Looking back, House fits precisely with the early 1990s postmodern (’pomo’) Zeitgeist, where insides and outsides and the permeable, shifting liminal zones between them were in a flux of radical undecidability, even of alterity. Clearly, the period’s critical theory buzzwords still flow fluently. In 1993, I was a student of English literature, particularly taken with critical theory, and it shows. It also explains why House made its mark on me, or should I say, it accounts for the continuing inscription of the Zeitgeist’s discourse onto the palimpsest of my (en)cultur(at)ed Weltanschauung. Still, it’s easy to sneer.

From Zeitgeist to Geistzeit. It was Halloween when I first noticed the moulding on this exterior wall of a basement in Dublin. Perhaps it was something to do with the way the drapes hang like a white-sheet ghost that drew my attention. The moribund plant container and the odd negative jail-cell bars on the frosted glass certainly played a role too. But I think it goes deeper than just association of ideas. Things that are inside-out can be disturbingly uncanny because they give solid form to what is not normally solid. That is not to say that inside-out buildings are always uncanny – the exposed entrails of the Centre Georges Pompidou or of the Lloyds Building are merely interesting. But when a building or its surfaces bear the trace of something now missing, as in House, or when concrete bears the mark of the piece of wood that contained it (example here), we are faced with some kind of ghostly remnant (if this sounds like Derrida, it is because it occurs to me that his Specters of Marx also dates from 1993).

On a cold winter’s day in Paris, when you notice the marks where, months before, the kickstands of parked motorbikes have sunk into the softened tar, the ghostly heat of that summer’s day brushes your cheek.

In Derry, are these micro-sculptures meant to be emerging from beneath the pavement, or have they fallen from above? Either way, they are imprints of the missing oak wood – Derry comes from ‘Doire’, which means oak wood – that once occupied this spot. The name of the city is contested – officially it is Londonderry, the colonial name, but the great majority of its residents call it simply Derry. The micro-sculptures are evidence that the ghost of the original wood has not forgotten, and will not forget, that this is an undead doire. It’s a good example of how the nationalist population of that city have won the cultural war, spending UK-exchequer money on deconstruction-influenced sculpture that proclaims the passing nature of the centuries-long British occupation.

The grisly curtains in Dublin make me wonder, with a quickening of my pulse, if the original curtains are still in there, undead and entombed inside the plaster? Whiteread’s scultpure always did have something of the sarcophagus about it, as if some ghastly entombment had happened there. Years after House was demolished, I lived in London and for a long while passed the spot regularly without knowing what had stood there. What I always thought of as I passed that spot was how 200 people were made homeless and 6 were killed there in 1944 by the first successful German V-1 ‘flying bomb’. There’s no trace of that.

You look around: here in the present, the modern lines, the hygienic atmosphere, the concealment of every item inside packaging, the medicalizing approach to the body and the reams of instructions, warnings and disclaimers, all seem to be undercut by the bag’s nostalgia for an Old Curiosity Shop consumer experience. Not a pharmacy, nor a chemist, rather an apothecary. We all know the scene: musty bottles, glass-fronted oak cabinets, banks of identical drawers labeled with yellowing paper, weird specimens, pestles and mortars, crude surgical tools, cursive fonts.

You go to France, where the pharmacy is a key component of every streetscape, even in the tiniest village. In its famously good healthcare system, the French state reaches into the life of every street in the form of the pharmacie, often located at a key crossroads, a place of social significance, marked by the simple, ancient symbol of the cross.

This is the manifestation of what Foucault described as the biopolitical state. The state takes on the responsibility for the health of the nation and in the process disciplines its citizens, obliging them to live full and healthy lives.

You are in the French countryside. You go into the woods. You pick some mushrooms. You’re unsure about how safe they are, so you ask around: who knows this stuff? The answer: the pharmacist, one of whose official functions is to identify wild mushrooms.

And the apparent contrast between the modern medical pharmacy and the olde worlde magickery of the apothecary suddenly diminishes. This is the same institution, playing more or less the same role as that of folklore, folk medicine, superstition, religion and prayer. In fact, the apothecary’s shop is the beginning of the shift that took medicine out of its immediate locales, out of the forests, and out of the hands of the local quacks and witches and into the world of mass society, consumer experience, scientific knowledge and into the sanitized hands of the pharmacist and doctor. In the older system, there is an awareness that the danger and the cure for the danger came from the same place (i.e. the natural world, the forest floor, your own body). Poison and cure are two aspects of the same thing. In modern medicine, this paradox is captured in a discourse of ‘dosages’.

The authority that went with the local healer transfers in the modern era into the hands of the beneficent state. But the old associations run deep. Here, at the foot of the Rue Mouffetard, one of Paris’s oldest streets, stands this modern pharmacy, like thousands of others across France. The slabs of marble that join at the corner are nicely done. Look again, though. The wolf of the old forests stares out at you.

This non-humanist, or post-humanist, worldview yields some interesting results for those of us who are interested in the built environment. Clearly, the built environment is a human product, but this does not mean that it cannot produce its own consequences, independent of human intention or even knowledge. Doors require opening and closing. Who is to do this work, and what kinds of social practices develop as a result?

