City Hide and Seek

Ever since the end of the 19^th Century when the Romantic imagination capitulated to the powers of its long-term foil – the metropolis – the city has become the central trope of the modern imagination.  20^th Century urban architecture was willowed down to a functional machine for living, cutting back the classical details of the Polis to create an iconography of Modernist materials – pristine cement, glass or steel.  An iconic language that eventually, corroded and corrupted imploded into the dystopian shopping mall, housing estate or postmodern folly.  Architecture is topography of both the physical city and the passageways haunted by the imagination of its inhabitants.  It is in this binary of the physical and the imagination that our experience of the urban environment is constructed and contested.

Any single experience of city life can be made up of bus journeys and advertising hoardings, anchor grinds and curb cuts, vaguely remembered clips from hip-hop videos, French new wave cinema or Tarantino dialogue mixed-in with the footfall of your journey.  We experience the city in a constant flux between literal experiences – we trip up the curb, we miss the bus – and a matrix of visual stimuli collected throughout our lives – an advert, a splice of music from a passing car, graffiti-tag or mural. Architecture bridges the two worlds of the imagination and the real.  The office block, for instance, is utilitarian, its orthogonal lines ordered like a ledger of checks and balances; we are disciplined by the building – it keeps us in check.  But, this order can be circumvented by our imagination – sparked by a piece of graffiti, a gaudy tag or a poster for an event that exists outside of the framework of commerce ­– we can hold onto a self, an interiority beyond the didactic architecture we pass through.

A city is built on a hierarchy of temporal sectors.  Transport, roadways, elevators and pavement cafés provide us with a prescribed experience of 24/7 living; bus timetables, menus, and road signs ­– utterings – on how we should interact – flow – with the physical world.  This temporal quality of city-living creates a tension between architecture and experience.  The city centre, for instance, dominates the 9 to 5, the lunch break and the shopping trip.  It is structured to facilitate a particular experience of ‘living’, as imagined by the town planner, architect or any given corporate strategy.  But this dominating homily of time and experience is constantly disrupted – reconfigured – by competing temporal modulations.  Skateboarders, lovers, drunks and graffiti artists – to name but a few – intervene and rebuild the city.  Any night, weekend or National holiday they create experiences outside of the architectural life-cycle of the business quarter, shopping centre or street corner.

These temporal configurations work on all our senses.  Crack-n-peel stickers, suitably placed, illuminate the non-places of any urban composition: the escalator instep, bus shelter or public stairwell.  These spaces act like a series of synapses.  Messages and images depicting gender politics, music promotion or hedonist pleasures, all of which can mix to create sparks of communication.  Lovers, walking in the early evening, find the blind spots of CCTV networks – to steal an intimate embrace– only to find the tagging signatures of midnight visitors from earlier in the day.  All are aware of the olfactory traces of drunks and others, who scent these spots like urban foxes defining their territories.

As architecture loses any sense of place – even the International style becomes too site specific – how we sense the city becomes ever more important.  Architectural imaginations can stretch from Lagos to Paris via New York – creating an exteriority of corporate landscapes in their wake.  But, the interior space of any city user is, by necessity, more parochial – we always carry a ‘home’ in our heads.  For many people, there is a need to create a self which is in opposition to that of the subjugating city they were born in.

City buildings line the streets like storm troopers for governmentality – concrete manifestations of regulations: health care, art galleries and sexuality – are all concepts that architecture helps make physical.  Organizational behaviour which once set solid, like bricks and mortar, transcend the 24/7 timeframe of city living.

In the 1930s the Futurist movement argued for each new generation to pull down the architecture of the generation before, and start again.  Today, in a less idealistic age – and for those who live outside of war zones – we have the opportunity to reconfigure the City by other means.