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Please Complete the Form

Or

Adventures in Administrative

Architecture

Margaret Elizabeth Brendan Joan McCormick

Submitted in partial fulfilment of the

Requirements for the degree of

Master of Arts

In the Graduate School of History and Critical Thinking

For the Architectural Association School of Architecture

History and Critical Thinking

Architectural Association School of Architecture

2013

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Acknowledgments:

I would like to give thanks to everyone who assisted with the writing of this thesis, especially

Mark Cousins, Marina Lathouri, John Palmesino, Douglas Spencer, Tom Weaver and my

colleagues, who were all instrumental in research and direction.

Special thanks also to my family and friends who supported this endeavour and heard more

about forms and French philosophy than they ever wanted to. Including Matt, Linda, Kate, Ted,

Tim, Jack, Georgia, Renee, Kevin, Heather, Dom, Clare, Caitlin, Liz, Vanessa, Jo, Jane, David

and M. Corbishley.

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For Gwyn

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Table of Contents

Introduction.............................................................................................................. 6

Part I: Please Complete the Form........................................................................... 10

Part 2: Pending Approval......................................................................................... 25

Part 3: Top Men....................................................................................................... 40

Part 4: Sealed......................................................................................................... 57

Afterword ................................................................................................................ 63

References

Bibliography............................................................................................................. 65

Image Sources......................................................................................................... 73

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Please Complete the Form

Or

Adventures in Administrative Architecture

"I learned that the world of men as it exists today is a bureaucracy. This is an obvious truth, of

course, though it is also one the ignorance of which causes great suffering...but moreover I

discovered, in the only way that a man ever really learns anything important, the real skill that is

required to succeed in the bureaucracy... the key is not efficiency or probity or insight or

wisdom, it is not political cunning, interpersonal skills, raw IQ, loyalty, vision, or any of the

qualities that the bureaucratic world call virtues and tests for. The key is a certain capacity that

underlies all these qualities, rather the way that an ability to breathe and pump blood underlies

all thought and action...the key is the ability, whether innate or conditioned, to be, in a word,

unborable."

- David Foster Wallace 1

Questions regarding public space are almost as infinite as they are tedious.2 Yet while the

debate of “what makes good public space” rages on, another "public" factor is frequently and

conveniently glazed over: the architectures of administration. Administrative architecture has all

the contradictions of life merged into one typology: unique and omnipresent, aloof (that is until

they choose not to be) and laden with symbolism, they are “public” is the most real sense of the

word.

This work discusses the four architectural embodiments of administrative narrative: The initial

objects used to achieve a goal, the extension of that request into the realms of disseminated

power, the symbolic idols which engender bureaucratic faith and the ending, which is, inevitably,

the invisible. Each chapter reinforces the notion that contemporary life is a dance of requests

and distrusts, both physical and metaphysical, that individuals are trained to do from birth to

death.

Society is not an arrangement of acquisitions, but rather of classification: stagnant legality

overpowering impossible speed. The necessity and nothingness of administration say far more

of society, power and the individual's place within them than is comfortable to admit. In

administration, more so than any other kind of design, the subtle and ingrained notions of

modern life are personified, classified, feared and then immediately ignored. We are all, whether

we want to be or not, whether we are aware of it or not, part of an administrative architecture

and to acknowledge it is to become its equal. 3

1 David Foster Wallace, The Pale King (New York: Back Bay Books, Reprint edition (2012) Chapter 44.

2 “What is good public space”, “Where is good public space”, “How does public space affect its users?” being just a

few examples. 3 The shock of speed belongs to an older generation, a much, much older generation.

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PART I: Please Complete the Form

“We die to each other daily. What we know of other people is only our memory of the moments

during which we knew them. And they have changed since then. To pretend that they and we

are the same is a useful and convenient social convention which must sometimes be broken.

We must also remember that at every meeting we are meeting a stranger.”

- T.S. Eliot 4

In part one, the tangible qualities of administration are explored as clues to their dogma. The

first step being how to enter administrative space, and while the obvious answer might be

“through the door”, its user is already entrenched long before ever physically arriving. The banal

nature of this inception is one of the strangest aspects of contemporary life, albeit in the most

boring way possible. The architect Richard Neutra once surmised that bad design, if not

checked, becomes the dangerous, “unnoticeable gamma ray” which can eventually kill5. In a

likewise fashion, these innocuous spaces provide training essential to survive in society, but can

become deadly if exposure is prolonged. Reactions to this exposure can range between

Manfredo Tafuri's assessment that: "One is not to 'suffer' that shock [of modern life], but to

absorb it as an inevitable condition of existence"6 or, alternatively, all the raging that Dylan

Thomas7 and punk bands can stand, though neither is fully recommended.

PART II: Pending Approval

“I would like to be the air that inhabits you for a moment only.

I would like to be that unnoticed and that necessary.”

- Margaret Atwood 8

The second essay looks at administration and disseminated power: architectures which expand

and contract as needed, exhibiting qualities essential and indifferent. This scale also marks the

difference between the administration of a building and the building of administration. In the

initial phases of design, the two products may be one and the same (as God and Louis Sullivan

intended); however bureaucracy lives only to serve its function and then changes shape.

Architecture, on the other hand, is a long con, so the design of disseminated function is one that

4 T.S. Eliot, 'The Cocktail Party: A Comedy' (New York: Harcourt, Brace 1950) page 73-74

5 Richard Neutra, Life and Human Habitat: Mensch und Wohnen (Stuttgart: Verlaganstalt Alexander Koch, 1956)

page 23. Referenced in the following: Reinhold Martin, The Organizational Complex: Architecture, Media, And Corporate Space (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006) 6 Manfredo Tafuri, Architecture and Utopia: Design and Capitalist Development (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1976)

page 86 7 Dylan Thomas, “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night” from:

Daniel Jones, The Poems of Dylan Thomas, (New York: New Directions Publishing, 2003) page 258 8 Margaret Atwood, "Variation on the Word Sleep" from:

Barry Callaghan, Lords of Winter and of Love: A Book of Canadian Love Poems in English and French, (Toronto, CA: Exile Editions, Ltd., 1983) page 1

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grows more apathetic with time. Here, administration is the ignorable arrangement necessary to

function, like air in a lung, only a problem when it stops working.9

PART III: Top Men

“I don't believe in it anyway. - What? - England. - Just a conspiracy of cartographers, then?”

- Tom Stoppard 10

Part three focuses on the perceptions of administrative architecture in the symbolic sense (a

separate ideology from functional power, but often mistaken for it) On a functional scale,

administration is the steward of daily life, whose guiding is so organized, so intuitive and so

subtle, that it becomes completely ingrained into the common sense of place.11 Symbolic

administration, on the contrary, deals with the conceptual idea of "the public"12 and is

subsequently much easier to hate. As ignorable as functional power is, that is how compelling

symbolic power appears. Yet by the time attention is paid, the bureaucratic logic has become

feral and transforms into an alien creature of fear and paranoia. As a typology, architects have

begged to redefine the semantics of this power but have ignored, either by choice, commission,

or acceptance the idea that the head should be anything but an iconic representation. An object

in a glass cabinet: static and for display only.13

PART IV: Sealed

“They say that none of us exists, except in the imagination of his fellows,

Other than as an intangible, invisible mentality.”

- Edgar Rice Burroughs14

The final section discusses the combination of symbolic power and functional power within

notions of the everyday. This is an interaction of varying scales and likenesses, of various

histories and typologies, both democratic and tyrannical. These are the systems which control

and define, not necessarily in a cruel sense, but in modes which are boilerplate and therefore

9 The scale can range from the waiting room that defines a person as both an expert and an amateur at their own life,

to the theater of the 24 hour news cycle. 10

Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead: A Play in 3 Acts (New York: Grove/Atlantic, Incorporated, 2007) page 107 11

The direction in which cars flow is merely a matter of someone deciding which is correct and the group following suit. When there is deviation from that pattern, or even from that logic, the result ranges from annoyance to fines to danger to death in quick succession. Administrative buildings are no different. 12

Which makes ‘the public’ seem like a homogenous being, rather than a vast collection of entities. As if the ‘Third Estate’ the ‘Hoi Polloi’ the ‘Unwashed Masses’ were a group in constant agreement. 13

Though this idea is as much a product of historical precedent as it is of expectation, it shows that the architecture of

administration is only noticeable as an interaction when it reaches the largest scale. So much so that the architectural

language of this power being anything other than a frontal representation renders the concept unrecognizable. 14

Edgar Rice Burroughs, Thuvia Maid of Mars (London: Methuen, 1928) Page 41

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brimming with expectation. The combination of these two ideas is a rigid attempt at normality

that can often feel senseless but is still, almost immortally, accepted.

The result of this four-part narrative is an absurd joke and an inescapable ghost story: played

over and over again, ending and starting at the exact same moment. It is a story worthy of

notice, as without which the lines grow deeper, stronger, and so slowly, that they live forever.

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SECTION I: PLEASE COMPLETE THE FORM

"On the most physical level the environment prompts people to think of the public domain as

meaningless..."

- Richard Sennett 15

"Power does not proceed downwards from a single center but is diffused throughout the whole

social body in complex networks and diverse relations."

- Michel Foucault 16

“After I died, and the makeup had dried, I went back to my place.

No moon that night, but a heavenly light shone on my face.

Still I thought it was odd, there was no sign of God just to usher me in.

Then a voice from above, sugar coated with Love, said, ‘Let us begin’.

You got to fill out a form first, and then you wait in the line.”

- Paul Simon 17

Power, at least in its ability, is not where it has so long been suspected. Stereotypes would have

it as a war hammer: singular, strong and efficient, but it is not so in the modern digital age.

Instead, its methods begin to show in the tangible moments of administration. This power is the

slow burning of acceptance, the trained regularity which eventually consumes. And it begins, as

all things do, with a form.

15

Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man: The Forces Eroding Public Life and Burdening the Modern Psyche with Roles it Cannot Perform (London: Penguin UK, 2003) page 12 16

Paul Hirst (editor), Space and Power: Politics, War and Architecture (Foucault and Architecture - Chapter 8) (Oxford: Polity, 2005) page 168 17

Paul Simon, The Afterlife, So Beautiful or So What © 2011 by Hear Music, 3:40

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THE FORM

- Or -

Immortality Through a No. 2, Standard Issue.

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18

Image credited to the Author.

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The moment a name is written on a form, administrative space has been entered. Within this

paper space, a person is only what they have self-identified, common symbols arranged in such

a manner to indicate existence. The form is also a dividing line between the personal and the

individual within a strict machine19: the individual being the physical embodiment of statistical

data, the personal serving as something more mystical, more human. Though being human

seems to be the lesser concern, as forms, and indeed the spaces which hold and process them,

have a different understanding of the living and the dead. By simply mis-writing information, one

could technically live forever, or never exist, or be in two places at once, which results in a

strange kind of immortality, particularly when it has to come to a lawsuit.20 21 22

In an administered and bureaucratic society23, a person enters into the rhythmic exercise of

form-filling exceedingly early. Before one is even capable of opening their eyes, a name has

been entered into a system for them: a birth, certified. To register for school, a form is filled,

another should they misbehave. Presumably they then become educated enough to fill out their

own forms, and so apply for higher education or jobs or marriages or whatever and every year

from their adulthood on, inescapable tax forms are filed. Even in death, the amount of

paperwork is staggering. Indeed, a benefit of dying seems to be one can personally avoid filling

out yet another form. This writing eventually becomes muscle memory, developed from years of

practice to the point where the paper can be filled out with little to no knowledge of what exactly

is written on it.24 FOR OFFICIAL USE ONLY is the barrier between the haves and the have-

nots, in this case of information and in a thin, inky way, of being: You don't exist until it's

recorded. 25

From the administrators’ perspective, the form is a map, an indication of a systematic destiny at

a pace determined by its understanding: the content deciding how much interaction is

necessary before a single word is spoken. It is the vessel of numerical trends and a record of

narrative chaos.26 Yet despite a frequency of interaction, the common understanding of

administration is still socially opaque and so becomes the stuff of Franz Kafka's nightmares. The

form is a manner, a ritual, a necessity, a tedious impediment accepted as fact, but also a

19

Achille Mbeme, On the Postcolony, (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2001) page 43, 224 20

Therefore the outcry and shock when it is discovered by news outlets that the dead or imaginary have been collecting pensions or signing petitions seems almost a little silly. 21

The strangeness and abstraction between the individual and the personal is how systems of administration become both implicit and contradictory. If, for instance, the date is listed where typically the birth date is placed then, technically and theoretically, one might have been born on the very same day they filled out the form. 22

From a personal perspective, how can someone, in all honesty, list a relation without there being associated feelings? In this sense, an emergency point of contact is the most honorable of annotation, far more than any ceremony can indicate. 23

At this point some clarification should be made between administration and bureaucracy. Administration is the active action of organization. Bureaucracy however is about methodology.

24 Regarding the actual constructs of a form, there is a space which should be noted specifically, at the bottom,

always in a slightly bolder font proclaiming FOR OFFICIAL USE ONLY. Ignorable as it is, this statement questions the very idea of self-knowledge. The provider of all the required information (name, sex, age, height, weight, etc.) is not its expert, but only its scribe. 25

There are times when selecting a single box to explain social situations seems simply impossible, the form is unsympathetic in its rigor. In this sense, the emergency point of contact is the highest honor a person can bestow. 26

This is true of the paper, of the building which holds them, and of the society which creates them.

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cornerstone of life which prompts a surprisingly strong social faith. A faith perhaps best

exemplified in a parable from Kafka's The Trial:27

"Before the law stands a door-keeper. A man from the country comes to this door-keeper and

asks for entry into the law. But the door-keeper says he cannot grant him entry now. The man

considers and then asks if that means he will be allowed to enter later. ‘It is possible’ says the

door-keeper, ‘but not now’. Since the door to the law stands open, as it always does, and the

doorkeeper steps to one side, the man bends to look through the door at the interior. When the

door-keeper notices this, he laughs and says "If you are so tempted, just try to enter in spite of

my prohibition. But take note: I am powerful. And I am only the lowest door-keeper. But from

room to room stand doorkeepers each more powerful than the last. The mere aspect of the third

is more than ever I can endure..."

It’s noticeable in the story that while the man from the country grows older, withered and

exhausted by his patient attempts at inclusion, the doorkeeper stays powerful. Even to the end,

when he reveals that:

"Nobody but you could gain admittance here, this entrance was meant only for you. I shall now

go and close it".28 29

The acceptance of administrative rules requires a belief that they mean something more than

ink and paper. Forms serve then as social hieroglyphics, languages that administrative societies

speak but are absurd when explained from scratch. Yet this is by no means a transaction in

which one tragically gives up their individuality to join the herd; it is merely the choice to join

oneself with the qualities of a certain society. A trade which expects contribution to receive

benefit, even if, as Kafka implies, those benefits are not reachable, resulting in an endless,

ultimately fruitless pursuit. One must pay to join the game and usually the currency is time.

