Thick Edge: Architectural Boundaries and Spatial Flows

from Intumus: Interior Design Reader Edited by Mark Taylor and Juleanna Preston 2006 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

Iain Borden

Having long been relegated to the domain of the 'inside,' interior design often confronts the issue of boundary crossing in the form of both literal and theoretical thresholds. But as architectural historian and urban commentator Iain Borden suggests, boundaries can be social and spatial ordering devices, particularly within the public urban realm. Noting a disparity in the idea of spatiality as the simple relation between objects and forms, Borden realigns spatiality as a force, or flow, among social elements, including all forms of inhabitation. In this way boundaries are defined as permeable, temporal and political markers of bodily negotiation.

Clear Blue Water

On London's Kingsway in Holborn sits the church of Holy Trinity. A theatrical inwardly-curved facade grandly enfolds a semicircular portico. Beyond splendorous Edwardian aesthetics, Belcher and Joass' design also provides a public micro-retreat from the motorcycle couriers and taxis on Kingsway. As a church, Holy Trinity welcomed visitors, drawing them onto the ambiguous stage defined by its facade, then into the portico, and onwards to the interior. Forsaken by 1991 as a place of worship, it rapidly became a focus for Holborn's many homeless, a semi permanent sitting and sleeping place away from the exposed doorways in the Strand. Holy Trinity was now a different stage set, at once public domain and private to those seeking defensible space and their own appropriated form of illegal real estate.¹ Clusters of homeless recomposed a niche space from layers of clothes, cardboard and classical architecture.

Except that a line has just been drawn: a three metres high plane of wood, painted a striking resonant blue, spanning the Holy Trinity front, and shutting off the semi-public stage set from the street and passers-by. Yet it is not so much that the building is shut off from people, but that people – particularly the homeless – are divorced from it. To the cognoscenti, the screen may suggest a Christoesque device or even Derek Jarman's reductive film screen 'Blue,' and certainly it inserts a startling colourist disjunction to the grainy grey of Holborn. But for the new owners of the church, the Post Office, this is a

considered attempt to keep architecture as things, and space as the distance between objects; they have constructed a boundary of exclusion, a brutally frontal relation which physically repels the unwanted and the unwashed. It is the architecture of separation, of clear blue water between spaces and peoples.

I learned much of this from a man called Bob, a small Geordie with a flat cap and weathered lines from decades of life on the streets of London. $^{2}$ To him and other former residents of the Holy Trinity portico, this is indeed a divisive boundary, demarcating the uncrossable chasm between private ownership and public use, recent history and immediate future. Architectural boundaries like this have social effects which cannot be denied.

But what is the boundary's socio-spatial nature? Architecture has too often been conceived solely as the product of design intention, from which social effects simply follow. The 'second nature' $^{3}$ of architecture is posited as simply the artificial replacement for Nature, the pre-given space to which people come and respond. But this view of space ultimately offers little more than what Soja terms the 'illusion of opacity,' by which 'spatiality is reduced to physical objects and forms.'

Since the 1970s, a politically-minded approach to architectural history has emerged, in which space assumes a more social character. The focus, however, still tends to the notion of function, in which buildings remain primarily designed objects, and the social activities are simply accommodated in architectural design (particularly in plan), or to the notion of social history, whereby buildings form backdrops to the drama of everyday life. In either case, the essential interrelation of buildings, spaces and people is reduced to a false dualism between object and social use. $^{4}$

In contradistinction to this dualism, and taking their cue from sources as diverse as anthropologist Marc Augé, urban geographers Edward Soja and David Harvey, historian Michel Foucault, and, in particular, the philosopher Henri Lefebvre, more anthropologically-minded historians and theorists are now reconceptualising architecture as what I call a 'space of flows' – not as objects, but as the interrelation between things, spaces, individuals and ideas. Bernard Tschumi is the most persistent architect here, arguing that 'architecture … could not be dissociated from the events that "happened" in it.' $^{5}$ Similarly, Adrian Forty remarks of the 'Strangely Familiar' project that architecture 'is not made just once, but is made and remade over and over again each time it is represented through another medium, each time its surroundings change, each time different people experience it.' $^{6}$ Architecture is both produced and reproduced, designed and experienced. It is a medium not a message, a system of power relations not a force, a flow not a line.

