"In the City"

Sebastian Jefford
In The City

In The City, there was a law that dominated its entire existence. If a citizen needed to enter any dwelling or building, whether for work or any other reason, be it personal or private, the citizen was required to witness its entire construction, beginning to end. And if they were born after the construction of said building, or had missed it due to the fact you were witnessing a different (re)construction that day, the citizen would have to make an application to the council to have it demolished, or rather, taken apart. If approved they were then required to witness the entire process of its reconstruction before they could enter that building. Once observed from top to bottom (which was obviously an incredibly time-consuming activity), the citizen could visit that building as many times as they needed to, for the rest of their life.

To encounter a place without knowing how it came into being was heavily frowned upon. Actually that’s an understatement, it was illegal. To intimately know your sense of place, to know the absolute origins of your location, was an incredibly important cultural value of The City. In order to function ‘appropriately’ as a citizen it was important that you were able to know how each of the rooms and buildings in which you spent your time came about.

It had been after the loss of the Minister of the Interior’s son, that the government and also their more radical supporters had rallied to implement the appropriate legislation. The earliest and only known piece of history, which was often disputed among city dwellers as folklore, was that the Minister of the Interior’s son had formed a coup and declared an independent state within the cavity walls of the Minister and his family’s apartment building. An attempt by the Minister to appease his son lasted for weeks, involving personal visits from priests, celebrities and even negotiators from the antiterrorism branch of the police. Yet, having voluntarily cemented himself inside the 30cm wide cavity walls, the attempt failed. The son’s muffled words had drifted eerily through ventilation shafts and mouse holes, proclaiming a profound sense of freedom in his exploration of his newfound-in-between-land, stating that he had “gone to Croatan.”

The Minister, driven to an increasingly nervous disposition by the whole affair, retired from office to spend the rest of his days indoors, listening to the dulled pitter-patter of his son scratching around the innards of the building. He had known early on that with just mice and spiders to provide nutrition to the only leader, citizen and spokesperson of the newly claimed territory, the son’s days were numbered. The Minister, driven by an unconditional love and the need to repel the onset of a nervous breakdown, had set up small feeding tubes that went through the wall, every morning and evening quietly tending to them like a pensioner tending a garden in the shadow of a harsh winter.

And so The Minister and The Son entered into a state of mutual dependency, or mutually assured destruction, for the rest of their days. One crisp autumn morning, The Minister didn’t wake up. Having lead an increasingly hermetic existence since resigning from office to support his son’s folly of frontier, no one thought to check up on him. His cadaver was not discovered for days, along with feeding tubes that had been sucked dry, after complaints about the smell from neighbouring tenants; although by this point The Minister’s body emanated somewhat of a faint bouquet compared with the acrid stench of the feces-filled cavity walls. The Son’s muffled pitter-patter could still be heard in the cavity, slowing and becoming less frequent as the last days went on, until eventually the apartment fell completely silent.

As you can imagine, the city itself was in a state of constant, chaotic but meticulous reconstruction. Small crowds of people would often be seen sprinting through the streets, desperately trying to avoid the falling labeled and numbered debris. They would run, hands over heads, to catch the next construction they were scheduled to attend, that they had to attend, so that they could start their new job, or give birth to their child (forward planning was essential). Of course, if they were going to work for a large company, they’d probably end up working very little, or at least working from home a lot, as with each new employee the building itself would have to be leveled to allow said employee to witness its precise (re)erection, so that they could walk through the doors and know exactly how the place had come into being.

Making an application to witness the (re)construction of a building was incredibly expensive, as well as long-winded and stressful. There were numerous forms to fill out, with references, personal statements, passport photographs, birth certificates and qualifications required. At one point, in the early days (although this is also just a rumour, folklore; history hasn’t been allowed to accrue in the constant upheaval of reorganization and rebuilding), you were required to attend an interview with a panel of eight people, although this proved problematic as the interviewee would then have to make another application just to be able to enter the Council Committee building and take part. Someone on the board suggested they could do home-visit interviews, but of course they quickly realized the interviewers themselves would have to make an application to visit each applicant and enter their dwelling, as well as be interviewed by another set of interviewers who themselves would need to make an application, etc, etc. So eventually, as you can imagine, interviews were ruled out as unfeasible.