27

Possibly proving Richard Sennett correct in his assessments that:"Manners and ritual interchanges with strangers are looked on as at best formal and dry and at worst as phony. The stranger himself is a threatening figure" [Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man: The Forces Eroding Public Life and Burdening the Modern Psyche with Roles it Cannot Perform (London: Penguin UK, 2003) page 12] 28

Franz Kafka, The Trial, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009) pages 150-165 29

In “The Trial” the main character of Josef K. or just "K" is never entirely clear on his place within in the system; a

victim of bureaucratic workings because they are not something he fully understands. Meanwhile in Charles Bukowski's “Post Office” the main character of Henry Chinaski is also a victim of bureaucracy, not for lack of comprehending the system but for being just content enough in its rewards to eventually be broken. For these two men, the ultimate punishment of administrative facilities is the loss of their power, virility and sexual freedom by a set of emasculating societal rules. However, it should be noted that this castration is not feminine in nature, as the women of these novels are treated with the same harsh mechanics, indeed with the added humiliation of figures like K and Chinaski further objectifying them through rape, suspicion and dismissive treatment.

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THE WAITING ROOM

- Or -

I Want To Know, Does It Bother You, The Long Click of the Ticking Clock?

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Waiting rooms divide users almost as much as the form, but with the added complications of a

body in space31. Theorist and film critic Siegfried Kracauer once wrote that the waiting room is a

device to:

"construct a whole out of the blindly scattered elements of a disintegrated world- a whole that,

even if it seems only to mirror this world, nevertheless does capture it in its wholeness and

thereby allows for the projection of its elements onto real conditions... to accommodate all who

go there to meet no one...a space that encompasses them and has no function other than to

encompass"32 33

30

Image: Tooker, George The Waiting Room, oil on canvas 1959(Smithsonian American Art Museum) http://americanart.si.edu/ 31

Though this separation is still somewhat esoteric. 32

Siegfried Kracauer, The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995) page 175

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The implication of the waiting room is the mirror of society becomes wry when compared

against the 20th century painter George Tooker's assessment that such places also indicate a

sense of purgatory. As Tooker grew more annoyed with the building permit offices in 1950s New

York City34, he began depicting environments not made of centrality, or even of manufactured

repetition, but of frustrating nothingness made of stuff: neither the burning hell nor refreshing

salvation. Upon exhibition of The Waiting Room35, he commented on the visual choices by

stating:

“The Waiting Room is a kind of purgatory---people just waiting---waiting to wait. It is not living. It

is a matter of waiting---not being one’s self. Not enjoying life, not being happy, waiting, always

waiting for something that might be better---which never comes. Why can’t they just enjoy the

moment?”36

Waiting rooms are a bland kind of phantasmagoria 37overwhelming in their boringness and, like

all phantasmagorias; the devil is in the details.38 These spaces, always different yet somehow

exactly the same, are a collection of tolerable flaws that slow time within their parameters,

particularly by their color choices. Salmon, beige, cerulean, or IKEA white, these are all

characters in the story but the most prevalent and, somehow, ignorable color that has ever

existed in the context of the waiting room is Battleship Grey39 . Battleship Grey is an apt choice

for this purgatory, walking the line between being and not-being within a viewer's awareness.40 41 The general hue of battleship camouflage is somewhere between water and sky, almost

indiscernible from shore. Though, should this color ever get close enough, it will make

something, possibly everything, in the general vicinity explode, a tactical advantage in war and

presumably a cheap paint to buy in bulk during peacetime. Like a battleship, the waiting room

has two effects: firstly, it goes unnoticed, the sea and sky acting as the unconscious mind (with

all the Herman Melville references that can be tolerated). Secondly, it is a promise of eventual

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Evidence of Kracauer's theory of waiting spaces being a small mirror of the modern dilemma takes a much more real and historically disturbing example can be seen by the recently restored waiting room at the Montpelier train station in Virginia. Like many places in the Southern United States between the years of 1876 and 1965, this waiting room was segregated based off of race and in the spirit of “separate but equal” the dimensions for the white patrons were 15’ X 15' while the waiting room for the “colored” passengers was 12' X 15'. If Kracauer's 1963 publication was not prophetic, it was at least self aware that the mirror of the world that the lobby presents, may not always be the most flattering. Philip Kennicott. "Montpelier train station preserves the architecture of segregation" The Washington Post, February 28, 2010, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/02/25/AR2010022505232.html (Accessed Aug 12, 2013) 34

Thomas H. Garver, George Tooker, (Portland, OR: Pomegranate Communications, 2002) page 32 - Also referenced in the Smithsonian Institute Website:"The Waiting Room, George Tooker" last modified August, 12th, 2009. http://americanart.si.edu/collections/search/artwork/?id=24195 (Accessed Aug 12, 2013) 35

ibid. 36

ibid. 37

Neil Leach, The Anaesthetics of Architecture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999 )page 43 38

Details which exponentially grow in importance due to lack of stimulation. 39

David Foster Wallace, The Pale King (New York: Back Bay Books, Reprint edition (April 10, 2012) 253 40

Maybe it’s the contrast with all the objects within these spaces, such as furniture that regardless of time of purchase seems outdated and needlessly expensive, the magazines on a matching coffee table with the addresses clipped out to protect the secretary's privacy or the stale, circulated, slightly-too-cold air but all are consumed and dulled by the presence of the battleship. Though, in the space's defence, almost any other color would seem either insufferably hip or even sadder, unfinished. 41

Particularly in its origins, simply put: it is the "Battleship" part which should be noticed.

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explosion or inevitable obsolescence. It is the color of foreshadowing, benign yet passively

threatening: a dream deferred or a dream denied. The vague dread, which never seems to go

away, results in copious anxiety. It is the daily fear without apparent violence that causes weight

gain, baldness and a general desire for a small pill to alter moods.42 And this is goes on an

office wall?

43

It could be argued that this is for the visiting public, that they should feel anxious because it is

an ingredient for administration’s power44. But where the public is only visiting, the

administrators can never escape the battleship, and so it becomes an octave of existence, a

fluorescent hum and a grim portent of death. Battleship Grey acts as a slow poison that one can

either adapt to or die from. Or as the philosopher Michel Foucault stated:

"Spaces are characteristics that affect the conditions in which power can be exercised, conflicts

pursued and social control attempted...basic geographical distinctions like land and sea...do

have effects, even if those effects are mediated by and specific to certain types of social

organization"45 46

42

The colors of these pills are unsurprisingly the same salmon and cerulean as the folders on the wall. Xanax, for example. 43

Image: credited to the author 44

Gary Littlejohn, Barry Smart, John Wakeford, Nira Yuval-Davis (editors) Power and the State, (Dundee, Scotland: Croom Helm, 1978) page 162 45

Paul Hirst (editor), Space and Power: Politics, War and Architecture (Oxford: Polity, 2005) page 3 46

A more scientific example of this “phantasmagoria” effect might be found in “The Whitehall Studies”. In 1967 the first “Whitehall Study” was started by the National Health Service to monitor the mortality of the British Civil service, researching a variety of groups, service levels and incomes to learn what eventually killed them. When the report was released in 1977 it implied that those in the lower grades were more likely to die younger, as opposed to persons higher in the rank. A follow-up experiment “Whitehall II” was started in 1985 and continued to collect data until the 2010s. The second study intended to find the connections, if any, between health, finance and stress. Though what the study has determined thus far is the best example of the falseness of stereotypes of power: that those in the highest positions, whose decisions affect the most amount of people are the least likely to be affected by diseases. If the Whitehall study is to be believed, it is the low-level administrators, sitting in an open floor plan, constantly watched by their superiors and the colleagues, filling out paperwork and never seeing the results, acting as the Sisyphus of public morality, who are the ones to watch out for. Tessa M. Pollard, Susan Brin Lyatt (editors), Sex, Gender and Health, (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999) page 125

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SIGNAGE

- Or -

The Apotheosis of the Pictogram Man.

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As irritating as it is to install, accessibility in public space is a socially conscious, administratively

driven requirement that is, if not ethically compelling, legally required. To claim that “architecture

was better in the old days” (that is prior to the legal restrictions) is to subscribe to a kind of

nostalgia that is as harsh as it is forgetful, particularly for the disabled.48 Still, complying with

accessibility should not be simplified by creating flat "open space" alone. It should “double for

something else, to yield increase and elasticity from use."49 Refusing to define public space out

for fear of legal ramification is to damn it to uselessness and deny it any kind of power.

Philosopher Michel Foucault alluded to this concept when he wrote of space which is

“configured by power in which space becomes a resource for power."50

Administrative rebirth then is not architectural in the sense of doors, walls and walkways, but in

the signage. If the form is a definition of roles and requirements, then signage is the indicator of

kinetic movement and passageway. Signs allow for the data of standards and exceptions to

change their course incredibly quickly and cheaply. One might argue that when architecture is

truly well designed, it doesn't need signage, but therein lies the old battle of “the duck and the

47

Image: credited to the Author 48

Instead it is better to see administrative design as one might view a text, a being from the past, existing in the present, preparing for future judgement. 49

Thomas S. Hines, Richard Neutra and the Search for Modern Architecture: A Biography and History (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1994) page 114 49

Referenced in the following: 49

Reinhold Martin, The Organizational Complex: Architecture, Media, And Corporate Space (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006) 50

Paul Hirst (editor), Space and Power: Politics, War and Architecture (Oxford: Polity, 2005) page 3

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decorated shed.”51 In an interior sense especially, a necessity for signage should not be taken

as a failure but rather as an anticipation of destiny and immediate communication of intent.

Almost like the stained glass windows in a cathedral.

These windows were designed initially to explain biblical stories without literacy and if we look

carefully, the pictogram man showing the exit does the exact same thing.52 The pictogram man

enters the building with the proclamation to his followers that YOU ARE HERE, and then

proceeds to remind the viewer each time they've lost their way.53 He does not run, but walks, in

case of emergency to the nearest exit. He is aware that electrical closets are dangerous;

particularly the ones marked HIGH VOLTAGE. The pictogram man is as wise as St. Thomas

Aquinas54 , as just as St. John of Capistrano55 and as thoughtful as St. Thomas the Apostle56, all

without a face. He is the figure that societies aspire their citizens to be. The only architectural

difference between the two is that there was probably not a legal requirement to hang particular

saints in particular places, which is a symptom of “Health and Safety”.57 Signage allows the

second life of space. Though bureaucracy is immortal, administrations are not. They are in

constant flux, particularly in the digital age.58

THE DESK, THE SCREEN & THE DOOR

-Or-

I'm Not Bad, I'm Just Drawn That Way. 59

Administration is an interaction that crosses the line between the everyday and the completely

absurd, trampled on continually and without notice. Where the interaction between administrator

and administrated is met face to face, so to speak, is at the desk, screen and door, though this

relationship has shifted recently.

There is a phrase in circulation now that is so overused it almost loses all meaning: "You can do

that online". This expression carried weight 10 or 15 years ago but now it seems to be an

51

Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, Steven Izenour, Learning from Las Vegas, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1982) 52

St. George is marked with a dragon just as the outlines at the bus stop would like to remind you that wheelchairs go before buggies. 53

In the abstract sense, the frequent pronunciations of 'YOU ARE HERE' mean, technically, that you never left. 54

Thomas W. Sheehan, Dictionary of Patron Saints' Names, (Huntington, IN: Our Sunday Visitor Publishing, 2001) pages 433 55

ibid. 138 56

ibid. 552 57

There is also, however a programmatic difference between stained glass and the pictographic man, which is the pictographic man has a flexible narrative, without the threat of superstition, where the saints stories grow into myth and cannon. 58

Administration buildings also seem to have a similarity to the catholic cathedrals in the middle-ages in that their construction creates a micro-economy for the area in which it's located. It is not only the contractors and the restaurants nearby that benefit from the construction but also the media as it allows them to report on a potentially lucrative example of government accountability, sometimes as the representative for the people, sometimes as a something more sinister. This micro-economy then has the continual, ignorable and obvious aspect of maintenance, which will ensure this economies' life, though perhaps not as regularly in the beginning. 59

Norman Kagan (May 2003). "Who Framed Roger Rabbit" The Cinema of Robert Zemeckis. Lanham, (Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield). Pages 93–117

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example of the obvious, the non-committal and often, the lazy.60 This cliché indicates that

entering administrative space, that is physically, is often proof of somehow bucking the system,

either by accident or with full intent.61 Though information on a screen is often taken as proof of

a conscious life, without eye contact, this necessary humanity is quickly lost; indeed, it may

already be gone from administrative consciousness.

When administrative space is physically entered, the human performance is always done in the

presence of one or two items: the clear Perspex screen and/or the information desk. Without

them, the spatial confusion is immediate and profound. As "spatial tension comes from

nothingness rather than somethingness"62 , so the presence of these items are, much like the

physical manifestation of forms, an ingrained and expected stop, confirming that "[when] public

space becomes a motion, it loses any independent experiential motion of its own."63 64

The desk in particular, much like the door-keeper in the Kafka parable, is more a reminder of

task than a physical boundary. When encountered, there is a need, whether or real or imagined

to convince the person sitting behind it of the requester's worthiness. It is an interaction of

servant and served (now reversed) which also puts a face to the process, and subsequently

eliminates the villain, or at least, re-arranges it. In all the anecdotes on bureaucratic frustration,

whatever they may be, the hero is always the person going through the process and, when met

in person, the villain does not usually stay the administrator. They are merely a functionary of

the true villain: the organization itself.65 Screens, be they transparent, translucent or the front

face of computers are a reminder that there are distinct societal roles of servant and served in

administration rather than a definition of them. These roles are never intended to be crossed but

often are which changes perceptions of power, something Foucault noticed when he wrote:

"In defining the effects of power as repression one adopts a purely judicial conception of such

power; one identifies power with law which says no; power is taken above all as carrying the

force of a prohibition. Now I believe that this is a wholly negative, narrow, skeletal conception of

power. One which has been curiously wide spread...power is a force that traverses and

produces things, it induces pleasure, forms knowledge, produces discourse."66

60

Of course you can do that online; you can probably buy an island online. 61

Sometimes it bears reminding however that there are people who, if it can be believed, may not have access to a computer. Much like 60% of the world. United Nations Report "Demand for Internet and mobile services rising due to lower prices" United Nations Online. February 27, 2012, http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=44242&Cr=broadband&Cr1=#.Ugn1XOVSDzo (Accessed Aug 12, 2013) 62

Reinhold Martin, The Organizational Complex: Architecture, Media, And Corporate Space (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006) 63

Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man: The Forces Eroding Public Life and Burdening the Modern Psyche with Roles it Cannot Perform (London: Penguin UK, 2003) 14 64

It should be noted that some administrative spaces are civilized enough that merely a desk and the breathing tension between the two figures as all that separates, but the clear screen that is meant to stop bullets or spit (either on purpose or accidentally) is a much clearer metaphor for the roles that are assigned within this space. 65

The Philosopher Hannah Arendt surmised a connection between this kind of interaction and Plato's allegory of the cave by pointing out that there is actually no villain in the piece but merely a misunderstanding between the collective and the other. Peg Birmingham, Hannah Arendt and Human Rights: The Predicament of Common Responsibility (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2006) page 108 (Specific Reference to Arendt's Essay "Between Past and Future") 66

Paul Hirst (editor), Space and Power: Politics, War and Architecture (Oxford: Polity, 2005) 61

20

67

When George Tooker painted the desks and screens of The Government Bureau in 195768 his

criticism was clear. Though after the initial impression of drab futility and unsympathetic

anonymity has worn off, the image starts to feel simultaneously historical and contemporary, the

faceless huddled shapes both familiar and haunting. If Tooker had painted the image today, the

barely visible, dead-eyed figures probably would be only partially visible the back of a computer

instead of a hole in the frosted glass: a screen for a screen.69 What Tooker had in 1957, which

is not available digitally, is that his work is sympathetic to both parties, both are beaten down,

both are exhausted,70 both wish they were somewhere else. When the interaction shifts from

physically entering space to digitally submitting to it, the process does not change, but the

perceptions of people within the systems does. They are even less human and much easier to

feel nothing for, proving political scientist Maarten Hajer’s assertion that authoritative

governance “must be studied empirically to be understood”, correct.71 This interaction becomes

even more solidified if the desk and screen are passed to meet the ultimate sign of mystical

power: the closed door.

