Architects are agents of the secure: fixers, controllers, protectors. This applies to the activity of building as much as it does to the intellectual work involved in establishing the boundaries of the discipline itself. If one is going to execute a plan for the organization of material in a space that is meant to have any kind of duration, then one had better be secure in the conviction that this is, in fact, the right way to do things. This means that the architect, or at least the architect who builds, must accept the role of one who yields power, of one who secures the future. This sense of security will always be false, but it is this false sense that separates the architect proper from the artist.

Historically the division between architectural and artistic activities has been blurred; the two disciplines shared the same space of production for centuries until architecture developed firmer boundaries, standardized education, and licensing systems. Art became more open as a discipline, while architecture sought security in an apparatus of professionalism. This is justifiable, as architects must design spaces where people feel secure, or ideally, spaces where security is a non-factor. Even the most architectural of artists makes lousy buildings… more

In the best possible (first) world, security is easily equated with comfort; a social nicety or convention reflecting suburban values. Its trajectory can be traced from a deliberate handshake to a lasting embrace up to joint speculation in real estate—commitment measured in the legally intimate terms of a lease. To some extent its feeling is psychological; I have been lucky enough to inherit the lease of an apartment because the amorous pair who first settled there discovered dwelling together killed their passion. On a macro-scale, societies allow themselves to be patted-down or broadcast on grainy television monitors as a reminder of betrayed trust.

In August, I was aghast when my compatriots stood their unlocked bicycles four meters from the stand, on Bergmannstraße, where we had just bought lemon ice-creams. Days after acquiring my current bicycle this October, I returned from a late-night supper gone long to find only the frame still locked to the gate outside the Prince George pub on Parkholme Road. Consensus and general atmosphere dictate how closely we must watch over the things we love; insecurity in peaceful times breeds mostly paranoia.

Though not in fact shelter, the counter serves as the most fundamental structure of exchange. Extending along a horizontal plane floating in between waist and chest height, it is not limited to the domestic; its smooth top indicates the interior of the narrowest taxi stand or noodle shop to be actively trading in goods and services.

Along with its ideological variants for the kitchen, including the optimally compressed work surface fitted into Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky’s Taylorist designs, there are looser definitions: the bank teller window, the service desk at the British Library controlling access to closed stacks, a younger sister’s occasional lemonade stand.

When properly functional, the counter’s planarity marries opposing expectations. What is “over-the-counter” is legally tendered, a deal openly agreed on both sides. Illicit affairs upset this fragile equilibrium easily, and it would be unthinkable to find the panic button anywhere but below the counter’s ledge. This duplicitous power structure lends political potence, too. Franklin McCain, Joseph McNeil, Ezell Blair Jr. and the late David Richmond’s open challenge in 1960, which localized national discontent and spurred a radical civil rights movement, was critically situated at a Greensboro lunch counter.

Home for winter break my freshman year of college, I took a job as a pedestrian counter for the Portland Chamber of Commerce. My tallies of the number of people approaching a street corner from each direction would be used to help calculate the retail value of commercial properties. I was given a small piece of plywood with four handheld counters attached to it—one counter for each direction—and asked to sit outside a downtown property for eleven hours, counting the confluence and the becoming public. My mission, it seemed, was to quantify transience and to pin down whatever was left over; to mine the uses of the city, to harness the consumption and replacement of space and skim the accumulated presences off the top. Though the numbers on the counter precisely indexed the number of individual passersby, the process of counting was really just massive speculation: an estimation of potential profile were something worthy of attention to appear, an effort to fold unconscious or tactical uses of city spaces into an overall strategy for development. The default mode of the city within the context of this action was passivity, the presumed subject consumed by tunnel vision or a blank stare, an unengaged individual occupying an inattentive non-place.

While my counting activity was used to generate speculative future values… more