Passionate Detachment in an Airbnb
My Airbnb Residency on the Broadwater Farm Estate is
an experiment in methods of engagement. Through the
orthodoxies of architectural education and practice, I
have found that ‘site research’ becomes a speculation on a
reality or a prejudicial projection that comes from a lack of
interaction and engagement.
“architect in residency” as a strategy of immersion in a
context; Anthropologist Clifford Geertz articulates this
approach in ‘Deep Hanging Out (Geertz,1998).
Allowing the process to guide my work, the following
studies in this chapter emerge from my the encounters and
situations made possible through my short residency.
It was about reconciling my position as an outsider to
the housing estate while trying to find appropriate and
meaningful moments of connection with the everyday
context of the estate.
The study is an acknowledgment of the presence of Airbnb
as an additional social structure on the estate, highlighting
the plurality of lived experiences on this architecturally
homogeneous site and suggesting that the same plurality
should be applied to the way we do ‘site research’.
In Mulvey’s article ‘Visual Pleasure in Narrative Cinema’
(1975) she discusses how passionate detachment “destroys
the satisfaction, pleasure and privilege of the ‘invisible
guest’, and highlights how film has depended on voyeuristic
active/passive mechanisms.” Using Mulvey’s ideas as a
metaphor for my research, I have attempted to blur the
distinction between myself as the voyeur and the residents
of the estate as my subject by becoming part of a system
that removes me from my territory as an observer, but
also physically locates me within the relative privacy of
their world. However it does not presume that I have
gained equitable status with the residents of the estate
by this process. In a panel discussion on regeneration,
Torange Khonsari described how public works become
“Reconciling my
position as an
outsider, finding
meaningful moments
of connection with the
many ‘every-day’s’ of
the estate.”