Von Bart Lootsma.
Von Bart Lootsma.
They are enumerations that recall similar lists of seemingly disconnected entities in an unspecified text by Jorge Luis Borges, cited by Michel Foucault in his preface to Let Mots et les Choses as the inspiration for this imposing philosophical work. In that text, Borges quotes a 'certain Chinese encyclopaedia' in which it is written that 'animals are divided into: (a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) sucking pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, (l) et cetera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher, (n) that from a long way off look like flies'. [note 1] After allowing our laughter to subside, Foucault writes that in our amazement at this taxonomy, it becomes clear to us in one leap that what Borges' fabulous enumeration represents as the exotic charm of a foreign system of thought is actually a limitation of our own mentality: and that is something which is otherwise impossible for us to grasp.
Something similar happening in the present book. I do not mean only that I have noticed that when I present these images to people in lectures and tell them what is going on, it often draws a laugh; but also that Bas Princen regards his photos as architectural projects, even though a feeling of incredulity that this could be architecture creeps up on us when we see this collection of photos. After all, hardly a single building appears in the photos, let alone a building with a certain aesthetic coherence or pretension. Perhaps these landscapes were once designed by someone, but now they are in transition to a new use and a new structure, or have simply been abandoned and forgotten; one can hardly speak of landscape architecture here. Still, maybe we could live with that. With Bernard Rudofsky, we could regard the spontaneous, informal structures we see now and then and which the people in the photos can themselves see, as a kind contemporary, minimal Western form of 'Architecture without Architects'. Or we could appeal to Bernard Tschumi when he argues so convincingly that 'Architecture is defined by the actions it witnesses as much as by the enclosure of its walls'.[note 2]
Foucault notes that 'The monstrous quality that runs through Borges's enumeration consists ... in the fact that the common ground on which such meetings are possible has itself been destroyed. What is impossible is not the propinquity of the things listed, but the very site on which their propinquity would be possible. (...) Where else could they be juxtaposed except in the non-place of language?' It does indeed seem to be a similar sense of alienation that dominates the places and events we encounter in the book of Bas Princen's work. They are abandoned, orphaned places and events, 'non-places' and 'non-events' which at first sight seem to be devoid of any logic.
Naturally, there is a tradition in photography of photographers taking snapshots of unrelated subjects as a kind of anecdotes. We can amuse ourselves by thumbing through such books and occasionally pausing by some or other image that catches our interests. Perhaps we familiarize ourselves in this way with the photographer's personal outlook and style. But Bas Princen's photographs are not snapshots. They are meticulous compositions made with large-format negative cameras and printed in a large format. They are more akin to the branch of photography that seeks alignment with the landscape painting tradition, in which artists like Andreas Gursky, Thomas Ruff and Thomas Struth also belong. Princen's photos are allied to the Dutch landscape painting tradition of Ruysdael etc., with its wide perspectives, explicit horizon and cloud-studded skies. In the absence of hills and mountains, distinct places stand out within these empty, flat landscapes by virtue of a ray of sunlight or a different soil condition. Often we can see small, forsaken groups of figures in such places, while a distant church tower or windmill denotes the presence of organized human activity.
The concentrated photographic gaze of Princen's images enables them individually to elicit reflection. As a series, moreover, they research a theme which takes explicit shape through the act of juxtaposing the photos in a book. Collated as they are here, they challenge us to think all the harder about that integrating theme.
Foucault compares the taxonomy of Borges with the improbable constellation from the famous poem by De Lautréamont, in which a sewing machine encounters an umbrella on an operating table. What makes Borge's list so disturbing, he holds, is that now even the operating table has been whipped away from under it. He argues that it would be impossible to find a space that could contain all the elements enumerated by Borges, that there is no table in the sense of a clarifying framework – and that the very possibility of thinking and classifying is thereby annihilated. Only a Utopia, with its beautiful, smoothed-out spaces, could in Foucault's view bind the heterogeneous elements together.
