Ch. 3, pp.120–128
- It’s an interesting installment this week. Yamamoto sees the Western threshold as having its origins in the shops that fronted houses and faced the street in mediaeval cities – a form that existed up until the Industrial Revolution. We know what happened after. In this translation are a couple of passages I’m not too confident about but, at the end are my takeaways.
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4 Labourers as Free as Birds
Labourers trespassing in the city
After the Industrial Revolution, there was soot and smoke from furnaces, and industrial and domestic waste flowing into rivers, there was the movement of people made possible by railways, and a process of local societies being destroyed by the large influx of labourers. “The Irwell River flowing through Manchester can hardly be seen because of the various factories for the manufacture of cloth and other products. Washed out impurities, toxic substances from cloth dyeing and bleaching, discarded remains after boiling, various impurities, drainage and effluent all flowed into rivers, along with the accompanying noxious odours. It is already beginning to resemble a sewer.” (Manford, The Industrial Revolution and The People, pp.179-180) As a result of The Industrial Revolution, the infrastructure that had been sufficient to support the livelihoods of people in regional societies came to be polluted by the expansion of the cities due to the large amounts of industrial waste they produced. This is from the time that large numbers of labourers began to arrive from outside of those regional societies. These labourers were looked upon as outsiders by the persons in those regional societies. “As was the custom in their native land, the Irish left their garbage in front of their doorsteps, creating puddles and piles of night soil that spoilt the appearance of the working class district and created foul odours. Also, as was their custom, the Irish built pigsties against their houses and, when they could not, slept with the pigs inside the house.” (Engels, The State of the Working Class in England, Vol. I, p.183) Many labourers come from Ireland and were farmers who had left the land. They were completely unlike the urban populations, and their nature could not be understood. At this time, before the identification of a laborer class, the labourers were seen as aliens coming from some unknown place. “The bourgeoisie has a much closer relationship with every other nation on earth than with the workers who live right next to them.” (Engels, ibid., p.239) These people were that different.
There had been no specialized housing
“The One Shilling Day was one of the wonders of the exposition season. Rumors had been spreading beforehand about barbaric behavior and disturbances but surprised well-behaved and endless crowds of labourers passed through the Crystal Palace eyes wide open. There were no communists throwing stones at the glass … and the labourers were well dressed in their flat caps. Children were wide-eyed and there were babies and simple picnics. Upper classes were moved by these scenes including the ginger beer they had no experience of. The English people are not prone to hyperbole but the scene before one’s eyes made one want to hold hands and shed tears.” (Bryant, A. & Kakuyama S., The Industrial Revolution and The People, quoted from p.282 onwards) The One Shilling Day was the reduced admission price on the weekdays of Monday to Thursday. In 1951 was the London exposition known as the Festival of Britain. For the people who until then had lived in London, labourers were people who disrupted their daily lives, and labourers who nobody knew where they came from were people to be afraid of and the realization they were all the same people after all was one of the reasons tears were shed. These terrifying people were the people Marx had called the proletariat. Even the word was epoch-making as persons whom nobody knew where they came from and who were not related to one another could be could be recognized as a social class. It was the bourgeosie who exploited the labour power of this proletariat.
Marx saw the society of that time as a battle between the bourgeosie and the proletariat, but this had no physical space but an abstract one. “In making the society of the future, it is not our duty to make it a utopia.” (Engels, The Housing Problem, p.42) Engels rejected the design of a physical architectural space for the future society for society was the space for the class battle. For Engels who had written about the poor living environment of the labourers, these terrible conditions were the starting point for the revolution. This was stated in “The Political Power of the Lowest Class” (Arendt, On Revolution, p.94) and others. One easy way of solving this was the petite bourgeosie. This petite bourgeosie comprised “the middle industrial class, consisting of small indusgrialists, small merchants, manual workers and farmers.” (Marx & Engels, The Communist Manifesto, p.57) It was meant for those who lived and workd in the same place. These were the people who were tied to the land by industrial guilds and manual workers guilds.
