individuals…Each space should be a highly independent shelter where the inhabitant can fully develop his individuality’. 5 The rise of the individual is even more in evidence now, ten years after De Cauter wrote his essay, in the proliferation of laptops, blackberries and smart phones.These devices are made not for a family, group or company but for each individual.The ipod, imac, ipad, iphone…the one-bedroom condominium unit is the housing equivalent of this phenomena, the ihome. If the individual condo unit is the capsule, it relies on a series of heavily controlled networks (circulation, mechanical, electrical). In condominiums, these controls take the form of secured entrance lobbies, sterile hallways and collective spaces kept forever neutral so as not to diminish re-sale prices, everything kept in a perpetual state of ‘new’. These controls foster an active separation from the public realm of the streets and an insider/outsider mentality amongst condo-owners. Separation from the city is also conveyed in condo marketing. Websites are quick to advertise views, the city is always shown from a picturesque bird’s-eye angle, sections of the website labelled ‘neighbourhood’ are edited to include the fashionable and trendy options located within walking range. In all aspects, a very large component of the city is denied and edited out, fostering a subconscious retreat from the urban realm. This is the paradox of the apparent freedom of the capsular unit: as it promotes individuality and diversity, it also creates thresholds of separation: ‘If anything, it seems that as we move physically closer together, psychologically we’re moving farther apart… the condominium model is a physical manifestation of our changing attitudes toward home, family, and community. It is the housing model of the individual – designed to be unique, self-contained, and fully customisable to your lifestyle needs.’ 6
Pre-construction sales are used to secure financing for the construction; the longer this takes, the more money a developer loses in interest. In this pre-built environment, image becomes more valuable than the eventual built reality. Marketing trumps design. This creates a sharp division between image and reality. Illusion, fantasy and themes are all deployed in a marketing onslaught that sells consumers an image first and a home second. In the absence of any built product or design, marketers are free to target consumers in a variety of different ways. Entering the Capsular Civilisation The end-game of this consumer-marketing escalation is that it hastens our collective descent into what the Belgian philospher Lieven De Cauter terms capsular civilisation , an expansion of the ideas of capsule architecture first suggested by the Japanese Metabolist Kisho Kurokawa in his 1969 essay ‘Capsule Declaration’. De Cauter’s definition of capsule is ‘a tool or an extension of the body which, having become an artificial environment, shuts out the outer, hostile environment. It is a medium that has become an envelope’. 3 His fears about rising capsular civilisation centre on the disintegration of society through barricading, segregation and isolation. In today’s condo culture this is promoted through the rise of the consumer individual, the fostering of an insider/ outsider mentality and an active retreat from the public realm that encourages a growing separation and polarisation of individuals. The Rise of the Individual De Cauter introduces hyperindividualisation as the ‘massive disinterest in the concept of society in terms of sociability and solidarity’. 4 A ‘free society is centred on the individual, freedom and mobility’ with the paradox being that such a society is rooted in ‘separation, enclosure and confinement’. The capsule is ‘mutually independent individual spaces, determined by the free will of
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Michael Panacci
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