In place of Utopia, Foucault introduces the concept of a heterotopia, which has a different way of combining diverse elements: 'Heterotopias are disturbing, probably because they secretly undermine language, because they make it impossible to name this and that, because they shatter or tangle common names, because they destroy "syntax" in advance, and not only the syntax with which we construct sentences but also that less apparent syntax which causes words and things (next to and also opposite one another) to "hold together". This is why Utopias permit fables and discourse: they run with the very grain of language and are part of the fundamental dimension of the fabula; heterotopias (such as those to be found so often in Borges) desiccate speech, stop words in their tracks, contest the very possibility of grammar at its source; they dissolve our myths and sterilize the lyricism of our sentences.'[note 4]
Indeed, Princen's photos and the way they are combined in this book (the format, the binding) undermine the existing order of architecture and planning in the same way as Borges' enumerations undermine philosophy. They do so by showing unexpected activities and places, which nonetheless possess a surprising vitality that makes them hold our attention. They do not even pose the question of what style we ought to build in, for the spaces portrayed are totally styleless. Semiotics is relevant, if at all, only where it relates to the traces left behind by the activities. Perhaps a modern-day Sherlock Holmes could read and explain those traces, but for the rest of us they are plain puzzling. There aren't even enough different coloured Magic Markers to fill in all the different photographed activities on an urban or landscape planning map. These are activities that drive planners to distraction, as demonstrated by the maps meant to show the space to be reserved for leisure activities and nature in the Dutch government's most recent spatial futurology exercise.[note 5] The coloured squares are scattered with abject randomness and thus uniformly (what else?) across the map of the Netherlands.
Princen's photos nonetheless have nothing to with Borgesian fabulation. The places in the photos actually exist or existed, and the activities do or did take place there. That makes them perhaps all the more disturbing. Quite apart from the fact that Princen's photos function as autonomous works of art or architecture, their place in the architectural discourse could be not unlike that of the American grain silos whose photographs were reproduced in Wasmuth's Monatshefte, the photographs of aeroplanes and cars in Le Corbusier's Vers une Architecture, or the photos of metropolises in the lectures and books of such city builders as Van Eesteren and Hilberseimer. They confront architects, urban planners and landscape designers once more with the evidence of their own myopia – 'des yeux qui ne voient pas' as Le Corbusier wrote. Now, however, it is not about the forms and technologies we are blind to, but new forms of human behaviour, organizaton and spatial use.
Michel Foucault developed the concept of heterotopia further in his famous text which has been influential among architects and urban planners, Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias (1967.6). Whereas the goal of Les Mots et lest Choses was using the idea of a heterotopia to break through the ostensible homogeneity of Western culture and 'restoring to our silent and apparently immobile soil its rifts, its instability, its flaws', in Of Other Spaces Foucault interprets the metropolis in such a way that we can see this fragmented realm as one of opportunities and freedoms, as one in which 'otherness' becomes a real possibility.
Of Other Spaces is about spaces which, in a 'primitive' society would be privileged, sacred or forbidden, and reserved for those in a state of crisis: adolescents, menstruating women, the elderly etc. Foucault argued that these heterotopias were vanishing from our society although vestiges survived in institutions like boarding schools and military service for young men. They made it possible for the first manifestations of male sexuality to take place 'away from home'. The deflowering of young women would similarly take place in an 'other' space, in a train or hotel while on a honeymoon trip. Contemporary heterotopias may also be recognized in prisons, old-age homes and mental hospitals – indeed in all functions, also including burial grounds and hospitals, which modern urbanism has banished to the city outskirts. Of Other Spaces also notes the significance of gardens, which, like Borges' Aleph, are capable of juxtaposing the most unlikely of things. The text also refers to amusement parks and tourist villages as concentrations of intense experiences in a single locus. He describes motels as places where men can leave the world and their morals behind them to enjoy undisturbed illicit sex, but he also speaks of places with a specific, exemplary character where the daily rhythm was strictly regulated and planned, in contrast to the chaos prevailing outside, such as Jesuit colonies in Paraguay. 'Brothels and colonies, here are two extreme types of heterotopia,' writes Foucault. 'Think of the ship: it is a floating part of space, a placeless place, that lives by itself, closed in on itself and at the same time poised in the infinite ocean, and yet, from port to port, tack by tack, from brothel to brothel, it goes as far as the colonies, looking for the most precious things hidden in their gardens. The ship is the heterotopia par excellence. In civilizations where it is lacking, dreams dry up, adventure is replaced by espionage, and privateers by the police.' [note 7]
However widely separated Foucault's examples may be in importance and in distance, they coalesce to produce the image of a city: our contemporary metropolis. Des espaces autres is a text that reconciles us with the city – as it does Foucault himself, who previously savaged the metropolis in his writings as a disciplining machine. Suddenly it appears there are sanctuaries in the city. It has been suggested that Foucault was inspired to write Of Other Spaces by his discovery of the gay lifestyle in San Francisco with its clubs and SM dungeons. It was liberation to him. The freedom of movement of the ship where you can sign up, allows one as an individual or as a group to plot ones own course, to put together ones own program of activities and ports of call, to bypass others, and so stage ones own biography. This means it is also an optimistic text, and that is how several generations of architects and planners have interpreted it. To them, it was a liberating and perhaps even a visionary text, on that describes a city that has room for pluriformity.
