Architectural History or a Geography of Small Spaces?

Abstract

An aesthetics of big scale dominates our historical imagination.1 As architectural historians we are seduced by the swagger of Daniel Burnham’s 1910 invitation to think big: “Make no little plans; they have no magic to stir men’s blood and probably themselves will not be realized.” This masculinist call to envision big plans suited the high age of imperialism, when the United States emerged on the global stage as an imperial power.2 The spirit of imperialist Westward expansion was now projected outward, making forcible occupation seem inevitable, necessary, and the “White Man’s burden.”3 The achievements in city planning for which Burnham is lauded were drafted from authoritarian planning scripts well honed in Europe and in the European empires. The neobaroque vistas in Burnham’s 1909 plan for Chicago visually overrode the city’s grid and declared the territorial sublime of imperial ambitions in the manner of Louis XIV’s Versailles and Baron Haussmann’s Paris (Figure 1).The aura of bigness and the abstraction on which such grandiose plans were premised gained new ethical value by being attached to modern architecture’s promise of solving the big problems of twentieth-century nation-states.4 That aesthetic predisposition and attendant abstraction continue to inform the history of architecture and design.5 Indeed, the aesthetics of bigness has now been compounded by the anxiety about not being big enough in our historical imagination. The large scale of spatial complexities that constitute global histories and the scalar anxiety of manifold planetary crises prompted by the threat posited by the Anthropocene have brought scalar imagination to the forefront of historical writing with a new urgency.6 To think big is no longer to think only about big space but also about the bigness of time, which demands even more abstraction.It is at this critical juncture of scale and historical imagination that I wish to posit a way of thinking about architecture that interrogates the entanglement between bigness and imperialist thinking and its production of the “color line,” to use W. E. B. Du Bois’s phrase.7 And I ask, is it possible to counter the aesthetics of bigness by taking small spaces as the primary focus of architectural history?* * *The small spaces I have in mind are neither entirely about size nor often about scale, but involve both these parameters. Spaces such as verandahs, courtyards, terraces, fire escapes, and stoops may be small in dimension, but they often, by themselves or as collectivities, occupy large areas. They are part of a global lexicon of spatial types and yet are rarely deemed sufficiently important to merit close reading. Even when such spaces are physically substantial, they do not register in the dominant scheme of things.8Smallness is typically thought of in terms of size—that is, in term of the dimensions of an object or space. Size and scale are related but distinct concepts. Scale is about enlargement or contraction of size to produce meaning. As Andrew Hamilton beautifully expounds in his discussion of the Andean world, scale is “a perceptual quality of art” and “plays a primary role in the ways viewers engage with and subsequently interpret objects.” The comprehension of scale, he points out, is not universal; it is culturally specific.9Smallness, when it comes to space, exceeds both scale and size. It involves the politics of materials and labor. Small spaces are fragments, products of division, isolation, and excision: they make up a fragmentary landscape created through repeated processes of racial, caste, gender, and class sorting. They are adjunct spaces that play supporting roles to the main architectural event in a building. Servants, the enslaved, children, and women flit in and out of these spaces. Once in a while, they take charge and become the center of commentary.Size, placement, materials, and nomenclature of buildings are deliberately used to make social distinctions and to marginalize. British residents in colonial India referred to servants’ quarters as “godowns”—storage spaces—since it seemingly made no difference whether the spaces housed people or things. Indeed, storage spaces were often better built than the spaces for servants and the enslaved. Slave owners in colonial America and the antebellum United States used scale, size, and location to place the enslaved “literally out, away, apart, down, at the back, to the side, or confined in storage areas” to visibly and corporeally render the subordination of labor explicit.10Small spaces as interstitial spaces are connectors: they force us to engage with fragmentation and disruption, and enable us to think of other ways of viewing the landscape. When we begin with small spaces, we notice subjects and effects that remain invisible at the large scale of analysis.Small spaces can shock our collective naïve belief that spaces function as they are intended—that they are what