So what is the boundary? Georg Simmel noted that boundaries make social orders more concrete, more intensely experienced; indeterminate in themselves, they stand in contrast to the physical boundaries of nature, their significance springing from interaction on either side of the line. For Simmel, the 'boundary is not a spatial fact with sociological consequences but a sociological fact that is formed spatially.' Boundaries do not cause sociological effects in themselves, but are formed between social elements.7

The Holy Trinity blue screen shows precisely this. The social effects on those who experience the boundary change its historical nature, dislocating significance away from the object itself. Furthermore, these effects are simultaneously an attempt by the Post Office to patrol the social relation between the homeless and its own property. The Post Office renegotiates that relationship by erecting a physical screen which hides – metaphorically and literally – its own concerns; in experiencing the screen-as-object we should remember with Guy Debord that such things are also spectacles, and thus 'not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images.'8 The conception of the blue screen purely as object is then reductive.

There is also another way in which the boundary is socio-spatial – through its materiality. The blue screen's obvious function is to keep undesirables off the stage-space beyond, hindering the transition of the human body. Apart from this, it offers another, more pervasive control over the space and time of the would-be-invasive body. In front of the stage-set space is a low wall, of the right depth and height to sit and, potentially, to sleep upon, To prevent this, the vertical screen makes a sudden 45 degrees deviation, such that instead of resting behind the low wall it terminates halfway across its depth, leaving only 150 millimetres clear in front. The condition produced is subtle and important; through the precise control of screen and wall in relation to the thickness of the human body, the low wall becomes too shallow for a person to sleep upon, or to sit upon for any length of time. Many similar edge-hardenings have begun to sprout up around London, where spiked windowsills, 'decorative' railings, studded flower-planters and night-time automatic sprinkler systems to 'clean' shop and office doorways are being used to repel the public from the edge of the street.

In the case of the Holy Trinity screen, even the 'respectable' pedestrian is discouraged from stopping. Beside erasing a temporary resting space, the smooth surface of the blue screen is devoid of detail interest and exactly that tactility which Maurice Merleau-Ponty reasserted against the domination of vision.9 It deflects attention away, presenting a blank nothing to the interrogative eye. There is no occasion to linger, observe or inspect.

What appears to be a simple, planar boundary, is then quite different; the blue screen discloses the boundary as a zone of negotiation, in which vision is just one of a series of body-centric architectural devices. The space of the body is used to control its interrelation with the

screen and, by extension, the influence of the screen's surface is projected onto the pavement. Passers-by continue to pass by, discouraged from stopping by the screen's materiality. The boundary is not a surface but a thick edge, a five metre deep in-between zone in which social relations are challenged and controlled through architectural materiality.

Rights of Passage

If the Holy Trinity screen frontally controls property and social relations through physicality, what of boundaries that see control in a more ambiguous manner?¹⁰ What of those new urban spaces – the shopping mall, plaza and transport concourse – those spaces at once public and private?

One of the most prominent of these spaces is the Broadgate office development, constructed for the post 'Big Bang' (1986) financial centre in the City of London.¹¹ Developed by Rosehaugh Stanhope and British Rail over the lines of Liverpool Street and the old Broad Street train station, the 29 acre site provides 4 million square feet of high-quality office space and three internalised urban squares.

