MASS-PRODUCTION and the GENTLEMEN’S TAILOR

László Rajk

MASS-PRODUCTION and the GENTLEMEN’S TAILOR
Interactivity: the new paradigm of architecture and painting

In connection with the paintings of András Kapitány

Mass-production, assembly-line production, and prefabrication have always been the opposites of uniqueness, individuality, and personal tailoring. In fact, not only opposites, but the products of two completely separate worlds. Since it is the works of a painter that persuade my contemplation, I might have rather said that it is Mona Lisa on the one side, and on the other, Warhol’s Marilyn Monroe. The former is the symbol of a perfect portrait resting on the foundation of an artisan, while Warhol’s portrait is rather an experiment in the manufacture of assembly-line artistic mass-production. The experiment was a success, and from that point on, painting (and art as a whole) has become inseparable from the serial world of mass-manufactured, if nevertheless personal objects.
The demand for interactivity fundamentally transforms every artistic process, from computerised architectural design plans to the artist’s brush. And in such a way that the artist increasingly satisfies personal demands, namely those of the client, as personality, as individual, thus freeing himself from patronage, or one might even say, from himself. The triumph of interactivity as fundamental principle in future will result in the client – the personage, the individual, the contemporary concoctor – conducting the artist according to his own taste and demands. (I do not contend separate categories for utilitarian and personal desires, that might be considered aesthetic.) It is altogether possible that hereby, artist as vocation will cease, and will be replaced by a professional possessing abilities based on a strange combination of psychoanalytic and technological knowledge. What is certain, however, is that every scientific and technological condition has already been fulfilled for the development of just such a new system of relations based on interactivity, not to mention the increasing demand for us to be able to create our own – tailor-made – world.

DESIRES
Anyone who enters a mediaeval house, ascends a staircase whose steps have become concave from wear, and then crosses the threshold, likewise worn to a smooth concavity, will be inundated with an infinite warmth. Our curious sentimentality is motivated primarily by a peculiar veneration for the (ancient) past, which is sometimes exaggerated. There is, however, another extremely important source of our deep emotion and intimate familiarity. And this is the personification that has come into being through the long use of houses, cities and neighbourhoods. (I am using the word personification hereafter not as the term for appearance in human form, but rather to indicate the process when someone [in the singular or the plural] moulds their milieu to their own image.) The magic is especially complete when the personification based on use and interaction can be associated with a well-known personality. Through them, the house and city take on a higher value in our imagination.
As a confirmation of just how much the interaction between ourselves and our milieu interweaves our lives, let us start with the simplest examples: in Transylvania today, the majority of so-called folk furniture is industrial production; it is no longer the local carpenter who has produced them. They are first retouched, then have patterns applied to them, to take on their final form. They act exactly as Picasso in his later period, when he painted over standardised clay tableware, remodelling them into his own image.
The most dynamically changing areas of personification generated by internal motivations are the visual arts (though we must not forget DJ-ing). Not only are they the most dynamic, but they are also the most wide-ranging. Duchamp merely had to paint a moustache onto Mona Lisa to claim her as his own; Endre Bálint sliced things for his montages, and Jeff Koons simply goes for direct appropriation. The architect simply steals: s/he undoes elements, then builds them into the new, from eclecticism through to the Stalinist baroque, from recent postmodernism to deconstructivism. András Kapitány infiltrates – Piero della Francesca, da Vinci, El Lissitzky, Bachman, Escher, and most recently, Rajk.
No matter the extent to which internal drive leads us there, we must acknowledge that this method with which we all work is the so-called “ready-made”.

(András Kapitány: Error)

Examination of the category of pattern-pursuit based purely on traditions brings us closest to an understanding of just how powerful the internal drive can be that leads to the radical transformation of our own environment. This inner compulsion is so strong that it compels us to tackle, even in a physical sense, creating, building and implementing our own little universe. This is how we will get an architect from a painter. If one travels this road, he will easily be branded a (holy) madman, and can be sure that he will remain alone. It is a real quixotic battle. We might call it a yearning in time and space, or a dream world, but if we take a good look around us, we might realise that we are not the only ones in whom such a desire burns. We might also describe the personification of our milieu as acting against some external will. Let us call our desires to transform our environment, in summary – to keep it simple – the desire for freedom.