Now, 35 years after Foucault's text, what we once called the city has turned into a huge, sprawling patchwork of heterotopias. Gated Communities spring up alongside Common Interest Developments, shanty towns alongside trailer parks, Megacinemas alongside peepshows, and so on again and again to far over the horizon. This is what Roemer van Toorn calls 'The Society of the And': an endlessly stuttering of and, and, and..... But it is a stuttering which when viewed from a car or a plane looks like an endless sea where the crest of one wave is barely distinguishable from the next.[note 8] The architect appears in this Deleuzian metropolis at best as a surfer riding the waves – assuming he has the courage, like Rem Koolhaas, to claim such a heroic role for himself. But in any case we know that surfers spend most of their time lying belly down on their boards waiting for the next surfable wave, and then most of them surf only briefly before sinking back into the brine.
In his book After the City, Lars Lerup introduces the term ‘dross’ to characterize the outstretched urban landscape of Houston. Dross is layer of scum that forms on metal during smelting, but is also used in the sense of dregs, of worthless stuff as opposed to valuables or value. Needless to say, in Lerup’s vision and in accordance with Guy Debord and Rem Koolhaas, most of the urban landscape is made up of dross. But in this dross it is the ‘stims’ that count. These stims seem to be a contemporary, smaller version of Foucaults heterotopias. Stim is a word Lerup came across in William Gibson’s science fiction novels, where they are a kind of virtual reality version of soap series in which people can actually participate. But, as Lerup says, the word stim also has connotations like Stimme, voice, and Stimmung, ambience. Lerup uses this word for the unexpected and often improbable places where small groups people start to meet and in which specific ambiences are created by technological means. The voices of these stims reverberate through the city by means of the communication media. [note 9] They cause people to move around through the city in a chaotic, alsmost Situationist dérive.
There is a huge difference between Lerup's city and the ship, which Foucault describes at the end of Of Other Spaces as the ultimate heterotopia. City-dwellers do indeed use the heterotopias in the way that Foucault hoped, but the role of the ship has long been taken over by the car and the plane. That's our way of surfing the world. The car takes us to the shopping mall and to the red light district. We can book an EasyJet flight for 15 Euros to some fabulous location where we can spend a weekend pigging ourselves and shopping for souvenirs and sex. The motel scene Foucault sketches in Of Other Spaces stood for liberation from the oppressive morals of the Sixties, but now it has evolved into spring break tourism with its bounty of self-indulgence.
The city Foucault described in Of Other Spaces, not long before May 1968, has long since turned into Die Welt als Supermarkt und Hohn, which interprets the world in trms of market and battle, the world of the 'Elementary Particles' in which, only temporarily and shame-faced, we can dream of a 'Platform'. [note 10] In other words, it is the world of the author Michel Houellebecq and not that of Michel Foucault in which we now live. It doesn't matter if some or other activity is morally repugnant: there is no longer any metaphysics which could justify such a morality, and that is exactly what makes everything so joyless, uninspired and frigid. Looking at 'other spaces' from Houellebecq's viewpoint, isn't it no wonder that he polemically seeks the cause of the world's disintegration not just in capitalism, but above all in the liberation movements of the Sixties and Seventies which Foucault helped inspire.