they are named to do, that modernity’s gift resides in calling out defined activities for particular spaces at distinct times. In a geography of small spaces, the kitchen in a plantation appears no longer just a place of round-the-clock toil but also a place of sexual assault, of a whipping so brutal that it traumatized a young Frederick Douglass.11Defined by unanticipated expansion and contraction of time, small spaces are experienced in terms of waiting, watching, servicing time. Take Harriet Jacobs’s description of the “loophole of retreat” in her 1861 autobiography Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. As a young enslaved woman, for seven years Jacobs hid in a garret to escape the sexual predation of a white enslaver. The garret was connected to the storeroom in her grandmother’s house: Some boards were laid across the joists at the top, and between these boards and the roof was a very small garret, never occupied by anything but rats and mice. It had a pent roof, covered with nothing but shingles according to the southern custom for such buildings. The garret was only nine feet long and seven feet wide. The highest part was three feet high, and sloped down abruptly to the loose board floor. There was no admission for either light or air.12 Jacobs’s uncle Philip, a carpenter, created a concealed trapdoor that allowed her to enter the garret through the storeroom: “The air was stifling; the darkness total.”13 Jacobs found a gimlet and drilled a 1-inch hole in the wall so she could observe the street outside.14 That inch-wide aperture was her opening to the world.When there was no space to call one’s own, no enclosure that the law would heed, this was a spatial discovery. Jacobs narrated her escape as a movement from one hiding space to another: under the floorboards, the closet, the garret, as well as the dangerous peripheral space of the swamp. Her sense of self and self-preservation were premised on her use of this garret as the “loophole of retreat.” The garret was withdrawal and escape.15 It was also a location that enabled Jacobs to observe without being seen.Think of the six-year-old C. L. R. James perched on a chair to peek through the window of a house in the small town of Tunapuna, in Trinidad. Ordered by his grandmother and aunts to stay in the house, he climbed the chair to steal glimpses of a cricket match across the road: Our house was superbly situated, exactly behind the wicket. A huge tree on one side and another house on the other limited the view of the ground. … By standing on a chair a small boy of six could watch practice every afternoon and matches on Saturdays. … I doubt if for some years I knew what I was looking at in detail. But this watching from the window shaped one of my strongest early impressions of personality in society.16This is how he came to appreciate the batting style of Matthew Bondman, an uncouth fellow who was “good for nothing, except to play cricket.”17 On the field, Bondman was an elegant practitioner of the game. His stroke was improvised. As his last name suggests, Bondman was heir to the legacy of enslavement, and yet he had transformed the master’s game with his own idiom to become a figure of awe. But only on that field. That restricted view from the window in Tunapuna gave James, the would-be cricket commentator, novelist, and Marxist historian, an early lesson in the sociopoetics of circumscription.18We can cite many such examples. Children, women, the outcaste, the marginalized, the enslaved inhabit fragmented worlds. Seen from their circumscribed positions, the world appears not as a panorama but as fragmented scenes. Correspondingly, there is no easy transition from subjection to subjectivity. Both Jacobs and James wrote the narratives of their young lives when they were much older, having patched together their sense of self as subjects by relying on their experience of interstitial spaces between disparate worlds. This understanding of spatial discontinuity, excision, and circumscription resonates with Antonio Gramsci’s view that histories of subaltern groups are episodic and fragmentary.19 The challenge is to write the history of that spatial fragment. How do we restitute the servants and the enslaved—“unseen people,” to use artist and writer Abanindranath Tagore’s description—to the spaces where they labored?20 How does one understand the relation between marginalized bodies and interstitial spaces using the tools of architectural history?For too long we have relied on the architectural plan to understand the relation between bodies and space. As Robin Evans notes in a classic essay, “If anything is described in an architectural plan, it is in the nature of human relationships, since the elements whose trace it records—walls, doors, windows, and stairs—are employed first to divide and then selectively to re-unite inhabited space.”21 Discussing the mid-nineteenth-century work of Robert Kerr in The Gentleman’s House, Evans observes how domestic