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The following article is a sequel and a synthesis of two past articles. While the first one, written in

February 2013 wascomparing the architectural design of the Western embassies to medieval

castles(less in their aesthetics than in their spatial organization), the second published a few weeks

ago wasexamining the colonial characteristics of gentrificationespecially in New York. I am

continuing my American/Canadian West Coast trip forArchipelagoand now finds myself in San

Francisco where gentrification is particularly fast and violent. I recorded an Archipelago podcast

with Alysabeth Alexander about this topic and in particular the role played by the privatization of

transportation by the tech industry in the city of San Francisco where more and more of its

employees are encouraged to live while working in Palo Alto. This podcast will be released on

Monday, but before doing so, I wanted to present a particularly blatant example of the way

architecture does not simply creates real estate value on a given land, but also organizes space in a

defensive and antagonistic manner. One of gentrifications characteristics consists in the fantasy of

danger that gentrifying bodies have for their gentrified counterparts hence the need for them to

accelerate the process and therefore requires from architecture to provide a semiotics of security.

I encountered the building on301 Rhode Island streetright before recording this podcast and

coincidentally or rather, logically a tech industry shuttle was parking right in front of it (see

photographs below). This building is only one example among many others of what I would like to

call gentrifying fortresses, yet it presents a certain amount of characteristics that makes it

particularly paradigmatic of the role that architecture plays in this societal process. A look at the

photographs below will show you how there has been a real architectural care in the conception of

the design (spatially, materially, aesthetically, etc.), which encourages us to think that this building

was created by an architecture office, which spent dozens of hours of work into it, and is likely to be

proud of it for that matter. I would like to argue that, for this reason, the responsibility that

architecture holds for the consequences of the spatial apparatus it embodies is even stronger than in

the case of developers projects.

The orientation of the building is already problematic as the most exposed facade to the street is

voluntarily left opaque in an explicit refusal to dialogue with the neighborhood. This aspect of

architecture is however more symbolical than actually violent on the bodies. The access to the

building, on the other hand, is paramount of the argument I have been regularly making in my writing

about the weaponization of architecture in the domestic realms. This building could have negotiated
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the conditions in which it was gentrifying its neighborhood an already problematic position but

simultaneously a more arguable one by proposing to the latter a public space of quality through

the interlacing of public and private space and the high porosity of access to it. On the contrary, each

access to the building constitutes a hyper-defensive checkpoint where fences have been raised with

a secondary vertical element in an explicit antagonist declaration to all body who does not reside in

the building. Similarly, the entire base of the building is made as little porous as possible to prevent

any interaction with the street to occur.

As often in architectures that reinforce social disparity, the violence deploys itself mostly in the

privilege of access to a space (having the key, or the code) rather than in the entire spatial formation

of the building. In the case of this specific building, one could destroy the fences that prevents its

access to every body and a public pedestrian street would be thus created. However, we should not

forget that these fences are not additive to architecture, they arearchitecture. An architect could

argue that the decisions of placing them was not his/her choice but their presence still belongs to the

architects responsibility as they are as much part of architecture as windows or columns are, and

ways to prevent such a controlled access exist when they are being considered as core decisions of

the project itself. In other words, the societal consequences that an architecture triggers cannot be

thought at the end of the conception, but rather, they need to be engaged all along the creative

process.


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All following photographs by Lopold Lambert (April 2014):
http://thefunambulistdotnet.files.wordpress.com/2014/05/gentrifying-fortress.jpg


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Tech industry bus across the street from this building

Do not let the fancy renderings of the winning entry for the new American Embassy in London

mislead you, what you see is nothing else than the contemporaneous version of the Middle Age

castle. The project, designed by Kieran Timberlake carries many characteristics of medieval means

of defense and thus constitutes the paradigm of the post-2001 American Embassy. As I already

pointed out ina previous articleabout the competition for the US Embassy in Belgrade, this

paradigm is defined by the contradiction between the appearance and the essence of the building,

the former representing the traditional discourse of openness, democracy, liberty and America

(quoting the issue of proudly AmericanMetropolis dedicated to US Embassies) while the latter is

really about the protection of the building and what it contains.

Just like for the new World Trade Centerin New York, the base of the building has to be solid

enough to contain a bomb-car attack. In the London case, the building is separated from the city by

an earth motte as well as a moat filed with water (seethe wired articleabout those apparatuses). As

many people also realize a square-base building ensures to have the least contact surface with the
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outside. Usually it represents a useful way to control the energy transfers and thus to make the

building more ecoLogical, in that case, it ensures to the core of the building to be protected from any

exterior attack. The peripheral glass is therefore only a decoy which indicates what truly needs to be

protected in an Embassy, not as much people, but documents that are stored in the center of the

building. It would be interesting to see the plans but of course, they are kept secret, which brings the

attention on the architects responsibility once again. The generation of architects currently practicing

has been built on the disillusion of the previous one (the moderns), and has therefore accepted the

idea that, as simple cogs of the mechanisms, they were not responsible for the political

consequences of their products. The very fact that their plans could be kept secret brings attention

on the power of the scheme that they participated to conceive.

