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Liberation from work is an old desire. Today, however, when
technological advancements bring us closer to that possibility, we
start to witness the dark aspects of this idea. As a testing ground
for new forms of labor and technology, the Netherlands allows us to
evaluate those trajectories and the contemporary complexities of a
life without work. Nonetheless, by putting the body at the center
of this relationship, this project subtly reminds us we should
still aim to counter the sadly famous slogan “work sets you
free.”
T he Netherlands is, arguably, a testing ground where the future
of labor has been and continues to be reimagined.1 Meticulously
shaped and designed, its landscape is the result of centuries of
human-machine enterprises. So is its organization of society.
Stressed in the ascetic rationalism of Calvinism, and still
maintaining an exalted position in contemporary culture,
an emphasis on work and discipline over leisure also
manifests in its architecture, from the scale of the territory to
that of the bed.
The flat horizon, managed and protected by flood control
systems, and the regularity of land lots is reinforced by that of
the greenhouses that fill them; enclosures where the productivity
of the ground is controlled and maximized by automated technologies
(Figs. 1 , 2). Inside these “new Gardens of Eden,” as coined by
amo, sweet tomato plants grow, assisted by climate control,
artificial lighting, and water and nutrient distribution systems.
They are unrestricted by exterior conditions, their immediate
surroundings, and soon, human labor.
KeywordsFreedom
Idea
Critique
Processes
Design
Work, body, Leisure
Dutch Pavilion at the Venice Biennale 2018
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1 2
FIG 1 Distribuidores de Foodora en el Vondelpark, Ámsterdam,
2018. / Foodora deliverers in the Vondelpark, Amsterdam, 2018. ©
Johannes Schwartz
FIG 2 Koppert Cress. © Jan van Berkel
#OfficeThese flat, climate-controlled interior spaces seem to
offer endless possibilities for experimentation outside of the
greenhouse typology as well. The flexible office, and its ideology,
has become a landscape of long shared tables and open office spaces
where workers no longer have a reserved seat, but rather reinvent
their personal workspace every morning. Assisting these
ever-changing communal spaces, walls of lockers present the
systemic counter image of individualized, closed worlds for the
administration of private identities and belongings (Fig. 3).
Populating factories, storage facilities, co-working spaces, as
well as the leisure-oriented architecture of the changing room, the
locker facilitates the nomadic and temporal reinvention of space,
and that of the bodies that inhabit it. For the locker is an
interface between the laboring and the non-laboring self, if any
distinction between the one and the other remains today.
marina otero-verzierDirector of Research Het Nieuwe Instituut,
Netherlands
Venecia, Italia
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#Playground Artist Constant Nieuwenhuys attempted to resolve the
dichotomy between work and leisure. In his seminal project New
Babylon (1956-74) – an architectural paradigm of free space
and time afforded by automation – society devotes its energy to
creativity and play, including the design individuals’ own
environments. By robotizing labor, Constant demanded the right
to not labor. The interior of New Babylon is
thus conceived as an architecture for a free and creative way of
life. Its inhabitants, liberated from the obligation to be useful,
have complete disposal of their time. In New
Babylon there is no leisure time. Instead all time is play.
Constant’s proposal for an alternative architecture and an
alternative society in which human labor is rendered superfluous –
architecture historian and theorist Mark Wigley points out –
visualized the imminent post-labor world: a world in which everyone
is an architect.
And yet, as Constant’s oeuvre evolved, his optimistic vision on
the possibilities and pleasures of automated labor gradually gave
way to a more conflictual perspective. Violence would not be
eradicated by the new technological order, mobilized to satisfy
society’s immediate needs; rather, it would reveal itself to be an
intrinsic part of such an order’s processes and aims. As Wigley
(1998) puts it, “pleasure becomes painful, or pain becomes
pleasurable, again”. If, following Wigley’s reading of New
Babylon, architecture was not labor and the world beyond labor is
all architecture, Constant not only envisioned “the end of the
architect and architecture as we know it,” but also acknowledged
the inevitably violent and conflictual nature of its practice.
#Harbor More than thirty years later, the architecture of full
automation is currently being implemented across agricultural
clusters in the Netherlands and in cities like Rotterdam, from the
self-managed logistical infrastructures of its port to the logic
and relations that define its physical and social landscape. As
described in the research project Automated Landscapes, the
FIG 3 oma, Timmerhuis, Rotterdam, 2015. © Sebastian van
Damme
FIG 4 aPm Terminal, Maasvlakte, nl. © Kees Torn (magleBy maersk
& mataDor 3), Creative Commons
3 4
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logistical infrastructure of the new, fully-automated aPm
container terminal in the port of Rotterdam’s Maasvlakte ii (Fig.
4) – where self-driving vehicles, automated cranes, and diverse
interfaces maximize the handling of containers with unprecedented
performance and productivity co-exist with the architectures of
port workers strikes and low-income neighborhood redevelopment
projects. It is in these spaces where the architecture of Johan
Huizinga’s homo ludens is being reenacted and reimagined.