space became neatly defined between route and destination, served and service spaces. Kerr, he notes, “made diagrams that reduced house plans to … trajectory (route) and position (destination), proposing that their proper arrangement was the substratum upon which both architecture and domesticity were to be raised” (Figure 2).22Keen to read architectural plans as harboring subterfuges and evasions, Evans nevertheless does not question the ontology of the plan as a mode of seeing and knowing. Implicit in his reading of the plan as architectural method is the idea of a fully formed, undivided subject who vicariously moves through the building, who sees and inhabits the whole. The abstract plan, and by proxy the building, is wholly available for cognizance, scrutiny, and experimentation. That space is perceived differentially, that space is fragmented, that the placid plan of domestic space hides just as much as it reveals, does not enter the discussion. If it does, it is in the last instance. Before we get to the everyday terror of that placid domestic space of the main house, we pay homage to authoritative modes of thinking architecture.Allow me to demonstrate this dilemma of architectural history by taking the idea of service space, and in particular the distinction between service space and served space, as a figure of analysis. This distinction pervades modern architecture. Consider two of the celebrated buildings of Louis Kahn: the Richards Medical Research Laboratories (1957–64) on the campus of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia and the Salk Institute of Biological Sciences (1959–65) in La Jolla, California.In the Richards Medical Laboratories, dedicated to biological and medical research, tall stacks house the HVAC, keeping the laboratories and offices as open spaces, free from the messiness of ductwork. The separation of spaces for intellectual work from spaces dedicated to mechanical services reiterates the mind–body dichotomy that pervades Western thought. The transposition of that bodily metaphor to the social metaphor of served spaces and servant spaces leans on the hierarchy implied in the mind–body distinction. The architectural deployment safeguards the bodies of the research personnel from potentially dangerous and dirty spaces of ducts and exhausts, and the stacks, in their distinctive brick-clad form, act as figures of protection (Figure 3). The laboratory building “intimates a kind of technological hubris,” notes Dell Upton: “The dramatic exhaust towers suggest the riskiness of what is done there and by implication magnify the stature of the research and the scientists who, it seems, work at the edges of human capacities.”23Kahn’s design brings together the neoclassical penchant for hierarchy and the modernist concern with functional distinctiveness in the conceptualization of served and servant spaces. These are also, respectively, spaces of natural light and spaces of natural darkness.24 Service spaces are viewed as necessary disruptions. At the Richards Medical Laboratories, instead of inserting service spaces willy-nilly in proximity to the main spaces of the building, Kahn found an architectural solution for their definition and confinement that was structurally integral to the plan itself. “In the very fabric of making it must already be the servants that serve the very things I’ve talked about,” he noted—“its timbre, its light, and its temperature control; the fabric of the construction must already be the container of these servants.”25Kahn’s change of design strategy at the Salk Institute, where he alternately stacked the HVAC floors and the laboratory floors, is in some ways a more integrated response than the one employed at the Richards Medical Laboratories.26 Here the served–servant space dichotomy hidden within the rectangular building frame is externalized as a relation between front and back. In contrast with the finely articulated windows of the scientists’ offices along the court threaded together with the open loggia, the squat stair towers at the back are stark and opaque (Figure 4). Their formal austerity is not merely a nod to the pure geometrical forms of eighteenth-century neoclassicism, resuscitated in reinforced concrete by a modernist architect; it is also essential to the distinction between light and dark spaces, central and peripheral spaces.The Richards Medical Laboratories and the Salk Institute articulate a distinction in labor that is easy to ignore, precisely because that distinction is so integral to the designs themselves. It is also easy to ignore because our analysis of architecture rarely pays attention to labor and laboring bodies. The geometric abstractions we notice in the envelopes of these buildings are instances of abstraction of concrete labor. The serving bodies in these spaces disappear—only the machines and ductwork, air and exhaust, heating and cooling devices are present. “Servants” abstracted as environmental controls become in Kahn’s conception part of the building’s infrastructure itself. Viewed from this angle, Kahn’s designs convey a much older paradigm of masters’ and servants’ spaces.I want to trace this idea of service space as an articulation of laboring space back to colonial America and India—to the nexus of servants, the enslaved, and women—and trace the techniques through which abstraction of labor is accomplished. If architectural plans embody social relations, we need to rethink our techniques of analyzing such plans to fathom the complex contours of these social relations.