Due to the expense of the application, you would often need to have a job in the first place to even entertain it as a possibility, which meant that just the idea of attempting to apply for a job in itself was not an option, unless of course you already had money. There was vast unemployment (although a booming industry, construction was almost completely mechanized), and many people simply never left their own homes apart from to wander the barren yet dangerous and chaotic streets. The City had become reliant on airdrops of humanitarian aid from neighbouring countries, although these became another potentially fatal projectile that the vulnerable pedestrians had to contend with, alongside oversized construction equipment and falling debris.

There was one exception to the rule of having to bear witness to the construction of a building before entering it, and that was if you were born in a building. Of course, this meant that many pregnant mothers never went to the hospital to give birth, choosing to stay at home, without the proper medical care, and this lead to a high infant mortality rate. Then there were the babies who were lucky enough to be born in a hospital. To be born in a hospital was unimaginatively nicknamed the ‘Golden Ticket’, as if you were born into the warm, sterile embrace of the maternity ward, according to the legislation, healthcare would always be available to you immediately and free of charge, as you would never have to enter into the rigmarole of making a longwinded application to have the building reconstructed. You could come and go as you pleased.

There were many children who never actually left the hospital, most of them orphans of mothers who had died in childbirth. You would often see them, eyes pressed up against the windows, their hot breath steaming up the glass as they looked down on the street below. Of course they were free to leave; many did but never returned. Those that chose to stay lived a nomadic existence within the walls of the hospitals, finding solace in the broom cupboards and ventilation shafts, preying upon left over foodstuffs from the canteen bins and sleeping patients’ unfinished meals. Hospitals became known for their infestations of fierce packs of feral infants who would occasionally prey upon some of the more vulnerable patients, and from time to time there would be a desperate cull. Men in white plastic suits and respirators would flood the whole building with anesthetic gas, searching the entire fabric of the building for wild children clothed in ragged papery hospital gowns clutching broomstick spears, dried umbilical cords still dangling from their bellies. One by one, they would gently but firmly remove them from the building. Prospects for these children were low. For a while the hospitals would be mostly empty and quiet again, with no danger of supplies or food going missing and patients being bitten, no possibility of the intense silence of surgery being stormed by a fierce pack of cannibalistic sprogs. But gradually over the months and years, a fresh group of nomadic feral infants would reappear, scratching around in the walls of the institution, their near-mythic status keeping nervous patients up at night, until they were deemed unbearable by the tired medical staff, who would once again have to pick up the phone and reluctantly request another mass anesthetized removal.

As the city’s buildings were being constantly demolished and rebuilt, the architecture hadn’t changed at all in hundreds of years. The fabric of the city itself had not been allowed to accumulate a history or to develop. It was almost as though the city and its inhabitants had been living through one moment in history, again and again. Everything was known, accounted for, inside out, particularly by the government. Yet in fact, many of the governmental figures had only seen plans of buildings, and in fact never visited them in the flesh. This was due to the obvious priority of saving time.

Architecture as a profession and an intellectual endeavour had completely died out. There was no need for it to exist anymore. The government had recognized this, but hadn’t necessarily outlawed it. The current overbearing legislation was enough to prevent it from even becoming an option.

Small enclaves of enthusiasts would meet regularly, usually under the cover of darkness, in the streets to practice a frowned upon and dangerous activity. In the comfort of their own homes, these individuals sought to re-imagine and re-invigorate the practice of architecture. However, they were limited to the practice of architectural model making. They would erect temporary structures in the streets, shielding them from view, allowing them to meet in relative secrecy. Underneath these makeshift tents, they would collectively assemble a new model of a potential city, an aggregate of the varying and unorthodox individual models they had brought from the worktables of their own homes. These models offered a relief, an escape, a sort of travel through surrogate building. It allowed them to extend their reach into a potential future or past, according to a collection of individual desires and interests. But most of all, it allowed a space for speculation, the potential to meander from the path, to not know. The models became a kind of tool that gave means to a semi-fictitious account. In the city where time, bound up in the urban environment, seemed to repeat itself, the model created a gap, a hole. This gap or hole allowed the enthusiasts’ dreams to gain a temporary traction, a sense of where they were in time and space, through a kind of semi-fictitious, proposed history. Surrogate-building provided grip against a constant slippage.