One has to understand that my criticism of the new London US Embassy project is not so much

directed at its defensive characteristics, it is not even so much addressed to the architectural

hypocrisy it constitutes, but as often in my writings, it is a critique of the place that it occupies within

a system. At an architectural level, this system is the one for which fame and pomp reign in such a

way that the design paradigm actually shifted, but at the global political level, it embodies a

retroactive justification of the reasons why a country like the United States actually needs to defend

itself. Once again, architects think that they are not responsible of the program that is given to them,

that they come after the events and policies that led to such program; however, by accepting what is

being asked for them within this system, they legitimize the policies that precede them. As always

my question remains: should we simply refuse to participate to this system? It is probably easy for

an architect to never design a post-2001 US Embassy but it is likely to be more difficult never to

design a building that is embedded within similar logic (an office, a store, a public benchpretty

much any piece of design in the city). We should therefore learn to subvert the system rather than

fleeing it, act as funambulists who play with the line that was supposed to subjugate their bodies, but

how much smarter than the system can we be? How can we prevent from being trapped by it?

Those questions probably escape from the strict theoretical approach and require their daily practice

for us to really make sense out of them.

More images of the London US Embassy project:


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http://thefunambulistdotnet.files.wordpress.com/2013/02/1267025310-kt-01.jpg


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Rainier Tower in Seattle by architect Minoru Yamasaki (1977)

/// Photograph by Lopold Lambert (May 2014)

Regular readers of The Funambulist will have noticed that I have been often referring to the

term fortress in order to describe pieces of architecture I recently encountered. This word refers to

the defensive qualities that each of these architectures presents through its physicality in the way it

organizes bodies in space (that is still my definition for architecture). However, it does not address

the political agenda that is enacted through these defensive characteristics. What I have been calling

proletarian fortresses in the last few years to describe Burail(Chandigarh),Rue Eugene Sues

Haussmannian social housings(Paris), theKowloon Walled City(Hong Kong) orthe Torre

David(Caracas) are the counterpoints to other fortresses, more deliberate and optimal, that

capitalist-ideological logic construct everywhere. Whether we refer to theU.S./Mexico border wall,

thewall that Israel built in the West Bank,thecurrent Western embassies,thisbuilding encountered

in San Franciscothat acts a paradigm of the architecture of gentrification, themilitarized public

space of downtown Oakland,or the building that I want to describe in this article, they all impose the

social violence of filtration between bodies who have access to both sides of their walls and bodies

on whom the violence of architecture is fully operating.

The Rainier Tower in Seattle was designed by Minoru Yamasaki in the 1970s, only a few years

after New YorksWorld Trade Center that did not wait for 2001 to embody the totem of American

capitalist ideology. It was built for the Rainier National Bank for its headquarters. The Rainier Tower

is particularly striking for its twelve first floors splaying from the top down into a fully opaque brutal

concrete base (see photographs below). Such an engineering prowess associated to a radical

aesthetics certainly put the first visitor (that I was two weeks ago) in awe. The well-known aesthetics

of the office tower is recognizable for the floors above the 12th floor of the building, thus reinforcing

the radicality of the basis in its contrast. To some degree, we might want to think of this tower as the

representation of the capitalist ideological architecture: a transparent aspect for the inaccessible

mirage and a defensive bunker for what should be its interactive base.

As usual however, I am not as much interested in a phenomenological approach when a body

encounters architecture. The latters physicality is almost always more efficient in the transcendental

strategy it unfolds. Questions are worth raising about what this concrete basis contains or have

contained in the past. When I asked the security agent at the front desk, they refused to answer. Yet,
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ignoring something often leads to perilous hypotheses so I would rather not make any here. It is not

so important to know whether this opaque concrete hides something when looking at the floor

plan, one can see that there is not much room outside the elevators and stairs but it certainly is to

observe what is the relationship that the building maintains with the street, i.e. the public realm. The

tower makes more room to potential public space but, in fact, this space is still privatized through the

shopping center that edges the building (on the other side, the shop visible on the photograph above

is not part of the tower). The dialogue proposed to the street could not be more minimal. Each

surface that could be considered as accessible is made of this opaque concrete up to where the

capitalist ivory tower can begin. In a post September 2001 era, such base ironically, like the one

of the newly built World Trade Center in New York could be seen as a militarized defense against

potential bomb attack from the ground; however, we can more simply interpret this hermetic aspect

as a reflex for capitalism to defend itself against the antagonism it knows it creates as well as to filter

the bodies that are part of its manufactured social elite from the others; in short, its necessary

impossibility by definition to be generous and to offer something to the public.

All following photographs are by Lopold Lambert (May 2014):


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