* * *In colonial India, a routine distinction was made between the main house and service buildings. The outhouses, necessaries, or dependencies, as they were variously called, followed an idiom of separation from the main house that was on the whole similar to antebellum U.S. examples. While nomenclature and types varied, service spaces were typically grouped together (Figure 5).27 The separation of the main house from service buildings protected European residents from the nuisances of the smoke, smells, and sounds of labor. Hiding the servants’ quarters “in some obscure corner where they cannot be seen” pleased Europeans in colonial India (Figure 6).28 Such techniques of separation are in their broad outlines similar to what might be seen in antebellum U.S. and other colonial contexts (Figure 7).29The information we glean from reading plans—the distinctions between servants’ spaces and served spaces that we habitually use to differentiate between spaces occupied by servants and their labor and those spaces occupied by the master’s family—is, however, not as helpful to our understanding of social history as it might appear. This form of distinction does not pan out when we pay attention to the temporal patterns of social life. Servants and slaves were everywhere, at all times. They slept on the floor in the passage in case the mistress needed them at night. Indoors, they pulled fans all day so that residents could dine, relax, and work in comfort. Outdoors, they walked all night to prepare a campsite, waited there for the arrival of the master’s family, and then served them a hot breakfast.30In some cases, as at Monticello, we find finely calibrated techniques of separating the enslaved from the masters. Design strategies such as placing the service spaces in the basement were intended not so much to remove as to sublimate enslaved labor—to render it more efficient and acceptable—with the use of ingenious contraptions such as dumbwaiters and revolving service doors that are often, if incorrectly, referred to as labor-saving devices.31 These are a form of architectural prosthetics: technologies that, as extensions of limbs and organs, compensate for incapacities and thus reorganize the spatial and temporal parameters of labor.Take the mechanical fan that Thomas Jefferson designed for his dining room at Monticello (Figure 8). The design sketch and notes are in the form of instructions. Imagined as a wound-up clock mechanism, this contraption would have relieved the dining room of the presence of a slave fanning the diners using either a whisk fan or a pull-fan known as a punkah, a technology that had traveled to colonial America from colonial India.32 Making enslaved labor invisible is only one aspect of this contraption. More important for Jefferson was to increase the efficiency of labor by saving labor time, so labor could then be deployed more profitably elsewhere. His notes are instructive: Figure 8Thomas Jefferson, “To fix a fan over the Dining room table,” Notebook of Improvements, Monticello, Virginia, 1804–7 (K 162-7, Coolidge Collection of Thomas Jefferson Manuscripts, Massachusetts Historical Society).Let a strong axis (a) pass from the W. side of the skylight square through the E. wall of the Dining Rm just below the cornice, presenting it, square end in the passage above stairs at (a) on which a pendulum is to be fixed. … A cord round the barrel of the swing wheel carried to a pulley (e) over the well of the stairs, and having a heavy weight (f) will put the swing wheel into motion.33The task of fanning the diners in person would have cost Jefferson one hour of a slave boy’s labor. Had this contraption been built, the same labor could have been performed by an adult slave in a fraction of that time. However, to make an 8-foot fan move the air to any degree would require a good deal of exertion in winding up the machine. Jefferson concluded the instruction with the caveat that to make the machine effective, “the weight must be proportionally increased & consequently the exertion in winding up.”34Machines that could operate without any expendable, or at least observable, power source represented the holy grail for engineers and tinkerers in the antebellum United States. Jefferson wrote with contempt about the exhibition of one such supposed device by Charles Redheffer, who charged people a fee to observe a “perpetual motion machine” through a barred window. In