Apart from being a set of ambiances, places, properties, fragments and fracture lines, today's city has become despite Foucault's attempt at characterization ever more a network of networks. It is not just a stable set of a limited amount of networks for traffic, drinking water and sewage, inhabited by uniform and stable communities, but an almost unlimited set of interfering networks of many different kinds, giving birth to and inhabited by even more different lifestyles and subcultures. Metropolitan culture and the urban way of life influence large parts of the countryside. Each of these lifestyles and subcultures uses the urban landscape in a different way. This certainly changes the use and the character of what we traditionally consider as public space, which is not necessarily the space where everybody meets everyone any longer. But these lifestyles and subcultures also produce bigger or slighter modifications and alterations to the urban landscape. Now, these alterations or modifications do not necessarily need to involve whole quarters or the rise of completely new typologies. The sometimes relatively small size and temporary nature of subcultures makes them look for niches in the urban tissue. More and more heterotopias arise. We can expect them to become increasingly outspoken and specific in the years ahead, and at the same time more retiring and temporary, because their very multiplication makes them smaller. They seem subject to the same principle as affected power in Foucault's Surveiller et Punir, which completely atomized.[note 11]
The new phenomenon of an unprecedented high individual mobility enables people to travel larger distances and to go exactly to those places they want to visit. They know about these places and they know exactly what they want to do there because they have heard about them in the media: either because someone called them on the phone, because they heard about them on the radio, read about them in printed or electronic media, or because they saw them on TV.
These are the places and activities Bas Princen photographs. They may not seem spectacular, they may be ephemeral and the groups involved may not be so big, but on all photographs we see that people are involved or even immersed in them in the most serious way – even if they are having fun. It is as if we experience the next step in the cultural process driven by democratization as described by Tocqueville: it is not just a matter of the massive production of pulp, but now the pulp gets more and more differentiated.[note 12] The pulp fragments, splinters and finally evaporates, leaving groups of people involved in empty rituals without a temple or tabernacle.
What these people have are gizmos, as Reyner Banham called them in one of his best known books, which he published in 1965 just two years earlier than Foucault's Of Other Spaces. Perhaps the twenty-first century really will turn out to be the era of gizmos, even if Reyner Banham first noted the revolutionary role of the gizmo in twentieth century America. Interestingly, Banham also talks about surfboards, but in his case it is to demonstrate that every historical or ritual aspect has vanished. Gizmos are point zero of design, and they can as easily be new patents as they can Budrillardian simulacra. ‘The man who changed the face of America had a gizmo, a gadget, a gimmick – in his hand, in his back pocket, across the saddle, on his hip, in the trailer, round his neck, on his head, deep in a hardened silo’, Banham writes. ‘From the Franklin Stove, and the Stetson Hat, through the Evinrude outboard to the walkie-talkie, the spray can and the cordless shaver, the most typical American way of improving the human situation has been by means of crafty and usually compact little packages, either papered with patent numbers, or bearing their inventor’s name to a grateful posteriority. Other nations, such as Japan, may now be setting a crushingly competitive pace in portable gadgetry, but their prime market is still the US and other Americanized cultures, while America herself is so prone to clasp other culture’s key gadgets to her acquisitive bosom that their original inventors and discoverers are forgotten – 'Big Kahuna' mysticism aside, even the Australians seem to have forgotten that they were the first White Anglo-Saxon Protestants to steal the surfboard from the Polynesians, so thoroughly has surfing been Americanized. So ingrained is the belief in a device like a surfboard as the proper way to make sense of an unorganized situation like a wave, that when Homo Americanus finally sets foot on the moon it will be just as well the gravity is only one sixth of earth’s for he is likely to be so hung about with packages, kits, black boxes and waldos that he would just have a job to stand under a heavier “g”.’ [note 13]
Although Of Other Spaces is primarily a philosophical and literary text, it comes across as rather nineteenth-century in comparison to that of Banham. Foucault's 'other spaces' consist of walled-in fragments of the city – indeed, of buildings, which elsewhere, in Surveiller et Punir and Les machines B guérir, he defines as machines because they produce a certain behaviour.[note 14] The ship that binds places together and makes space fluid is actually a rather clumsy, outdated machine for producing forms of behaviour. Perhaps Foucault needed that crudeness to highlight the fractures in thinking and in the city.
Unlike Foucault's hefty machines, Banhams relatively tiny gizmos ensure that the fractures will be overcome almost without effort. They transform the world into the smooth space that Foucault reserved for Utopia. So it is revealing that Banham chose a quote from Arthur Drexler as the motto for The Great Gizmo: 'The purpose of technology is to make the dream a fact ... The end is to make the Earth a garden, Paradise; to make the mountain speak.' [note 15] Cars, motorbikes and speedboats are the vehicles which take over the role of the steamship in this 'gas-powered pastorale' (Banham).
