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Love in the Middle
Love's facade. Site of the balcony; place beloved of lover's literature, place of the
appearance of the Beloved. Site of the bedroom, with its
tell-tale window, discreetly veiled, silent resting place of the Beloved.
Love's facade. Drawing the aim of
desire; ever-present target for arrows of love from the Lover waiting below.
Boudoir of the Lady, dressing room of the gentleman; permanent position of the piano nobile.
Love's facade. Making of us all -
all passers-by, all wanderers in the city, all prisoners in the dream of
transit - making of us all Lovers in our passing, in our passing stares
(passing-by down below). For the passer-by, this is the last home of
unguarded intention and final resting place of unspent desire. Love's facade. The 'Middle'.
The Middle. We already know what happens on the entry level; this is the floor of
transit; the neutral space of passage. And we are not interested in what lies
behind the graven symbols that touch the sky (in the absence of a dwelling, a
penthouse, we assume the functional presence of winding gear and water tanks). But the Middle? This is the place where people live and
work... We would know more, we would suppose more, we would assume more. In the
Middle we find a home for our desire.
The Middle is a true and distinctive innovation of
urban civilisation - a prop of the urban scene. A part to be
defined differentially against the other parts that make up the visual field of
city life. Like the other fundamental parts it presents itself as a
horizontal slice of architecture, or better, its experience (our experience of
architecture) its consumption in signs, its rendering into the world of images.
Its range: from the windows overlooking the street, from the aptly named
'first' floor (not the ground floor mezzanine) to the upper-most story below,
but not touching, the horizon (that potent privilege is reserved for another
kind of symbol-bearing part, another 'part' of the experience of architecture). The horizon is never part of the Middle.
What kind of place is that lies behind the facade of
the Middle. What kind of space is it that is the
recipient of the desire, the fantasy, the
ever-drifting imagination of so many, so often? This experiential zone is at
once the space of the suburban bedroom, the high-rise apartment (when nearer
the top than the middle, home of the gods) as well as of the compact urban flat
and the ubiquitous city centre office. These are the places of life found
between the entry level and solar regions of space; the places of life and our
curiosity thereof. True home of our curiosity in others, in
others' lives, and our curiosity about sex, about the sex of others (a
curiosity driven by desire and its metaphoric associations rather than a desire
for knowledge (of others) as such). Always more a
mirror than a magnifying glass. A concealed microphone
rather than a microscope.
Almost inevitably incited by the
presence of a window. Porthole in the steel
hull of another's privacy. Peep hole into the imaginary sex-show of
others. 'Middle' or facade windows: from the chintz of the suburban upstairs to
urban shutters, from the office wall of glass (now also in apartments) to the
sculpted receptacle (trap for desire) the triphora of the loggia, pocket of plenty, sure sign of
the presence of a piano nobile .
And so to the back windows of the balcony, first revealing, then
concealing the larger space further on within. True also of
domestic architecture (for example, as exemplified historically in the
paintings of the eighteenth century artist Thomas Jones, most notably in his
Love's
facade. In what way do we care about what goes on there?
It is in this realm - neither the sacred realm of the
solar skyline, nor the world of commodities and reflected identities of the
ground or display floor - that we find the zone of life. Of work as life, if
the vista we survey takes in the office levels of the city-scape.
Of sexual relation or expression when habitation is involved. It is here that
are acted out the negotiations and intimacies of sex and recognition (the omni-present desire for others and for the signs of
acceptance from others' selves, and the often embarrassing curiosity about
their bodies which reminds us, perhaps anecdotally, of the behaviour of our
ethological cousins). This is the zone of actual life and in this sense alone
it is perhaps less imaginary than the other two zones. As the place of life or
the place of work - this is the place where most time is spent (this is even
true of suburbia where more time is spent on the ground floor, but it is the
bedroom nevertheless that remains more interesting from the outside). This
'real time' is opposed to the imaginary times of its external perception, as
experienced when viewed from without, with the past or future as the place of
the deferred event (deferred because of the lack of immediacy, because mediated
by glass and stone and distance). Never present before us as is the street and
its level within which we pass, nor present as symbol as in the skyward
location of the horizon; not then the fullness of the moment nor the sense of
the outside of time of the other two zones. Zones where time is spent: lost,
dissipated in the upper regions; compressed into a full-frontal presence in the
lower. There is an intuitive sense of both real and imagined life as taking
place in the Middle; the shared ground of all office and domestic interiors,
not least of suburban exteriors - although most specially the bedroom
(enigmatic light in the upper storey).