Yet far from being the basis of a free and creative way of life as
envisioned by Constant, automation does not necessarily lead to a
desired retirement for many workers.
#Bed The domestic space is not exempt from labor’s sprawl. The
bed, in the research of architecture historian and theorist Beatriz
Colomina, is rendered as a unique horizontal architecture in the
age of social media, a contemporary workspace transforming labor. A
scattered, pillowy office from which professionals regularly work,
assisted by communication technologies and a growing digital
infrastructure.
The clear demarcation of work and leisure time – between
domestic space and the space of the officeor the factory – is thus
no longer a prerequisite for apost-industrial society that is
enmeshed in pervasivedigital infrastructure. Yet as architects and
scholars PierVittorio Aureli and Maria Shéhérazade Giudici argue
intheir account of the place and form of work and leisurewithin
ancient Greek and Roman domestic spaces, thisdialectic of labor
and otium did not result in a socialmodel in which the
house functioned as the sole realmof leisure and reproduction.
Rather, the obligations ofmaterial life and the pursuit of doing
nothing coexisted.“Reproduction, as feminism teaches us,” write
Aureli andGiudici, “is not leisure; and work cannot be kept out
ofthe house” (Aureli & Giudicci, 2018). And the bed –
asColomina argues while considering the bed as a site forprotest,
work, and production – becomes a ‘fucktory.’
FIG 5 Lida Licht-Lankelma, c. 1960. Modelo a escala de figura
humana. / Scale modelof the human figure. © Collection Het Nieuwe
Instituut, Rotterdam
FIG 6 The Door of No Return. Isla Gorée / Gorée Island, Senegal,
2004. © Lela Jefferson Fagan
5 6
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#Casilleros#Locker Room
#Puerta#Door
#Granja#Farm
#Oficina#O�ce
#Simulación#Simulation
#Cama#Bed
#Campo de juego#Playground
#Door This architecture of interior, exterior, flexible offices,
locker spaces, containers, control rooms, and beds through which
bodies are categorized, defined, and transformed, has a door. In
her research on the Door(s) of No Return, a symbol of the
Trans-Atlantic slave trade, Amal Alhaag analyzes the historical
significance and implications for descendants of enslaved Africans.
The Door(s) are a particular architecture for the brutal
displacement, disposal, and transformation of bodies, languages,
identities, belonging. The space between the Door(s) and the ocean
signs the violence that precipitated the forced movements of the
enslaved, and those still unfolding of the migrant and refugee. Yet
the Door(s), or rather the threshold between being and no/being,
is, according to Alhaag, also a site of science fiction. A space
for acts of refusal. For the fight for a non-exploitative,
non-discriminatory, non-racist world.
This quest for freedom, and for a non-exploitative world,
cultural critic Egbert Alejandro Martina argues, “might mean the
end of work itself.” Martina charts the connection between the
survival of the Dutch colonial project and the introduction of the
waged labor system. According to his account, the access to freedom
was dependent on the introduction of the formerly enslaved in a new
system of waged labor, a system that would prevent, as alleged in
the legislative sessions pertaining to the abolition of slavery,
that Black people would “fail as ‘free citizens’ because they
lacked a proper incentive to work,” and that “their main idea of
freedom is the right to do nothing” (Martina, 2018).
FIG 7 Work, Body, Leisure. Planta pabellón / Pavililion floor
planRietveld Pavilion Venice Biennale© Studio Raphaël CoutinE. / S.
1: 200
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Notas / Notes
1 This text has been published in: Marina Otero-Verzier (ed.),
Work, Body, Leisure, Rotterdam, Berlin: Het Nieuwe Instituut, Hatje
Cantz Verlag GmbH, 2018. Special thanks to: Floris Alkemade, Aslı
Çiçek, Claire Cichy, Martijn Coeveld, Linde Dorenbosch, Em’kal
Eyongakpa, Gabriella Fiorentini, Flora van Gaalen, Syb Groeneveld,
Ester de Groot, Behrang Mousavi, Trudy Nieuwenhuys van der Horst,
Kim van der Horst, Tess Jungblut, Ippolito Pestellini Laparelli, Ed
van Minnen, Judith Öfner, Frida Orupabo, André de Raadt, Angela
Rui, Jouke Schaap, Lara Schrijver, Johannes Schwartz, Willem
Schinkel, Maarten Tas, Herman Verkerk, Floris Vos, Nelleke de
Vries, Madelon Vriesendorp, Francien van Westrenen, Annemarie de
Wildt, Marije Wilkes.
Bibliografía / Bibliography
auReli, Pier Vittorio; GiuDici, Maria Shéhézade. «The Form
of
Otium: Labor and Leisure in Ancient Greek and Roman Domestic
Space». En: Marina Otero-Verzier (ed.), Work, Body, Leisure,
Rotterdam, Berlín: Het Nieuwe Instituut, Hatje Cantz Verlag
GmbH, 2018.
m aRtiNa, Egbert Alejandro. «The Abolition to Come». En:
Marina
Otero-Verzier (ed.), Work, Body, Leisure, Rotterdam, Berlín:
Het
Nieuwe Instituut, Hatje Cantz Verlag GmbH, 2018.