Gizmos, like Foucault's machines produce not only the direct effects for which they were made but also behaviours. They are not only solutions to concrete problems and means of conquering barriers. Once a gizmo exists, it is so seductive that the user has to seek problems and barriers in order to use it. It is not a case of the biotope engendering a species; the gizmo goes in search of its ideal biotope. In this world, the dérive, walking through the city in an alternative fashion, in search of specific experiences in order to undermine the society of spectacle and the order imposed from above, has long ago been absorbed by capitalism. In Of Other Spaces, Foucault observes (but does not expand on the idea) that, since the sixteenth century the boat was simultaneously both the greatest instrument of economic development and the greatest reserve of imagination. The same applies now to the car, the plane and the communications media. The playful, footloose human of Constant Nieuwenhuys has become a reality – not because we have more leisure time but because we use what leisure we have more intensively.
We spend more and more on our leisure time. Globally speaking, the leisure economy now involves more money than any other sector. It is not only tourism for which people travel great distances in search of authentic, specific experiences, but more local leisure activities (not to mention recreational shopping) add up to a substantial mileage. The leisure industry produces every necessary and imaginable gizmos and gadgets to support these activities. They make it possible to venture into the most inhospitable areas, be they covered with snow, mud, rocks, lianas, sand or water. Because the gizmos are relatively small and barely intervene between the body and the environment, they make it possible to experience the body/environment relation in a more intensive way. Should anything go wrong other gizmos will snap into play to prevent a catastrophe, and the experience is preserved on camera for display to the home front, who must be seduced into following. The Camel Trophy exists both as a direct experience and as a TV programme.
These gizmos have long ceased being merely 'functional' objects, insofar as that term might be considered applicable to leisure accessories, but are now predominantly objects that help the possessor to express his or her identity. Consider the huge, diverse ranges of trainers and other sports clothing sold by companies like Nike and Adidas, and now also by serious fashion houses like Yoshi Yamamoto, Dolce & Gabbana and Prada. The people who wear these products do so more often for everyday life activities other than sports. They have become an important part of the individualization process of Western society. They make it possible for people to live out their fantasies, even without the help of virtual reality.
A gizmo is not just a thing in its own right. Gizmos are tied up with much larger organizations and lifestyles (in the sociological sense, i.e. the way an individual organizes his life by means of institutions) than is directly legible from the object. They are linked into networks – which may be anything from networks of sales staff, service departments or filling stations to social networks and communication networks. And it is these last, in particular, that have proliferated so enormously since Foucault, Banham and Lerup wrote their texts. Wireless networks and satellite links make it theoretically possible to plug in anywhere in the world. GPS receivers moreover make it possible to determine your position anywhere in the world. The result is that the organizations behind the gizmos and the behaviour they produce are increasingly invisible to the naked eye. We see only the perplexing consequences, such as people who lurk in corners or walk along the street with a vacant, preoccupied gaze, while they emit loud, animated utterances. Are they just insane or are they talking to someone on a mobile phone?
These are the forms of behaviour the Bas Princen photographs. Perhaps it is no coincidence that he first studied industrial design and then architecture. To illustrate the difference between the forms of behaviour generated by the 'old' networks and structures and by the new, it may be worth comparing Bas Princen's photos with those of the Austrian artists Walter Niedermayr.
