I have a friend who often sends me interesting snippets, photos, links and isolated clever thoughts. A few days ago, he sent me a link to some Flickr pix he had taken depicting what he called the OCD of consumerism--the obsession that we seem to have with displaying patterns filled with large matrices of what he called "perfectly organized and aligned consumer goods." We've all seen this in grocery stores, but also in those large stacks of perfectly folded sweaters in clothing stores.
For some reason, Richard's reference reminded me of a fascinating meeting I had had recently with a couple of very sharp architects and a gifted young student they are training. As is my wont, I had been rabbiting on about space and how its size and shape defines us and how such definitions can be measured. Robert Jan Van Pelt, a man whom I had just met, interjected with an absolutely mesmerizing monologue, reminding me that I shouldn't forget the importance of objects. Immigrants in particular, he said, forge attachments to things because their movements from one country to another draw giant fracture lines through their lives. Whatever goods they can manage to take with them are all that make magnetic links between the lives they've left behind and the unknown futures they're leaping into. At first I was a little unsettled by the suggestion that there might be more important things than space -- I have something of a bias in this regard these days. But as Robert Jan continued to talk, winding me in with his eloquence and his logic, I tumbled to his argument.
Later in the meeting, whose focus was really supposed to have been about how to build houses that people actually want to live in, Robert Jan drew a simple graph that was meant to convey where he thought the main points of interest lay in 21st century architecture. Essentially all designers now focus, he said, on the very large (museums, civic buildings, airport terminals, railroad stations) or the very small (lemon squeezers, stools, vases). There's little attention being paid to dwellings. Robert Jan was skeptical about an idea of mine, but I wondered whether there might be some connection between an emphasis on the small, the carry-able, the holdable in one's hand and what we're doing to geographical space by punching it full of electronic holes.
The argument is this: we're slowly but surely killing real space by using telecommunications -- cell phones, mobile computing, social networking, geo-twittering, and so on -- and so we're twisting place beyond recognition. Our kids are less likely to have attachments to favourite sitting spots in the branches of apple trees, or nooks under basement stairs, because their lives are defined by ad hoc collections of cybernetic places they throw together themselves on the computer screens they spend half their days in front of. So in place of sacred places, we make sacred things. Mass production allows us to make LOTS of sacred things, all identical copies, so we don't even have to worry about which is the REAL sacred thing. So we surround ourselves, for comfort, with objects that are endlessly prone to clever rearrangement, whether they're stacked on supermarket shelves or arrayed in nice patterns in our family rooms. We surround ourselves with objects of comfort, and we don't even have to bother taking them with us because there are so many of them we can find them anew wherever we go.
So as we're dismantling real space using modern communication technology, we're also taking down one of the few footholds real space had left -- that an object can only be in one place at a time -- by making zillions of identical objects that can be anywhere. We may be doing it to give ourselves the comfort of familiar surroundings, but the effect is really to contribute to a world in which being everywhere means we're nowhere.