However, these were people who were not just simply tied to the land. The place to which they were tied to was the sole source of their livelihoods. Cities were such a place. People who loved in one place in a city, each made their own local society. CIties prior to The Industrial Revolution had the “social and political aspects of guilds. Even though “both the outer appearance and the actuality of guilds remained practically unchanged until the 18th century” (Manford, The Industrial Revolution and The People, p. 254) those people still had strong ties to their local communities in the form of communes. These people living in these local communities were the petite bourgeosie who Marx had referred to. This does not mean that they lived in housing catering specifically to them because no such thing yet existed. A house was a place of work. “A house was the workplace of one family.” (ibid., p. 260) It was a house where buying and selling took place. “The entrance facing the street was a very important place for people who were selling things and so had to allow everybody.” “It was not the case that the urban houses of the Middle Ages were houses only for a family to live. They were at the same time factories (for handmade goods), offices, general stores and specialty stores. They were also places for communal living for people who weren’t related.” “Depending upon the guild, apprentices might live with their masters for the seven year term of their apprenticeship.” “The ground floor of the house was usually for retail but workers such as shoemakers and candlemakers who did not require large amounts of space worked in a shared space.” (Benevolo, The History of Modern Architecture, p. 368) “In other words, the medieaval city was comprised of such small shops and workshops. There was a tendency for related workshops to be near each other and often the name of the workshop would take the name of the street. Moreover, the name of the workers was often derived from that of the work itself.” (Guis, F. & Guis, J., Life in a Mediaeval City, p. 117) The street consisted of rows of workshops and small shops facing it. They were retail streets. Some of the streetscape of these mediaeval cities still remains as shopping streets of small shops. In Italian, these small shops and workshops are called bottega, and in French they are known as boutiques. (Figs. 1–3)
Streets of the mediaeval city lined with boutiques
Guilds were one type of autonomous organization, with regulations relating to their internal operation as well as dealings outside. “Whatever the guild, the importance of abiding by the decisions made by members of the same guild was recognized. This not only put restrictions on competition but there was also the role of guaranteeing a minimum level of quality.” (Guis, F. & Guis, J., Life in a Mediaeval City, p. 130) “In practically all guilds, inspections were not a formality, as stores were subject to random inspections, scales were checked, substandard goods were impounded on the spot and either disposed of or given to the poor. Fines were collected in accordance with the worth of the goods. … It was also prohibited to collude with others to fix prices and to sell from other than registered stores.” (ibid., p. 131) In addition to these strict regulations relating to the external interactions of the guild members, there were also internal mechanisms so that the members could mutually assist each other. “Within the guild, gifts were given upon the birth of a child, assistance was given to those who were ill or had fallen on hard times, and there was also a degree of charity.” (ibid., pp. 132-133) Each group within the guild had a set area and various protections relating to the work were safeguarded. The city was configured by these guild groups that together, formed a commune. “Even in Italy, communes were fundamentally groups of citizens.” (ibid., p. 33) These citizens were “weavers, straw goods makers, helmet manufacturers, winemakers, and all other types of workers and shopkeepers within the city.” (ibid.) In north-west Europe, guilds flourished despite objections from The Pope and bishops. (ibid., p. 25) Cities effectively became spaces that were autonomously managed by the workers and shopkeepers of the guilds.
“The medieval city was in a sense a collection of smaller cities, each of which had a degree of autonomy and self-sufficiency.” “Each featued one or more churches, often had a market for local produce, and a local water supply from a spring or a well.” “The primary residential unit for families and persons close was determined according to the profit-loss relationship with workers, and compensated for by parish divisions.” (Manford, The Industrial Revolution and The People, p. 278) This meant that “nearby residential units were not simple collections of houses but, at the same time were parishes of guild groups having the power to autonomously manage the community.” Manford calls these small cities. The commune was a group of these small cities, and was beginning to assume the spatial characteristics known as The World and the relationship between it and the workers and shopkeepers associated with a guild was that of a community within a community. The shops where buying and selling took place and the workshops where goods were made were its thresholds. In the polis, the threshold was the andronitis or the “male space” but in the mediaeval city it was the boutiques and bottegas of shopkeepers and workers. The shop was the public space inside the private space, and it was through these shops that the urban space was configured.