Broadgate is also an area which strives to define its social ethos, and the dominant temper of well-salaried and besuited office workers is reinforced by many different measures. An aesthetic enclave within the fragmented postmodern city, Broadgate contains Americanised 'fashion effect' architecture designed by Arup Associates and SOM, generating a pervasive ambience of prestige and wealth. There are no 'festival' or 'liminal' spaces here, nor the crowded conflicts of pedestrians and pavement cafés in Soho. Carefully delimited shops, golfing emporia, health clubs, restaurants and bars cater for middle-manager tastes and pockets, while displaying signs barring entry to those not in 'smart' dress. The Broadgate Broadsheet newspaper furnishes a booster guide to news and events, like the much-publicised 'Broomball' contests on the Arena ice rink. In contrast, the army of service workers are kept out of sight, hidden in a subterranean undercroft of access roads and maintenance circuits, while in a similarly Disneyfied scopic regime undesirables are escorted off the scheme, litter is instantly removed, and hawks are brought in weekly to scare away pigeons. Social difference within the 20,000 working population is accommodated, but only within a class, gender and race framework predicated on the middle class Oxbridge-educated businessman.

Following the two IRA bombs in the City of 1992 and 1993 both within 400 metres of Broadgate, and the later Canary Wharf attack in 1996, it might be expected that Broadgate would toughen the outer walls of its enclave. However, because the 'Ring of Steel' armed road-checks and 24-hour 'Camerawatch' CCTV networks organised by the City police have successfully (for the City) redirected both terrorism and armed robbery to other parts of London, Broadgate's managers are content to rely on their own extensive system of private security guards and surveillance cameras.¹²

Broadgate's boundaries are therefore free to be configured toward more social ends, installing a further social ring of defence within the City's militaristic frontier. Subtle yet distinctive signs mark this inner social cordon: brass rails let into the pavement signify the edge of the property line, public art like Serra's 45-tonne 'Fulcrum' signals entrances, armorial devices record the borough thresholds, and various gates denote the transition from public to private realms.

Prominent among these gates is a very curious device marking the northern edge of Broadgate Arena. Designed by the artist Alan Evans, the 'Go-Between Screens' seemingly provide the usual boundary control – open during daytime and closed at night. Except that these are not normal gates, for even when 'closed' one can walk around their sides, a 2 metre gap being left for this purpose. The boundary here is never sealed, operating in a manner other than physical exclusion. This feeling is reinforced by the artful materiality of the 'Go-Between Screens' which, in contrast to the highly-machined surrounding buildings, are fabricated of mild steel, with line forging used to create a 'soft' visibly hammered surface.

What the Broadgate gates do is not so much obstruct horizontal movement of the body, as to challenge the visitor's self-perception as to whether they are permitted to enter. As privatised urban space under corporate control, Broadgate in effect has no resident-owners, and everyone who enters is either a worker, visitor or trespasser. As Foucault notes, '[a]nyone can enter one of these heterotopian locations, but, in reality, they are nothing more than an illusion: one thinks one has entered and, by the sole fact of entering, one is excluded.'¹³ To control this ambiguity, the combination of hard architecture and soft gates, unlike the exclusionary physicality of the Holy Trinity blue screen, provokes in the visitor's mind as they momentarily pass through the thickness of the edge the questions, 'Should I be here, and now? Do I have the right of passage?'

The temporality of the through-passage is also critical, providing the momentary yet urgent actuality of this questioning process. The gates are not just the space but the lived time of several seconds through which the visitors validate themselves in relation to Broadgate. As a result, space, temporality, body and identity are mutually confronted and constructed, in a version of Augé's 'non-place as a turning back on the self,' checking the contractual relation between the individual and that non-place.¹⁴ More material and mental suggestion than brute physicality, this is the ultimate extension of the Benthamite project of surveillance, in which each and every citizen surveys and disciplines themselves.

