Upheaval as an Architectural Performance
FUTURE: A SPECULATIVE ALTERNATIVE
Currently the property 352 Somerset Street is advertised as four levels of office spaces; ranging $10 to $35 per sqf, the 6000 sqf floorplate [40] will generate a stable income if leased. It will welcome anchor tenants that are capable of promising long-term profit for the owner. Once again, the owner stresses that the visual aspect of the house will be “beautifully restored” revealing the brick texture at the interior of the office spaces. However, going through the history of the Somerset House, the renewed house that takes the same skin is losing its history as the once loved destination in the neighbourhood. Of course there is a market for commercial or office spaces, but in what way can a workspace become heterogeneous and ignite more collaborative engagement without compromising its function to serve the 9 to 5 workdays? Taking inspirations from unsolicited events such as the Bucky Dome and Occupy Central Movement, can the spontaneous flow of public engagement inhabit the skin of the Somerset House differently? What if the stable 9 to 5 lifestyle can coexist simultaneously with the transient public participation in a limited footprint throughout the 24-hour day so that the house itself becomes a heterogeneous enclave that never falls asleep?
By turning the off hours into on hours, the architecture becomes a machine, a generator that keeps the community engaged not only within its physical floor area that it can offer, but in the measure of time: the house that functions 24 hours per day. Given the 8-hour office habit of the modern lifestyle, the office space is usually vacant 2/3 of the day. The remaining 16 hours out of the 24-hour day is undervalued, just as the ruined Somerset House is viewed by the neighbourhood an eyesore, or an airbed tucked away in an Airbnb listing. If set aside 1/3 of the floor area of the Somerset house for the permanent office area that operates 1/3 of a day’s hours, the other 2/3 of the space that can function in a longer hours should take responsibilities to generate more opportunities to enable activities that are heterogeneous and potentially unsolicited. The ruined Somerset House expresses a perfect opportunity from its collapse; the event of destruction is an upheaval and frees up the rare half of the building from its rigid functional space. The tragedy should not be taken as an unfortunate event but should be transformed into a new ground for speculative architecture. An architecture that is constantly in action, not as a heritage building preserved in stills for storytelling, but a framework that allows multiple stories to be expressed: an expressive architecture that is like a screenplay constructed from different frames and angles of perception, except that in the experience of architecture, each participant of the spatial and timely configuration is an actor, each eye is a camera, each encounter draws an episode, and the stories of different individuals intertwine into endless dramatic scenarios without intermission.
Through appreciating the undervalued spaces and hours, the value generated is not limited to the monetary revenues resulting from previously assured models such as the “anchor tenant” leasing strategy and mixed-use with street level commercial, but more by allowing values to be discovered, tested, and generated by the participants of the architectural spaces themselves. Like posters and graffiti which redefine the values of the barricaded ”eyesore” by benefiting the public exposure of different communities of artists, the new Somerset House should be inhabited by an eclectic collection of architectural environments suitable for both work and leisure.
Of course it is impossible to re-write the history of the Somerset House since its collapse, but it may still be worthy to suggest an alternative scenario to speculate what could happen in an imaginary imagery: as Bernard Tcshumi would say “architecture in paper space”.
Next >> Does Architecture Dream of Upheaval? Performance — Act I
40. Data obtained from Primcorp <http://www.primecorp.ca/ historic-somerset-house/>