67

Image: Tooker, George The Government Bureau, oil on canvas, 1956 (Metropolitan Museum of Art) www.metmuseum.org 68

Thomas H. Garver, George Tooker, (Portland, OR: Pomegranate Communications, 2002) page 35 69

But then again there would also be fewer people in that office. The relative contemporary feel of Tooker's painting is a nod to bureaucracy's immortality. Since the birth of administration, almost everyone has had an anecdote about how frustrating the process can be. 70

Rather than a stock image of a person wearing a business suit 71

Maarten A. Hajer, Authoritative Governance: Policy Making in the Age of Mediation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010) page 47

21

Restriction of this kind, as a sign of respectability, was explained by novelist Marguerite

Yourcenar when she wrote: "Morals are a matter of private agreement but decency is of public

concern."72 In a purely architectural sense, theorist Robin Evans wrote that the change in floor

layouts from series of connecting rooms to the corridor with private rooms adjoining had an

elitist intent, but also a moral one, stating that "Connected rooms is appropriate to a type of

society which breeds carnality” 73. Although philosopher Giorgio Agamben touched on the

opposition via the Flamen Diale, where the private sphere and the public function are absolutely

identical74 a concept that may partially explain the past 10 years' obsession with administration's

literal "transparency" which is rarely ever true, but nevertheless expected.75

76 77

When the public goes past the desk, beyond the Perspex screen, into the long corridor, behind

the locked door and even into the open floor plan behind, that is when the real performance of

administration begins, as it is an invitation to the sanctum. The closed door is the mystical

understanding of power. That the action is, in fact, terribly dull is of no concern: the closeness,

but inaccessibility, makes the intrigue thicker, more appealing. This is a hint towards grander

expectations of power in general.78

72

Marguerite Yourcenar, Memoirs of Hadrian (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005) page 104 73

Robin Evans, Translations from Drawing to Building (Cambridge MA: MIT Press 1997) pg 88 (essay: Figures, Doors and Passages) 74

Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998) page 30 75

An example of this might be Sir Norman Foster’s London City Hall (2002). 76

Image: Credited to the Author. Inspired by Darrow Montgomery, May. 21, 2010 at 12:36 pm “Photos: DMV, the Line Dance” The City Desk Blog Sponsored by Washington City Paper, May. 21, 2010, http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/blogs/citydesk/2010/05/21/photos-dmv-the-line-dance/ 77

Image: Credited to the Author. Inspired by Government Accountability Office, US Government “Chapter 6, Elmer B. Staats: Broadening GAO's work, 1966-1981” last modified August, 30th, 2013. 78

The actual responsibility of being the "OFFICIAL" in "OFFICIAL USE ONLY" is just as strange as being on the

other side. Despite moans of incompetence and distrust there is a strong societal faith in the function of

22

What Foucault touches upon and Tooker addresses is that desks, screens and doors are not

the vessels to a central and simplistic notion of power, but rather, a division of obligations. All

stuck in this together because it is the organization that collectively, as a society, everyone more

or less agreed on. The elimination of this empathy from either side is a potential threat to the

humanity of administration and creates a much more dangerous method of the servant and the

served. 79

CONCLUSION

In all of these objects, though the connection with them feels almost like a stream of

consciousness, a narrative begins to emerge. One in which the roles become defined as

servant and served, though the player can switch back and forth with restrictions ranging from

understandable to suspicious, encapsulated by the element of time. It is a system in which

speed and efficiency are praised but not entirely necessary. Indeed, administration may be the

only service in the contemporary world which still works on this slower model. But as the

narrative shifts, from the objects to the environments (both of disseminated functional power

and singular symbolic power) the notions of administration become more active and less tactile.

administration. Therefore those persons who carry out the actions and process have an expectation of ethical

superiority thrust upon them. To be an administrator in this sense is to live in two worlds, but belong in neither. 79

If the form is a map of administration, then the restriction of “OFFICIAL USE ONLY” could be seen as shorthand for

a locked door and the long hallway (In this sense, the desk and the screen act as passageway, but a wall is, in fact, a

wall) In most administrative space, the locked door is labelled as a security factor and so perpetuates the old

conceptions of “Si vis pacem, para bellum” (If you want peace, you must prepare for war) Flavius Vegetius Renatus,

(trans: Nicolaus Schwebel, Godescalcus Stewechius) (Charleston SC:BiblioBazaar, 2011) Book 3. Yet this type of

restriction long precedes the contemporary understanding of security and completely gives up on another ancient

maxim: "Sit procul omne nefas; ut ameris, amabilis esto." (If you wish to be loved, be lovable) Ovid (trans. Roy K.

Gibson) Ars Amatoria, Book 3 (Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003) Book 1, Page 213.

23

80

80

Image: Credited to the Author. Inspired by Darrow Montgomery, May. 21, 2010 at 12:36 pm “Photos: DMV, the Line Dance” The City Desk Blog Sponsored by Washington City Paper, May. 21, 2010, http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/blogs/citydesk/2010/05/21/photos-dmv-the-line-dance/

24

SECTION II: PENDING APPROVAL

"This new geography is communal vs. urban, the territory of warm feeling vs. the territory of

impersonal blankness."81

- Richard Sennett

"But beneath the myths themselves there was an operation, or rather a series of operations

which silently organized the world... the methods of cure and at the same time the concrete

experience of madness...madness was controlled, but not cured."82

- Michel Foucault

"In this wave of democratic utilitarianism, that is sweeping over the earth, art may seem

engulfed, refinement destroyed and men may shudder as the wave seems about to hide forever

all that remains of the ancient idea of the beautiful...when the greatest happiness of the greatest

number shall have become something like a reality, when life's tragedy shall cease to clash with

life's romance, and the squalor of the hovel shall no longer mar the cathedral's beauty, then

again may "music freeze into marble" and forests blossom into stone."83

- Frederick Jackson Turner

Administrative architecture's disseminated form is a story of policies, movements and

obsolescence all fighting for dominance. To better exemplify this architecturally, the town halls

and council office buildings of London are presented as a case study, particularly their shift in

intent and the designs that followed.

81

Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man: The Forces Eroding Public Life and Burdening the Modern Psyche with Roles it Cannot Perform (London: Penguin UK, 2003) page 301 82

Michel Foucault (trans. Paul Rabinow), The Foucault Reader (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984)142-143 (essay The Birth of the Asylum) 83

Steven Conn, Max Page (editors) Building the Nation: Americans Write about Their Architecture, Their Cities, and Their Landscape (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003) page 22 (Essay Frederick Jackson Turner, Architecture Through Oppression, 1884)

25

THE SHOCK OF THE OLD

- Or -

Hell is Not Paved with Good Intentions, Hell is Paved with Concrete.

84

Across from George Gilbert Scott's St. Pancras Building is a series of muddled grey curves that

in the perpetual early-November weather of London may go completely ignored. The building's

form is encased by a semi-committed connection to modernism and brown-tinted windows in

1960s/70s bubble-concrete, the result of which renders the structure almost completely solid. In

this mass, with its public entrance on a side street, is the Camden Council Building. This stern

aesthetic does not induce a sense of awe but rather a kind of shrugging pity, most noticeably at

the entrance. The pathway leading to the public doors is distinctly non-ceremonial and the

waiting room lacks that instrument of power: the central desk. Instead of this performance, the

council has installed a series of small “information stands” which are for the public to approach

84

Image: Credited to the Author. Inspired by Dan Carrier, 7 February, 2013 “PROPERTY: Campaigners fear building on site of council’s annexe could put historic squares in the shade” The Camden New Journal 7 February, 2013

http://www.camdennewjournal.com/news/2013/feb/property-campaigners-fear-building-site-council%E2%80%99s-annexe-could-put-historic-squares-sh

26

staff individually.85 Though this plastic gesture is more important than it seems; it shows a shift

in the language of functional, disseminated administration. In its way, the Camden Council

Building lobby is looking to return to a distinctly different typology one that, coincidentally, the

London Councils had originally set out to kill.86

THE RISE AND FALL OF THE TOWN HALL

- Or -

Memories on Ice, Steel Numbers in the Velvet Night.

In her thesis, Graphic Form as a System of Regulation, Valeria Guzman-Verri reasoned that

contemporary understandings of administration and bureaucracy come from a Victorian

methodology of accumulating and displaying information. Further, that this arrangement was

thanks in no small part to the Statistical Society in London (formed 1834)87 and the census

takers of the 1830s creating an "understanding of man as an object of study that can be

theorized and criticized which can then be again examined, questioned and theorized."88

Following up on this point is Ben Rodgers' investigation into the English town hall building type

in which he states:

"The history of the town-hall proper, however, begins with the introduction of elected local

government in Britain with the Municipal Reform act of 1835...by 1903 there were 313 municipal

boroughs in England and Wales...by World War I the most ambitions amongst them [led by

Birmingham] had been given (or had taken) responsibility for planning, parks, public health,

health insurance, education, welfare, unemployment, gas, electricity and water, among other

things."89

The housing of these ambitious and ever-growing functions meant that Victorian (and to some

extent Edwardian) England experienced a boom in the apparatuses of administration. Specific

examples in London might include:

- Clerkenwell Vestry Hall (1857)

- Shoreditch Vestry Hall (1867)

- Hackney Public Offices (1869)

- Poplar Public Offices (1869)

- St. Pancras Vestry Hall (1874)

- Greenwich Public Offices (1875)

- Westminster City Hall (1878) (Soon changed to Caxton Hall)

85

The intention, presumably, is to make the space feel less intimidating, more individual, but rather than achieving this, it makes the arrangement confusing. 86

It seems interesting as well that along the back of the building, through something just a little bit larger than a mews is a piece of street-art, which depicts a rat holding a protest sign with an exclamation point on it, protected by plastic. An almost ironic gesture from an organization that sends out reminders to all its inhabitants to remember to pay their council tax on time so that the city can remain clean. 87

Valeria Guzman-Verri "Graphic Form as a System of Regulation" (PhD Diss., Architectural Association School of Architecture, 2010). Introduction 88

Ibid. 40 89

Ben Rogers, Reinventing the Town Hall: A Handbook (London: Institute for Public Policy Research, 2004) Page 14

27

- Bermondsey Town Hall (1879)

- Battersea Public Hall (1882)

- Kensington Town Hall (1882)

- Westminster Town Hall (1882)

- Battersea Town Hall (1893)

- Finsbury Town Hall (1894)

- Deptford Town Hall (1895)

- Hammersmith Town Hall (1896)

- Eastham Public Offices (1898-1903)

- Kensington Vestry Hall (1899)

- Shoreditch Town Hall (1901)

- Acton Town Hall (1903)

- Woolwich Town Hall (1903-1906)

- Islington Town Hall (1925)

- Poplar Town Hall (1927)

- Stoke Newington Town Hall (1935)90

91

Many of these buildings were aesthetically similar (mostly by an obligation to either a modest

neoclassicism or a composite gothic revival with consistently grand entrances) and seemed to

coincide not only with the growth in the field of statistics, but also in the regulation of

architecture. An almost certain by-product of this regulation was the formation of the London

City Council Architects' department (LCC architects) in 1890 92

90

Colin Cunningham, Victorian and Edwardian Town Halls (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981) 235-319 &

Christopher Hibbert, Julia Keay & John Keay, The London Encyclopaedia(London: Pan Macmillan, 2010) page 137 91

Image(s): Shoreditch Town Hall, Bermondsey Town Hall, Deptford Town Hall. - Courtesy of the Author. Inspired by

Dean Nichols "The Faded Grandeur Of London’s Old Town Halls" Londonist, 30 April 2013,

http://londonist.com/2013/04/the-faded-grandeur-of-londons-old-town-halls.php?showpage=18#gallery-1 (Accessed

Aug 12, 2013) 92

It is also significant to note the London City Council's architectural office in post WWII London was one of the most

prestigious places to work, but was nevertheless greatly reduced to almost near extinction in the 1960s mostly due to

decentralized administration. The systematic submission of work, now available in the London Metropolitan Archives

shows a shift in the on-site management of the designs 1700s which are more gestural in the surviving submissions,

to more regulated construction documentation in the mid-1800 and early 1900's. This may have related to the

creation of the tube in the 1860s, but also suggests that not only was the professional nature of the field changing, its

28

93

focus from aristocratic grandeur to well-intended public undertakings seems like a thoroughly middle-class idea,

particularly in the Victorian age.

Nadir Lahiji, The Political Unconscious of Architecture: Reopening Jameson's Narrative (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate

Publishing, Ltd., 2011) 93

Image: Finsbury Town Hall. - Courtesy of the Author. Inspired by Dean Nichols "The Faded Grandeur Of London’s

Old Town Halls" Londonist, 30 April 2013, http://londonist.com/2013/04/the-faded-grandeur-of-londons-old-town-

halls.php?showpage=18#gallery-1 (Accessed Aug 12, 2013)

29

As the Finsbury Town Hall (1894) shows, small administrative spaces of the Victorian age94 are

almost academic in layout. The offices appear to be mostly a classroom with a mixture of factory

floor and palace corridor thrown in, serving aesthetically as somewhere in-between. Much like

schools, functional administration has the need to please authority figures in a way that other

forms of office work do not. Superiors are superiors in practice but also as numerical ranking95

so bypassing that that chain of command a form of light treason, allowing administrative control

to seem vaguely military in its construction. 96 Finsbury Town Hall's plan of the space ensures

that the chain of command is as difficult to circumvent spatially as the managerial plan intends.

