Boredom, Architecture, and Spatial Experience

Christian Parreno

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Visual Arts
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781350148154
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture Criticism

Boredom is a ubiquitous feature of modern life. Endured by everyone, it is both cause and effect of modernity, and of situations, spaces and surroundings. As such, this book argues, boredom shares an intimate relationship with architecture-one that has been seldom explored in architectural history and theory. Boredom, Architecture, and Spatial Experience investigates that relationship, showing how an understanding of boredom affords us a new way of looking at and understanding the modern experience. It reconstructs a series of episodes in architectural history, from the 19th century to the present, to survey how boredom became a normalized component of the everyday, how it infiltrated into the production and reception of architecture, and how it serves to diagnose moments of crisis in the continuous transformations of the built environment. Erudite and innovative, the work moves deftly from architectural theory and philosophy to literature and psychology to make its case. Combining archival material, scholarly sources, and illuminating excerpts from conversations with practitioners and thinkers-including Charles Jencks, Rem Koolhaas, Sylvia Lavin, and Jorge Silvetti-it reveals the complexity and importance of boredom in architecture.

CHAPTER 1

A COMPONENT OF MODERNITY

Among the many histories of boredom, Aldous Huxley offers a concise genealogy in “Accidie” (1920), comprising literary fragments by a variety of authors.¹ The essay presents the condition, modern in character and pervasive, as a separating factor in the timeline of Western civilization—a pre- and post-boredom world. As a proto-boredom, acedia surfaces in the medieval period, breaking from similar notions popular in antiquity, including the lack of determination of desire venerated through Eros, the irritation with mundane repetition of άλυς, and the displeasure with boundaries implied by horror loci and taedium vitae.² The term derives from the Greek kedos, meaning “to care,” and the negative prefix a-, denoting absence and connoting lack of attention, which anticipates the crisis of faith of secularization. Although framed by towns and the early control of the countryside, acedia is a spiritual malaise, independent from the physical environment. Borrowing from Evagrius Ponticus, Huxley portrays it as a daemon meridianus—“a fiend of deadly subtlety,” pestering monks who wander in open deserts or rest in closed monasteries in the heat of midday, and so diminishing their capacity to pray and work.³ Importantly, acedia is committed rather than suffered. As a personal failure, it is manifested in “tardiness,” “coldness,” “undevotion,” and “sadness,” condemning those who have sinned to find “everlasting home in the fifth circle of the Inferno.”⁴ As a public weakness, the condition establishes a bond between the offenders, forming a community based on guilt and practices of penance. In the “Parson’s Tale” (c. 1390) of The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer, acedia prevents redemption by being contrary to the experience and demonstrations of the joy caused by being close to God, operating as a disjunction between heaven and earth, or as an unsuccessful escape from the material realm due to the demands of the body. For Huxley, echoing the warnings of Thomas Aquinas about the power of acedia to induce irrepressible misery “on account of the flesh utterly prevailing over the spirit,” if atonement does not enact change, the condition leads to despair, with the risk of suicide.⁵

In the Renaissance, melancholy ousted acedia. Originally diagnosed by Hippocrates in the fifth century BC as an excess of black bile, it is a malfunction that produces fear and despondency, emphasizing individual needs. Unlike the exclusively negative character of its predecessor, melancholy entails creativity by promoting inspiration and the reconsideration of the nearby circumstances. Huxley cites The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621) by Robert Burton, which eclectically identifies the origins of the condition in lack of movement or erroneous orientation. It impedes the meaningful approximation to the environment—“as long as he or she or they are idle, they shall never be pleased, never well in body and mind, … offended with the world”—and therefore enforces the ideation of remedies that are based on active rectification through the avoidance of inadequate spaces: “if the seat of the dwelling may not be altered, yet there is much in choice of such a chamber or room, in opportune opening and shutting of windows, excluding foreign air and winds, and walking abroad at convenient times.”⁶

In eighteenth-century Britain, melancholy branched into spleen, also as a corporeal ailment but with added overtones particular to its cultural context. In “The Spleen” (1737) by Matthew Green, which Huxley mentions, the condition is poetically described as a convulsion of the nerves caused by small particles in the blood, derived from the “stormy” qualities of certain locations.⁷ In a systematic manner that alternates measures to improve the body with instances of entertainment, the impurities could be cleaned through a regimen of “a moderate diet,” “laughter,” “reading,” “the company of young ladies,” “exercise,” and the abstention of “passions,” “drinking,” and the company of “Dissenters and missionaries, especially missionaries.”⁸ Without spiritual allusions, Green’s remedy focuses on enjoyment, dynamism, and exploration, advocating for the poised combination of hedonism and asceticism—a maxim of the Georgian and Regency eras. The recommendation echoes the contemporaneous theories of the sublime in which the monotony of the quotidian covers and counterbalances existential anxiety and terror. Surpassing the physiological basis of melancholy and anticipating the popular character of boredom, the spleen constitutes a refusal to engage with the unattainable and a preference to linger within the ordinary, insisting on temporary distractions.⁹

