#17 Permission to Trespass
Austin has a yearly event called the Austin Studio Tour during what passes for fall in the southern part of the country. During the three weekends of the studio tour, art galleries and local indie artists open their spaces (ranging from homes to fully managed galleries) for the general public to walk through, buy art and make conversation. This was my second year biking from venue to venue for the studio tour and just like the first year, the spaces themselves piqued my interest more than the art. This year I walked through a school building from 1911 that is now an office complex for a local movie theater chain, an old mansion built in 1870 where O Henry got married, a museum built by an antique collector for his partner of 32 years who is now dead, and through the garages and bedrooms of several artists young and old. The experience, which I unironically enjoyed, reminded me of one of my favorite architectural texts, Nakatami Space.
In the essay Geoff Manaugh uses Die Hard to explore the architectural ideas in architect Eyal Weizman’s paper Lethal Theory. The paper is about the spatial techniques used by the Israeli army to modify the urban space in their favor during Israel’s 2002 invasion of Nabulus. Manaugh compares the Gile Deleuze-inspired techniques of the Israeli army to John Mclane blasting his way through walls, and crawling through air ducts to fight villains in Die Hard. The essay (itself worth multiple re-reads) talks about how high agency fictional characters like Mclane and Jason Bourne, and organizations with high agency such as militias and armies, use and modify architectural spaces to their needs:
What I find so interesting about Die Hard—in addition to unironically enjoying the film—is that it cinematically depicts what it means to bend space to your own particular navigational needs. This mutational exploration of architecture even supplies the building’s narrative premise: the terrorists are there for no other reason than to drill through and rob the Nakatomi Corporation’s electromagnetically sealed vault.
Die Hard asks naive but powerful questions: If you have to get from A to B—that is, from the 31st floor to the lobby, or from the 26th floor to the roof—why not blast, carve, shoot, lockpick, and climb your way there, hitchhiking rides atop elevator cars and meandering through the labyrinthine, previously unexposed back-corridors of the built environment?
Why not personally infest the spaces around you?
The Austin Studio tour that exists in a space for a limited amount of time gives permission to the general public to infest spaces around them. These types of events are the refuge of people with lower agency than the Israeli army and John Mclane. It gives you the chance to move through the city in a way that is not usually possible, without any of the existential risks.
These types of permissions to infest seem to be usually used by the middle and upper middle class in an urban space. The rich do not need a special weekend to buy and enjoy art, the poor do not have the reality privilege to enjoy such events (or they end up servicing such events). It is the aspirational class that is drawn to such spaces. These types of low-risk infestations also exist digitally in the form of architecture walk-throughs the houses of celebrities and reality shows based around selling expensive mansions. They are temporally short experiences that give you a chance to enjoy architecture and also builds the desire to emulate or occupy such spaces.
These permissioned spaces could have a longer temporal span than a few weekends. Every now and then when I’m in a restaurant or bar with architecture that makes me take note, I most likely find that I'm in a building that is over 50 years old and has been through different forms from union building to homeless shelter to hipster bar. It reminds me that architecture once used to be a form of public art freely available to everyone walking by, that now I need permission to enjoy, and the permission comes in different forms from the means to buy a $15 cocktail to time to appreciate art.
In the book Beautiful Necessity, Claude Brandon describes architecture as Frozen Music:
..since that which in music is experienced by harmonious intervals of time and pitch, successively, after the manner of time, may be translated into corresponding intervals of architectural void, and solid, height and width.
The modern way in which you can enjoy this public art is in the form of temporary infrastructure that exists within walls that you can temporarily infest with the right kind of permissions.