Walter Niedermayr makes large photographic prints of landscapes that are used for leisure activities. In some cases they are rugged rocky terrain and sometimes snow-laden mountains. People appear only sporadically and sometimes only as tiny figures. In his photos of ski resorts they look lonely, pale and ephemeral against the white background, in a way reminiscent both of nineteenth-century romantic landscape painting and of certain groups of figures by the sculptor Alberto Giacometti. The people in Niedermayr's photos form apparently groups whose origin is unclear. Are they due to chance? Are they a result of local snow conditions on the piste? Are they clusters of friends? Only in an incidental example, such as the ski school in which all the children wear identical jackets, is there clearly evidence of a motivated pattern. In the background or margins of Niedermayr's photos, however, we always notice the infrastructure that facilitates these activities which are taking place in the supposed snowy wilderness: piste markings, ski-lifts, artificial snow, hotels, coaches, trains, lift passes etc. The cover of his book, Civil Operations, reproduces a map of a skiing area which shows pistes, shelters, funicular railways and ski lifts. [note 16]
The difference in themes of the photos of Niedermayr and those of Bas Princen may not seem all that great at first sight, but they exist nonetheless. Niedermayr is concerned with classic forms of mass tourism facilitated by major infrastructural interventions, but much though the tourists depend on artificial aids there is always a nature experience involved. In Princen's landscapes, on the other hand, there is scarcely if any trace of the magnificence of nature, and the range of leisure activities is much greater and more diverse. The activities in the photos by Bas Princen not infrequently involve practice runs and training sessions for skills which will seriously be put to the test during the one or two week wilderness holidays that the participants can permit themselves annually. For example, there is a photo of backpackers who have set out a marked route through a golf course and adjoining woodlands to practice for a holiday in the Scottish Highlands. The 4x4 enthusiasts have not bought their off-the-roader vehicles to surmount day-to-day problems (apart perhaps from the speed bumps, kerbs, roundabouts and other measures meant to stop them racing though the urban traffic at top speed); on the contrary, having purchased them, the owners have to hunt for suitable areas of terrain which will present a challenge. Exercises like these sometimes evolve into sports in their own right; such as the form of fly-fishing without water in which the aim is to cast a line as far as possible. The activities in Princen's photos are mostly simulations of sports which themselves originally developed as simulations of hunting, fishing and fighting. The gizmos are simulacra of fishing rods, spears and chariots.
The groups of figures in Princen's photos are much smaller than those in Niedermayr's, which, despite the lack of a visible infrastructure, have a much higher level of organization. They are classic examples of what the Internet guru Howard Rheingold has called Smart Mobs. [note 17] Smart mobs are new, spontaneous, ephemeral forms of organization that can exist by virtue of the ubiquitous wireless networks made possible by such technologies as WLAN, UMTS, GPRS or the ordinary mobile phone services. The 4x4 clubs have websites telling the enthusiasts where they drive their vehicles, complete with detailed descriptions, quality ratings and GPS coordinates. Similar websites exist for countless other activities. Birdwatchers can receive an SMS tipoff when a rare species has been sighted so that they can rush to the location with telephoto lenses cocked. This explains the flocks of photographers, alarmingly well hung with equipment, mustering around a subject which is completely invisible in one of Princen's photos. Needless to say, the occurrence is a stim, as we now know. The draw is actually a tiny bird, so small that it is indistinguishable in the photo. So small, so specific and so rare has the authentic experience become, and so wholly has it been transformed into a media experience, that we must finally concede that it has practically vaporized and lives on only in the personal logbooks of the participants. Maybe it was one of those logbooks that inspired Borges to his enumeration.
Anyone who supposes this evaporation process also results in the dissolution of architecture and urban design, must think again. It is just that it is not responded to by the traditional authorities – except perhaps the City of Rotterdam, which realized that the Maasvlakte was turning into a haven of new forms of leisure activity, and therefore provided the minimal infrastructure needed to turn it into a 'macho centre'. [note 18] Companies like Nike and Adidas are foremost in taking advantage of leisure activities that have developed bottom up to launch new forms of marketing with urban development implications.[note 19] By setting up informal football pitches, subtly subsidizing new bars, organizing media events and sponsoring tournaments for alternative sports like xgolf, these companies reprogram the city. Both Nike and Adidas have also found new ways of communicating with their individualized public without even parading themselves as brands, which might otherwise frighten off the 'underground' market. Such companies do so with a sound reason: it is individualization and differentiation that enlarge the market for gizmos and fashion goods. We may react to this disparagingly because they are large, commercial companies; but the reprogramming of the city on a Situationist model has achieved an unprecedented enrichment and invigoration of what the city used to be. 'Goodbye Baumeister – hello Traummeister', Friedrich von Borries has written. 'The widespread retrenchment in aesthetic and technological respects does not relieve architects and planners from the consequences of a fundamental transformation of their field of work. They must accept the different conditions and demands more wholeheartedly, and search the present and future situation for opportunities to create the space for non-determined experiences. They should moreover take their leave of the moral and aesthetic rigorism of the Modern, and devote themselves to becoming the architects of everyday activity for the benefit of experience-consumers. Only then is there a chance of architects being clever enough to develop some or other tactic to facilitate freedoms in the future city.'[note 20]