This elaborate carved door to an ordinary-looking apartment building in Paris draws our attention. It is the first line of defence for the security of those who live in the building, and clearly there seems to be a problem with how well it is doing its job. How do we know this? Because the following notice is affixed to the inside of the door:

Please excuse the photography. The notice may be translated as follows:

Why has nobody attached a hydraulic door-closing arm to this door? Possibly because the door is too valuable an antique to desecrate in this way. Or possibly because it is cheaper to put up this plaque. Why not just put in a modern door? Probably because the door is cherished for its aesthetic properties. What is happening is that the door is enlisting our help because it cannot perform its task properly. Its beauty and its age are not its greatest assets, as it would have us believe, rather they are its weakness. The mode of address, from the door to its user, is interesting too. The door needs to remind us how to operate it, that is, how to behave in relation to it. Design usually aims to perform functions on our behalf, instead of us, to save us the trouble; but then it relies on us to operate it properly, or to know how to act in its presence. Revolving doors require a very specific mode of behaviour, for instance. Hinged doors, such as this one, need to open and, especially when our security is at stake, to close when we need them to.

It may be objected that the message is not actually from the door, it is a statement by a human that has been affixed to the door. This is true, and Latour would concur, as his call to pay attention to the social lives of objects is not so naive as to anthropomorphize them. He does not propose that the door addresses us. Rather, he proposes that the social world is mediated through designed, technological objects, and this door is one of them. The particular features of this door results in a particular kind of social relation and mode of address – humorous, admonishing, friendly, self-deprecating, apologetic, and so on. The problem that people have not been closing this door properly in the past is a problem for the social life of a particular set of humans, and so the door has become the medium through which one group communicates its frustration with another group. The door and its functionality, or non-functionality, are part of the glue that holds this microcosm of the social together in a particular network of relations.

And I bet you thought I would talk about the trompe-l’oeil carving.

Your Slab contributor, cognizant of the fast-approaching quarter finals of the Champions League, and always conscious of the many Tottenham Hotspur fans out there among the readership, considers it time to look at things on aggregate. When it comes to buildings, aggregate is the term for any fine material that is used to bulk up the volume of a composite, such as concrete. In this sample, taken from the front of an art gallery on Rue Bonaparte in Paris, the shards of black and white are the aggregate.

Generally, I would associate such large-scale use of aggregate with certain institutional buildings of the 1960s and 1970s, such as this industrial school, now an art college, in Dublin.

The suburban slouch of this low-slung staircase, where real estate is not at a premium, contrasts with the verticality of the next staircase, from a Dublin city-centre hospital refit of the same era.

The material itself is of course not made for close inspection. Its effect is intended to be aggregate, you might say. But close inspection reveals a scattery world of disorder and chance, where the distribution of elements follows no pattern.

These samples provide good illustrations of how random arrangements appear to us. A truly random array of elements has a high chance of containing clusters of the same element, and of what seem to be patterns or geometrical arrangements. Of course, by definition there is no arrangement in something that is random – it is merely our pattern-seeking tendency that sometimes finds arrangements within them. It is when clustering and incipient patterning are absent that we should suspect that a human hand has intervened and smoothed things out, ironically leaving a trace of itself in the very act of trying to do the opposite.

More conventional urban treasure hunting is to be found in picking through boxes of cut-price books. This is of course a popular pastime in Paris, particularly along the Seine. This neat shopfront design playfully tempts the passerby to delve into the shop’s innards. The loss leaders in the boxes draw us in.

This untidy French shopfront certainly does not draw us in, at least not anymore. But the decaying lettering has left us with the decrepit painting business of ‘M. Badin’, which translates as ‘Mister Playful’. Serendipity or joke?

The salmon-pink of the wall, a popular choice in boom-era Irish pub design, is well used as a contrasting background for the green paint. Did the artist intend on drawing a face, and then saw the cock-potential? Or was the sequence of events the other way around? Or was the whole thing planned? The decaying windows and doors of the pub (closed a good number of years now) are given a cheery lift by this little fella. By contrast …

… this manic action-painting offers an alternative vision of sexuality, to say the least. The medium is ketchup, applied both by hand and direct from the bottle. The anatomical strangeness achieved by spontaneous indecision gives this a wholly different kind of life. In the week after this photo was taken, a spell of dry weather, the ketchup turned brown, then dark-brown, and finally developed a slightly glossy film which then flaked off, but the original remained intact. A week after that, the wall was entirely repainted by the shop whose side we are looking at.

The convention of drawing a penis with a horizontal line across the shaft, and a vertical line to indicate the opening at the top of the penis (what is the word for it? the hole?) is well established, presumably across the world. The penis in this convention is clearly circumcised. Strange then that it should catch on in a country such as Ireland where circumcision is and always has been very rare. Where did this convention come from? When did it become established? Can we call this a skeuomorph?