Requests are not just transactions, they are performance.

97

94

That are prevalent in so many of these buildings. 95

Government Service (GS) Levels being the clearest example of this phenomenon 96

This could have implications toward what President Eisenhower called "The Military Industrial Complex" (Dwight D. Eisenhower, The Military-Industrial Complex: With an Introduction by Jesse Smith (Lacey, WA: Basementia Publications, 2006) and the subsequent distrust this term produced, but it seems to be a much more benign format of that tension within the Victorian and Edwardian eras of the Town Hall and its associated middle-class (some might argue 'Bourgeois') morality 97

Image: Plan of Finsbury Town Hall, 1897, AR/BR/22/012578 436-461, Finsbury Collection London Metropolitan Archives

30

Similar in intention is the Old Westminster Town Hall (now known as the City of Westminster

Registry Office - 1882). Notable for its almost cinematic main entrance and staircase, in addition

to its materiality: the dark waxed wood and grey stone speaking to a certain micro type of

hierarchy through the architectural language. Almost a tomb, almost a church, almost a lot of

things, but easily identifiable as something built to last.

98

On the other side of the city, a slightly more modern form of this layout is in the Islington Town

Hall (1925). While very, very far from the avant garde architects of the time, (the Le Corbusiers

or Mies Van de Rohes) there is a kind of republican understanding about this space, albeit

saddled with a dogmatic association to neo-classical styling. There are spaces for public and

spaces for administrators but the interaction between them is easily accessible. The interior

seems to have the belief that civil justice comes from steps leading upward, as the main area is

full of them 99 Where Finsbury wished for a procession to go through the space, Islington was

looking for a procession to go up into it.

98

Image: Old Westminster Town Hall - Courtesy of the Author. Inspired by Dean Nichols "The Faded Grandeur Of

London’s Old Town Halls" Londonist, 30 April 2013, http://londonist.com/2013/04/the-faded-grandeur-of-londons-old-

town-halls.php?showpage=18#gallery-1 (Accessed Aug 12, 2013) 99

Though in the “performance wing” there is also an awkwardly small elevator retrofitted in for legal reasons. There

are two very different languages being spoken here. For Example, In Islington there is a problem with where the desk

is located. In the Camden building, it was too small to be taken seriously, here; it seems to be too big. There is a

general scale problem with all of these places as they try to retrofit into administrative leanings or directives.

31

100

Town Halls were the places of ceremony and survival in the Victorian age beyond the

expectation of the local church. Administrative capability allows for a public connection and, for

lack of a better word, charity, without the overt implications of the eternal. Bureaucracy does not

assist the public out of the goodness of their hearts, but because they are being paid to do so,

which is, historically, more reliable than kindness.

Yet when comparing pre-war town hall typologies to post-war council office typologies, there is a

noticeable change in administrative thought, (shown mostly by the latter's lack of public

gathering space and noticeable entrances). 101The structures of the post-war were encountering

a very different understanding of duty in relation to the people, changing, especially in

perception, from charity to obligation. For example:

1895

"The present evils of city life are temporary and remediable. The abolition of the slums, and the

destruction of their virus of feasible...if one uses the term City Government in the large sense

that makes it inclusive of this entire ordering of the general affairs and interests of the

community."102

100

Image: Plan of Islington Town Hall, 1925 (reproduction from 1965), GLC/AR/BR/002317, 421-435, Islington Collection, London Metropolitan Archives 101

This emphasis on entrances is somewhat typical for these kinds of public buildings, as is shown in Peter

Eisenman’s assertion that entrances are akin to the grain pattern of wood they direct movement and show design

intent. Eisenman, Peter. Giuseppe Terragni, Manfredo Tafuri. Giuseppe Terragni: transformations, decompositions,

critiques. New York: Monacelli Press, 2003 102

Albert Shaw, Municipal Government in Great Britain, (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1895) Chapter i, page 3 - quoted by: Ebenezer Howard, To-morrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform, (Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010, original printing 1899) page 63

32

1965

"The older conception of politics was that it deals with the question: who gets what, when and

how? [But now it is] Who perceives what public issues, in what way and why?"103

104

BECOMING THE COUNCIL BUILDING

- Or-

Green Glass Laughter as Hated Morning Comes.

Administration shifted in the post World War II period from a central, sustained small scale

interaction to a sealed, hermetic office attending to a larger entity: gathering spots were

superfluous, but the filing of claims was exponentially growing. The changing attitude was

103

Richard Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style of American Politics, (New York: Random House LLC, 2012) Introduction page xxxiii 104

Image: Credited to the author

33

cemented by the London Government act of 1963 which sought to conjoin the smaller

townships in favor of larger boroughs. Specifically stating:

"There shall be established new administrative areas...to be known as London boroughs...(2) If

in the case of any London borough, on representations in that behalf made to the Privy Council

by the Minister, Her Majesty by the advice of Her Privy Council thinks fit to grant a charter of

incorporation of the inhabitants of that borough..."105

106

107

105

"London Government act of 1963, chapter 33, section 1" Last Modified August 13, 2013 http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1963/33/contents 106

Image: Dean Nichols "The Faded Grandeur Of London’s Old Town Halls" Londonist, 30 April 2013, http://londonist.com/2013/04/the-faded-grandeur-of-londons-old-town-halls.php?showpage=18#gallery-1 (Accessed Aug 12, 2013)

34

The council buildings that followed this act were distinctly different from the town halls108, often

to public discontent. Brutalism was (and is) often blamed for an unfriendly aesthetic, but really,

the administrative intent had completely changed and the architecture was just a symptom of

that request. Further, the oft mocked spatial requirements and materials were a direct outcome

of economic pressure. As Reinhold Martin argues in The Organizational Complex: "The only

difference [in modern office spaces] was that both the market and the “organism” had changed.

By 1930 the professional journals could designate the ‘open plan’ as the preferred alternative in

office planning with pragmatic matter of factness"109. The new council buildings were made to

define themselves by recent standards of “value” from the private world as well as distinguish

themselves the town halls who they were still in direct competition with for public love. The old

buildings had withstood the war, but they had to go.

The confrontation reached its most violent at the destruction of the Old Kensington Town Hall

(1882) in 1982. The council (most notably Council Member Nicholas Freeman) allowed the old

building's facade to be smashed at 3:00 am the day before it would have become a listed

property. The conservative members argued that the old building had become a kind of

albatross and that ridding the neighbourhood of the burden would allow for a cheaper, more

efficient council building just around the corner. But of course, an albatross is only bad luck after

it is killed. 110111112

What decentralized administration lost was a connection to the populous and subsequently the

relationship changed. By restricting the movement of the public to only select portions the

interior, and indeed, restricting the movement of the administrators to the exterior, more than

walls were being formed. It was the first steps towards the “faceless men” that administration

would come to represent. The destruction of Kensington Town Hall, instead of prompting a

population in favor of innovative change, resulted in a love of the old buildings growing even

stronger, dissolving the connections between administration and the public to near invisibility.

And so, the old town halls met specifically social fates. For example, the Bethnal Green Town

Hall now holds a hotel and two restaurants, most of Holborn Town Hall is a fusion cocktail bar,

107

Image: London Councils “Council Map” Last Modified August 13, 2013 http://www.londoncouncils.gov.uk/images/londoncouncils/boroughmap.gif?height=398&width=500 108

Though it should be noticed that the official title of "County Council" was in use long before this point. F.W.G. Benemy, Whitehall Town-Hall, (London: George G. Harrap & Co LTD. 1967) page 164 109

Reinhold Martin, The Organizational Complex: Architecture, Media, And Corporate Space (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006) 110

"Property Ads", Investors Chronicle, Volume 67 Financial Times Business Publications, 1984, page 28 111

Almost as a rule, administrative buildings do not retire; they just get sold and even then, always carry the moniker of being "the old post office" or "the old registry". This leads to a public feeling of nostalgia for an era that never was, using administrative space as shorthand for national pride. So it's no surprise that the architects in the post-war had pressure to create something that looked at felt completely different to the prior design, often to its detriment. 112

It is also worth noticing that there had been an attempt to demolish the Gilbert Scott St. Pancras building in the 1960s, which would have, by proxy, made the council building look better. 112

David Pearce, Conservation Today (London: Routledge 1989) page 216

35

the Shoreditch Town Hall a restaurant/music venue and Finsbury Town Hall became a dance

academy. Further examples include:

- Battersea Town Hall (now the Battersea Arts Centre)

- Southwark Town Hall (now the Cuming Museum)113

- Bermondsey Town Hall (set to be converted into flats)

- Stoke Newington Town Hall (now a wedding and party venue)

- Poplar Town Hall (now the Bow Business Centre)

- Deptford Town Hall (now part of Goldsmith's Campus)114 115

Though it is irrelevant to grieve for this loss of connection, as Manfredo Tafuri may have

suggested the solution in Subject and Mask: “[In public space] there is room for nothing but an

internal process of resolution even if it must divide, separate and dissolve connections".116 The

“internal process of resolution” suggests that if the council building type is to survive, it must

change shape into something both newer and older. Something that the old town halls have

already become, something attempted already in the current Camden Council Office’s lobby:

embracing the ideals of the Victorian age, but at no additional cost to the public and free wifi in

the cafe.

113

Damaged by fire in 2013, Dean Nichols "The Faded Grandeur Of London’s Old Town Halls" Londonist, 30 April 2013, http://londonist.com/2013/04/the-faded-grandeur-of-londons-old-town-halls.php?showpage=18#gallery-1 (Accessed Aug 12, 2013) 114

Dean Nichols "The Faded Grandeur Of London’s Old Town Halls" Londonist, 30 April 2013, http://londonist.com/2013/04/the-faded-grandeur-of-londons-old-town-halls.php?showpage=18#gallery-1 (Accessed Aug 12, 2013) 115

The Camden Council is also looking to sell the following Bidborough House, Cockpit Yard, Crowndale Centre (with the library to be re-provided in an alternative property), Jamestown Road, Roy Shaw Centre / Cressy Road, Town Hall extension, 98-100 St Pancras Way, 56 West End Lane and have already ended leases at Bedford House and Clifton House and in the longer term will do so at 42 Caversham Road. 115

Camden Council "Plans and Policies, Frequently Asked Questions" Camden.gov, August 11, 2013 http://www.camden.gov.uk/ccm/content/council-and-democracy/plans-and-policies/camden-strategies-%26-partnerships/frequently-asked-questions.en (Accessed Aug 12, 2013) 116

Peter Eisenman, Giuseppe Terragni, Manfredo Tafuri "Giuseppe Terragni: transformations, decompositions, critiques" (New York: Monacelli Press, 2003) pg 481

36

TRIBUTIS ET CIRCENSES

- Or -

Next Year's Brand New Model.

117

When the architecture of administration changed in London from the well-intended stratification of Victorian bourgeois assistance, to a post-war attempt at economic efficiency, it resulted in a mixture of mutual distrust between the administrators and the public. This means that what 5 Pancras Square, London N1C 4AG might become, that is the new Camden Council building, (set to be complete in 2014) is a serious question in the realm of disseminated power. On the official documentation, the Camden Council describe their soon-to-be-building as:

Built at no additional cost to council tax payers it will provide the following facilities:

- Two swimming pools. The sports facility will be aimed at all ages, abilities and needs. It will

include a small ‘lagoon’ fun pool with water features for families together with a spa for adults.

- Fully equipped gym. The 100 station fitness gym will have views over the pool and spacious

exercise studios.

117

Image: Camden Council "New Building at Pancras Square" Camden.gov, August 11, 2013 http://www.camden.gov.uk/ccm/navigation/council-and-democracy/camden-plan/strategies-and-partnerships/new-building-at-pancras-square/;jsessionid=BB08392383A37F0B685BFA7571F1706D (Accessed Aug 12, 2013)

37

- Contact Camden customer services centre. This will be a contact point for many of the

Council’s services to the public helping residents helping residents to get easy access to all the

services they need.

- Library, including a children’s library. It will provide a modern, fit for purpose library service for

residents of all ages, visitors and students.

- Café providing a snack and drinks service for residents visiting the building

- Council offices locating all of our main service department in one place for the first time to

better coordinate and deliver services to residents.

- On opening the building will provide fantastic new facilities in a modern setting. It will draw

many services into one place which will be designed around your needs and help us to deliver

‘right first time’ services.

It will allow us to be:

- Cost effective: by selling old inefficient buildings we are able to provide these new facilities at

no additional cost to Camden’s council tax payers. See the list of buildings we will be selling on

our list of FAQs

- Green: built to the highest environmental standards your new building will cut carbon

emissions and reduce energy costs. Through selling old inefficient accommodation and moving

to the new site we will cut carbon emissions by an estimated 64%. Based on current energy

costs this would lead to projected annual savings of more than £500,000.

- Efficient: by bringing the majority of our office based staff to one site we will be able to save

money and work together to deliver better services to you.

- Collaborative: the new building will mean that we can work more collaboratively and

productively within our organisation and with our partners delivering better services.118

119

118

Camden Council "New Building at Pancras Square" Camden.gov, August 11, 2013 http://www.camden.gov.uk/ccm/navigation/council-and-democracy/camden-plan/strategies-and-partnerships/new-building-at-pancras-square/;jsessionid=BB08392383A37F0B685BFA7571F1706D (Accessed Aug 12, 2013)

38

Immediately the description justifies itself as a valuable gathering space which also happens to

have council offices, a requirement that is almost tacked on at the end. Go to the pool and pay a

parking ticket at the same time, how convenient. The building120 is aware that it cannot install

fear or inspiration with a historical architecture (a waste of money), but neither can it ignore its

environment and expect any form of cooperation (bad P.R.). Yet any assessment of the

potential plan must have at least three needs kept in mind

Firstly, that administrative space should offers something beyond immediate reward.

Bureaucracy should not be apologetic in its functionality (unpopular as it is) or put too much faith

in a neo-liberal attitude of economic interaction. Administration exists because it is a

requirement of contemporary life, no more, no less. Secondly, in the contemporary London, a

shield of legality is expected to protect a population against administrative violence or passive-

aggressive unfairness, which sometimes proves untrue.121 Architecture alone cannot resolve

this issue, but can provide its setting. The new design banks its charm on the idea that negative

reasons for visiting the council building have been removed before the threshold is ever

crossed. Thirdly, that the characters of Administrative space, both administrators and the public,

are just as important in a human way as they are in a functional way. An architecture which

seeks to gratify only the public will have a very different effect than one seeking to gratify only

the administrators. Whether or not the new Camden Council building brings the design of

administration into a new era of good feelings between public and public servant is to be

decided. A single building alone almost certainly will not, but their intentions become precedent

and indicate yet another shift the cities' relationship with disseminated administration.122

CONCLUSION

Disseminated administration in London is an ever evolving story, as is all functional power.

