Hyperorganized Environment

Definition

The hyperorganized environment is Kevin Melchionne's term for the pristine, severe interior in which "a conception of order [is] embodied in the arrangement of objects" (editors' headnote, p. 228) — the Glass House as its "particularly hyper-organised" instance. Its four defining features in the source. (1) Design leads and habit follows: "In a hyperorganized environment, design leads and habit follows. The house is a spectacle to which the inhabitant must adjust. The practice of dwelling must respond to the conception of order embodied in the arrangement of objects" (p. 231) — the inversion of Lawrence's dwelling order, where "long-standing habits in building and living patterns" order the house. (2) The space is a composition: "everything in the Glass House has a place. The space is a composition. To move (at least on a permanent basis) a piece of the composition is to destroy the work of art" (p. 231). (3) The body is implicated: "Rather than organizing the space around pre-existing habits, the body is implicated in the idealized order" — domestic practice becomes "the art of maintaining the discipline of implication in the order, of more or less forcing habit to follow aesthetic conception" (p. 231). (4) The spaces demand too much: this "explains why formal and hyperorganized spaces are felt to be 'uncomfortable' and their radical aestheticist occupants subject to the pop-Freudian epithet anal. The spaces demand too much" (p. 231). The type also has its inverse register: the "dumpy room, where the dusty couch invites slouching and where 'good manners' come off as arrogance" (pp. 231–232) — the two poles between which every interior's demand on the body is set.

Key Thinkers

• Kevin Melchionne — the concept's author (1998/2006): the mechanism (design leads, habit follows), the composition thesis, the bodily implication, and the demand diagnosis.
• Philip Johnson — the concept's exemplary author-environment (not yet paged — see log): "an ideal space, characterized by a clear exposition of formal principles like symmetry, unity, and harmony, in relative abstraction from conventional lifestyle patterns marked by privacy, informality, and comfort" (p. 231).
• Ward Bennett — the concept's material witness (not yet paged — see log, via Iovine's New York Times Magazine piece): the designer whose remark supplies the order's emblem — table-top bric-a-brac "discreetly marked with indications of their correct location" (p. 229).
• Mark Taylor & Julieanna Preston — the editors who name the condition in their headnote: "a particularly hyper-organised interior environment" (p. 228).
• Roderick J. Lawrence — the concept's structural contrast (1987/2006): the normal dwelling where "houses and their internal activities are ordered by long-standing habits in building and living patterns" — habit leading, design following — the order the hyperorganized environment reverses. See habit.

Related Concepts

• glass-house — the concept's limit case and namesake instance: the house whose "extreme orderliness" (bric-a-brac marked with their correct locations) makes "one never feel truly at home" (p. 229).
• radical-aesthete — the concept's required occupant: the person whose habit-repertoire is "fully responsive to the organizational and aesthetic terms of inhabited space" (p. 231).
• habit — the concept's axis of inversion: in ordinary dwelling, habit orders design; here "design leads and habit follows" — the concept is habit-theory's mirror case.
• tidying — the concept's labour condition: "the true occupant would have to return everything to its spot"; neatness "would have to be perfectly habituated" (p. 231).
• comfort — the concept's casualty: the spaces "are felt to be 'uncomfortable'… The spaces demand too much" (p. 231); Johnson's counter-quip ("comfort is a function of whether you think a chair is good-looking or not," p. 230) restates comfort as aesthetic agreement.
• sterility-of-perfection — the decorator's name for the condition's room-scale version: perfection as sterilization, "a series of foyers leading to nothing" (Baldwin).
• privacy — the lifestyle pattern the concept abstracts from: "in relative abstraction from conventional lifestyle patterns marked by privacy, informality, and comfort" (p. 231).
• white-cube — the concept's gallery cousin: the pristine, isolated space whose condition Abercrombie says cannot be lived in (p. 228).
• Authorship — the concept's protecting frame: "The space is a composition" — the interior treated with the permanence of an artwork's internal relations, the author's composition preserved by the occupant's curatorship ("the correct manner of inhabiting… must also be a form of protection of the original composition," p. 231).

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Living in Glass Houses (Melchionne 1998/2006) — the concept's founding and sole source: the editors' headnote ("a particularly hyper-organised interior environment," p. 228); the order-inspection detail (bric-a-brac marked with their correct location, p. 229, via Ward Bennett); the mechanism ("design leads and habit follows," p. 231); the composition thesis (p. 231); the perfect-habituation requirement (p. 231); the demand diagnosis and the 'anal' epithet (p. 231); the nonradical's bodily awareness and the dumpy-room inverse (pp. 231–232); the social distribution (p. 232).
• Social, Spatial and Temporal Factors (Lawrence 1987/2006) — the concept's mirror image: the dwelling ordered by long-standing habits (habit leads, design follows), against which Melchionne's inversion is legible.
• source-notes/carley-2018-puzzle

Open Questions

• Is the composition livable at any tempo? The hyperorganized environment demands that unconscious habit serve conscious order — "forcing habit to follow aesthetic conception" (p. 231). Spuybroek's counter-programme ("brief habits," the disappearing architecture of appropriation) suggests habit needs slack to work: is the hyperorganized environment habit's overload point, the condition where the everyday's automation breaks down? See habit, appropriation.
• Is the 'nest of prohibitions' experience (p. 232) a property of the environment or of the occupant? The same room is the radical aesthete's pleasure and the nonradical's prohibition — is 'uncomfortable' then an aesthetic judgment disguised as a bodily report, and is comfort (see comfort) partly the agreement of one's habits with a scheme?
• The outbuildings question: Johnson's property carries "numerous outbuildings… probably serving to capture the predictable overflow of 'stuff'" (p. 230). Is every hyperorganized environment internally paired with an overflow space that absorbs the disorder it excludes — and does the concept therefore require its own repressed junk-room (the garage, the annex, the basement) to exist? See architectural-purgatory, drive-in-house.
• Can a hyperorganized environment be designed for ordinary life? The concept is defined against "conventional lifestyle patterns marked by privacy, informality, and comfort" (p. 231). If most clients "lack the proper repertoire of habits" and their "lives are simply too confusing and overloaded" (p. 232), is the hyperorganized interior a professional impossibility — or the brief for a design that builds the habit-repertoire rather than presupposing it?