(András Kapitány: LEGO city)

ATTEMPTS
Many have already attempted to transform our built environment according to their own demands, deviating from the general, through the means of interaction. There were among them innocents (let us call the architecture they created spontaneous architecture, without architecture), rebels (urban guerillas, effectively behaving against the system) and the conscious. The conscious have done everything in the interest of establishing a real dialogue between the client and the artist (designer). They are the ones who early on recognised the serious errors of architecture related to mass-production and standardised manufacture, and they tried to rectify them from inside.
I find two main tendencies of the strategy of the conscious important. The first relates to the attempts to dissolve with assistance the rigidity of prefabrication and mass-production; aside from accepting the principles of the system, they have tried to render the structure flexible. The other group has characteristically built upon the amelioration of communication, aiming for the enhancement of effective dialogue between the client and designer, as well as for the participation of the client in the initial stages of planning.

(András Kapitány: Building, as Sculpture/ Sculpture, as Building)

The inception of systems theory research coincides with the appearance of structuralism in the 1960s, which insured an intellectual background and medium for the systems theory. The research was extremely far-reaching, targeting the humanization of assembly-line work, and pertaining to the study of materials, technological, organisational and logistical fields, as well. From the perspective of the current study, those research are of interest that facilitated the implementation of structural flexibility of the various prefabrication systems. The Gutenberg principle of fragmentation seems to be the most obvious example. (The philosophical and technological embeddedness of the principle borrowed from Dr. Mihály Párkányi’s basic research is extraordinarily interesting.) With his discovery of book-printing, Gutenberg did nothing more than exploiting the possibilities inherent in the structure of the writing of characters. It is easy to see that written language is composed of elements (letters) prefabricated in a limited number. With the arrangement of these elements alongside each other according to a given structural order (words) and their variations (sentences), any train of thought may be produced as mass-production (books). Be it the Bible, or the story of Gargantua. The essence of Gutenberg’s principle of fragmentation is that the individual prefabricated (lead type) elements have no inherent meaning, i.e., they do not determine their own positions, associations or situations. In spite of this, or due precisely to this, the number of "constructible products" describable by their variations is virtually infinite. (Although it is from an entirely different approach, the hologram principle of Dénes Gábor also functions according to a similar logic.)
In Vasarely’s programmes in France, the formation of final variations of (prefabricated) decorative elements created by the artist insured the interactive participation of the user. These experiments touched upon not only interior design or housing blocks, but also had urbanistic connections. Naturally, the avantgardists also appeared in this area, who also considered this communication-based interaction narrow. Hundertwasser’s first well-known action also probed these limits. He leaned out of the window of his sixth-floor flat, and as far as his hand could reach, he painted the façade according to his own taste. (Later, as a famous artist, the façade decoration of the houses he designed was also composed of the contiguous squares of the surface of his initial protest work. In the first case, the result of his individual interaction is comprised by his standing at the centre of the endless concrete façade, spurring on the occupants of the house to act similarly to his protest-art. However, in the case of his later houses, the great artist did not permit anybody to lean out of their window and spoil his artwork. Certainly, today neither do we consider the graffiti of the city an interaction of self-expression or personification, or a (quasi-)artistic product.)
It is not by chance that the most frequent terrain of the experiments of Vasarely (and the French urbanist, Yona Friedmann) was architecture. Another group of experimenters encouraging interaction by communication also strove for the client – maintaining the processes of mass-production – to increasingly have the chance to move into a flat moulded to her/his own image. (Moreover, not in an aesthetic or decorative sense, but considering the physical nature of the apartment as an object of transformation.) This principle materialises naturally in the case of a family house (see gentlemen’s tailor), but can be a serious brain-teaser in the case of mass-production and standard manufacture (housing estate). The more precise the demands, the sooner the appropriate techniques proposed by appraisal. Planning teams were supplemented with sociologists, psychologists, anthropologists, poets, writers and civilians. With this, in actual fact, there was no interaction, since the more precise appraisal of the clients’ demands occurred during the preparatory phases. Yet, considering that the period prior to the creation of the complex teams marked the absolute autocracy of the designers, this too was an enormous advance (“one small step for mankind, one giant leap for man”). The real result of the penetrating research was the discovery that the spatial demands of individual communities (be it a commune, or a family of several generations) change incredibly rapidly. It is also not by chance that the existence of the community became the central problem of the planning teams, as it was precisely at this time that the first examples of civil organisations took form.
The designers learned that flats, houses and cities “speak”, but not for their own sake, and even less so for the designers, but they mainly speak about their owners – be it good or bad. Fortunately, the work of those conscious of the untenability of both the rebels and the rigid systems never flagged.