this scam, the machine was powered by a hand crank turned by an old man who was shut inside an adjacent windowless room (and fed only bread and water) (Figure 9).35 Jefferson disdained not only the visual trick but also the wasteful labor. His own fan design is haunted by a similar laboring presence, however. The fan machine intercedes to enhance the aesthetics of comfort and privacy in the dining room, and in so doing enables the master to reorganize the field of production—both indoors and outdoors.The desire for a mechanism that would extend, rather than “save,” labor power remains in Jefferson’s architecture as a prosthetic trace, as the adjunct space of the “passage” and the “well of the stairs,” as the boundary work that sustains the image of consumption as labor-saving creative production.* * *Jefferson’s elite European contemporaries in late eighteenth-century colonial India typically chose to portray themselves with servants: the presence of servants added value, contextualized the European subject’s location in the landscape, and conveyed authority. Servants were needed to keep the outside world at bay. Domestic laborers provided a protective envelope for Europeans in India, but the economy of laboring bodies, in their excessive presence, was a constant source of racial anxiety. A painting of the Auriol and Dashwood families in Calcutta by Johan Zoffany is a case in point (Figure 10).Created in the mid-1780s, the painting depicts members of the Auriol, Dashwood, and Prinsep families, which included senior merchants in the East India Company as well as officials in the EIC’s army and civil service. The families grew wealthy because of these positions as well as through private trade and investment in plantations. In addition to family members, the painting shows five servants, all finely dressed, suggestive of the elevated social rank of the families: a hookahburdar standing near a tree prepares John Prinsep’s smoking pipe, as Prinsep and two of the Auriol brothers, Charles and John, engage in conversation. On the right edge of the picture, a hurkarah, or mail carrier, hands a letter to James Auriol, causing him to look away from his chess game with the seated Thomas Dashwood, while his sarkar, or manager, stands nearby with bills in his hand. Two women are seated at Dashwood’s right; they are Charlotte and Sophia Auriol, the wives of John Prinsep and Thomas Dashwood, respectively.At the very center of the composition, just behind and between Charlotte and Sophia Auriol, a servant pours water into a silver teapot held by a dark-skinned boy. This boy is likely John Auriol’s enslaved child servant, euphemistically called Nabob (nabab means a royal deputy or prince). We know of this boy because Auriol gifted him to the Calcutta lawyer William Hickey to accompany Hickey on a visit to England.36 Nabob labored as a personal servant, attending to the immediate comforts of his master and mistress. This would no doubt include the task of fanning them in warm weather, as shown in a contemporary painting of Lady Impey in Calcutta.37If writings, paintings, and other visual depictions reveal that servants and slaves resided in the very center of the narrative of European families and social life in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, architectural drawings do not make this relationship straightforwardly evident, given the putative separation between served and service spaces that we see in plans. The problem is simple. If a modest family of two or three had at least eight to twelve domestic servants, and people in the middling services had about sixteen to twenty servants—the numbers of domestic servants increasing with rank, with the governor-general at the apex with a contingent of three hundred—where did the servants live? If many of them had homes in the city, that still left a very large number of servants on the premises. Considering they were expected to be at hand all the time, where would they be in these buildings, and how might they have understood their experience of space?Plans become useful here when we consider not necessarily what they show at the building or urban scale but instead what they do not reveal. In my previous work, discussing the relations among servants’ spaces, I have argued that if we trace the spaces designated as service buildings in a plan, we get a pattern at the building scale and may surmise that the service buildings were a set of protective envelopes whose cumulative impact at the urban scale was open to interpretation.38 Depending on one’s point of view, such houses could be seen as protected or besieged. But even that does not show us the ubiquity of laboring bodies. Unless the function is specifically grounded to a space, the plan is blind.Consider a plan of a bungalow in the town of Jhelum in the Punjab sketched during the years of the Sepoy Rebellion of 1857–59 (Figure 11). The rebellion began as a mutiny of the soldiers, or sepoys, of the EIC and became a full-scale