However this practice was incredibly dangerous. Very few people spent extended periods of time in the streets, as a human body was always incredibly vulnerable in the outdoor areas of the city. The sheer volume of heavy-duty machinery and wide-load vehicles, already preoccupied with avoiding collisions with each other, or the near constant brickwork or scaffolding falling from ongoing construction works (workers no longer bothered to shout ‘Heads!’), meant that accidents were plentiful. At least two dozen happened daily across the city, which meant that most of the city dwellers remained at home, indoors, unless it was absolutely necessary. Very often these Model enthusiasts, gawping, salivating over their scaled down, cardboard or balsa wood alternative atopias, beneath a hastily erected and weather-beaten wedding gazebo, would be obliterated by a set of girders fallen from a faulty crane, or flattened by an upturned truck that tried to swerve too late to avoid them.

Accidents such as these would be a rare occasion when crowds would attempt to gather in the streets. Among a knowing few, the fragments of the wrecked models would be salvaged from the gore, taken home to be worked on again, cleaned of blood and tissue, to become forgotten proposals remembered differently. A rare thing in the city: through this underground network of model makers, a history managed to accumulate. A proposal for a history accumulated in the shady archives (kitchen cupboards) of these model makers. It was said that if one were to actually construct the fluid, interchangeable model city that sits in the pantries and cupboards of these people, it would be three times the size of the current city.

For all their danger and fatalities, the impermanence of these model meetings was incredibly empowering. Their makeshift, slapdash and improvised nature allowed them to be organized, take place and disappear with relative ease and without much fuss. Even when they were the victims of an accident, the vast amount of chaotic activity around them became enough of a distraction to deem them invisible.

Gradually over time, a hidden conflict began to take place. It was difficult to define, but somehow it resembled a kind of architectural insurgency. A shady enterprise colloquially known as the ‘Different Architects’ were at the heart of it.

It was said that the ‘Different Architects’ were a radical fringe group, who not only claimed to have implemented and infiltrated new buildings, but also to have constructed a concrete architectural history of the city. Their origins began in the underground Model community, but they had formed the splinter group after the model had ceased to satisfy. These individuals would select high-employee-turnover buildings that were constantly being dismantled and put back together again, and visit them after each reconstruction. They began to forge ‘fresh’ applications under assumed identities, in order to pose as having not witnessed before. This allowed them to gain access to the buildings construction process, and gain a more intimate relationship with the contractors. Eventually they bribed a few discrete members of the construction team, who would in return make subtle ‘mistakes’ in the reconstruction: bricks laid upside down or a few millimeters out, planters or paving back to front. These quiet interventions began to accumulate.

The splinter group proposed that these ‘mistakes’ allowed the existing buildings to become autonomous, a new design. They gradually performed this technique at a number of sites across the city, steadily documenting the process. This covert activity meant that thousands of people every day were entering buildings that they thought they knew inside out, but didn’t; they thought they were upholding the coveted cultural value of witnessing, unaware of their own participation in it’s subversion. It turned out someone eventually got wind of this. Members of the splinter group began to disappear, reemerging weeks later, blue and putrid, falling out of cavity walls during demolitions.

Security tightened at entrances to prevent uninvited and unauthorized spectators. In order to prevent unauthorized witnesses of (re)constructions, while building work was ongoing, the sites would be cloaked in a large canvas tarpaulin, with a 1:1 scale image of that building printed on to it. Invisibility had become both desired and enforced, not just on the everyday shut-in citizens, but also on the city itself.

As the years went on, the administration had grown more and more radical, obsessive and unhinged. Governmental figures had fallen into paranoid delusions. They would rant about passengers in aeroplanes entering the city’s airspace or motorcars driving through the city’s congested byroads, eyeballing the city as they went by on their travels, how they were voyeuristically undermining their most coveted cultural value and law. These outsiders hadn’t witnessed. They were entering the city’s jurisdiction without knowing of its origin.

More and more, tighter and tighter legislation was introduced. In one of those secret rooms with a big round table, the most senior figures in office decided that there was no other alternative. They had to enforce the law so that it covered not just a building, but the city itself. In a sweaty, heady rush, they passed the law without much consideration. It didn’t take long for them to realize that the initial construction of the city as a whole had been out of living memory for years. Literally every citizen would need to be evacuated, and one at a time, witness. A giant 1:1 scale tarpaulin went up, stretched across the entire city by a team of dozens of helicopters, forming a bizarre cube draped in a static, ghostly image of the now empty metropolis. And so the demolition began.