I will not make any puerile jokes about the name of the street in the second image here. The source of the name, according to Julie Craig, author of ‘See Dublin On Foot: An Architectural Walking Guide‘, is the nearby but now disappeared ‘Pleasants Asylum’, which was founded in 1814 by Thomas Pleasants as a home for orphaned young Protestant girls.

Class dismissed.

This corner is on a narrow street along the main building of the Sorbonne. The railing prevents people using the corner either as a place to urinate or to sleep, or both (note how the spikes point upwards and downwards). The stench of urine from dark urban nooks and crannies can be overpowering, and clearly it can lead to desperate measures in some parts of the world. It is easy to understand the urge to preserve the building and the street in this way. This fairly brutal instance of preservation is interesting, though, because it reveals a feature of preservation efforts in general that is not always apparent. While the task of preservation seems to be concerned with the past, and with the future survival of valued objects, really what is at stake is the control of the streetscape in the here and now.

The construction of the spiked bars (here is another example from a few streets away) are an effective effort at protecting something without destroying it. The space is still public, but it simply cannot be used. The space is negated. So it might be better to put it like this: what we have here is a way of destroying something without protecting it, because the space itself is being protected for non-use. Better to destroy the space than let it be used. In fact, what is being protected is the adjacent space, i.e. the pavement where those who are not mad or homeless walk by. Similarly, churchgoers in Saint Sulpice, a short walk in the other direction, are protected from beggars at the door by this bar which doubles as a boot scraper (for more on boot scrapers in these pages, you might like to read this and this). Admittedly, a beggar could stand here, but would be prevented from sitting. Well, they have to do something to be the deserving poor, don’t they?

I was not around in the 1960s or 1970s to see the buildings of the South Bank Centre in London, so I don’t know what the signage was like in those days. But I do know that the big colourful signs that are tacked all over the complex now betray a certain lack of love for their architectural heritage on the part of the people who run these buildings. 1960s brutalism, as exemplified by the Hayward and the Queen Elizabeth Hall, both pictured here, can indeed be hard to love. That is, it can be hard to love if what you love is flat, multi-coloured, letters-as-cartoons.

These flaky masks deny all the qualities (volume, substance, materiality, roughness, depth, anchoredness) that the buildings stand for. The original design is so uncompromising, however, that the undeniable, unconquerable volumes win out, and the contemporary signage looks like so many price-stickers that one day will be faded, curled and outdated as they cling to a forgotten tin in the back of your cupboard.

On the evidence of the sign pictured here, the control of chewing gum seems to be a pressing concern, too. Discarded chewing gum on the ground may be undesirable, but it seems that the drive to avoid it in Kingston has lost sight of the fact that used chewing gum is possibly even more disgusting when displayed at eye level. The sober tones of alcohol control are replaced here with jaunty, children’s-TV humour. This is social control achieved with the carrot, not the stick. It is friendly, light-hearted, playful, just like the celebrity culture it exploits. The waterfront is saved from disfigurement, but not these women’s faces. It is fine to disfigure them. Nothing like a little symbolic sexual violence to keep the place looking neat. Nothing like smearing famously assertive women with ejaculation residue in order to keep Britain tidy.

The semi-circular terrace is the perfect shape for these buildings because it allows vistas only of the fronts of the buildings. The geometry of the semi-circle means that looking out the back of any of these buildings makes it impossible to see the rear facades of the neighbouring buildings. This is entirely in keeping with the clean and proportioned aesthetic of the fronts, which are possible only at the expense of the jumbled and irregular rears. Thus, the townhouses of Cartwright Gardens were designed so that the only thing that could be seen from the rear would be the gardens of the houses themselves, providing a buffer between the terrace and whatever the next building would have been around 1807.

This is the view from the rear of the Harlingford Hotel, on the south side of Cartwright Gardens. Whatever green space there was visible from here has been eaten up in the intervening years, and now the townhouses have no space out the back other than the closed-in courtyards which act as light- and air-wells. The pressure of space and the temptation of high land prices have taken their toll, and now the genteel terrace contemplates an array of warehouse roofs. The overall effect is that distinctively London look of eras upon eras, spaces upon spaces, blocks upon blocks, where the commercial imperative above all has created a jumble that ranges from captivating to distressing, depending on your mood and your pay level. There has been little to invite hotel guests to glance out the window of the return stairs between the third and fourth floors, from where this picture was taken. Until 2009/10, that is, when the colourful rear facade opposite suddenly appeared. What the children’s colourbook colour-scheme of the new building attempts to distract us from is the fact that the new structure has filled the only unoccupied gap on the entire block.

The new building appears in this satellite image as a grey rhomboid, backing on to the beige-roofed buildings on the north side of Tavistock Place. The warehouse roofs of the first picture shine white in the sunshine in the satellite image. The view from the window at the back of the Harlingford used to include the rear of Tavistock Place, but this is a fact I can assert not from memory but only from deduction. I have stayed in that hotel many times, and looked out that window many times, but I can no longer remember what the view used to be. Now that this new building has appeared, a gap in my memory has opened. Nobody knows the value of an empty site more than a building developer, except perhaps the people who spend the rest of their days gazing out at the object that has taken its place.