When the town hall typology was replaced by the council building typology, it both castrated and

sanctified (perhaps accidentally) the bespoke spaces of the Victorian Era, spaces which now

speak to the digital age's interpretation of what is desirable in administration. However, this is a

bit of a red herring in terms of public perception. The two embodiments of administration were

merely different shapes of the same animal. Where bureaucracy lives forever, that does not

mean it stays the same. A different shell for the same creature, albeit a bit changed, still lives in.

119

Image: Camden Council "New Building at Pancras Square" Camden.gov, August 11, 2013 http://www.camden.gov.uk/ccm/navigation/council-and-democracy/camden-plan/strategies-and-partnerships/new-building-at-pancras-square/;jsessionid=BB08392383A37F0B685BFA7571F1706D (Accessed Aug 12, 2013) 120

It should be noted that the designers of the new Council Building are Bennetts Associates Architects 121

Though there should be a clarification that administrative violence is not the same as police violence. 122

What is most likely to guarantee the success of this administrative architecture is acknowledging two things: 1) No space within administrative architecture is sacred or static. 2) Too much storage space is never enough.

39

123

123

Image: Credited to Author

40

SECTION III: TOP MEN

"There is something comforting - religious, if you want - about paranoia, there is still also anti-

paranoia where nothing is connected to anything, a condition not many of us can bear for very

long."124

- Thomas Pynchon

“I told myself: 'I am surrounded by unknown things.' I imagined man without ears, suspecting the

existence of sound as we suspect so many hidden mysteries, man noting acoustic phenomena

whose nature and provenance he cannot determine. And I grew afraid of everything around me

– afraid of the air, afraid of the night. From the moment we can know almost nothing, and from

the moment that everything is limitless, what remains? Does emptiness actually not exist? What

does exist in this apparent emptiness?”125

- Guy de Maupassant

"A house for the public is not and cannot be a folk-style building in the usual sense of the

word."126

- Giuseppe Terragni

When pushed to the largest scale, the seemingly counter-intuitive logic of administration is

perceived as aggressive and secretive, entering the realm of the paranoid and the bizarre. If the

town halls of London are the premier case study for disseminated power, then Whitehall is its

counterpoint in symbolic power.

124

Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow, (New York: Penguin Group 2012) Referenced in Reinhold Martin, The Organizational Complex: Architecture, Media, And Corporate Space (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006) 125

Guy De Maupassant, The Complete Works of Guy De Maupassant (New Edition) (London: Standard Publications, Inc 2007) page 158 126

Peter Eisenman, Giuseppe Terragni, Manfredo Tafuri "Giuseppe Terragni: transformations, decompositions, critiques" (New York: Monacelli Press, 2003) page 261

41

BARTERING, FORFEITING, FUNCTION, FAME

- Or-

It's Not Paranoia If They’re Really Out To Get You.

127

Administrative interactions are often so banal they are beneath notice, dispensed as needed

and then forgotten, that is until they aren't. When administration becomes symbolic, the roles

change from servant and served to that of two complete strangers and if "how we experience

strangeness and strangers is a matter of expectancy"128 then public knowledge of this power will

be an extreme reflection of the initial experience (which is usually estranged and infrequent at

best).129

This kind architectural symbolism is seen worldwide, each example being fantastically

mythological and very, very real. Though the best example from an administrative standpoint

are the offices at Whitehall. On this distinct street there are strong contradictions of moral duty

127

Image: Credited to Author, inspired by a photograph from London-Based Photographer Chris Young/PA 128

Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man: The Forces Eroding Public Life and Burdening the Modern Psyche with Roles it Cannot Perform (London: Penguin UK, 2003) page 37 129

If, for example, the only interaction between the public and the administrator stopped at the waiting room (if that) than only the restriction and timelessness of that space is available to public understanding.

42

and mutual distrust, of historical re-imagining and constant, showboating self-assessment: a

game that no one wins, but is played nevertheless.

130

THE CREATION OF WHITEHALL

- Or -

Lost In Darkness and Distance

Whitehall, like the White House or the Kremlin, is now considered shorthand for the presence of

government. Though unlike the White House, which has a leaning towards executive power, or

the Kremlin, which has arguably more military origins, Whitehall is a condensed version of

administrative power specifically. Up until the 20th century, the street seems to have been

considered merely an extension of offices from Westminster which, having no other avenue of

expansion, had simply worked their way towards Charing Cross.131 Though bureaucrats were

moving into the area as early as the mid 1700s, their presence wasn’t necessarily expected until

the Prime Ministers began to live full-time at 10 Downing Street, starting with Pitt the Younger in

130

Image: Plan of Whitehall in 1894 - Survey of London http://www.british-history.ac.uk/image.aspx?compid=67920&filename=figure0747-120.jpg&pubid=747. Plan of Whitehall in 2013 created by Author, modelled on information from "Google Maps) 131

The only exception possibly being Scotland Yard, which had been adjacent to the old palace as early as 1829. But was pushed back to Scotland Yard almost immediately and in 1890 were moved to New Scotland Yard and then again to Broadway in Victoria in 1967, in 2013 it was announced that the headquarters will move again in 2015 to Victoria Embankment. BBC News London "New Metropolitan Police HQ announced as Curtis Green Building" BBC news, 20 May 2013. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-22593003 (Accessed Aug 12, 2013)

43

the early 1800s. After Pitt, the street was taken for granted132 until both Benjamin Disraeli and

William Gladstone, partly out of necessity, partly out of rivalry, commissioned extensive interior

work in the 1870s.133 This administrative architecture, like their town hall colleagues, had a

sentimental penchant for the English aesthetic language of gothic revival or (a version of) neo-

classical.134 Specific examples of this might be George Gilbert Scott's Foreign Office (1868) or

Norman Shaw's Scotland Yard (1887). Though these stylistic choices might also be seen as a

pre-emptive strike against growing doubts regarding English imperialism. Joseph Conrad’s

Heart of Darkness (1899) 135 and Rudyard Kipling's Kim (1901)136, published a generation later,

were slowly etching away at the facade of technological and moral superiority which was pivotal

to the notion of imperial justness. Whitehall’s initial architectural retort to this assessment was to

dive even deeper into the facade by constructing the War Office in 1906. Even in the aftermath

of World War I (which arguably shattered the idea of technology being an obvious sign of

superiority) the administration refused give up its stainless self-promotion, however, it would

begin to do so in a very different way.

137

132

Though this probably had a lot do with the accidental destruction of the parliament building, and its subsequent reconstruction from 1834 and 1844. 133

10 Downing Street Website. "History" Gov.UK August 13, 2013. https://www.gov.uk/government/history/10-downing-street (August 14, 2014) 134

Which created their own style in the process 135

Rudyard Kipling, Kim, (New York: Doubleday, Page and Company, 1922, first published as serials in 1901) 135

Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, (London: Penguin Publishing, 2007) 136

Rudyard Kipling, Kim, (New York: Doubleday, Page and Company, 1922, first published as serials in 1901) 137

Image: Cenotaph Concept Drawing, 1919, Art.IWM ART 3991 b, Gift from the Artist (Sir Edwin Lutyens) (PRA), Imperial War Museum Archives

44

As regional, almost bucolic versions of administrative power (that is the town hall/vestry

building, etc) were waning in London, large-scale nationalist architecture was waxing, and a

new understanding of what Whitehall could mean on a symbolic level was coming into focus.

In 1920, the street's first clear example of nationalistic morality was created by the Cenotaph.138

This monument has been noted as one of the first, if not the first war memorial in England that

was not under the guidance of any specific church.139 The monument therefore is an

administration superimposing itself as the vessel of righteousness instead of a religious

organization: A ministry for a ministry. Yet to solidify this new vessel, a source of mystical power

needed to enter public consciousness.

Several years after the Cenotaph’s completion, the road that would be known both physically

and colloquially as “Whitehall” was still partly an extension of Charing Cross. However in 1931

when the offices of no 32 & 33 Charing Cross requested the addition of a door into their waiting

room, the architects were careful to note the shift in moniker to 47 & 51 Whitehall, a small

change, but one that implied a new branding technique for the administration. 140 The negative

aspects of this growth were catalogued with vitriol by The New Despotism (published in 1929)

which claimed that the growing force of the English Civil Service was undermining the nation’s

governance, making stern and exacting references to the culture of the street 141 “Whitehall” was

becoming, for better or worse, a catchphrase for certain kind of power.

142

138

Imperial War Museum Official Website, "The Cenotaph: Original Design for the Structure in Whitehall" IWM.gov. August 13, 2013. http://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/17077 (Accessed Aug 13, 2013) 139

Imperial War Museum Official Website, "The Cenotaph: Original Design for the Structure in Whitehall" IWM.gov. August 13, 2013. http://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/17077 (Accessed Aug 13, 2013) 140

Plan of 32 & 33 Charing Cross, March 5th, 1931, GLC/AR/BR/17/0033770Whitehall Collection, London Metropolitan Archive 141

FWG Benemy, Whitehall Town-Hall, (London: George G. Harrap & Co LTD. 1967) page 147 142

Image: Plan of 32 & 33 Charing Cross, March 5th, 1931, GLC/AR/BR/17/0033770Whitehall Collection, London Metropolitan Archive

45

A year prior to this change, Chapter 45 of the 1930 Survey of London for the Parish of St.

Margaret which began with a somewhat auspicious quote: "Donec templa refeceris" ("Until you

have rebuilt the Temples")143

The passage comes from Book 3 of Horace's Roman Odes, a poem that focuses mainly on the

"victorious veterans from the civil wars ... to help them resettle in the homeland"144. Horace

argues that part of this reintegration includes the rebuilding of sacred temples.145 Though as A

Companion to Horace points out, the poet's invocation of the Muse and his general tone

"focuses not so much on the new...but rather on the rebirth of old Roman customs and of

everything that had once been great about the Republic."146 Whitehall was becoming, like the

“Old Republic” much more about nationalism as a means of piety than about rebuilding anything

(and all without actually changing any of the buildings). 147

If this dogma was to be believed, then the administrators of Whitehall, like priests, were

beginning to be seen as somehow morally superior to the average citizen: as the guardians of

civil rights, or more importantly, of civil finances, their correctness must be completely without

reproach. It is in this moment, especially architecturally, when the lines between expectation

and administration became blurred and began to enter into notions of the bizarre. Following

World War II, Whitehall was still an oddity of a location, not quite fully formed but not without

consequence either. The Whitehall of the 1940s and early 1950s was a series of nodes,

damaged by bombing, looking for a connection.148

143

This particular survey is more concerned about what the Whitehall palace meant in a historical context, as the author(s) take their time explaining the well-worn narrative of Henry the VIII's break from European tradition (mostly for himself, but also, maybe a little bit for the country) using the quote in a literal sense. Yet the original context of "Donec Templa Refeceris" may be much more relevant Whitehall, especially contemporary Whitehall, than may have been intended. Montagu H. Cox and Philip Norman (editors), "Publishing and Survey committees," Survey of London: volume 13: St Margaret, Westminster, part II: Whitehall I, British History Online, http://www.british-history.ac.uk/report.aspx?compid=67770 (Accessed Aug 12, 2013) Gregson Davis, A Companion to Horace, (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2010) page 194 144

Ibid. page 194 145

Classics scholars debate as to precisely which temples. 146

Gregson Davis, A Companion to Horace, (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2010) page 195 147

Indeed the first line of the poem warns the youngest generation that, unless the old customs are followed, the

consequences will be dire. "I hate the vulgar crowd, and keep them away; grant me your silence. A priest of the

Muses, I sing a song never heard before, I sing a song for young women and boys." Gregson Davis, A Companion to

Horace, (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2010) page 195 148

It therefore is telling that in the London County Council bombing map 1939-1945 (Simon Rogers, "London Blitz 1940: the first day's bomb attacks listed in full" The Guardian Online, September 6, 2010, Accessed August 13, 2013, http://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2010/sep/06/london-blitz-bomb-map-september-7-1940), the street is in between the folds and difficult to see as a whole. Perhaps this was just a by product of the scale chosen by the cartographer, but it's seemingly inconsequential placing, in relation to contemporary tourist maps suggests not.

46

ORDER AND ORDINATION

- Or -

Real Fantasies Are Never As Good As Fantastic Realities.

149

By the time the Ministry of Defence (MOD) offices were completed in 1959, they had entered a

very different environment from their 1936 commission150. At the beginning of the war, the

concept of “Whitehall” was still in its formative stages, after the war, the MOD's architect, E.

Vincent Harris, surreptitiously became a pivotal figure in what London’s large scale

administration would look like from point on. 151 Harris was not the darling of the avant garde,

but neither was he incompetent or uncreative, he was, however, woefully dismissive to the

golden rule of symbolic power which is "Governments have a preoccupation with

personalities".152 After winning the RIBA medal in 1951, he stated: "Look, a lot of you people

here tonight don't like what I do and I don't like what a lot of you do, but I am proud and

honoured to receive the Royal Gold medal".153 This self-entitlement worked its way into the

architecture of the MOD by choosing to address only the design itself, rather than the street, or

any interaction with it. Yet in designing so, Harris allowed for a very democratic understanding

of administration, probably more so then what was being built elsewhere in Europe and

worldwide.

The Ministry of Defence is bulky, imposing, and above all practical. There is no symbolic

gesturing that was so popular at the time, no overly wrought drama:154 it's a building, nothing

more, nothing less. In its wake, Harris reinforced the precedent of a street full of buildings which

149

Image: Credited to the Author. Defence Images Online “Photography Archive” Last modified August 30th,

2013 http://www.defenceimages.mod.uk (August 30th, 2013) 150

Andrew Crompton "Interior Design Goes to War", AA Files (2010): 61 151

Andrew Crompton "Interior Design Goes to War", AA Files (2010): 60 152

Maarten A. Hajer, Authoritative Governance: Policy Making in the Age of Mediation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010) page 14 153

However it should also be noted that his words were not too scandalous, as only 18 people showed up. Andrew Crompton "Interior Design Goes to War", AA Files (2010): 60 -65 154

There is no symbolic gesturing that was so popular at the time, no overly wrought drama, (though there is the Edwardian leaning towards too much decoration).

47

are ignorable as individuals, powerful as a whole. Though not every architect wished to follow

this precedent.

IMAGINARY VISIONS

- Or-

I Thought It Would be Bigger.

Sir Leslie Martin's155 proposal for Whitehall from 1965 could not have been more different than

Harris' vision.156 The proposed plan was ambitious, somewhat irreverent and, almost predictably

for the time, an attempt to create “The Ideal” in administrative offices.157 According to the report,

the ziggurat-based superstructure was the end result of an eight phase process:

1. Build New Parliamentary Building, Underground Station & Shopping Concourse

2. 396,000 sq. ft. of offices built, Scotland Yard Readdressed

3. The Foreign Office is demolished, 462,000 sq. ft. of new offices built, new building to have

setback for Downing St.

