The question of whether this activity holds any relevance to a discussion centring architecture needs to be addressed. Urban Exploration does not hold any artistic goals in its actions. It is an experiential activity, which while documenting its work does not propose the documents as any more than proof that these forbidden places exist and have been discovered. Parallels within the art world do however exist; The Work of Jane and Louise Wilson, in their video installations of Las Vegas Casinos. Rather than `documents of places that are physically cordoned off, the eerie quality of the work comes from a temporal displacement. The Casinos, inhabited by large numbers of people twenty-four hours a day are displayed in a deserted state, a situation that would not normally occur. This temporal displacement strikes us directly with the question, Where are all the people? Has there been some instantaneous tragedy. Nevada is one of the key sites for U.F.O sightings, these images maybe the result of an unexplained mass exodus.
A similar example that I have personally witnessed involves a Steel Cable Factory, in Musselburgh, Edinburgh. The factory was the one of the main reasons behind the development of the local community. Being the largest employer in the area, and subsequently undertaking the development of a Theatre and other art based programs for the town’s residents. During the summer of 1997 the factory was closed down. One year later a group of architecture and art students were invited into the sprawling warehouses, to take a look around, and indeed to take anything that they felt they could make use of. Armed with numerous rolls of photographic film and a white transit van the expedition began surrounded by a state of anticipation and excitement, even though we were invited guests this was the beginning of my vocation as a trespasser.
When the final bell had rung, at twelve noon the staff, instead of taking their lunch breaks as usual, left the premises. No preparations had been made in terms of re-consigning documents, finishing orders or even tidying up. On entering the buildings, it was evident that nothing had been touched, no pages turned since that hapless day a year before. The time punch-cards for employees still remained in their racks on the walls, the clocks themselves frozen as the power was shut down. Time had indeed been suspended within this hermetically sealed environment. An instant museum had been formed, without the display cases but with the familiar connection to the essence of a mausoleum. Cans of Irn-Bru half empty were dotted throughout the complex. Machines halted mid-flow, in-trays containing matured documents, and filing cabinets, their open draws offering an insight into the workings of this industrial magnum.
This description is only a tiny portion of what we were able to salvage. Video evidence together with Installations of displaced material, photographic documentation and diary exerts from three weeks of exploration, formed the basis for the final year exhibition. This was truly our, and indeed the dedicated local communities own personal development of Robert Smithson’s ‘A Provisional Theory of Non-sites’ “Everything between the two sites could become physical metaphorical material devoid of any natural meanings and realistic assumptions”
The following year we approached the firm again to continue the documentation. Plans were afoot for demolition and the construction of a ‘Barrat’ or similar estate on the site, and we wanted one last sweep through this overwhelming landscape. Due to imagined dangers from the deterioration of the buildings we were only allowed into a small section of the territory we had previously explored, and had to be accompanied by one of the former employees. Over a single year, the teenagers had moved in graffiti marking the boundaries of each groups claim a section of the province. After three hours we were instructed that we had had to leave and would not be able to return. The company’s insurance had lapsed, and they feared the threat to our well being compromised their interests. The consideration towards our safety did not run to include, the youngsters who had found the chink in the walled defences. Every weekend, bands of teenagers would gather in the foyer to this reconfigured composition. The main gate now replaced by a ground floor window with a makeshift set of stairs leant against the decaying walls. At least they weren’t causing havoc and running through the streets, though I doubt outreach programs would assert their activities as valuable lessons of social consciousness. Their behaviour demonstrates the development of an accepted protocol within a lawless environment. Although this countered our own interests in the buildings, they had won the race to stake a claim to the winding corridors and vast halls, and the damage they actually caused was superficial. Only scratching the surface of a structure which faced much worse from the demolition crews who followed. We began to be accepted as a regular part of their tireless occupation, and though they did not wholly understand why we were so interested in their garrison, they did acknowledge that it was a great place to escape to, in order to break away from parental and indeed police control. The combined activities of the two groups would have certainly interested the constabulary, but this constituency was thoroughly outside the eye and arm of the law. Or its occupation had been accepted, and remedial action was too complicated to undertake. If the improvised entrance had been closed off, another would have been exposed, and opened up in a matter of days. The cranes, and demolition machines began to appear on sequential visits, the spaces now occupied by an alien force with great destructive power. Huge hydraulic pincers for ripping steel roof trusses from their foundations, jackhammers and numerous other devices for torturing the structure lay in wait for the signal to engage. Our unrecognised tenure had expired. As the demolition crew moved in we bade farewell and turned away. Not willing to risk confrontation with this mercenary strike-force. Nor to see our revered domicile lose its enigmatic influence, or its symbolic significance.
