Block 213/183/153 Red Road is coming down. As part of the £60m redevelopment scheme planned for the area this block is to be demolished. Residents are being cleared and rehoused elsewhere, letter boxes are being closed over, salvage teams are removing carpets other items, keys are being retuned to the concierge. How can the end of a building be recorded? How can one capture that moment when a building moves from being lived in and operational (viable) to being vacated, closed down (unviable). We viewed this process as a shift in the value attributed to Red Road, such that a once operational housing complex deteriorated to the point of obsolescence.

Looking closely at a deteriorated building is to assume a ‘perverse’ view of architecture, whose concerns are more usually with buildings that are designated viable, successful, redeemable. For example, much scholarship in architectural history and design emphasises generative creative processes and represses the coincident, but inevitable, processes of degeneration. As such architectural theory and method provide little guidance as to how one might depict and understand the moment when the last vestiges of value ebb away from a building and it is consigned to the category of waste.

Waste thoughts

Slavoj Zizek (2003) has argued that scholars of the post-industrial present need to develop a ‘feeling for the inert’: a feeling, that is, for the wasted, the redundant, that which is seemingly no longer active in terms of value. His call extends an longer tradition of theorising waste that includes Benjamin’s celebration of the ‘rag picker’ in nineteenth century Paris (1999), Mauss’ (1967) account of the potlach, Bataille’s (1985) formulation of expenditure, and Douglas’ (1970) famous discussion of pollution. Recent scholarship has enlivened this tradition of scholarship by theorising rubbish more generally (Hawkins 2005; Hawkins and Meucke 2003; Hetherington 2004; Thompson 1979; Rathje and Murphy 1992; Rathje 2001, Thompson 1979) as well as specifically examining the meaning of wasted architectures and urban spaces (Buchli and Lucas 2001; Edensor 2005a, 2005b).

The phenomenon of waste is a necessary but as yet under-explored component in the generative work of design and the formation of architectural value. There are some suggestive threads of scholarship in contemporary architecture. In the first instance we might think of the postmodern  embrace of the architectural ordinary (exemplified by Venturi, Scott Brown and Izenour’s famous reading of Blake’s God’s Own Junkyard) (Harris and Berke 1997) as well as ‘dirty realist’ readings of the city (Lefaivre 1989; Jameson 1994), and the attention paid to how buildings wear and weather (Mostafavi and Leatherbarrow 1993; Brand 1995; Hill 2003). These threads within contemporary architectural thinking have unrealised implications for a wider and more foundational questioning of architecture’s relationship to theories of value.

We have been able to enlarge the theoretical and aesthetic vocabulary for an analysis of architecture and value by focussing on artistic engagements with waste. There is a rich tradition here, including work on the ready-made (Duchamp to Arman) and the entropic ‘anti-monument’ (Smithson 1996), as well as studies of the Formless (Bataille 1991; Bois and Krauss 1997). Of specific interest have been a series of artists whose work engages with wasted spaces and places: Dion’s pseudo-archaeology, Matta-Clark’s performative demolition, and Paeiement’s photographic documentation of ordinariness. We have been especially indebted to the work of Agnes Varda on gleaning. Her work reminds us that ‘waste’ is rarely permanently out of the system of value, and documents how ‘valueless’ items are brought back into a system of value by the act of gleaning. Gleaning traditionally picks value out of dross – left over grain, rubbish, windfall fruit – and sets it going in new, often subversive directions. Gleaning points to other directions for theories of value that reside in relations of inter-dependence.

Gleaning Red Road

The technique that we deployed at Red Road drew upon a specific representational tradition that architectural historian Robin Evans (1997) describes as the ‘developed surface drawing’. This representational format emerged in the eighteenth-century to describe new relationships of the decorated interior surfaces of a domestic space to the furniture that populated it. The format consisted of a set of orthographic projections that metaphorically ‘folded out’ the internal sufraces of the space so that they appeared to lie flat on the page. In its original eighteenth-century context, this drawing technique enabled coherent decorative schemes to be developed. For twentieth-century scholars such as Evans, the drawings and, in particular, their registration of furniture arrangements, served as surfaces that preserved the traces of domestic social life. Subsequently, other drawing formats were developed to capture the relationship of social life to interior spaces. The populated sectional drawing, for instance, became an important representational format in the later nineteenth-century.

