Occupy porosity

Joseph: The idea that Occupy should keep moving is interesting. In Melbourne, after the initial eviction from City Square and the difficulties faced settling a new location, it became clear to me that the signature for that city was one of movement: less an Occupation, and more a migration, or even a pilgrimage. Clearly Porosity tells us much about the tension between public and private space, but does it also speak to the tension between movement and stasis?

Richard: That's a good question. Tension between movement and stasis is in itself a definition of the city. Often in large cities the so called stasis of its occupants is a matter of only a few hours of sleep before they again have to start their endless journeys of commuting, child minding or managing, shopping, socialising, etc. The futurists were right, the city is about movement. To have free access to the city's internal structure, including its vertical movement systems, corridors, and rooves, should be a goal of the Occupy movement.

To date, the sheer mass of protesting numbers draws attention to the immediacy of Occupy's group issues. However their tent cities soon become slums without any of the charm that most real slums create. Movement is the key to this stasis.

Barricades can be put up to stop the protest groups from flowing through the city in certain patterns, but the crowd can simply react as a mass and flow elsewhere. Its relationship to the original "derives" of the Situationists can then be made as the mass movement embraces chance and even play as it channels a new psycho-geography.

Maybe it can flow out into the suburbs and test the Porosity of these settlements. People forget, and I speak as a child of the fifties and a teenager of the sixties, that during those post war years everybody's back door was open. Children played through strings of houses and across loosely formed town centres. The suburbs then were porous. Maybe they need to be porous again in order to mobilise the masses and to enhance the Occupy movement.

In Cairo the masses gathered but were in continual flux. They are still gathering and flowing inside the city despite the tanks and snipers. In the ambiguous spaces of Porosity, the "chiastic" spaces which I have defined, the appropriate behaviour is one of pausing. A delay within the blood stream of the organism. Occupy is a virus within the bloodstream of the city-a bloodstream which already suffers from the blockages of high cholesterol capitalism.

Joseph: There seems also to be a gender issue going on here, at least at the symbolic level. The subtitle of your book refers to "invagination", a folding in of spaces. What I noticed about many of the drawings in the book was these phallic private buildings bursting in an almost ejaculatory manner with public space: typically, private space is gendered as feminine, and public as masculine. So it seems like Porosity, just like Occupy, has multiple sites of contestation, a kind of intersectionality in both a literal and political sense. Does that sound like a fair reading to you?

Richard: I agree that Porosity and Occupy have multiple sites of contestation, both literally and politically, but let's get a few issues sorted out first. I am endeavouring to imagine public space as a three dimensional construction within the matrix of the city. This is in direct contrast to the very two dimensional groundplane on which public space is situated today. In order to do this, public space must express both masculine and feminine characteristics. When bridging between buildings with public space, the action will be gendered as masculine. Alternatively, when public space is found and claimed within private space the action will be gendered as feminine.

The explosions I created within my research are the expanding internal public spaces (chiastic spaces), which suggest how and where building towers might connect these public longings or desires. These studies, rendered as animations in Maya software, are indeed ejaculatory, as a provocation to urban designers. Ultimately the resulting architecture they make is the connective tissue of a new type of architecture within existing architecture (the "architecture of invagination").

The overriding gender of the resulting architecture is feminine in the metaphorical sense, as it is generated from within the existing body of architecture. The greatest challenge of these theories however, is directed towards the political systems which structure the city. As with the Occupy movement, this provocation by Porosity-challenging the proprieties and boundaries of private space-is essentially confronting capitalism with urban planning (social) failures.

Unfettered capitalism is already proven to cause catastrophe following the global economic crisis. Ultimately, market forces do not find stability like some "natural" system. Nature itself can only be defined as a tendency towards finding an equilibrium which it never exactly meets. Hence again there is no stasis, only movement.

The "market" is best described, in my opinion, as a slow explosion. This is another reason for my use of the explosion metaphor and graphics. Like Michaelangelo Antonionis' 60's film Zabriskie Point, in the end the beautiful modernist house and its contents explode in an iconic question mark for our capitalist future.

Today the explosion is the zeitgeist for a world exploding in conflict. I try to use this metaphor as a regenerative force, a positive way forward: the beginning of new formations, generated from within the wombs of the castles of capitalism's floor space ratio-driven riches.