City as Postcard / City as Polis / City as Poem: Alexandra Midal

As part of the Walker’s presentation of Designs for Different Futures (on view now), we will be publishing a number of texts from the exhibition catalogue (Yale University Press, December 2019), exploring the ways in which designers create, critique, and question possible futures, big and small. The exhibition was organized by the Walker Art Center, Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Art Institute of Chicago.

City as Postcard / City as Polis / City as Poem

This conversation took place by phone on February 12, 2019, with Alexandra Midal in her apartment in Paris and exhibition co-curator Michelle Millar Fisher at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

MMF

What to you is a city?

AM

What to me is a city? This question is appealing because I’m realizing I have never really asked it aloud. For me, the first example I have in mind is a book by Hannah Arendt [The Human Condition, 1958] that I read years ago. In a footnote, she describes the difference between the public and the private sphere. She explained that for the Greeks, the private was opposed to the public space. So far, this makes total sense. But in this formulation, the public sphere, in fact, was the place of freedom, and the private sphere was where people were unequal; they could be enslaved, and depending on their masters, they could be killed. There was absolutely no guarantee whatsoever to be able to express yourself in the private sphere. The place where you could be equal and express yourself was the city. 

I think it’s really interesting to look at the city on Arendt’s terms, in a political way. Instead of thinking of the city as a physical structure, or as a network of streets—as different as Los Angeles with no city center or New York with its central nexus of Manhattan, to take two examples from the United States—I would highlight the political idea, the concept of the city as the place of equality, of freedom, where people can express themselves, and where there is a certain sharing of values. And privacy is the family, or the household. That’s where violence is embedded, at least for Arendt and for the Greeks. And you realize right away that the Greek polis is the ideal of the gathering of the community, a fantasy of a place where complete equality could happen.

MMF

I know you studied under [the Princeton professor of architectural history] Beatriz Colomina, and so your answer made me think about the ways in which she formulates public and private spheres, too. In Privacy and Publicity, Beatriz Colomina stipulates that mass media has moved the site of architectural production from the private to the public space, thereby transforming privacy. ^{See Colomina, Privacy and Publicity: Modern Architecture as Mass Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994).} And in terms of the Greek fantasy—just as everybody has their own social location from which they experience life, everybody then brings that experience to the city. So your New York is not my New York is not someone else’s New York, and the same with Philadelphia, anywhere. Time changes cities, too. We say, “Oh, you should have seen New York in the seventies, those were the days.” 

AM

Yeah. But you know I live in a nineteenth-century city. It’s so passé already. I spent a year in Rome, I commute to Switzerland every week, and I live in Paris. I’m living in a postcard. I am aware of that.

MMF

It might seem like a self-evident question, but why should we care about the future of cities?

AM

It’s not at all a self-evident question. I find science-fiction novels that deal with the future of cities extremely important in this regard. Science fiction has often used the future as a tool to imagine the city of tomorrow. Many urban planners are looking to sci-fi, and especially sci-fi from the sixties and the seventies. The city is a trope in sci-fi. Two fantastic examples from earlier are [Isaac] Asimov’s novels Caves of Steel [first published in 1953], which depicts the city of tomorrow, a city on Earth, and The Naked Sun [1957], which depicts a city on the fictional planet of Solaria, a city in space. Asimov placed these two cities in opposition regarding the idea of privacy. On Earth, people live in extremely packed environments. They have no access to light. And many inhabitants share the same space. But on Solaria, in space, they have a very different experience because they have plenty of room. The idea of privacy does not exist anymore because everyone has so much space. For instance, when they make something similar to a Skype call—they call it viewing in the book—they can be naked. But they cannot stand the idea that someone would share their house. They have immense houses to avoid personal contact. But to be naked in front of a screen is absolutely not a problem. That’s exactly the opposite of what’s happening on Earth in Caves of Steel, where people are very close to each other. They share very, very tiny apartments, but the idea of nudity is absolutely unheard of. 

This question of body, of sexuality, is even more important for The World Inside [1971] by Robert Silverberg. Silverberg’s idea is that the population of the planet is seventy-five billion people and they all live in huge skyscrapers, thousand-floor skyscrapers. So this is another idea of how people live together, and of course sexuality becomes an issue. Each city is made of forty floors and people wander from one floor to another of these huge cities. According to your status, you can move a certain number of floors up or down. And men wander during the night and enter any home and have sex with anyone. These kinds of ideas transform the concept of the city, not only, as I said before, as a physicality, but as a way of examining how sexuality and politics are intertwined in a city context.