(In this sense the experience of architecture
parallels the experience of the canvass (also the window and the screen): the
presence of the foreground; the possibility of either pastness
or futuricity of the middle ground; the ethereal
potentiality of transcendence residing in the background, the sky. The regions
of time are differentiated by the regions of the eye.)
The Middle is the site of the smaller everyday rituals
of work and domestic life. The big rituals of communal identity and social
meaning are symbolised by the solar level: whilst the public rituals attending
transit and exchange (commodity and recognition) take place on the ground
level, place of the transition of thresholds (place of exchanges over, and in
the face of thresholds). The relations
masked by the facade of the Middle involve the exchanges of recognition on the
intimate and habitual level as opposed to the mass recognition rituals of
transit or the mass 'festive' or intense rituality of seasonal religious events
(or if so only on a scale permitted by the space available, or as a simultaneous
participation in a generally celebrated cyclic festival such as a religious
festival, or singularities such as the festivities attending the end of war).
Not either therefore the commercial or commodity-based exchanges symbolised by
the ground level (regardless of whether the purchase will be linked to identity
support or recognition rituals); nor the implied sacred conversation and very
real (economic) exchange of money (space) for sign (of the solar top). Rather
the everyday domestic or workaday exchanges of the Middle. Exchanges rendered
exotic only by our imaginations, as we pass and glance up (up, but not all the
way up to the bright rim of the horizon) exchanging, as we pass, our
well-trodden experience of actual human relations for the rumoured suspicion of
ideal sex.
Lovers meet in the Middle. This is the site of office
romances (real or imaginary); of the apartment and the affair; of the adultery
that is the implied pole of contrast to the steady world of suburbia. Sex
behind the window; sex in the afternoons; 'sex in the head'. The world of the
painter Edward Hopper; scenarios of boredom and desire.
The
Middle is the setting for architecture's novel.
Curiosity of the other, for the other, for others'
activities. A curiosity played out here,
on this level between levels (the level of the other) sandwiched between the
big picture, the mega-beliefs fed by the horizon, symbolised by the skyline (at
once the level of the Absolute Other and the Absolute Same, the absent ground
to collective belief) and the currency of objects and faces, the circulation of
objects and faces that regulates the flows -slow in suburbia, fast in the city-
of the ground (the level of identity, the level of the Same). The fantasy of
the other and of the self, or same, as other, finds its home in the windows of
the Middle. The place where the contact, the communion, imagined, fantasised,
elsewhere (here, in the place of yearning down below) can, or is believed, to
take place.
The Middle implies the tangle of intimacies that (we
believe) must teethe behind the epic vision of the Gurskian
anthill.
The Middle. The hidden presence of the future past;
sign of the second order temporalities, less present but giving time its sweep,
life its duration, existence its rhythms, and offering memory and anticipation
their true homes. (By contrast there is the eternal presence of the ground,
also our eternal ground of presence; and the eternity alluded to by the solar
regions).
Individual and collective recognition find their place
in the other levels, in other parts; here, in the Middle, the recognition of
the other as matter - as other than just idea - comes about through the medium
of desire.
The Middle shows us ourselves at play, but also at
production (it ignites our tendency to supposition, stokes it to its most
fantastic, yet also offers the combination of the other with time and with
desire, with the sensuousity of matter in memory and
anticipation). As ever this ineluctable propensity for creation shows itself
equally in the snarl on the face of destruction, as in the gentle smile
attendant on humanity's moments of benign and harmless fancy.
The Middle: white screen onto which we paint the
colours of our desire.
*
Like
the walls of the museum, the walls of the urban womb are festooned with a
thousand framed pictures under glass.
Copyright 2004 Peter Nesteruk