rebellion against British rule. Arthur or Archie Wood, a captain in the EIC’s army, rented this bungalow located just outside the military cantonment of Jhelum, where he lived with his wife, Minnie, and their infant children.39 Their house and nearby cantonment were caught in the maelstrom of the rebellion: the regiment stationed at Jhelum mutinied on 7 July 1857.40In this otherwise simple and typical plan of a colonial bungalow, there are two rooms on the left marked with Minnie’s name: her private dressing room and the storeroom. The dressing room had two doors opening to the back of the house and was also the location of the nurse’s bed. The nurse was the sole European servant—a subaltern’s wife hired to care for Minnie during her final weeks of pregnancy and her confinement.41 The mehter (sweeper) would have to go through this room to clean the bathroom, and the sweeper was at hand all through the day. The private dressing room was thus not very private. In contrast, Minnie’s husband, who drafted this plan, had a whole room for his private use and anointed the master bedroom as “Our Bed Room.”The storeroom, on Minnie’s side of the bungalow, turned out to be the only room that Minnie felt was her own. The plan’s annotation points out that it is “especially for her own use.” Why the storeroom? It was for the storage of provisions: Minnie issued daily supplies to the cook from this space.42Although this room was not a living space, in 1857 Minnie wrote about it with some pride in a letter to her mother: “I have a very nice storeroom which I have christened the other day by putting three pots of preserve in it, and that is all I can think of, as you cannot as in England go out to shops.”43 Minnie struggled in her role as mistress of the house. She did not know the local language and required her husband’s help to translate basic instructions to servants, and her husband was annoyed by her inability to cook jellies and custards – signals of polite status in colonial society.Minnie’s house was in constant upheaval: her children cried, and she and her husband yelled at the servants.44 Minnie’s failure as a mistress resided in her inability to convey the virtue of idleness—to aspire “‘by hidden method and management’ to give a surface impression of large leisure.”45 The three jars of fruit preserve stood as proof of not just her housewifeliness and self-worth but also her connection with shops in larger towns that sold European bottled provisions and preserves. That connection linked her to Europe and the hope of a place to which she could escape.Note that Minnie’s storeroom was the size of the room allocated to Captain Wood’s personal attendant, the sardar bearer. The affective economy around the storeroom was based not on size or the monetary value of what was stored inside. Rather, it was premised on the fact that servants were not allowed unrestricted access to the room.Employing between ten and sixteen servants at various times, the Woods fell into debt and had to justify their expenses. The most expensive item on their list was servants. Captain Wood wrote by way of explanation: During the hot season, 7 months of the year, we require many more to pull the punkahs and water the tatties, etc. The latter are the reed blinds which are hung in the doorways, etc., and kept sprinkled with water to try to afford a little cool air. Four punkah coolies are absolutely necessary to be in attendance day and night at our house. You cannot imagine what the heat is during the hot months. These four men each receive four rupees, which makes additional 16 rupees for servants.46 In addition to punkahs hung from the ceilings and reed mats over windows, as described by Captain Wood, the Woods’ house had a thermantidote—a fan attached to a window that a servant moved manually to generate a breeze.47* * *The punkah, a large fan suspended from the ceiling of a room and manually operated by a servant, was not new to colonial India—it was a precolonial luxury enjoyed by elites, while the vast majority of people used handheld fans to cool themselves. By the early nineteenth century, what had been a luxury became a standard feature of the residences of Europeans and public buildings in India, such as courtrooms, offices, and churches. As the idea of the debilitating effects of the “tropics” on the European constitution took hold in colonial medical circles, being fanned around the clock came to be regarded as a necessity (Figure 12). Initially, the punkah was operated by a servant standing in the same room, but soon the removal of the servant to an adjacent space, still connected to the fan by a rope, erected a visual barrier between master and servant (Figure 13).By the mid-nineteenth century a new category of menial laborer—the punkah coolie—emerged. The job required strength and endurance, and employers recruited low-caste seasonal migrant labor especially for this work. As the residents of a home moved from one room to another, the punkah cool