4. Great George Street completely replaced, 522,000 sq. ft east-west and north-south galleries

established

5. All traffic on Whitehall put into a new tunnel in the river, Scotland Yard enclosed, entire area

to be made to be a pedestrian walkway

6. Demolish attached offices to allow for better view of Inigo Jones Banqueting House

7. New enclosing Building to surround Methodist Central Hall, demolition of Middlesex Guildhall,

terraces and viewing galleries installed

8. Hall of Residence for MP's (no internal plan provided), Public gardens improved in area of

current Victoria Gardens158 159

Upon presentation, Martin's plan had been a respectable success and was thoroughly backed

by Lord Mitchison in the House of Lords. "Planning will be set in hand as soon as possible" The

politician stated "In general, Government building in Whitehall will be planned in accord with the

general principles set out by Sir Leslie Martin."160 It was both a surprise, and yet somehow not,

when the plan was decidedly less popular in the House of Commons161 and quietly shelved in

155

Who coincidentally served as deputy architect to the London County Council 156

Then again Martin was entering a very different London for administration. The year prior, both the War Office and the Admiralty were being moved under the Ministry of Defence. 157

Adam Sharr, Stephen Thornton, Demolishing Whitehall: Leslie Martin Harold Wilson and the Architecture of White Heat, (Farnham, Surrey, United Kingdom: Ashgate Publishing, 2013) 158

Ibid. 159

“Adam Sharr at UCD School of Architecture - YouTube" Youtube Video, 59:10 posted by "ucdarchitecture" 6 Mar 2013, www.youtube.com/watch?v=E3d4AKu6lgo 160

Redevelopment of Whitehall and Parliament Square Areas, 1st sess. D HL Deb 19 July 1965 vol 268 cc476-80, Parliament of the United Kingdom 1965. Available online at: 160

"Redevelopment of White hall and Parliament Square Areas" Last modified August 13, 2013, http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/lords/1965/jul/19/redevelopment-of-white-hall-and, (Accessed Aug 13, 2013) 161

“All Commons debates on 3 Nov 1965” Last modified August 13, 2013, http://www.theyworkforyou.com/debates/?id=1965-11-03a.1037.0 (Accessed Aug 13, 2013)

48

1971.162 163 Eight years earlier, in 1963, The Labour Party was convinced that, again, technology

would be the meritocracy that would lead Britain into the “White Heat” of a new age.164

Economic slumps and general disillusionment crashed against Martin’s utopian ideals and

reminded the architect that Whitehall was actually much more about tradition than it ever was

about innovation. 165

166

162

The only remnant of this debate is arguably the Queen Elizabeth II conference centre, which had been waiting for Whitehall to resolve itself before construction. Simon Bradley and Nikolaus Pevsner, "London 6: Westminster" (The Buildings of England), Yale University Press, 2003, p. 272-3 163

L. Martin and C.D. Buchanan, 'Whitehall: A Plan for the National and Government Centre London: HMSO, 1965, from 163

Ian Rice, "Ziggurats for Bureaucrats": Sir Leslie Martin's Whitehall Plan, Architectural Research Quarterly, 2004. Vol. 8(3/4), pages 313-23 164

Harold Wilson Speech, at the Labour Party Conference, Oct. 1, 1963. Adam Sharr, Stephen Thornton, Demolishing Whitehall: Leslie Martin Harold Wilson and the Architecture of White Heat, (Farnham, Surrey, United Kingdom: Ashgate Publishing, 2013) 165

It should also be noted that Martin's plan has a distinct view about what is or is not important about architectural

history. Adam Sharr surmised his selections were based not so much on personal preference, but on a Pevsner-

indicator of what was or was not good about historicism. 165

"Adam Sharr at UCD School of Architecture - YouTube" YouTube Video, 59:10 posted by "ucdarchitecture" 6 Mar

2013, www.youtube.com/watch?v=E3d4AKu6lgo 166

Image: Adam Sharr, Stephen Thornton, Demolishing Whitehall: Leslie Martin Harold Wilson and the Architecture of White Heat, (Farnham, Surrey, United Kingdom: Ashgate Publishing, 2013)

49

THE ARCHITECTURE OF DEMOCRACY

- Or -

Gone Frizzon'

The Whitehall that survived, therefore, was Harris' Whitehall, one that is concerned about

architecture on an individual building scale rather than a larger whole or a connection with the

public. Each office is particular in its sensibilities but homogenous in its complexities. The

functional methods (that is what agencies go where) are surprisingly flexible in this plan,

programmatically speaking. Their universality creates a system that responds to a design

without glamour, or what Charles Jencks referred to in The Architecture of Democracy as

“Frizzon”.167 Jencks explains the term further by stating: "Clearly if we are to find an architecture

of democracy it will not be in a single style or set of buildings, nor will it be apparent at first

glance."168

In 1959 both Lewis Mumford and Nikolaus Pevsner were unsurprisingly against the idea of

buildings like the Ministry of Defence or “The Whitehall Monster”, in this latter's case,

specifically.169 Yet in 1987, 28 years after the MOD’s presentation, the distrusts of symbolic

power were found in more gestural architecture rather than neo-classical fortresses: "(mass-)

democratic architecture is often so bathetic; why is it constructed between bureaucracy and

bombast; such appalling archetypes as the pentagon and the un secretariat, Brasília and the

CIA building".170

171

Jencks’ argument focuses on the idea that real “democracy” is about anticipating change, and

creating aesthetic accessibility more than ceremonial action. So his choice of Brasília may

also be seen in conjunction with a seminal film of paranoid bureaucracy (which relished this kind

of overtly powerful design) from two years prior, Terry Gilliam's Brazil (1985).

167

Charles Jencks, The Architecture of Democracy: The Phoenix Municipal Government Center Design Competition, Volume 57 (Chichester, UK: Academy Group, 1987) Page 6 168

Ibid. Page 9 169

Andrew Crompton "Interior Design Goes to War", AA Files (2010): 60 170

Charles Jencks, The Architecture of Democracy: The Phoenix Municipal Government Center Design Competition, Volume 57 (Chichester, UK: Academy Group, 1987) Page 6 171

Image: Credited to the Author, inspired by an image from Alamy & Getty Images, respectively

50

172

Like a mix between Josef K in The Trial and Henry Chizinski from Post Office the main

character of Sam Lowry is both inside and outside the administrative system, but where the

other works are about being tragically and slowly grinded down, Brazil is sudden and darkly

comedic, especially in the inevitable victory of the heartless administration. Though in the film,

administration is inseparably linked to military power which Whitehall, as an architectural

concept, isn’t (despite the presence of the Horse Guards, The Admiralty Building and the MOD).

Instead Whitehall's architecture seeks to have power both ways: it is solid and unnoticeable on

the pedestrian level (with a few exceptions), and does not seek a singular memorable or iconic

structure, instead it presents itself as an entire street, rendering an entity both tangible and

imaginary. In comparison to its contemporaries or even Martin's super-structure, Whitehall is

democratic in its functionality within the system, but still fortress-like to the public. The

separation is intensely urban, created not from walls but by refusing to address its connection to

the street173. It may be argued that Whitehall is not for the public to visit174, but rather intended to

serve the public in a conceptual sense. Though to separate these ideas is to also separate

symbolic administration from functional administration.

172

Screenshot from: Brazil. Directed by Terry Gilliam. 1985. London, UK: Embassy International Pictures NV,

(Distributed by Universal Studios/ 20th C. Fox) 173

Something, coincidently, that Martin's plan did very well. 174

Especially true as the number of public restrooms border on near extinction.

51

IMMEDIATE LIGHT

- Or-

I’m in Love with a Strict Machine.175

Brazil, like most media depicting large scale administration is a fantasy. Having a centralized,

tyrannical and monumental center of administration is a utopian (or dystopian, depending on

your leaning) idea that has persisted in architectural thought for centuries. Piranesi, Soane,

Boullee, Neimeyer, even to some extent, Martin, all created fantasies of power which are still

studied and analyzed. Yet the “paper architecture” of these examples is where the quality lies.

Conceptually, they are just singular understandings of power looks like: a cartoon. Whitehall is

bureaucratic power which becomes symbolic, rather than the other way around. As an icon of

power, Whitehall is very much on the side of what Henry Russell Hitchcock defined in 1949 as

"The Architecture of Bureaucracy"176

"When the superficial appearance of modern architecture was more widely accepted...two sorts

of derivative work appeared...on the one hand there was all the worthy work of the younger men

who were following the bold leadership of the first masters of the 20s...on the other hand there

was the "pseudo-modern"...work whose designers sought cheap popularity through the strident

use of clichés."177

Much like the “strident use of clichés” that Hitchcock notes when criticising second rate, albeit

considered design, so the stereotypes of “faceless bureaucrats” are lumped, pejoratively

(though perhaps not intentionally so) into an association with Whitehall. A reference that F.W.G.

Benemy would attempt to refute in the 1967 edition of "Whitehall - Town Hall":

"Another criticism, almost a conventional point of view, of the administrative grade is that they

are out of touch with the mass of the people. They need the politicians to keep them in the right

lines. This may well have been true thirty years ago, say. Until very recently this grade was

recruited almost entirely from young men of the upper-middle classes, educated in the oldest,

most famous, and fashionable public school and either at Oxford or at Cambridge. They were

nurtured on games and on the classics...this is, of course, a distorted picture of to-day." 178

This simplification of bureaucracy is designed in such a way that, almost as one makes war-time

propaganda of an enemy, de-humanizes the figures of administration. That way their exchange

or removal is, much like the buildings that house them, unnoticeable. Given the urban quality of

Whitehall, that it is located between two tourist-heavy locations, the administrative architecture

still manages to create a completely separate culture. One that acts as a micro-environment to a

175

Goldfrapp, Strict Machine, Black Cherry © 2003 by Mute Music, 3:51

176 Granted in this case, he was speaking more about methodology than outcome.

177 Henry-Russell Hitchcock, "The Architecture of Bureaucracy and the Architecture of Genius", Architectural Review

(1947): 3-6 178

FWG Benemy, Whitehall Town-Hall (London: George G. Harrap & Co LTD. 1967) 148-149

52

specific code of ethics and understanding, which, in a removed sense, could be classified as a

ghetto. 179

180

The administrative ghetto is not much different from that of corporate office politics being

separate from public knowledge, but because of administration’s implied morality and cost,

there is a sense national ownership which deems secrecy unacceptable and makes a one-to-

one public interaction impossible.181 In the offices of Whitehall, there is no reason for a person to

be inside there without request and that relationship makes for an extremely awkward

interaction. Sennett maintained "when a bridge between stage and street arises, in response to

an audience, a public geography is born"182 but at Whitehall, there is no bridge. Just two figures

on either side of a river, shouting at each other, each one expecting too much.

179

Keller Easterling, Enduring Innocence: Global Architecture and Its Political Masquerades, (Cambridge MA:MIT Press, 2005 ) pages 68-72 180

Image: Credited to the Author, inspired by an image from the English National Archives website http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/records/research-guides/photographic-series.htm 181

For more on symbolic ownership vs. functional ownership please see the introduction to Charles Bukowski's 'Post Office' by Niall Griffiths. Charles Bukowski (introduction by Niall Griffiths), Post Office, (London: Random House 2011) 182

Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man: The Forces Eroding Public Life and Burdening the Modern Psyche with Roles it Cannot Perform (London: Penguin UK, 2003) page 14

53

IN CONTEXT

- Or-

Standard Issue Morality.

At this point, Administrative architecture finally engages with and distinguishes itself from its

fickle friend: Politics.

Where administrators are expected to be pure in intent, almost celibately so, politicians are

allowed to be extremely subjective, both compelling and trivial, equal parts socially deadly,

nostalgic and forgettable. As the philosopher and sociologist Hannah Arendt once pointed out,

"No one, as far as I know, has ever counted truthfulness among the political virtues"183 and

when studying central notions of power, it reminds viewers that the appearance of truthfulness

is far more convincing and cunning than any actual truthfulness. When considering this in

relation to the architecture, the question arises that since politics are so frivolous, what does it

matter to the buildings (and therefore the functional aspects of power) if their myths are overlaid

on top?

184

It doesn't, that is unless its banality becomes more insidious than innocuous.

For example, in Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem she explored this concept through the

lens of war criminal Adolf Eichmann. Through her research Arendt determined that the “Banality

of Evil” is what is so dangerous about modern life, particularly in Duties of the Law-Abiding

Citizen185. According to reports, Eichmann had cast himself as Pontius Pilate, doing his job not

because he liked it, but because it was his duty (a vast misinterpretation of Kant). Though after

183

Lewis P. Hinchman, Sandra Hinchman, Hannah Arendt: Critical Essays (New York: SUNY Press, 1994) 104 184

Image: Charles Jencks, The Architecture of Democracy: The Phoenix Municipal Government Center Design Competition, Volume 57 (Chichester, UK: Academy Group, 1987) Page 6 (Osbert Lancaster's 'A Cartoon History of Architecture) 184

Image: Charles Jencks, The Architecture of Democracy: The Phoenix Municipal Government Center Design Competition, Volume 57 (Chichester, UK: Academy Group, 1987) Page 6 (Osbert Lancaster's 'A Cartoon History of Architecture) 185

Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, (London: Penguin UK, 2006) page 145

54

months, years, eventually "he lost the need to feel anything at all.”186 When confronted on his

specific choices in dealing with the genocide labelled “The Jewish Problem” Eichmann claimed

the cruelties carried out were implied by Hitler's rhetoric having the “force of law” behind them,

so they did not need to be written down. However, as Arendt points out, this only further points

to his guilt. The huge amount paperwork that the holocaust produced was put in place

specifically to give it a non-centralized legality.187 When evil loses the quality of temptation of a

moral wall that is when it is at its most dangerous, just as propaganda is at its most dangerous

when it only comes from one source.

Rhetoric is an element of politics that in and of itself is fairly harmless, however is becomes truly

dangerous when it enters administrative policy. Further, when a breach in morality is found,

even just suspected, the public the outrage is immediate and changes civil servants from

guardians of righteousness to the gears of the "Whitehall Monster".188 Promises are the easiest

things in the world to break, but a paper-trail might as well be shackles. Though much like

another monster of public consciousness, that is Frankenstein's Monster,189 large scale

administration is a product of a vague human want (in this case of stability), and it is difficult to

blame the result when the system created it so specifically. As such, Whitehall is the physical

result of what happens when the actor and crowd are pushed to their extreme contexts. This

may also explain how the street understands security.

SECURITY BLANKET AND BLANKET SECURITY

-Or-

Hiding in Plain Sight

“Security” as it relates to symbolic administration, is a mix of fear and aloofness. Whitehall has

decided that rather than moving their operations almost outpost-like to the outskirts of cities still

choose to “hide in plain sight”. Whitehall’s ignorable presence, along with the massive number

of CCTV cameras, is arguably a more subtle kind of panopticon than the fantasies of power

which architects desire. While these visuals might encourage parties believing they are living in

an “administration of fear”, it is not the enemy one hopes for. "The administration of fear is on

both sides: it is an environment."190 CCTV, if regarded with suspicion, can and does feel like a

violation of liberties and, depending on political affiliation, is. Yet from a pragmatic stance, the

question of "the gaze" is called in, 191 and reminds that paranoia is ever self-aggrandizing.

