Fabric__rather off topic but nonetheless...

Fabric
Liwen Zhang

When reading the variety on interesting texts that are posted for the word fabric this week, I felt especially drawn to Bradley Quinn’s piece, The Metropolis, which attempts to bring out the parallels between fashion and architecture.

Having lived most of my life in Hong Kong, an urban metropolis with hyperdensity (of people, cultures, buildings, fashion, trends…etc), the term “culture of hypervisibility” in particular resonated to me. There is definitely a codified surveillance present when you walk through the streets of Hong Kong, where the term “eyes on the street”, as Jane Jacobs would say, is taken to a whole new level – hypervisibility in an area of hyperdensity.

In Hong Kong, fashion is definitely what Quinn would argue as “walking signifiers” of “urban space”. This coupled with the city’s inherent need for speed and efficiency, brings about an intense and accelerated circulation of commodities. The competitive nature of the market in Hong Kong demands products to be consistently recalibrated to not only achieve high turnover rates but also to keep up with demanding consumers. The city has, in a certain sense, gone beyond what Quinn describes as “glorified consumption zones” unto what Walter Benjamin would call a “place of pilgrimage to the fetish Commodity”.

What is interesting about Quinn’s article in this context is how he relates fashion to contemporary discourse in architecture, namely Augé’s non-places and the Foucaultian notion of the ‘heterotopia’ (perhaps not really contemporary discourse in architecture, but nevertheless has a huge impact on how we think about the city). In Ananya Roy’s ED 100 course, we learn of heterotopias to be impossible, ambiguous and imaginative spaces that are not easily pinned down. Aside from the many examples given by Quinn of spaces that could be heterotopias (such as parks, theatres, galleries, libraries), we learn of the camp as another genre of heterotopic space. The example given in class is the detainment camp in Guantanamo Bay, where despite being a US territory, the prisons at the camp exist outside of US laws and jurisdiction. Thus vile acts of violence happen unaccounted for in such spaces. Roy described it to be a “strange extension of American power”, where the prisons are spaces of exception and desubjectification , where there is a suspension of one’s status as a subject. After that particular lecture I felt quite depressed – Roy was basically suggesting that the prison or refugee camp is now a paradigmatical space which questions the way we think about cities and perhaps even serves as a marker to the end of the city. This rather longwinded description has a connection to the Quinn reading, I promise – I basically wanted to bring out a certain contrast to Quinn’s overly optimistic and perhaps even superficial reading of the “potential uses of heterotopic spaces” – as warehouse turned catwalk for high fashion. I understand that it is not the goal of Quinn’s work at all to talk about human desubjectification, however I cannot help but see a vast contrast in the application of the notion of heterotopia illustrated between the two examples.

In our current networked society which requires architecture and planning to respond in hybrid ways, the idea of heterotopia is perhaps fitting – programmatic organization of space then becomes ambiguous and multifaceted. However, as Quinn briefly mentions, this may result in fragmentation of space and culture. How do we as architects and planners then respond to spaces like Guantanamo Bay, where fragmentation has basically taken up a life of its own?