MMF

I’m listening to you talk about the city as both a trope and a text. So often, yes, sci-fi has been a catalyst for thinking about futures in general, and our moment in the present, and our architecture and design, our cityscapes. And as you were talking about clothes and nakedness it took me back to someone like [the nineteenth-century German historian Gottfried] Semper’s thoughts [in The Four Elements of Architecture from 1851] about the architecture of what we wear and the notion of the first proto-architecture being really reliant on fabric. 

Thinking back to another kind of genesis, one of your own—I wondered if you had a memory of the first imaginary place or city that you ever encountered, textile or otherwise?

AM

I have two for you. One is, when I was a kid in the seventies, I would play a game with my older brother that we called Year Two Thousand, in which we made a city. We stole sheets from my mum, put them into water with ink, and created surfaces and then structures. The idea was never to play with dolls or with soldiers, but to create cities. The city was really the core of my childhood’s Spielraum [playroom, or free play].

Then the second thing is also very personal. I can’t remember how many years I’ve been obsessed with the same recurring dream, a dream about cities. I’m in a city and I’m discovering new buildings, new houses, even places. I’m sure that any psychoanalyst could understand the meaning behind this, but I don’t want to overanalyze, I just love the idea that my dream conveys a fantastic sense of architecture. They are fantastic dreams of wandering, walking, discovering places. The city of my subconscious is very vivid during the night. And it’s always whispering to me new paths, new ways to explore. 

It is not a nineteenth-century idea of wandering in the city, but dreams that reflect continuity, expansion, and freedom, where the street becomes the room and the room becomes the street. [Walter] Benjamin constructs a model for the explosion of the interior outward, from the home into the streets, in his examination of Parisian arcades.^{See Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), 406.} Similarly, in relation to my dreams, I speculate that there is no real gap between mind, psyche, and the city. Have you noticed that you can fly in your dreams? You can fly above the city. And that’s linked also, of course, to this modernist idea that you could see the cities from above thanks to the plane, which is something that Le Corbusier invoked several times.^{Le Corbusier’s Aircraft discusses flight’s ability to give us a bird’s-eye view of cities: “The eye now sees in substance what the mind formerly could only subjectively conceive.” Le Corbusier, Aircraft: The New Vision (London: The Studio, 1935), 96.}

MMF

So that’s a perfect segue into the next question, thinking about the city as a ground zero for architects’ fantasies, or thinking about it as a design device, as a playground for exploration. What is an example of a future city proposed by an architect that’s a particular favorite or particularly interesting to you?

AM

I would go with a dystopian city—

MMF

Yeah, let’s do that, let’s do a counterexample.

AM

—like [Ron Herron’s] Walking City from the 1960s. (For more on Ron Herron’s Walking City, see Zoë Ryan’s essay from this volume.) Herron’s city is like a living organism that is delegating, contracting, multiplying, walking; it’s as if the city is a natural component in a landscape of despair. 

MMF

We’ve talked about imagination and Arendt’s notion that the city is a place of freedom, at least from its Greek beginning, versus the contextless, roaming city that Herron’s project evokes. Today, we might think about people who lack access to shelter and are forced into a nomadism, rather than that being an imaginary or playful state. So there’s this duality between the possibilities of freedom offered by the city and the harsh realities of urban living for many today, a situation that’s not generative or human or in any way fair. I guess that leads me to think about writers like David Harvey, for example, and The Right to the City,^{First used in the 1960s by the philosopher and sociologist Henri Lefebvre, “right to the city” was defined by David Harvey as “far more than the individual liberty to access urban resources: it is a right to change ourselves by changing the city … [that] inevitably depends upon the exercise of a collective power to reshape the processes of urbanization.” Harvey, “The Right to the City,” New Left Review 53 (September–October 2008), newleftreview.org.} and to wonder who has access to the city in our current capitalist nexus?

AM

We can also change this perspective. Currently, in the nave at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Bordeaux, there is an exhibition of my most recent series of films that analyze the failings and the dark side of the Industrial Revolution. One of the films, Possessed, explores the remains of a ghost town, examining the chiasmus between objects that were perceived as subjects and slaves that were perceived as things during the gold rush in California. In a ghost town, you can feel the sediment and the layers of all the pasts. But the authorities in charge of it fantasize it and try to keep it the way they think it should have been. Of course it’s not the past exactly, and yet you might see ghosts everywhere. It is so potent. American ghost towns are not the only examples; we could also conjure up Chernobyl as a more recent ghost town. 