As dismissive as it is, most people's lives, much like administrative architecture itself, are

considered to be generally too trivial for intensive study. So rather than an administration of fear,

it is more an administration of indifference, albeit one that, perhaps contradictory, wants to keep

the tape running. If administrative architecture teaches anything about the constant watch is that

186

Ibid. page 150 187

Ibid. page 151 188

This is what the Ministry of Defence building was pejoratively referred to as by Nicholas Pevsner. Andrew Crompton "Interior Design Goes to War", AA Files (2010): 60 189

Or if you check his paperwork, Adam Von Frankenstein 190

Paul Virilio, The Administration of Fear, (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007) page 19 191

Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic, (trans. Tavistock Publication) (Oxford: Routledge, 2012)

55

it is surprisingly easy to go unnoticed. "Security" in this sense then is not an issue of interaction,

but in how that interaction is expected and framed. To the administrator reading a form or the

guard watching a crowd through a video, ordinary wanderings are not exceptionally fruitful, only

the individual request matters, as it ever did. Rather than suspecting power is an all seeing,

never blinking eye, it should be seen more like Argus: a 100 eyes, but not all of them are open

at the same time.

For Whitehall, successful administrative architecture implies a power that denies overt artistic

implication and therefore, quite frankly, a target.192 The focus instead is the immortality of its

own bureaucracy. In this sense an empty shell is far more useful than ceremony of its exterior.

Which would explain why most of the London Metropolitan Archive's documents concerning

Whitehall do not have much to do with the rearranging of facades or entrances, (public and

noticeable changes of power) but have more to do with have to do with the installation of back

hallways, corridors and temporary construction.193 From a security standpoint, Whitehall's

architecture determines that if it is to be attacked in a real, devastating fashion, it will be from

the inside out rather than the outside in.

194

192

As it also seems to be somewhat oblivious to understandings of singular power which result only in spectacular ruins. 193

Whitehall Buildings Plans, 1930-1976, GLC/AR/BR/17/0033770, GLC/AR/BR/17/068190, GLC/AR/BR/06/055734, GLC/AR/BR/06/061977, GLC/AR/BR/34/004606/01, Whitehall Collection, London Metropolitan Archive

194

Image: Claude Lorrain, Mercury and Argus (17th C.), Dulwich Picture Gallery, London www.dulwichpicturegallery.org.uk

56

CONCLUSION

Symbolic administration, much like all symbolic power, does not actually fulfil its promises of

being a moral and architectural center for ideology, but perhaps the expectations that formed in

the 1930s were too lofty to begin with. Administration of this sort, more than other fields of office

or space construction are held to a standard that must meet the desires or fantasy, street

attachment, nationalism, propaganda and scale, all while maintaining itself as a nominally

functional element. Long-term administrative buildings understand symbolism is a deist moment

that can either be cherished or ignored, whatever the leaning implies. Life is short, art is long,

but the need for storage space is immortal. An extreme banality, an absurdity, but also an

undeniable truth of the contemporary world.

195

195

Image: Credited to the Author

57

SECTION IV: SEALED

"Law has no existence for itself; rather its essence lies,

from a certain perspective in the very life of men."196

- Friedrich Carl von Savigny

"Ordinary things contain the deepest mysteries." 197

- Robin Evans

"People respond, in short, to the great drama of the public scene. But in this drama, as it is set

before them and as they perceive it, is not identical with questions involving material interests

and the possession of power."198

- Richard Hofstadter

The connections between symbolic power and functional power in administrative architecture

are the small but not inconsequential reminders of societal training. By analysing this

phenomenon in its concentrate form, the effects of administrative architecture can inform the

best use of “public” space.

196

Friedrich Carl von Savigny, as quoted by Giorgio Agamben. 196

Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998) page 30 197

Robin Evans, Translations from Drawing to Building (Cambridge MA: MIT Press) page 56 (essay: Figures, Doors and Passages) 198

Richard Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style of American Politics, (New York: Random House LLC, 2012) Introduction

58

PAPER IN A PLASTIC AGE

- Or -

How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the Stamp.199

The language of administration, both architectural and otherwise has often been disregarded as

irrelevant because it does not fit with a convenient understanding of what power looks like.

Power is perceived as the grand scale of news reports, of trade negotiations, of celebrity gossip,

but these are symptoms of the public scene, not its material possession.200 They are not the

power which affects, not really. There are hundreds of everyday examples of this kind of power,

from the direction that traffic flows, to knocking on a door. Though one need only look in the mail

to find what the physical combination of symbolic power and functional power, that is real

power, in an everyday sense, looks like.

201

199

In his 1888 and 1889 portraits of Postman Joseph Roulin, Vincent Van Gogh put forth the image of a man who

has the sureness of self through the means of his office. As Simon Schama wrote, "Joseph Roulin [1889], salt of the

earth, solid republican and patriot, was only a postman, but Van Gogh's primary colour and arresting frontal pose

signalled grandeur and honesty and turned the public servant into a pillar of society, someone who wore his uniform

as if her were an admiral from Toulon." [Simon Schama, The Power of Art, (London: Random House, 2006) page

324] In the seriousness of the poses that Van Gogh chose, there is a sense, whether intentional or not, of the

ridiculous. 200

Richard Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style of American Politics, (New York: Random House LLC, 2012) Introduction 201

Image: Credited to Author

59

In Empire of Signs writer Roland Barthes explores a country of his own imagining (in this case a

version of Japan) and regards the smallest aspects of life as intensely significant. "The

miniature does not derive from the dimensional but from a kind of precision which the thing

observes in delimiting itself, stopping. Finishing."202 Barthes expands this strangeness to

uncover representational power: that it does not have power in itself, but as an annotation

towards function. "The streets of this city have no names. There is of course a written address,

but it only has postal value. It refers to a plan (by districts and blocks, in no way geometric).

Knowledge of which is accessible to the postman, but not the visitor."203 To Barthes204, the

postman is the translator between conceptual assignment and functional means; it determines

power as a function of imagination: it exists, particularly symbolically, where it is perceived to

be. If the postman is the human factor of such a power, then the stamp is its convenience.

205

202

Roland Barthes, Empire of Signs, (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1982) 43 203

Ibid. 33 204

And Van Gogh. 205

Image: Vincent Van Gogh, Portrait of Postman Roulin, 1888, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston from Simon Schama, The Power of Art, (London: Random House, 2006) page 324

60

Stamps and seals carry a combination of powers without being particularly noticed or feared. It

is merely a requirement to get from point A to point B with as little trouble as possible.206 When

something is marked “by order of ....” it becomes, almost magically, a concentrated form of the

power invested upon it and is, in a way, ridiculous. What does the queen care if a card is sent to

a grandmother? And yet, it is still, nominally, under her protection.207 Something that author Niall

Griffiths experienced firsthand during his work as a post office employee:

“When I fortuitously found a letter addressed to myself out of the many hundreds in the through

and suspected that it was an urgently-needed cheque and asked the boss if I could take it home

rather than wait the three days for it to be delivered, he looked at me as if I’d just asked him for

permission to expose myself to a nun. ‘How do I know it’s for you?’ ‘Because it’s got my name

on.’ ‘Could be for someone else with the same name.’ ‘What, at the same address?’ ‘How do I

know it’s your address?’ ‘Because on the form I filled in for you when I started here. Go and

check. I really need that money.’ ‘This is the ROYAL Mail. Until it goes through the letterbox it’s

the property of Her Majesty the Queen. Can’t let people take it willy nilly. Now get back to work

and put that letter on the belt.’ And so on. The envelope tsunamis kept coming. Tens of

thousands of letters each night. Scores of thousands. Every night.”208

Money is only a number on a screen and a stamp is just a sticky piece of paper, yet these are

the devices which create administrative training, training then reinforced by interactions with

administrative architectures209. In its representation, the methods of stamps and seals are

absurd, but in action, they are the product of an exact and accepted system.

The places of administration as a genesis for architectural thought are too often simply ignored,

allowing them to grow ever more obsolete and esoteric in the process. What should be

translated from them is a particular kind of interaction that their design provides. Administrative

architecture, like a stamp, has no power in and of itself. But it imagines a kind of power that can

be useful and human (stemming from their constant use) rather that the mask of inefficiency and

paranoia which concepts of bureaucracy induce. To abandon the tangibility of this power is to

sever the individual from acknowledging the systems which they are, knowingly or unknowingly,

a part of: it is to give up the hope of having truly public space, most noticeably on the urban

scale.210

206

However, unlike stamps, which seem humble and necessary, administration, particularly on a large scale, is more cumbersome. 207

As are, apparently, groceries and the swans in Hyde Park. 208

Charles Bukowski's 'Post Office' by Niall Griffiths. Charles Bukowski (introduction by Niall Griffiths), Post Office, (London: Random House 2011) pages v-vi 209

Council buildings and Whitehall as the structures of functional and symbolic power. 210

"Cities have been and still are on the key foundations for effective and legitimate government in the modern states". Paul Hirst (editor), Space and Power: Politics, War and Architecture (Foucault and Architecture - Chapter 8) (Oxford: Polity, 2005) page 7

61

CLEAR INTENT

- Or -

The Passive Aggressive is Still a Kind of Aggression.

Administrative architecture in relation to the city is a one of implied mutual expectation: a

relationship of tenuous understandings. Precedent indicates that administrative buildings are

obligated to provide a place of being, but then in turn request isolation. The public, meanwhile,

feels disconnected and foreign to the places meant to assist them, as there is no familiarity. The

acceptance is similar to Tacitus' assertion that too often: "They make a desert and call it peace".

The lack of communication on this front therefore prompts a misplaced conversation about how

to elevate “public space”, which is usually taken as shorthand for public parks. This fetishism of

public space is not malicious or mean-spirited, but it does foster an imaginary sense of

“community”.

The word “community” much like the word “architecture” sounds like a balm for social issues,

something that, once implemented, will just make everything better. In reality, what the frequent

use of “community” ignores is that there is already a kind of community in cities; it's just not an

idealized, craft-selling, farmer's-market kind of community. The kind of public space that

administration creates is not something that necessarily defines a city, but it is also one of its

underutilized and inescapable needs. When the conversation does find itself in the unfamiliar

territories of public space, that is administration, the results too often do not fit the requirement.

Confronted with the opportunity to redefine a space, the best choice seems to be more

nothingness, a great imaginary complex, or even worse, a kind of temporary, amateur

intervention which has all the insufferable qualities of forced interaction. The intent being to

push the boundaries of civil interaction and get the viewer outside of his or her comfort zone, but

in reality, is just alienating.

Foucault illustrates that such designs are indicative of a kind of Tabula Rasa which serves as a

statement of withholding, rather than an invitation. The nothingness of the Tabula Rasa

becomes awkward and intimidating unless the user is at the scale of a crowd: the blankness

“classifying the architecture as me & it.”211 212

CONCLUSION

Apathy and acceptance are strong factors in administrative architecture's invisibility and

sometimes potency. Its effects float outside of (or insidiously infiltrate, depending on political

leaning) the boundaries of wall and into the fabric of daily life, whether intentionally or not.

These are the moments, small and large, where the subject and the stranger, stranger still,

interact through a sheer gauze of what has been deemed “bureaucracy”. All of it done within a

specific, irritating and inescapable language of instantly recognizable shapes and forms.

211

Paul Hirst (editor), Space and Power: Politics, War and Architecture (Foucault and Architecture - Chapter 8) (Oxford: Polity, 2005) page 7 212

The empty spaces of symbolic power can therefore be ineffective, aside from service as backdrop for political affiliation: the architectural language being one of shouting poetry rather than a working hum.

62

So the question of the stamp is then: how can one have a public-accessed space without

clichés?213 If disseminated administrative space chooses to overcome the fear of actually

interacting with the public, let alone the price tag, then it might have potential in fostering an old,

but still required form of open interaction. If symbolic architecture is seen not as a head, but just

another body part of the same animal, then it might lose the condensation and absurdity of the

visual language. Administration lacks the snarky alternativeness of fads, because it is after all,

the ultimate in establishment. It is an architecture that bureaucratic societies have already been

trained to interact with, so its use as architectural centerpiece makes sense. In accepting the

administrative as a necessary public space, both the servant and the served enter into a

relationship of mutual need, of possible growth, with an understanding of flaws. It may not be as

romantic as grandiose gestures, but is what we are.

214

213

Paul Hirst (editor), Space and Power: Politics, War and Architecture (Foucault and Architecture - Chapter 8) (Oxford: Polity, 2005) 7-30 214

Image: Credited to the Author. Based on an origami design from Patch First Company. Patchfirst Shop Website. “Origami Flower” Wordpress.com. Last Modified December 27

th, 2009.

http://patchfirstshop.wordpress.com/2009/12/27/origami-flower/) (September 1st, 2013)

63

Afterword:

Administrative architecture is a lot of things: boring, feared, hated, loved, isolated, involved. It is

a mixture of faith and disbelief disguised as a piece of paperwork and a squeaky office

chair. The banality and acceptance of administration is who we, as a contemporary society,

are. If it is to remain accepted, then acknowledgement is the requirement. If it is to be rejected,

then the shape of the monster must be recognized before it can be killed. However, to ignore

administration as a typology, as a method of design, is to subject oneself to someone else’s

rules.

One turns to face the mirror and finds that it is not ugly, but altered. Time passed and nothing

was ever done about it. The clock and the body, once equals, have now seen who is stronger

and the other was left wanting.