This configuration of a city remained practically unchanged until the eighteenth century when it was largely destroyed by The Industrial Revolution of the nineteenth. The inhabitants of these cities about to be destroyed were the shopkeepers and handicraftsmen. Marx called them the petite bourgeosie. The master and apprentice relationship of the guilds can be thought of as the same relationship between “free citizens and slaves”, “the urban nobility and the common people” and “lords and peasants.” In “Guild Masters and Workers” (Communist Manifesto, p.41) this relationship was thought of as one of mutual opposition between masters who were the oppressors and the workers who were the oppressed, with each bound tightly to the other and the workers being the proletariat. The masters, the sellers, and also the petite bourgeosie each fell into the proletariat class (ibid., p.53) because they “all lost the competition with larger capitalists.” (ibid.)
Many countries have a history of shopkeepers living above shops and the entrance to the residential quarters is usually through the shop open to the street. Japan certainly does. Think of the domestic comings and goings through the Oo-La-La [うらら] beauty salon in Ozu’s Tokyo Story. Here are two more Japanese examples, one traditional and one contemporary.
This next project is Riken Yamamoto’s 2003 Canal Court Codan, in Tokyo. The plans are for what’s known as SOHO – an acronym for small office home office. The layout can be arbitrarily adjusted to be used fully or partially as an office or dwelling. Instead of an opaque door with a peephole is a large glazed threshold opening off the corridor. This is Yamamoto’s update of the mediaeval city with its bottegas and boutiques.
This next project is his 2004 Jian Wai SOHO, in Beijing for SOHO China (who were a major client of Zaha Hadid Architects – Galaxy SOHO, etc.) Buildings in the development have commercial use on the lowest three levels and residential above but even those can be used as offices. The relatively open plans can be easily reconfigured. Each have what could be a maid’s room or a room for storage or the photocopier. I can’t tell if the wall with the front doors is fully glazed, but it could easily be. With its large, windowed waiting area, this is not the usual residential corridor. Let’s not get nostalgic for the artificially ventilated and illuminated access corridors of 20th century residential towers. How the large spaces (one sixth of the unit area) just inside the entrances would be used is difficult to image for a residential unit but not for an office where it would make an ideal reception. This is Yamamoto’s Lesson #2 from the medieaval city. Is it not possible that people might already worked out the best way to live and work more than half a century ago? This stuff matters. Now, when working from home is back on the agenda it’s merely as a remote outpost of the mothership office and it’s little wonder our dwellings descended from isolated factory worker housing are ill equipped to deal with it.
It’s easy to see how these twenty-year old ways of configuring residential space as possible commercial space borrow from the mediaeval city but we now have fewer occupations that benefit from a street frontage and footfall. We’re no longer smiths, shoemakers, bakers …* True, we do have occasional live-work units for people who need a studio space but these are rarely where their customers pass by. For most of us, working from home doesn’t require a threshold shopfront. All it needs is a laptop, something to put it on, and maybe a virtual background because we feel the need to separate our workspace from our living space. This virtual background is a wall, not a threshold. Instead of living and working as a community within a community we isolate ourselves inside our work spaces inside our isolated living spaces. We think we’re all connected online and indeed we are (just as you and I are now) but if doing some kind of work and performing those repetitive and cyclic processes called living is what life is all about (and, thanks to Hannah Arendt, I suspect it is), then maybe we should think of some way of bringing them together a bit better. Some new kind of phalanstère?
*… or archers, barbers, brewers, butlers, carpenters, carvers, cooks, drapers, farmers, fishers, foresters, fowlers, gardeners, hunters, masons, millers, pipers, potters, sadlers, skinners, tanners, weavers, or wheelers.
• • •
2024/08/12 Ch. 3, pp.120–128
2024/07/21 Ch. 3, pp.115-120
2024/07/21 Ch. 3, pp.108-114
2024/07/14 Ch. 3, pp.101-107
2024/06/30 Ch. 2, pp.92-100
2024/06/23 Ch. 2, pp.87-92
2024/06/16 Ch. 2, pp.78-87
2024/06/02 Ch. 2, pp.69-78
2024/05/05 Ch. 2, pp.66-70
2024/05/05 Ch. 2, pp.58-66
2024/05/05 Ch. 1, pp.46-55
2024/04/28 Ch. 1, pp.35-46
2024/04/21 Ch. 1, pp.23-35
2024/04/07 Ch. 1, pp.18-23
2024/03/31 Ch. 1, pp.14-18
2024/03/24 The Space of Power vs. The Power of Space: Preface pp. 7-11
Revisited this week:
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