The work of Gordon Matta Clark contains a level of urban exploration, in locating the sites for his work he frequently occupied areas of urban decay. Rather than being through some pre-occupation with the romantic notion of the ruin, these were the sites which were available, and logistically where such ‘ground breaking’ work could occur.
“Among the conditions my training and personal inclination have taught me to deal with, is neglect and abandonment. These words when applied to children or human beings of any age evoke a profound call for alarm and rectification, yet when existing in massive proportions throughout our urban environment evokes only bureaucratic and juridical ambivalence and inaction.”
These comments demonstrate Matta Clark’s proactive interest in individual rights of free expression, and the state of freedom in society. Attempting to clarify these ‘situations’ through artistic intervention in the urban fabric. Matta Clark’s awareness of prevailing conditions and their need for improvement, exposes one of the beliefs held by urban explorers: That these peripheral spaces are given up (through neglect) by their associated organisations, and in the action of inhabiting them (winning them back) once again become part of the public realm, that people were once able to freely explore.
There is a distinct moment when you leave a place you are allowed to be and enter a place where you are not. It takes momentary courage to break the plane and flout the rules. Once you pass through the portal, mental and physical you enter a new mind state, a lawless environment. Less philosophically it is like finding a secret level within a video game, though far more rewarding. In fact the parallel goes beyond the simple discovery of hidden doors or passageways. The Jinx and Infiltration websites function as “cheat books” not for places within a virtual gaming environment, but for places in the real world. Documentation of the Lawrence Subway Station, part of the Toronto Underground pans out into a how to guide for future explorers. “Once you are off the platform and into the abandoned part, climb short staircase, turn around, and walk up ramp. Descend long ladder (careful-for most of the descent you are visible to anybody on the platform below, or would be anyway. If people bothered to look up.) Walk through ventilation chamber with high ceiling. Enter pitch-black room. Turn on flashlight to see…An enormous cavern, more than one hundred and fifty yards long and 30 yards wide, all cement empty and silent.”
There is no explanation as to what this space was used for, and the plans available for the building do not indicate its existence. The inhabitation of these ambiguous spaces is an attempt to escape from the designated areas prescribed by society and the authorities. You have not listened to an elevator until you have stood behind its casing as passengers ride up on the other side. The experience of unlawful inhabitation seems to heighten the awareness of your surroundings. Every sound becomes amplified. Every unseen movement registered by your whole body, and recorded subconsciously as a possible threat. The chance of being discovered forces you to analyse the smallest details, and this opens up a much more powerful perception than the autopilot of everyday existence. You adapt and develop a new way of seeing things, and even after you have left a particular place, the precision of those moments remains with you and continues to function. Even within derelict buildings there is a certain and wholly individual beauty. You sit down and listen and the building starts to play a symphony for you. Cities could open up and offer tours of the subway tunnels, but this would create an entirely different experience- they would put up handrails and cover up graffiti, and then the space has been designed in some way for you. It is far more authentic to see an urban setting in its natural state, when it hasn’t been designed or planned for your presence.
This feeling also applies to areas of the city that seem to have been passed over by the urban planners, the spaces beneath and between highway intersections being an obvious example. As the automobile infrastructure is layered over an existing city plan, gaps appear. These become prime spots for graffiti artists and other transients to settle. The dismissal of these spaces also reflects the troubled ‘State’ of their inhabitants. “Concrete Island” by J.G Ballard deals with such a space. An exploration into the deterioration of the triangular asphalt traffic island sandwiched between the London West-way embankment, and a Flyover is translated through the mental disintegration of a fictional character who becomes trapped on this bounded wasteland.
“Soon after three o’clock on the afternoon of April 22nd 1973, a 35-year-old architect named Robert Maitland was driving down the high-speed exit lane of the West-way interchange in central London. Six hundred yards from the junction of the newly built spur of the M4 motorway, when the Jaguar had already passed the 70 m.p.h. speed limit, a blow-out collapsed the front rear-side tyre, The exploding air reflected from the concrete parapet seemed to detonate inside Robert Maitland’s skull.”
Despite evidence of other inhabitants, Maitland begins to realise that this terrain has become a resonant echo of his state of mind. The ruined landscape that he inhabits is both a physical location and his inner meditations.
This notion of parallelism enables us to dig deeper into the relationship between the physical community of urban explorers, and its virtual counterpart on the web. The two existences of a single community, one fragmented and geographically scattered, the other a fine network of electromagnetic radiation and binary pulses, which allow the appearance of a prominently united front. The effect of Diaspora (the dissipation of a community from its homeland through emigration and sometimes exile) is experienced here in its reverse condition. A gathering together of likeminded individuals to form a shared homeland located somewhere in the ether. The inhabitation occurs both on the level of corporeal urban dereliction, and simultaneously somewhere beyond the phone lines buried deep beneath the surface and satellite links orbiting the globe. The final frontier of the American West that was replaced during the second half of the Twentieth Century with the dream of conquering outer space, has been usurped once more. It now lies, right under our noses, and indeed under our fingers poised above the computer keyboard, yet conceals itself outside our normal field of vision.