64

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65

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Cox, Montagu H. and Philip Norman (editors), "Publishing and Survey committees," Survey of London: volume 13: St Margaret, Westminster, part II: Whitehall I, British History Online, Accessed Aug 12, 2013. http://www.british-history.ac.uk/report.aspx?compid=67770 Kennicott, Philip. "Montpelier train station preserves the architecture of segregation" The Washington Post, February 28, 2010, Accessed Aug 12, 2013. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/02/25/AR2010022505232.html Montgomery, Darrow May. 21, 2010 at 12:36 pm “Photos: DMV, the Line Dance” The City Desk Blog Sponsored by Washington City Paper, May. 21, 2010,http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/blogs/citydesk/2010/05/21/photos-dmv-the-line-dance/ Nichols, Dean. "The Faded Grandeur of London’s Old Town Halls" Londonist, 30 April 2013, Accessed Aug 12, 2013. http://londonist.com/2013/04/the-faded-grandeur-of-londons-old-town-halls.php?showpage=18#gallery-1 Rogers, Simon. "London Blitz 1940: the first day's bomb attacks listed in full" The Guardian Online, September 6, 2010, Accessed August 13, 2013,http://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2010/sep/06/london-blitz-bomb-map-september-7-1940

Journal Articles "Property Ads", Investors Chronicle, Volume 67. (1984) page 28 Crompton, Andrew. "Interior Design Goes to War", AA Files, Volume 60. (2010) Hitchcock, Henry-Russell. "The Architecture of Bureaucracy and the Architecture of Genius", Architectural Review, 1947. pages 3-6 Rice, Ian. "Ziggurats for Bureaucrats: Sir Leslie Martin's Whitehall Plan", Architectural Research Quarterly, 2004. Vol. 8(3/4) pages 313-23

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Websites 10 Downing Street Website. "History" Gov.UK Last Modified August 13th, 2013. https://www.gov.uk/government/history/10-downing-street (August 30th, 2013) BBC News London. "New Metropolitan Police HQ announced as Curtis Green Building" BBC news, Last modified 20th, May 2013. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-22593003 (August 30th, 2013) British History Online. “Survey of London 1930 Image” Last modified August 11th, 2013 http://www.british-history.ac.uk/image.aspx?compid=67920&filename=figure0747-120.jpg&pubid=747 (August 30th, 2013) Camden Council. "New Building at Pancras Square" Last Modified August 11th , 2013 http://www.camden.gov.uk/ccm/navigation/council-and-democracy/camden-plan/strategies-and-partnerships/new-building-at-pancras-square/;jsessionid=BB08392383A37F0B685BFA7571F1706D (August 30th, 2013) Camden Council. "Plans and Policies, Frequently Asked Questions" Last modified August 11th, 2013 http://www.camden.gov.uk/ccm/content/council-and-democracy/plans-and-policies/camden-strategies-%26-partnerships/frequently-asked-questions.en (August 30th, 2013) Defence Images Online “Photography Archive” Last modified August 30th, 2013 http://www.defenceimages.mod.uk (August 30th, 2013) English National Archives Online. “Photograph Log” Last modified August 30th, 2013 http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/records/research-guides/photographic-series.htm (August 30th, 2013) Government Accountability Office, US Government. “Chapter 6, Elmer B. Staats: Broadening GAO's work, 1966-1981” last modified August, 30th, 2013. http://www.gao.gov/about/history/articles/working-for-good-government/06-gaohistory_1966-1981.html (August 30th, 2013) Imperial War Museum Official Website. "The Cenotaph: Original Design for the Structure in Whitehall" Last modified August 13th, 2013. http://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/17077 (August 30th, 2013) London Council. “Council Map” Last Modified August 13th, 2013 http://www.londoncouncils.gov.uk/images/londoncouncils/boroughmap.gif?height=398&width=500 (August 30th, 2013) Smithsonian Institute. "The Waiting Room, George Tooker" last modified August, 12th, 2009. http://americanart.si.edu/collections/search/artwork/?id=24195 (August 30th, 2013) United Nations. "Demand for Internet and mobile services rising due to lower prices" last modified February 27th , 2012, http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=44242&Cr=broadband&Cr1=#.Ugn1XOVSDzo (August 30th, 2013)

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Legislation Legislation.Gov "London Government act of 1963, chapter 33, section 1" Last Modified August 13, 2013 http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1963/33/contents Milbank Systems."Redevelopment of White hall and Parliament Square Areas" Last modified August 13, 2013, http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/lords/1965/jul/19/redevelopment-of-white-hall-and Martin, Leslie and C.D. Buchanan, "Whitehall: A Plan for the National and Government Centre" London: HMSO, 1965 They Work for You “Redevelopment of Whitehall and Parliament Square Areas, 1st sess. D HL Deb 19 July 1965 vol 268 cc476-80, Parliament of the United Kingdom 1965” Last modified August 13, 2013, http://www.theyworkforyou.com/debates/?id=1965-19-07a.1057.0 (Accessed Aug 13, 2013) They Work for You “All Commons debates on 3 Nov 1965” Last modified August 13, 2013, http://www.theyworkforyou.com/debates/?id=1965-11-03a.1037.0 (Accessed Aug 13, 2013)

Paintings Lorrain, Claude Mercury and Argus, 17th C., (Dulwich Picture Gallery, London) www.mfa.org Tooker, George The Government Bureau, oil on canvas, 1956 (Metropolitan Museum of Art) www.metmuseum.org Tooker, George. The Waiting Room, oil on canvas 1959(Smithsonian American Art Museum) http://americanart.si.edu/ Van Gogh, Vincent Portrait of Postman Roulin, 1888, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston www.dulwichpicturegallery.org.uk

Film Brazil. Directed by Terry Gilliam. 1985. London, UK: Embassy International Pictures NV, (Distributed by Universal Studios/ 20th C. Fox)

Online Videos "Adam Sharr at UCD School of Architecture - YouTube" Youtube Video, 59:10 posted by "ucdarchitecture" 6 Mar 2013, www.youtube.com/watch?v=E3d4AKu6lgo

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Archive Sources

Cenotaph Concept Drawing, 1919, Art.IWM ART 3991 b, Gift from the Artist (Sir Edwin Lutyens) (PRA), Imperial War Museum Archives

L. Martin and C.D. Buchanan, 'Whitehall: A Plan for the National and Government Centre London: HMSO, 1965. The British Library

Plan of 32 & 33 Charing Cross, March 5th, 1931, GLC/AR/BR/17/0033770Whitehall Collection, London Metropolitan Archive

Plan of Finsbury Town Hall, 1897, AR/BR/22/012578, 436-461, Finsbury Collection, London Metropolitan Archives Plan of Islington Town Hall, 1925 (reproduction from 1965), GLC/AR/BR/002317, 421-435, Islington Collection, London Metropolitan Archives

Whitehall Buildings Plans, 1930-1976, GLC/AR/BR/17/0033770, GLC/AR/BR/17/068190, GLC/AR/BR/06/055734, GLC/AR/BR/06/061977, GLC/AR/BR/34/004606/01, Whitehall Collection, London Metropolitan Archive

Songs

Paul Simon, The Afterlife, So Beautiful or So What © 2011 by Hear Music, 3:40

Goldfrapp, Strict Machine, Black Cherry © 2003 by Mute Music, 3:51

Additional Sources

Cavalcanti, Lauro. When Brazil Was Modern: A Guide to Architecture 1928-1960. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Architectural Press, 2003 Conrads, Ulrich. Programs and Manifestoes on 20th-century Architecture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 197

Deleuze, Gilles and Fe l ix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus. London: Continuum, 2004. (essays on Capitalism and Schizophrenia and Control Society) Elden, Stuart. Terror and Territory: The Spatial Extent of Sovereignty. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2009 Foucault, Michel. Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Knopf. New York: Doubleday, 2012 Gellner, Ernest. Nation and Nationalism. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008

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Hardt, Michael & Antonio Negri. Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire. New York: Penguin Books, 2005 Hejduk, John. The Mask of Medusa. New York: Rizzoli, 1985 Kant, Immanuel. Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals. London: Broadview Press, 2005. Klanten, Robert and Sven Ehmann, Sofia Borges, Lukas Feireiss, Matthias Hübner. Going Public: Public Architecture, Urbanism and Interventions. London: Prestel Publication, 2012 Koselleck, Reinhart. Critique and Crisis: Enlightenment and the Pathogenesis of Modern Society. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000 Lapp, Ralph. Why Must We Hide. Whitefish, MT: Kessinger Publishing, 2010 Mitchell, W.J.T. (editor) Art and the Public Sphere. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992 Mitchell, W.J.T. Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995 Plate, Brent S. Walter Benjamin, Religion And Aesthetics: Rethinking Religion Through The Arts. London: Routledge Chapman & Hall, 2005 Rossi, Aldo. Architecture and the City. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1984. Spieker, Sven. Big Archive: Art from Bureaucracy Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008 Sutcliffe, Anthony. Metropolis 1890-1940. London: Mansell, 1984 Wacquant, Loic. Designing Urban Seclusion in the Twenty-First Century. Perspecta: The Yale Architectural Journal 43: 165-178. 2010 Waterman, Robert H. Adhocracy: The Power to Change. London: W.W. Norton, 1993

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Image Sources:

(Footnote 18) Image: Credited to the Author.

(Footnote 30) Image: Tooker, George The Waiting Room, oil on canvas 1959(Smithsonian American Art Museum) http://americanart.si.edu/

(Footnote 43) Image: Credited to the Author.

(Footnote 47) Image: Credited to the Author.

(Footnote 67) Image: Tooker, George The Government Bureau, oil on canvas, 1956 (Metropolitan Museum of Art) www.metmuseum.org

(Footnote 76) Image: Credited to the Author. Inspired by Darrow Montgomery, May. 21, 2010 at 12:36 pm “Photos: DMV, the Line Dance” The City Desk Blog Sponsored by Washington City Paper, May. 21, 2010, http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/blogs/citydesk/2010/05/21/photos-dmv-the-line-dance/

(Footnote 77) Image: Credited to the Author. Inspired by Government Accountability Office, US Government “Chapter 6, Elmer B. Staats: Broadening GAO's work, 1966-1981” last modified August, 30th, 2013.

(Footnote 80) Image: Credited to the Author. Inspired by Darrow Montgomery, May. 21, 2010 at 12:36 pm “Photos: DMV, the Line Dance” The City Desk Blog Sponsored by Washington City Paper, May. 21, 2010, http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/blogs/citydesk/2010/05/21/photos-dmv-the-line-dance/

(Footnote 84) Image: Credited to the Author. Inspired by Dan Carrier, 7 February, 2013 “PROPERTY: Campaigners fear building on site of council’s annexe could put historic squares in the shade” The Camden New Journal 7 February, 2013 http://www.camdennewjournal.com/news/2013/feb/property-campaigners-fear-building-site-council%E2%80%99s-annexe-could-put-historic-squares-sh

(Footnote 91) Image(s): Shoreditch Town Hall, Bermondsey Town Hall, Deptford Town Hall. - Courtesy of the Author. Inspired by Dean Nichols "The Faded Grandeur Of London’s Old Town Halls" Londonist, 30 April 2013, http://londonist.com/2013/04/the-faded-grandeur-of-londons-old-town-halls.php?showpage=18#gallery-1 (Accessed Aug 12, 2013)

(Footnote 93) Image: Finsbury Town Hall. - Courtesy of the Author. Inspired by Dean Nichols "The Faded Grandeur Of London’s Old Town Halls" Londonist, 30 April 2013, http://londonist.com/2013/04/the-faded-grandeur-of-londons-old-town-halls.php?showpage=18#gallery-1 (Accessed Aug 12, 2013)

(Footnote 97) Image: Plan of Finsbury Town Hall, 1897, AR/BR/22/012578 436-461, Finsbury Collection London Metropolitan Archives

(Footnote 98) Image: Old Westminster Town Hall - Courtesy of the Author. Inspired by Dean Nichols "The Faded Grandeur Of London’s Old Town Halls" Londonist, 30 April 2013, http://londonist.com/2013/04/the-faded-grandeur-of-londons-old-town-halls.php?showpage=18#gallery-1 (Accessed Aug 12, 2013)

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(Footnote 100) Image: Plan of Islington Town Hall, 1925 (reproduction from 1965), GLC/AR/BR/002317, 421-435, Islington Collection, London Metropolitan Archives

(Footnote 104) Image: Credited to the Author.

(Footnote 107) Image: Dean Nichols "The Faded Grandeur Of London’s Old Town Halls" Londonist, 30 April 2013, http://londonist.com/2013/04/the-faded-grandeur-of-londons-old-town-halls.php?showpage=18#gallery-1 (Accessed Aug 12, 2013)

(Footnote 107) Image: London Councils “Council Map” Last Modified August 13, 2013 http://www.londoncouncils.gov.uk/images/londoncouncils/boroughmap.gif?height=398&width=500

(Footnote 117) Image: Camden Council "New Building at Pancras Square" Camden.gov, August 11, 2013 http://www.camden.gov.uk/ccm/navigation/council-and-democracy/camden-plan/strategies-and-partnerships/new-building-at-pancras-square/;jsessionid=BB08392383A37F0B685BFA7571F1706D (Accessed Aug 12, 2013)

(Footnote 119) Image: Camden Council "New Building at Pancras Square" Camden.gov, August 11, 2013 http://www.camden.gov.uk/ccm/navigation/council-and-democracy/camden-plan/strategies-and-partnerships/new-building-at-pancras-square/;jsessionid=BB08392383A37F0B685BFA7571F1706D (Accessed Aug 12, 2013)

(Footnote 123) Image: Credited to Author

(Footnote 127) Image: Credited to Author, inspired by a photograph from London-Based Photographer Chris Young/PA

(Footnote 130) Image: Plan of Whitehall in 1894 - Survey of London http://www.british-history.ac.uk/image.aspx?compid=67920&filename=figure0747-120.jpg&pubid=747. Plan of Whitehall in 2013 created by Author, modelled on information from "Google Maps)

(Footnote 137) Image: Cenotaph Concept Drawing, 1919, Art.IWM ART 3991 b, Gift from the Artist (Sir Edwin Lutyens) (PRA), Imperial War Museum Archives

(Footnote 142) Image: Plan of 32 & 33 Charing Cross, March 5th, 1931, GLC/AR/BR/17/0033770Whitehall Collection, London Metropolitan Archive

(Footnote 149) Image: Credited to the Author. Defence Images Online “Photography Archive” Last modified August 30th, 2013 http://www.defenceimages.mod.uk (August 30th, 2013)

(Footnote 166) Image: Adam Sharr, Stephen Thornton, Demolishing Whitehall: Leslie Martin Harold Wilson and the Architecture of White Heat, (Farnham, Surrey, United Kingdom: Ashgate Publishing, 2013)

(Footnote 171) Image: Credited to the Author, inspired by an image from Alamy & Getty Images, respectively

(Footnote 172) Screenshot from: Brazil. Directed by Terry Gilliam. 1985. London, UK: Embassy International Pictures NV, (Distributed by Universal Studios/ 20th C. Fox)

(Footnote 180) Image: Credited to the Author, inspired by an image from the English National Archives website http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/records/research-guides/photographic-series.htm

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(Footnote 184) Image: Charles Jencks, The Architecture of Democracy: The Phoenix Municipal Government Center Design Competition, Volume 57 (Chichester, UK: Academy Group, 1987) Page 6 (Osbert Lancaster's 'A Cartoon History of Architecture) (Footnote 194) Image: Claude Lorrain, Mercury and Argus (17th C.), Dulwich Picture Gallery, London www.dulwichpicturegallery.org.uk

(Footnote 195) Image: Credited to the Author.

(Footnote 201) Image: Credited to the Author.

(Footnote 205) Image: Vincent Van Gogh, Portrait of Postman Roulin, 1888, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston from Simon Schama, The Power of Art, (London: Random House, 2006) page 324

(Footnote 214) Image: Credited to the Author. Based on an origami design from Patch First Company. Patchfirst Shop Website. “Origami Flower” Wordpress.com. Last Modified December 27th, 2009. http://patchfirstshop.wordpress.com/2009/12/27/origami-flower/) (September 1st, 2013)