A City Is Not a Computer by Mattern Shannon;

Author:Mattern, Shannon;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2021-05-19T00:00:00+00:00

41a and 41b. Stills from Koolhaas Houselife, 2008, directed by Ila Bêka and Louise Lemoine.

Acedo has learned to improvise, to negotiate the space’s idiosyncratic orientations and accept its inefficiencies. In one sequence, she lugs a mop, a bucket, and a vacuum cleaner up a spiral staircase, then resourcefully deploys these long, linear tools in a space of tight curves. We marvel at her patience in accommodating a structure that clearly aims to make life difficult for its caregivers. Yet when he saw the film, Koolhaas was disappointed that the architecture hadn’t inspired more innovative maintenance: “I am kind of surprised by the fact that someone who has such a daily involvement [with the building] is so insistent on a kind of generic technique of cleaning something so exceptional. I can easily imagine if I were a cleaner—maybe this is something we should have thought of—[I would have devised] some sort of protocol of what is convenient to be done by hand and what is convenient to be done by machine. I am completely surprised that something that is as harsh and exceptional as the spiral staircase is treated with a Hoover. It is completely insane.”64 This probably isn’t what Stewart Brand had in mind when he wondered how a building might “teach good maintenance habits.”65

Acedo, a link in the global care chain, sleeps overnight in the staff quarters and thus dedicates more time to this home than to her own. And she cares not just for the house but also for “the negotiated order that surrounds it” (to reprise Graham and Thrift), including the family that inhabits it and the tourism industry that feeds upon it. We don’t see much of the family in the film; we instead see the traces of their presence: messy stacks of books, dirty dishes. Lemoine died not long after the building was finished, making its central mechanical conceit obsolete. Koolhaas told the New Yorker’s Daniel Zalewski that “the elevator had become a monument to his absence.”66 The house itself is also a monument, designated a landmark just three years after its completion. Yet if Acedo’s cleaning is an act of preservation, this obstinate house seems to resist care. Its leaks and deteriorating concrete core, both highlighted in the film, suggest a hastening toward the end. Even monuments turn to dust.

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