WiGley, Mark. Constant’s New Babylon, The Hyper Architecture of
Desire.
Rotterdam: Uitgeverij, 1998.
A society liberated from the bondage of labor was, nevertheless,
envisioned in New Babylon’s initial proposal to inhabit a
space where there are no windows, rooms, furniture, or storage; no
greenhouses, offices, beds, or lockers; and perhaps most
importantly, no doors. It was, nevertheless, an architecture
serving a hegemonic order, founded on the exploitation and
invisibility of working bodies, conceived of as automated machines.
Would New Babylon be possible without the work of the
other?
By reflecting on this spectrum of spaces and theoretical
viewpoints, Work, Body, Leisure seeks to foster new forms
of creativity and responsibility within the architectural field in
response to emerging technologies of automation, a domain of
research and innovation that still lacks a critical spatial
perspective. The project aims to open a discussion about this
imminent future and the technological regimes that make it possible
and, ultimately, to explore our agency and ability to accept or
challenge it. ARQ
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FIG 8-9 Casilleros / Locker room Rietveld Pavilion Venice
Biennale.
FIG 10 Sala cama / Bed room Rietveld Pavilion Venice
Biennale.
FIG 11 Casilleros / Locker room Rietveld Pavilion Venice
Biennale.
FIG 12 Sala campo de juego / Playground roomRietveld Pavilion
Venice Biennale.
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Marina Otero-Verzier
Architect (Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, etsam, Spain,
2008), M.S in Critical, Curatorial and Conceptual Practices in
Architecture (Columbia University, gsaPP, u.s. , 2013), PhD in
Theory of Architectural Design (Universidad Politécnica de Madrid,
etsam, Spain, 2016). Has been awarded the Feature Grant, Design
Trust Hong Kong (2017); FaD Prize, Thought and Criticism, (2017);
Grant Programme for Architecture, The Creative Industries Fund nl
(2015); Communications Award, Fundación Arquia (2014) and Graham
Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts (2017, 2015). Her
recent works include Steve Bannon: A Propaganda Retrospective by
Jonas Staal (2018) and After Belonging, Oslo Architecture Triennale
2016. Her recent books include Unmanned: Architecture and Security
Series (Barcelona, New York, Rotterdam, 2016), Work, Body,
Leisure (Berlin, Rotterdam, 2018), and Architecture of
Appropriation (Rotterdam, 2019). Currently works as Director of
Research at the Het Nieuwe Instituut, Netherlands, and Tutor at the
School of Architecture, Royal College of Art, London.
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FIG 13 Sala Granja / Farm roomRietveld Pavilion Venice
Biennale.
FIG 14 Sala Puerta / Door roomRietveld Pavilion Venice
Biennale.
FIG 15 Sala Oficina / Office roomRietveld Pavilion Venice
Biennale.
FIG 16 Sala Simulación / Simulation roomRietveld Pavilion Venice
Biennale.
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work, body, leisure
Comisario / Commissioner: Het Nieuwe Instituut (Guus Beumer,
General and Artistic Director)Curadora / Curator: Marina
Otero-VerzierCuradora Asistente / Assistant Curator: Katía
TruijenAsistentes / Curatorial Assistants: Flora Bello Milanez,
Malou den DekkerContribuciones / Contributors: Amal Alhaag, Beatriz
Colomina, Marten Kuijpers, Victor Muñoz Sanz, Grace Abou Jaoude,
Emma Paola Flores Herrera, Chris Zogopoulos, Simone C. Niquille,
Mark WigleyCon el apoyo de / Supporters: Dutch Ministry of
Education, Culture and Science; Creative Industries Fund nl
(Extended Program); Embassy of the Kingdom of The Netherlands in
Rome, Italy; mvrDv; Océ – A Canon Company; X-treme; Powerhouse
CompanyDiseño de exposición / Exhibition Design: Raphael Coutin,
Marina Otero-Verzier Diseño gráfico / Graphic Design: Hans
Gremmen
Dirección de arte / Art Direction: Marina Otero-Verzier, Guus
BeumerArchivo / Archivist: Ellen SmitGestión y producción del
proyecto / Project Management and Production: De Projectstudio
Producción de la exposición / Exhibition Production: Landstra
Ontwerp en UitvoeringComunicaciones / Communications: Christiane
Bosman, Eveline Mulckhuyse, Silvie van Oost Programa de extensión /
Extended Program: Jane Chew, Matthew Stewart; Northscapes
Collective; Noam Toran, Florentijn Boddendijk, Remco de Jong;
Giuditta Vendrame, Paolo Patelli, Giulio Squilacciotti; Liam
YoungFotografías / Photography: Daria ScagliolaRevista web / Web
Magazine: Cathy BrickwoodLibro / Book: Marina Otero-Verzier (ed.),
Nick Axel (managing ed.)
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