The peripheral formation of a community outside mainstream culture adopts the hermetic characteristics of an exile. The removal (albeit through choice) of oneself from the realm of civilisation, in order to experience something other has a distinctly solitary essence. Even when accompanied by others the retreat into oneself is evident in the silence that accompanies the occupation a supposedly inaccessible place. When an individual is not trapped (as in Ballard’s example) and is both free to explore and free to leave, the ‘closed’ nature of the space allows an opening of the emotional state. The understanding of what Heidegger means when he speaks of “dwelling” (in terms of the human condition) becomes much clearer, and certainly more lucid when confronted by a structure where all the signs of past activity are either erased or historically ambiguous. The only thing one can do within these places is dwell in the purest sense of the word. Whether you dance, scream, lie in the dirt, or spin round until you collapse is not important. Simply being there is enough to satisfy some of the most active segments of the populace.
Certainly these abandoned spaces would be prime spots for redevelopment, if the economic and cultural situations arose. The re-use of previously industrial buildings has enjoyed successive waves of resurgence since the loft living of Soho artists in New York began in the Nineteen Sixties. The recently completed redevelopment of the arched markethall underneath the Queensboro Bridge in New York City, by Sir Terence Conran contains two new restaurants and a high end home furnishings emporium. The space’s long, and tangled history begins in 1908, with the completion of the Queensboro Bridge. During the Depression the market hall closed down. The space was taken over by the New York City Department of Transportation for use as a storage depot. After various unsuccessful plans for redevelopment that included; a film museum (The American Cinematheque) by I.M. Pei, and a huge farmers market and retail outlet. Conran signed the lease in 1997, crowning the new plans for the space.
“The Site was surrounded by barbed wire and a chain-link fence, and when we got inside I suddenly sensed a sort of stirring. There were half a dozen tramps just sleeping there in this amazing space. Then wild dogs jumped out. It was very frightening. The site was in a deplorable state. A lot of the tiles were down, the windows were broken, it was shabby beyond belief, but I got very excited and decided to find out more about it.”
The monumental vaulted hall extends 275 feet underneath the Bridge, between York and First Avenues. In 1974 the bridge and the halls beneath were designated New York City Landmarks. The arches soar 33 feet overhead, and the vaulted ceiling is constructed from self-supporting, white terracotta tiles designed by nineteenth century architect Rafael Guastavino y Esposito, a method based on the building technology used in Catalan vaults.
This redevelopment is an admirable achievement, even considering the displacement of the homeless who were using the space as a makeshift hostel. Certainly, more people will be aware of its existence now, and they will be able to (explore?) its spaces in luxurious comfort, whilst purchasing their Swedish pine fruit bowls or relaxing over a cosmopolitan martini in the bar. Yet something, and perhaps a great deal has been lost in the polishing of the tiles, and pyramidal piling of lobsters on ice. The space has lost its freedom, passing from its covert but definitely public state, into an all singing all dancing, economically segregated structure that accepts gold cards as positive identification at its chic points of access. Its quiet symphony overpowered by a cabaret of consumption. The urban explorers will find no delight there anymore, unless they can infiltrate its service spaces and elevator shafts unnoticed.
There are, however, plenty of places yet to receive the attention of the property developers. These enduring sites remain relatively open celebrations of a history that includes a place for entropy, and monumental erosion.
The Brooklyn Bridge, the most distinctive of the New York Bridges with its Gothic stone towers and intricate weaving of steel cables retains a magnetic attraction for the Jinx crew. This led them to scale its most lofty points, halting the traffic below in the process, but also through the revelation that like the Queensboro Bridge, there is an interior to this golatian symbol. Photographically documented by native New Yorker Barbara Mench. The caverns and tunnels that riddle the supporting structure provide the perfect counterpoint to its soaring span across the East River.
“It reminded me of the ruins of a great civilisation”
Although apparently referring to Egyptian, Mayan, or even Roman ruins, this comment touches one of the central themes of this piece. That contemporary ruins do exist and they hold as much information about the culture that built them as their Ancient counterparts. Their accelerated decay hints at the decreasing ability of architecture to keep up with societal changes, but allows their exploration to continue without the time delay required by archaeologists.