The 'Go-Between Screens' are a form of mirror, by which the visitor is ultimately returned not a view of Broadgate but, in Augé's terms, of themselves playing a role within it:

What he is confronted with, finally, is an image of himself, but in truth it is a pretty

strange image … The passenger through non-places retrieves his identity only at Customs, at the tollbooth, at the check-out counter. Meanwhile, he obeys the same code as others, receives the same messages, responds to the same entreaties. The space of non-place creates neither singular identity nor relations; only solitude, and similitude. $^{15}$

Visitors reconfigure themselves in the normative character of Broadgate, such that, as with Disneyland's staff, everyone becomes a 'cast member.' $^{16}$

We might even consider that if Broadgate's architecture, as mirror, acts as a kind of Sartrean 'other's look,' conferring spatiality on the viewer, then it too is looked back upon, the gaze being returned. This architecture is then absorbed within the self, dissolving the organic space of the body and the social space in which it lives, and entering that 'betweenness of place' beyond objectivity and subjectivity. As such, the boundary is validated by the anthropological ritual of passing through – its presence does not act upon visitors, but is a projection outward by visitors considering themselves in relation to the architecture. (… p 86)

Notes

1 Neil Smith, 'Homeless/Global: Scaling Places,' Jon Bird et al (eds), Mapping the Futures: Local Cultures, Global Change, Routledge (London), 1993, p 89.
2 Conversation, Kingsway, London, January 1996.
3 Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, Blackwell (Oxford), 1991 and Edward W Soja, Postmodern Geographies: the Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory, Verso (London), 1989, p 123.
4 See for example, Iain Borden and D Dunster (eds), Architecture and the Sites of History, Butterworth Architecture (Oxford), 1995; Adrian Forty, Objects of Desire, Thames and Hudson (London), 1986; Dolores Hayden, Grand Domestic Revolution, MIT Press (Cambridge, Mass), 1981.
5 Bernard Tschumi, 'Spaces and Events', Questions of Space: Lectures on Architecture, Architectural Association (London), 1990, p 88.
6 Adrian Forty, 'Foreword' to Iain Borden, Joe Kerr, Alicia Pivaro and Jane Rendell (eds), Strangely Familiar: Narratives of Architecture and the City, Routledge (London), 1996, p 5. See also Iain Borden, Joe Kerr, Alicia Pivaro and Jane Rendell (eds), The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space, MIT Press (Cambridge, MA), 1997.
7 Frank J Lechner, 'Simmel on Social Space', Theory, Culture and Society, vol 8 no 3, August 1991, p 197; and David Frisby, 'Social Space, the City and the Metropolis', Simmel and Since: Essays on George Simmel's Social Theory, Routledge (London), 1992, p 105.
8 Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle, Black & Red (Detroit), 1983, para 4.
9 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, Routledge and Kegan Paul (London), 1962, pp 207-42.
10 This section of the paper has benefited from studies carried out by students at the School of Architecture and Interior Design, University of North London, and at the Bartlett, University College London. I am particularly grateful to A Keightley-Moore, N Murray, S Warren, W Whyte.
11 Jane M Jacobs, Edge of Empire: Postcolonialism and the City, Routledge (London), 1996.
12 City of London Police, Camerawatch, City of London Police (London), 1994.
13 Michel Foucault, 'Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias', Joan Ockman (ed), Architecture Culture 1943-1968: a Documentary Anthology, Rizzoli (New York), 1993, p 425.

14 Marc Augé, Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthology of Supermodernity, Verso (London), 1995, pp 92, 101–2, and Michel Foucault, ‘Panopticism’ in Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison, Penguin (Harmondsworth), 1979, pp 195–228.

15 Marc Augé, Non-Places, p 103.

16 Michael Sorkin, ‘See You in Disneyland’, Michael Sorkin (ed), Variations on a Theme Park, Noonday Press (New York, 1992, p 228.

Iain Borden, ‘Thick Edge: Architectural Boundaries and Spatial Flows’,

Architectural Design, vol 66 no 11–12, 1996, pp 84–7.

(Excerpt pp 84–6)