(András Kapitány: FikaGRA)

The gentlemen’s tailor reincarnated
The gentlemen’s tailor is never to return. The advantages that the gentlemen’s tailor symbolised have been terminated, and a version of standardised mass-production has replaced them, making it possible, at the same time, that every single product of the process become personified. That is to say, the reincarnation of the gentlemen’s tailor is a new type of artist, who rambles at the end of an assembly-line, ready to take on tailor-made orders and to execute them.
As a consequence of the explosion in informatics and technology, the tools of individual tailoring – in the form of software and hardware – already exist. Moreover, we can even intervene into the process of (mass-)manufacturing, without generating a disturbance in production. Or if only in part, but if that type of interactivity has been realised, which results in the products of mass-manufacture obtaining their final form through a certain degree of personification.
Albeit the scientific and technical knowledge at our disposal has developed admirably, architecture has still not approached genuine interaction. Indeed, to a certain extent, with the emergence of CAD-based techniques, design planning has become even further estranged from the actual users. This is even more interesting in the light of the fact that the computer revolution itself rendered the implementation of increasingly effective interactivity possible. The question is whether the future client will be satisfied with an augmentation of the selection of mass-produced (architectural) objects as “ready-mades”. Will s/he be satisfied with continuing to venerate the designer as the author of her/his built environments, or would s/he like to replace him?

(András Kapitány: Architecture without a Floorplan)

With a brief summary of the processes of the recent past, I have tried to demonstrate that the demand for personification attainable through interaction has always been present in architecture. (I have highlighted personification from the long list of aims of interactivity only to reinforce its necessity.) As a counter-argument, we might put forward that such a quantity of knowledge has accumulated in architectural planning, that we can only come into possession of it with some sort of specialised training, i.e., designers will always be unavoidable and inomissable. Contradicting this line of argumentation, we might assert that the knowledge of individual designers has not grown over the past decade, but has radically metamorphosed due to CAD-based planning. Computerised design has not brought some sort of new knowledge to be mastered to planning, but has simply restructured existing knowledge.

(András Kapitány-Zsuzsy Novák-László Rajk: Blue Gate/Portal)

Just a few decades ago, no one would have dared to imagine that another revolution would follow the computer revolution, when the computer would suddenly become a personal computer (PC). No longer does the user have to learn computer language, but the development of computers sets out on a path that increasingly indicates a tendency of real personification. The computer user did not have to learn something new entirely from the beginning, but simply had to restructure her/his existing knowledge.
I am convinced that architecture has also set out on a similar path. I would add, however, that those creating the possibilities for genuine interaction in architecture will presumably not be architects. If my postulation proves to be true, then what would logically follow from this is that the users of these possibilities are neither necessarily architects. Perhaps we might consider them rebels, in the same way as the guerillas of the computer systems personified to a certain extent. We might also accuse the rebels of the digital world of romanticism, and here I am thinking of the open sharing of programs and so-called “copyleft” instead of copyright. I myself am not among the circle of mudslingers, and I observe with satisfaction how some guerilla strategies have filtered into the sphere of architecture. The new generation working in architecture does not find anything objectionable in virus or parasitic architecture or in the existence of memesis; to the contrary, they consider these simply procedures with whose aid they can increasingly mould their environment to their own image.
In the computer age, space is not something in a permanent state of rest, but the terrain of interventions. The objet trouvé moves into the space, and it cannot be determined whether it is the parasite metamorphosing our space, or it is the artist who drains its energy and explodes it, only to then reconnect its elements according to an entirely different logic. This reconnection often takes place not according to some program written beforehand, but through the creation of a kind of artificial nervous system.

(András Kapitány:FikaGRA)

Naturally, I have exaggerated a bit in contending that no special expertise whatsoever is necessary for the pursuit of architecture. I am fully aware of the fact that a certain technical knowledge is indispensable for the design of a house, or for the interactive intervention related to a building, park or city. The development of computer programs, however, indicates that precisely this technical knowledge and expertise becomes simply a part of the program. Thus, it is not our own technical skill that stipulates the limits of the objective, but the computer that drives us. Virtually everything necessary for the creation of genuine interaction is given; or rather, what is missing is exactly that which is also missing from today’s architectural designers and real estate investors. To the best of my belief, this knowledge will be acquired by intellectuals outside of architecture sooner than by those who are directly engaged in architecture today. Today, perhaps the personification of architectural standard production might still seem to be a kind of non-conformist conceptual art, just as, half a century ago, the concept of the standardised production of unique artistic creations appeared as non-conformist bluster. The propagation of interaction, nevertheless, is uncheckable, from which follows that the interactive participants of architecture will conquer an increasingly greater sphere from the architectural designers.