As the United States weathers its continued economic decline, the possibility of home ownership becomes more and more remote for the majority of citizens. At the beginning of May, the New York Times’s Metro Section reported on a respectable citizen whose tight budget forced him to move into a 20-year-old mobile home that he parks on the street in his home borough of Queens. Another new NYC celebrity is Steve Stanzak, a sophomore at New York University who lived for eight months in the basement level of NYU’s Bobst Library, unable to afford the US$20,000-per-year cost of a dormitory room. These are but two examples of middle-class citizens forced into ad-hoc living arrangements, and they say nothing about the economically deprived lower classes who have no recourse to even the simplest of shelters. These banal stories nonetheless force the country to confront the conditions of poverty that exist in so many places elsewhere in the world, a world that still, for most Americans, remains an abstraction.

The grip of global capitalism increases its reach, flattening vast swaths of local culture and with them, the potential for new experiences and ideas, even while purporting to offer the possibility of liberation through industry and ingenuity. While corporations broaden their view with wide-angle access [the distortions of the lens fanning out like a compass plotting the next arc of appropriation], individuals are now forced to see the world from the wrong end of the telescope, a rapidly diminishing field of vision that tunnels downwards into a pinprick of light in imminent danger of being extinguished.

All we have left are the interstices—the wedges of light, or air, or ground that result in between architectural monoliths and swarming infrastructural systems of conveyance and transportation. Following Homi Bhabha, these “sliver spaces” might be the only places left for the constitution of selfhood and identity formation, of dissent and disavowal. But how to expose them and make them available for such use? To whom do they belong? Can some sort of compromise be reached whereby the feelings of disenfranchisement are mitigated by an equitable series of exchanges?

The coordinates that define the balance between hegemon and subject need radical revision. Underway are several proposals—self-reflexively marginal and hence appropriately authentic with regard to the ideas that they propose. We are all by now perhaps familiar with Tom Sachs’s tongue-in-cheek reconstructions of, for example, the Unité d’Habitation, Le Corbusier’s canonical contribution to the typology of post-war housing needs. In Sachs’s work, Styrofoam and packing tape are used to undermine the legacy of International-Style-modernist truth to materials, introducing a D.I.Y aesthetic into a heroic-modernist vocabulary in order to demonstrate the extent to which a dogmatic attention to facture and Existenzminimum stands in contradistinction to the simple pleasures of folkloristic technique and the ingenuity of adversity.
Such a critique remains steadfastly within an operative paradigm, failing to move into a mode of praxis or productive instrumentality. The insularity of such projects causes an ability to speak beyond physical boundaries, a condition hampered by smug bravado and a seeming fear of a confrontation with the Real.

In an obverse relationship to Sachs stands Michael Rakowitz, a young New York-based architect and sculptor whose significant contributions to contemporary sculptural practice (also using quotidian materials) are his so-called “paraSITES.” The paraSITES are individual homeless shelters made of trash bags, Ziploc bags, and clear waterproof packing tape, and are customized by Rakowitz for the individual inhabitant/owner. Produced at a cost of US$5.00 per shelter, and easily folded into a portable size that can be either carried by hand or on one’s back, the paraSITES represent a paradigm shift in the task of sheltering the city’s destitute and downtrodden.

The process of customization is based on both practical as well as aesthetic concerns. One recipient wanted his unit to look like the character Jabba the Hut from Star Wars; another wanted translucent pockets in which to display his private belongings to the public, perhaps as a pedagogical gesture to demonstrate the “humanity” of the otherwise overlooked homeless population. Each unit is equipped with an intake tube that the inhabitant attaches to a chosen building’s HVAC [heating, ventilation, and air conditioning] exhaust vent, inflating the structure while simultaneously heating it. Some paraSITE users have fostered relationships with a certain building’s superintendent; others furtively hook themselves up after hours and hope for the best. Rakowitz’s decision to create structures that glom on to existing buildings offers a trenchant critique of the inequity in both quality and number of the public services available to city residents. Rakowitz correctly determined that the heat and air expended from large industrial or residential buildings exists in inverse proportion to the assistance available to the homeless population. The millions of cubic units of wasted resources is thus translated, via the bricoleur’s endless resourcefulness, into a useful supply of energy.

Rakowitz devised the paraSITE as a corrective to former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani’s “quality of life” improvement laws of the mid-1990s, many of which punished the city’s growing homeless population without providing the means for reversing their plight [examples include anti-tent legislation, meant to preclude homeless encampments from taking over public parks, or the infamous “squeegee law,” enacted as a means of combating windshield washers who would pounce upon cars at stoplights with water and rags, only to demand money for their unwanted services]. One of Giuliani’s many missteps was to erase any semblance of authenticity from the city, imagining a conflict-free (and hence reality-free) public sphere as something both desirable and salutary for the city’s population. In fact, this sort of blindness leads to both complacency and ignorance. Rakowitz’s structures insist; they are intentionally translucent and, hence, exceedingly, blindingly illustrative of the lives they circumscribe and contain.

Public space is a place not only for a kind of universalist subject formation, but functions also as a site for the working through of conflict; as Marshall Berman has written, it is “a place where people can actively engage the suffering of this world together, and, as they do it, transform themselves into a public.” By foregrounding adversity, Rakowitz’s surprising pragmatism squeezes significance out of the slimmest margins yet remaining in the capitalistically overwrought urban sphere.

 

Translated by Timothy Jones

 

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