Dirty Business

Architecture is particularly adept in producing waste. The skillful collection of waste at a domestic scale and its distribution within a vast network of undetectable conduits is relevant to contemporary circumstances, which prevent any meaningful reconciliation of the personal impulse to accumulate with the universal desire for equilibrium. Readymade goods play a significant disciplinary role in a culture that has completely abandoned resistance to commodification, instead favoring the spectacle and sensations produced by these objects. In architecture, readymades are essential building components (material) and superfluous construction debris (materiel). They are invisible utilitarian tools, engineered with metric precision (anti-matter) that simultaneously produce unintended decoration, eliminating the need for craft (proto-image). The disposition of the readymade is relevant to architecture’s waste management crisis as both ubiquitous physical commodity and disposable cultural image. Dirty Business retrofits a manufactured portable toilet with machine-extruded drainpipes. In this scenario, object becomes site and surface becomes object. The readymade is procured as self-accumulating agent with mutable physical properties, reconfigured by the blatant image of their everyday operation.

https://doi.org/10.35483/ACSA.AM.107.25

Volume Editors
Amy Kulper, Grace La & Jeremy Ficca

ISBN
978-1-944214-21-0