In parallel, ennui became prevalent in Europe during Romanticism, expanding the creative qualities of melancholy by denoting the existence of intangible dimensions. According to Huxley, ennui is more complicated and dangerous than acedia—“a mixture of boredom, sorrow and despair.” Opposed to the associations with the daily routine of melancholy and spleen, ennui is aspirational, “an essentially lyrical emotion, fruitful in the inspiration of much of the most characteristic modern literature,” epitomized in the writings and sensibility of Charles Baudelaire.¹⁰ Also known as the mal du siècle, the condition is fundamentally negative, stifling and elitist, without possibility of recovery but with limitless modes of expression.¹¹ Huxley asserts that ennui marks “the triumph of the meridian demon” of acedia, and signals the consolidation of modernity and the eagerness to be “anywhere out of the world,” an ambiguity of being in one particular place yet wanting to be in another.¹²

The problem of existential inhabitation finds its mundane but “respectable and avowable” counterpart in boredom, popular in Britain since the mid-nineteenth century. For Huxley, the French Revolution (1789–99) created a fertile ground that introduced and nurtured the condition across Europe, aided by secular and materialist interpretations of existence that displaced the belief in religious salvation and the possibility of transcendence. The overpowering processes of capitalism led to the speculative accrual of wealth, the desecration of nature, and the loss of communal values, starting a process of disenchantment in which all expectations of meaning depend on individual experience. Moreover, the Industrial Revolution (c. 1760–1840) mechanized and divided time into regular segments that ordered everyday life and imposed predictable sequences of work and leisure, amidst processes of intense urbanization and the rise of the architecture of commodity—without symbolism, at once concrete and abstract. As a mode of being rather than a spiritual or physical disorder, boredom found its space in the city, “with a certain pride”; “habituated to the feverish existence of these few centers of activity, men found that life outside them was intolerably insipid. And at the same time they became so much exhausted by the restlessness of city life that pined for the monotonous boredom of the provinces, for exotic islands, even for other worlds—any haven of rest.”¹³

Spatial Etymology

As Huxley implies, boredom did not come into existence when the word was coined. Instead, it surfaced progressively with the need to articulate and explore the experience of modernity; the mechanisms of progress, including capitalism, industrialization, secularization, rationalization, and urbanization, demanded new vocabulary. From the equivalents in the main languages in Europe, two groups of terms can be distinguished according to their chronological distance. The older ones, which remain close to their origins, relate boredom to bodily feelings and undesirable emotions. In the thirteenth century, the French ennui and the Italian noia emerged from the Latin inodiare to denote a sentiment of annoyance and the action of making something hateful. In the sixteenth century, the Spanish aburrimiento, from the Latin abhorrēre, “to abhor,” and the Portuguese tedio, from the Latin tedium, “tiresomeness,” became prevalent in their capacity to convey physical exhaustion. In the late seventeenth century, the Slavic languages adopted cognate versions of the onomatopoeic ky to allude to the loneliness and generic qualities of the cuckoo.¹⁴ And since the eighteenth century, the Swedish tristess and the Norwegian kjedsomhet designate states of sorrow and the absence of appreciation, both derived from Latin. Newer expressions include the German Langeweile and the English boredom, both with specific associations to the modern experience. The first surfaced in the early eighteenth century to indicate an extended time of waiting, and the second followed to suggest an extreme condition of intolerability to the surroundings.

According to The Oxford English Dictionary, the etymology of boredom is uncertain; its meaning refers to “the state of being bored; tedium, ennui.”¹⁵ The term transpired from the combination of the verb or substantive bore and the suffix -dom, from Old English. While the latter forms nouns that denote domains or general conditions, the former has two possible origins. The first suggests the figurative use of “to perforate,” probably as a result of a forgotten anecdote.¹⁶ This sense can be traced further to two variations. One derives from the Old English borian, which indicates the action of drilling a solid with an auge...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• Foreword
• Introduction: Boredom as Architecture
• 1 A Component of Modernity
• Part 1 Differential Distances
• 2 Fascination and Aversion
• 3 Søren Kierkegaard’s Babylonian Tower
• 4 Catherine Gore and Charles Dickens: Idle Restlessness/Restless Idleness
• 5 Blunting and Jading
• 6 Coney Island, Misleading Structures
• Part 2 Circular Trajectories
• 7 A Unity of Disarray
• 8 Martin Heidegger’s Urge to Be at Home
• 9 Oran, the Capital of Boredom
• 10 International Style Confusions: Sigfried Giedion
• 11 Los Angeles, Flat Enough
• Part 3 Extended Thresholds
• 12 Potential Architectures
• 13 Andrew Benjamin’s Antithesis to Boredom
• 14 Boredom in Domus
• 15 Servitude and Liberalism: Russell Kirk
• 16 Charles Jencks, Rem Koolhaas, and the Generic
• 17 Jorge Silvetti and Sylvia Lavin: Unamused Muses and Lying Fallow
• Epilogue: Architectures of Boredom
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright