaire’s ideas of modernity as the coexistence of two different worlds, of the “chimneys and spires”, that symbolise the new world of industry and the old world of religion. For Baudelaire modernity was something heroic, a place of co-existence where modern man and woman dwelled side by side with the new, and with the built environment.
“The display of fashion and the thousands of floating existences which circulate in the subterranean places of a huge city – criminals and prostitutes- give us proof that we only have to open out eyes to learn about the heroism of modern life.”[3]
The experience of these places, or rather these non-places can lead to what Durkheim describes as anomie, a state of confusion with regard to norms and an increasing impersonality in social life, which can eventual lead to the breakdown of the social norms that regulate behaviour. In our modern industrial societies, the emphasis is no longer on society as a whole but on the individual. A move has occurred from what Durkheim called ‘mechanical’ societies to ‘organic’ ones, which separate people and weaken social bonds, mainly as a result of the increased complexity and division of labour. This is especially evident in (post) modern society, where people are further separated and divided by computer technology and the Internet, increasing beaurocracy, and specialization in the workplace.
More than ever before, members of Western society are exposed to the risk of anomie, and if environmental factors are taken into consideration, then the non-spaces of ‘supermodernity’ are surely the breeding ground of such a phenomenon. Alongside, or perhaps part of any feelings of anomie that arise in non-spaces, there also comes a sense of anonymity even amongst other people, the sense of being alone even in a crowd, (but not in a pleasurable way as in Benjamin or Baudelaire) and a loss of identity.
These are transitory spaces, like corridors, passages that serve only as a means to some greater end, places that only exist to be used temporarily, never quite complete.
In his existential work ‘L’Estranger’ Camus wrote about the effect this questioning and confusion of ones existence can have, as seen through the story and eyes of the novels protagonist Mersualt, who at times is overwhelmed with a sense of anomie.
Ideas around these non-spaces can also relates to ideas around ‘the strip’ particularly in the USA, but increasingly in the smaller, modified form of the Retail Park in the UK. In “Learning From Las Vegas”, Venturi, Scott-Brown and Izenour examine the Las Vegas Strip, a vast sprawling highway of consumer choices and of even vaster parking lots and billboards. The language of such places as the ‘strip’, and indeed of many of the non-spaces of the 21st century is the language of signs. Order is maintained in an airport, for example, by a vast system of signs – screens with numbers on, different coloured lines to follow, various lounges to sit in, you match a number on your ticket to a number on a sign so you know where to move to next, which gate to use and so on.
In an average European town, with narrow streets and market stalls, merchandise is sold because it has been seen or smelt or touched, but out on the strip the only way to connect the driver out on the road to the store set way back of the road and separated by a sea of parked cars, is through the huge sign advertising the bargain of the day that can be seen from the road. “The graphic sign in space has become the architecture of this landscape”[4], the stores themselves are inconspicuous, and it is the sign that dominates.
Henry Miller saw this landscape as an outward manifestation of a degraded American character. He titled the autobiographical sketch of the of a cross-country car trip he took in 1944, ‘The Air-Conditioned Nightmare’. The title epitomizes his disgust with what he saw as a brash, ugly, and commodified landscape. He wrote how interior travel in America had become "diluted, contrived, and prefabricated." The uniform gas stations and restaurants just off the highway insulated a traveler from interaction with the local people, and the tacky roadside attractions spoiled any discovery of the landscape.
With reference more to the complexity and enormity of the road networks that were spreading throughout America in the post-war years, Jean Baudrillard wrote that they were creating a, “
“Gigantic, spontaneous spectacle of automotive traffic. A total collective act, staged by the entire population, twenty-four hours a day. By virtue of the sheer size of the layout and the kind of complicity that binds this network of thoroughfares together , traffic rises here to the level of a dramatic attraction, acquires the status of symbolic organization....”[5]
Even the architecture of non-places form a system of control, a way of making people flow in a certain way, often achieved without even the need for actual signs. Take a railway station – from the taxi outside you move to the ticket window, from there to the shops or cafés, on to a waiting room and then to the platform. [6] movement is regulated and controlled without the need for telling people what to do and when to do it.[7]
One way in which this form of the built environment can be figured, or annotated[8], is through photography. The lens can capture the sense of these places, the essence of which perhaps does not properly translate into words, more concretely, because the experience they create is one felt, a picture can sometimes more fully recreate this sensation.
In 1955, the Swiss photographer Robert Frank travelled throughout the United States by car and returned with a bleak portrait of what the American road had to offer. As Jack Kerouac writes in his introduction to the book that came out of the trip, ‘Americans’, Frank's photographs had "sucked a sad, sweet, poem out of America," [9]a sadness found in the forlorn looks of waitresses, funeral attendees, and human faces rendered unrecognizable in the glare of jukeboxes. The slightly offset angles and the blurred focus of many of the photographs suggest the nervousness and dislocation of the people they capture. Frank dispels any romantic notions of the lingering pioneer spirit of America by presenting a landscape of people and places absent of hope and promise. This wasn’t the prosperous post-war America that everyone else was talking about, this was the darker, concealed side, that made people feel uneasy just looking at photographs of it, letting alone living in it. His pictures captured the essence of the non-place, and the effect this environment has on its inhabitants.
Ed Ruscha, Artist and photographer also chronicled the non-spaces of his native America with his camera. Some of his works include ‘Twentysix Gasoline Stations’ (1962), ‘Some Los Angeles Apartments’ (1965) and ‘Thirtyfour Parking Lots in Los Angeles’ (1967). All of which comprise of exactly what the name suggests, photographs of gas-stations, apartment blocks and parking lots. Through their repetition the images take on a surreal quality, they are mundane every day places that we all know exist, yet we never give them this much attention – they move from being just random places to symbolic images of the non-place.
Personally, my built environment, the urban sprawl of south-east London, contains many of the non-spaces Ruscha and Frank captured, and many of those that Auge highlights in his book. On a walk around my area, (or a derive as some would have it) I took several photographs of what I thought might be considered non-spaces. But in the process of doing so I began to question the ‘non-ness’ of theses spaces. The local garage, petrol stations and railways stations did not seem somehow as transitory as perhaps I had begun to believe. The only place that to me had that some non- spaciality of, for exmple a large airport, was the local J.D. Wetherspoon Public House. The location of these pubs almost wherever you are in the country, and their faux-modern art interiors give them the atmosphere of a large waiting room, either in a hospital or an airport, I’m not sure which.
[1] Augé, Marc ‘Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity’ 1995
[2] Augé, Marc ‘Non-Places’ 1995
[3] Baudelaire, Charles, ‘The Heroism of Modern Life’
[4] Venturi, Scott Brown, Izenour, ‘Learning From Las Vegas’ pg. 13
[5] Jean Baudrillard, America (London: Verso, 1986), p.53
[6] Venturi, Scott Brown, Izenour, ‘Learning From Las Vegas’ pg 9
[7] This is not often the case in the airport, where the mood is often more subdued, and the threat of terrorism tangibly close, such much so that people do not mind being treated like sheep, herded through various gates and prodded occasionally. After all, there are armed police everywhere, so it must be serious.
[8]an·no·tate to add critical or explanatory notes to a text (often passive)
[9] “That crazy feeling in America when the sun is hot on the streets and music comes out of the jukebox or from a nearby funeral, that's what Robert Frank has captured in the tremendous photographs taken as he travelled on the road around practically forty-eight states in an old used car (on Guggenhiem Fellowship) and with the agility, mystery, genius, sadness, and strange secrecy of a shadow, photographed scenes that have never been seen before on film.” - Jack Kerouac, from his introduction to The Americans.
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