Perhaps the urban explorer is the equivalent of an archaeologist from the next century with a historic interest in the conditions at the end of the millennium, yet their appearance today assigns them an intriguing position. The future archaeologist will definitely have to engage in an investigative labyrinth, tracing the html codes of obsolete websites to their physical origins within defiant monuments to the industrial decline. Unless the undeveloped condition of these spaces is confirmed, an important stage in their history will have been erased.
Rejecting the glossy and deliberately vacant images of Architecture magazines, and revelling in the raw and perhaps ‘essential’ state of these forgotten spaces. Unoccupied for a very different reason, the urban explorer does not enforce or contrive a purity of the image, he just points and clicks. The power of these images comes not from an in depth knowledge of the photographic process, or from lengthy discussion on the artistic merits of a particular shot but from the palpable grasp of the space itself. Photography’s “this has been” its essence understood as “the living image of a dead thing”, its separation of life and death by “the mortiferous layer of the pose” the transparent threshold that forms with the instantaneous click of the shutter. In this way, the true essence of a place at a specific time is discovered. Perhaps even its eventual fatalistic condition is captured on the light sensitive film, but remains hidden by the cosmetic layers that are re-applied by the architect during conversion. Urban explorers are not interested in ‘saving’ the space for personal economic gain, rather they offer themselves up in an act of self-sacrifice, in order to give a new and unique lease of life to a failed, or failing mortal structure.
“Architecture has traditionally been perceived as enduring, permanent structures. Innovations in building technology and materials have been made in order to increase the length of time a building might stand. It is apparent that the monument syndrome of static permanent architecture as persisted throughout history into these dynamic times.”
Despite striving for monumentality, in many cases the building seen as a throwaway item. This leads to the deterioration of large areas of architectural fabric of the city, where the property market is all-pervasive.
“Most industrial products are today manufactured for useful life-spans much shorter and costing less than those which only recently were considered essential and economical. But immovable human shelters and cities are manufactured for a physical life far beyond their socially useful life on the original site.”
Rather than advocating the design and construction of dynamic architectural structures, which physically and functionally adapt to the needs of the users. Thereby remaining profitable and legitimate within the capitalist economy. We should accept the directions of social and economic fate, with an understanding that we can gain valuable lessons from periods of decline. By stepping off the well beaten track we are able to record conditions which we may feel are disturbing but are an essential part of contemporary society. But more importantly we can develop an insight into our own condition, through the exploration of these dwellings. These buildings reveal a miscalculation by the planners and architects and this maybe the reason why they are shunted to the periphery. Cordoned off as if they might infect the rest of the city, public access is denied by the respective councils to reduce the risk of an epidemic. The dysfunctional syndrome seems to threaten those responsible for its appearance, but allows the buildings themselves and their occupants to experience the true essence of their partnership. By inhabiting the places of this essay, you will feel truly alive. “To preserve the fourfold, to save the earth, to receive the sky, to await divinities, to initiate mortals-this fourfold preserving is the simple essence of dwelling. In this way then do genuine buildings give form to dwelling in its essence, and house this essential unfolding”
Bibliography
Ballard, J.G. Concrete Island, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1974
Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida, trans., Richard Howard, London, 1982
IVAM Centre Julio Gonzalez, Gordon Matta-Clark, Exhib Cat, Serpentine Gallery, 1993
Conran, Terrance, ‘Interview with Minna Lacey’, Metropolis Magazine, May 2000
Heidegger, Martin. Building, Dwelling, Thinking, 1954
Lonberg-Holm, K. ‘Time Zoning as a Preventative of Blighted Areas’, Record and Guide, June 1993
Mench, Barbara. A History of New York in Images, Columbia University Press, 2000
Smithson, Robert. ‘A provisional Theory of Non-sites’, 1968
Zuk, William, Kinetic Architecture, Van Nostrand Reinhold Company, 1970
WEBSITES
J. Lennon & P. Macartney, ‘Day in the Life’, 1965
Robert Smithson, ‘A provisional Theory of Non-sites’, 1968
Letter from Gordon Matta Clark in Paris to his lawyer in New York, October 1975.
Cheat book for Lawrence Station, 1999
J.G.Ballard, Concrete Island “Through the crash barrier” p7, Farrar, Straus and Giroux 1974
Terence Conran, Interview with Minna Lacey, Metropolis Magazine, May 2000, p76
Barbara Mench, A History of New York in Images, Columbia University Press, 2000
Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, trans., Richard Howard, London, 1982, p.79.
Roland Barthes, Ibid., p.32.
William Zuk and Roger H. Clark, Kinetic Architecture, Van Nostrand Reinhold Company, 1970
K. Lonberg-Holm, “Time Zoning as a Preventative of Blighted Areas”, Record and Guide, June 1993
Martin Heidegger, Building, Dwelling, Thinking, 1954