MMF

Cities, whether they are the cities of tomorrow or today, have the potential to shape the lives and ecosystems of the people who live within them for better or worse. So often their design is a project of imagination only; a lot of it does not get enacted. We can think about the term utopia, for example, literally meaning “no place.” Are cities always destined to be aspirational no-places? 

AM

The idea of the city of tomorrow is intriguing and very important for many designers—take Henry Dreyfuss’s Democracity or Norman Bel Geddes’s Futurama for the 1939 New York World’s Fair, for example. (For more on Norman Bel Geddes’s vision of the city of tomorrow, see the discussion of his Futurama pavilion at the 1939 New York World’s Fair in Andrew Blauvelt’s essay from this volume.) Their cities of tomorrow are places of imagination and fantasy that some would call utopic. Interestingly, Thomas More [in his 1516 book]gives his fictional Utopia spatial specificities. He even provides the exact number of kilometers of one side of the island of Utopia. So Utopia cannot be considered as a place that does not exist; it has a topography. It has a certain—

MMF

Dimension.

AM

­—dimension, exactly. The island, of course, is not located somewhere, but More gives some insight into how it looks. And that’s really interesting, because it’s maybe not a nowhere, it’s for sure a somewhere. All of us have in our minds an idea of the way the world looks. It’s not just that a country can look different from one map to another—each of us perceives the world differently. There is even the possibility that several worlds coexist, as in quantum mechanics, for example, or Philip K. Dick’s novels, such as The Eye in the Sky [1957].You can see a multiplicity of ideas, and parallel ideas, worlds of tomorrow, worlds of today, and even future cities. We might say that, in a way, the city of the future is not a no-place, it is a mental place. It’s a place of imagination but also a place of overlapping— 

MMF

Memory.

AM

—yes, exactly, memories. I don’t know if it happens to you, but when I walk—for example when I would walk home while I was at Princeton, I would always think, “This was where, at one time, Einstein walked.” And maybe I was walking in his very steps. I think that’s maybe an aspirational idea of the no-place, linked to people who are above you, under you, all of them all together, across time. 

MMF

Yes, it’s a multilayered, multilevel sediment that is deeply human, acknowledging conflicts, acknowledging histories, seeing the many competing, contested, complex, but ultimately more careful ways you can understand where you stand, literally. 

AM

I like the idea that we are part of a genealogy, a history, within our cities. That there’s history before and after us, and that the city might be a specific location with memories of people, of lives, of people who loved each other and who died, and that it can go on and on forever. I think if we single out the city as a constellation of lives and people, then we go far beyond the idea of rationalism or aesthetics to reach the poetry that lies in what a city is. ▪︎

ALEXANDRA MIDAL is an independent curator and professor in the master’s in Design, Space and Communication program at HEAD-Genève. She has curated exhibitions at the Musée d’Art Moderne, Luxembourg; Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris; Wolfsonian Museum, Miami; and Artists Space, New York. Midal is the director of the annual Festival of Invisible Films at HEAD, presenting experimental films by designers. Her most recent publication is Design by Accident: For a New History of Design (2019).

MICHELLE MILLAR FISHER is the Ronald C. and Anita L. Wornick Curator of Contemporary Decorative Arts at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Her work investigates intersections of power, people, and design. She is currently collaborating on the book and exhibition Designing Motherhood. Previously she worked at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art, New York, where she co-organized Items: Is Fashion Modern? (2017) and Design and Violence (2015).

The catalogue was produced by the Philadelphia Museum of Art, with design by the Walker Art Center. It was edited and conceived by the exhibition’s curators: Emmet Byrne, Design Director and Associate Curator of Design, Walker Art Center; Kathryn B. Hiesinger, The J. Mahlon Buck, Jr. Family Senior Curator and Michelle Millar Fisher, formerly The Louis C. Madeira IV Assistant Curator in the department of European Decorative Arts after 1700, Philadelphia Museum of Art; Maite Borjabad López-Pastor, Neville Bryan Assistant Curator of Architecture and Design, and Zoë Ryan, formerly the John H. Bryan Chair and Curator of Architecture and Design, the Art Institute of Chicago.

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Text and compilation © 2019 Philadelphia Museum of Art, Walker Art Center, and The Art Institute of Chicago