usus / usures

Taking its simple starting point around the fact that wear is always about situations, the research study behind the Belgium Pavillion État des lieux / How things stand goes into some of the social implications of the used object in the built environment. How this study, which does not directly relate to architecture, ended up in the Venice Architecture Biennale, and was exhibited in the way it was, I did not yet find out. The book was really interesting in itself, but did not mention architecture once, and I think it could be even more interesting to find out how this study ended up as a “national representation” of Belgium’s state of the art of architecture.

The study is presented as several years of research conducted by the group Rotor, consisting of everything from photographers, architectural critics to sociologists. The initial idea was to investigate the potential market for second hand building materials, and it soon became clear that people received the idea of used objects in two very different ways; on the one hand with a kind of disgust for what had already been used and touched many times, on the other hand with a pleasure, an appreciation of the patina of an object with a visible history. This ambiguous reaction was, as I understood it, the starting point for a more thoroughgoing research with the essential statement that need is what makes wear interesting. Connecting it to architecture, you could say that wear is the reaction to use in architecture. So investigating wear is an interest in the material world and the changes within it, and a questioning of the material's entropy. A huge amount of energy is invested in combating entropy, however; keeping things looking new and shiny is an essential part of every city or building’s maintenance, even though wear is unavoidable. The research study states in the beginning that it is not trying to judge wear as good or bad, attractive or repellent, but it clearly posits itself critical towards the battles to maintain perfection in (architectural) society.

Wear can be a messenger: if one doorknob of a double door looks more polished and used than the other, we tend to take this side of the door. One could say that wear is an invitation to use. If many people have walked on a certain path through the snow of the sidewalk, we choose this path assuming it is the best one. Users associate themselves with other users by showing confidence in the traces they leave behind.

Wear is a system of communication: but it doesn’t have a fixed meaning behind it. Each new alteration is blurred by all those that went before. In the end you cannot separate the scratches but only note that a layer of colour has disappeared, for instance. The narrative of wear gives you a relationship to all the users that went before, it leaves traces of the crowd.

Wear is connected to responsibility: You are more likely to make a hole in a wall in your new apartment if there are already holes. A sense of responsibility decreases the more alterations have already been made; the first alteration will always be a starting point, the pivotal point in a material’s history. Probably also why they paint over the yellow walls of Assistens Kirkegården (a cemetery) every time the slightest bit of graffiti appears. The first graffiti removes the object (the wall) from an immaculate state to one of transformation.

The altered object engenders an action: it becomes a form of production. The intact state (the freshly painted yellow cemetery wall) reveals the silence of use, the absence of a multitude of actions of users. But nothing is fixed, and all artefacts go through successive stages in their production. The pristine state of an object can only appear at the price of great blindness to the labour that led to its production, and taking the analogy further, the yellow cemetery wall only comes into being in its urban context when it is activated as a place by its graffiti-painting users.

There are social implications of the used object as stated in the above, but the pristine object also has its implications: It maintains a day to day perfection, but it cannot be a medium for sharing, it carries no memory of users. The experience of the used brings you closer to the crowd whereas the new singles you out.