The Red Road project adopted the idea of the developed surface drawing and applied it in modified form to five empty lounge room interiors in the Red Road slab block. Each room was documented photographically and represented as a ‘fold out’ surface. This surface was then ‘gleaned’ following the departure of the flat’s residents. The gleaning process was informed by the cultural history of that practice, as sketched above. The abandonned contents of each room were carefully documented and their original locations noted and mapped. The resultant representations register the abandonment of the space, rather than its inauguration as would be the case if they were interior design drawings, and the traces of occupation through material remainders.

We have presented this material in a number of academic contexts in the past year, and we are currently working through the material. Some of the key themes that have emerged from these presentations and through discussion with colleagues and friends have been:

• the status of the gleaned remainders, their value and current ownership
• in what ways is gleaning an archaeological practice?
• how does the economic dimension of gleaning inform our deployment of it?
• how these images operate as ‘dialectical images’ in Benjamin’s sense?
• how do might documentary images sustain an operational or critical status?

We plan to publish this sub-section of the research project as a book, the working title of which is ‘Architecture and Waste: Gleaning Red Road’. We welcome comment and discussion on these or related themes

Bibliography

Bataille, Georges (1991). The accursed share. London: Zone Books.

Bataille, Georges (1985). ‘The notion of expenditure’, in Visions of excess: Selected writings, 1927-1939, Allan Stoekl (ed.), Allan Stoekl et al. (trans.).  Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press.

Benjamin, Walter (1999). The arcades project. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap Press.

Blake, Peter (1964). God’s own junkyard: The planned deterioration of America’s landscape. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.

Bois, Yves-Alain and Rosalind Krauss (1997). Formless – A Users Guide. New York: Zone Books.

Brand, Stewart (1995). How buildings learn: What happens after they’re built. London: Penguin.

Buchli, Victor and Gavin Lucas (eds) (2001). Archaeologies of the contemporary past. London: Routledge.

Douglas, Mary (1970 [1966]. Purity and danger: An analysis of concepts of pollution and taboo. London: Penguin.

Edensor, Tim (2005a). Industrial ruins: Aesthetics, materiality and memory. Oxford: Berg.

Edensor, Tim (2005b). ‘Waste matter – the debris of industrial ruins and the disordering of the material world’, Journal of Material Culture 10 (3): 311-32.

Evans, Robin (1997). ‘The developed surface: An enquiry into the brief life of an eighteenth-century drawing technique’, Translations from drawing to building and other essays, Robin Evans. London, Architectural Association.

Harris, Steven Harris and Deborah Berke (1997). Architecture of the everyday. New York: Princeton Architectural Press.

Hawkins, Gay (2005). The ethics of waste: How we relate to rubbish. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.

Hawkins, Gay and Muecke, Stephen (eds) (2003). Culture and waste: The creation and destruction of value. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.

Hetherington, Kevin (2004) ‘Second-handedness: Consumption, Disposal and Absent Presence’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 22(1): 157-173.

Hill, Jonathan (2003). Actions of architecture: Architects and creative users. London: Routledge.

Jameson, Frederic (1994). The Seeds of Time. New York: Columbia University Press.

Lefaivre, Liane (1989). ‘Dirty realism in European architecture today’, Design Book Review 17.

Mauss, Marcel (1967). The gift: Forms and functions of exchange in archaic societies, trans. Ian Cunnison. New York: Norton.

Mostafavi, Mohsen and David Leatherbarrow (1993). On Weathering: The Life of Buildings in Time. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press.

Rathje, William (2001). ‘Integrated archaeology: A garbage paradigm’, Victor Buchli and Gavin Lucas (eds), Archaeologies of the contemporary past. London: Routledge: 63-76.

Rathje, William L. and Cullen Murphy (1992). Rubbish! The archaeology of garbage. New York: Harper Collins Publishers.

Smithson, Robert (1996). ‘Entropy and the new monuments’, Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, ed. Jack Flam. Berkeley, University of California Press: 10-23.

Thompson, Michael (1979). Rubbish theory: The creation and destruction of value. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Varda, Agnes (2000). The Gleaners and I (Les Glaneurs et la Glaneuse).

Zizek, Slavoj (2003). The fragile absolute: Or, why is the Christian legacy worth fighting for? London: Verso.