About 10 years ago I attended a surprisingly fractious conference
of North American architecture academics in Mexico City. Much to the frustration of the US and
Canadians, none of the presentations of local work was addressing the issues
that we had come to learn about: the proliferation of informal settlements, water
quality and alternative energy, the social and environmental consequences of
the proposed new airport. We wanted to
hear about all the architecture and design issues that made Mexico such a complex
and fantastic place, geographically so close to us yet so different. Instead, all the work presented seemed like
it could have been in Santa Monica.
Nothing against that idyllic city, but we could have gone to LA to see
that.
At one point a young architect was presenting a housing project
his firm had just completed, a complex of mid-rise residential towers connected
by glassy pedestrian bridges. I was
already working up a question about heat gain in those greenhouses when someone
asked a question about something else in the photo: beneath the glass bridge
was another identical bridge but with completely solid walls. “What’s that?” He probably expected an answer
about ducts, pipes and such interstitial things. But no:
“The blind bridge is for the servants.” That was the phrase he used, the
blind bridge. A wave of class-conscious discomfort settled over the audience as
we digested first the naked architectural segregation and marginalization of a
group of people, and then the unexpectedly casual answer to the question, free
of any global north guilt. The bridge was “blind,” probably because that was a
handy translation for a bridge that has no view, but the blindness was also a
metaphor for the designed invisibility of the service class.
That’s nothing new in the history of building and any honest
American architect in the audience knew that. Our cities and buildings present, to use the
medical term, our social roles and cultural values, if we choose to see them
that way. They are literally built into our
world: a geography of servitude, a topography of power. Consider the impeccably preserved town of
Williamsburg, with its fine-grained relationships of main building to out-buildings;
kitchens and storage buildings are stretched out to the edges of the property, shaping
gardens and courtyards between. Why are
things that way? While it’s true that the Tidewater heat and the risk of fire
argue for a pragmatic location of a kitchen a healthy distance from the main
house, it’s also true that if you yourself had to make that walk several times
a day you’d think of a different solution.
No, it’s slave space, no matter how charming it now appears to us. The back stairs of 19th and early
20th century rowhouses which now provide delightful secret passages
for children or privacy for houseguests were for the silent and discreet
servants of the household. The swinging
door between kitchen and dining room was a clever mechanical solution to the
problem of an unreliable maid or housewife to keep the service space of the
kitchen invisible. We don’t need sci-fi cloaking devices: we can design
invisibility; we can make people disappear.
Over the last century we’ve managed to eliminate all sorts
of spatial segregations in our buildings and cities, with more than a little
assistance from the judicial system, recognizing that separateness and equality
are inherently not compatible, not for race, gender or disability. Everyone is entitled to use the same door. Yet,
we’ll permit the demotion of equality and allow separation when the servitude
is voluntary, because it is, ostensibly, an economic relationship based on an
exchange of services for compensation. We
don’t think twice about back doors and alleys for the folks that clean our
buildings and mow our lawns, even if we may start to get queasy about blind
bridges. Something about the blatant separateness
and designed invisibility feels a step too far. Who is made blind with this
bridge?
It’s true that the relationship between serving and served is
one of the fundamental first principals of design; we just don’t usually think
of it as sorting out people. That’s part
of why the so-called “poor
door” in the NYC residential tower has prompted such an overflow of
unfocused indignation. It feels wrong,
but no one can really say why, not even the people who would trade their
dignity for an apartment there. It’s the
wickedest of problems, but part of it lies in this history of servitude: deploying an architectural solution conventionally
use for the separation of service persons to segregate equals, neighbors in
fact, who simply happen to earn different amounts of money. The teachers, firefighters, and architects
who come in through the “poor door” are walking a servant’s path. Is this the best we can do as architects,
owners, and policy-makers?
