El ángel exterminador (1962) is a film by Luis Buñuel in which the group of main characters are stuck for weeks in a living room after a urbane dinner. Nothing visually seems to prevent them from actually exiting the living room but for a mysterious reason none of them seems to try to actually get out despite the fact that they are close from dying from hunger.
This narrative is a good subject of investigation for the theory often attempted here (thank you Nick for pointing that out) according to which architecture has a fundamental power on the bodies. Of course, in that case the living room does not appear as a prison as the large double door at its entrance remains open all along the film but we can, once again, interrogate ourselves about the power that the line drawn by the architect carries in itself.
What is a door after all? Isn’t it simply an apparatus that organize architecture’s porosity or, in other words, a device that control the carceral characteristics of a room. After all, a prison always have a door. A locked door is nothing else than a wall for which (most of the time) the human body cannot develop a sufficient effort to modify or destroy it. Each interior space (aka room), traced by the architect as a continuous closed line is a prison en puissance (“in power”, “potentially”). On a side note, I recently learned that the word “prisoner” has the interesting characteristic to be written 囚 in Chinese and Japanese. Whoever has been learning the very basics of Chinese characters will recognize 人 i.e. a person, surrounded by a continuous and closed line. As often, those characters are fascinating by their minimal representation of their meaning.
The claustrophobia that L. Buñuel succeeds to transmit in El ángel exterminador is a feeling that we should as fundamental in the creation and use of architecture. We have to be claustrophobic architects and architecture users! By that I do not mean in any way that we should refrain from designing and using narrow or small spaces (there are other phobia developed in large open spaces), but rather that we should be somehow “terrified” by the very act of tracing the lines that shuts (claustrum in Latin) space onto itself. Again, that does not mean that we should never trace or experience those lines, what it means is that we should be fully aware of the tremendous power contained within them in order to trace/experience them in such a way that we would the least possible subjected to their violence. As Michel Foucault says in his preface to Deleuze & Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus, we have “to neutralize the effects of power linked to [our] own discourse.” (see previous article “Do not Become Enamored of Power“)
One of your best articles to date, very discrete; film/visual space, and the basic elements of confinement.
I love the figure of the worrisome draftiest painstakingly scratching out each wall and door, trembling under the thought of its potential for human confinement.
Thank you very much Mick, it means a lot.
I do believe that architects must exhaustedly taste as many archetypes of space as possible, as much as a cook chief tastes food for the sake its own imaginary process when pursuing unearthly sensations.
And we do too little of it. Recently I had the humble opportunity to give a workshop on analyzing projects, only with the little information that most of the daily visited websites provide to its viewers to “judge” and have their own prejudiced impressions on building that they never been into. One of my surprises were that, even when faced with the fact that you see dozens of projects in a daily basis, most of the students couldn’t reach the minimal level of abstractness to envision the building as an architectural experience for the senses, and therefore, could not really have any critic opinion on it, and therefore, could not learn from it. One of the reasons to blame, in my guess, is the little “space catalog” that we have within our life time experience. How many architectural students pursue or even have access to a variety of spaces, for them be able to understand it and, as you say, “draw the lines in the paper” with confidence and responsibility?
It scares me a little bit. To think that only people born with the opportunities and spacial talent would be capable of making spaces with an untroubled, conscious and responsible mind.
P.S.: kanji’s fun fact: the kanji noisy (姦) is the kanji for woman(女) written 3 times.