For various reasons, I have been thinking a lot about boredom…

In a Formulary for a New Urbanism, Gilles Ivain (pseudo Ivan Chtcheglov) (1953) remarks on the predominant experience of boredom in the contemporary city and concludes the first section of his essay with the famous statement: “You will never see the hacienda. It does not exist. The hacienda must be built.” (A statement with particular meaning for the people of Manchester, as it inspired the naming of the infamous club- The Hacienda). He goes on to call for a modifiable built environment that might change with the desires of its inhabitants.

The architect Cedric Price took this idea forward in his conceptual model, Generator (1976-79, not built). This was a series of cubes, screens, walkways and catwalks that could be moved around by a mobile crane on the site to meet visitor’s needs and desires. Price’s collaborator John Frazer, proposed that the cubes be outfitted with sensors that would report on the use of the components. If the pieces of Generator weren’t moved enough, they would grow bored and design their own layouts, which in turn would be handed off to the mobile crane operator to put into place. The central idea of Price’s work was that new technology could enable the public to gain control over their environment, which would be responsive to visitors needs and the activities that take place there.

Now, the ‘new technology‘ available to Price was fairly primitive compared to what we have available at our disposal today and this led me into thinking… what if we could design boredom, not only into architecture, but into everyday things? So that they adapt, change and find new purpose? Nothing would be left to waste, nothing would be useless any more. For example, we could design pictures that change after a period of time, if no one has looked at them. The aim, not to design perfect control and stability but to create ‘generators‘ which make things that neither the creator or the users expect, things that get involved and play an active role…once they get bored. It would be a world of constant reinvention and interest, of ordered disorder. Martin Heidegger, who studied boredom in Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics (1983) as part of his continual exploration of existence, suggests an interesting strategy when faced with boredom: “Not to resist straight away but to let resonate… only by not being opposed to it, but letting it approach us and tell us what it wants, what is going on with it.”

So, I have concluded that being bored is not a bad thing. In fact it is an opportunity to build the hacienda.