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UC Berkeley's graduate architectural journal
______ Issue 08
BETWEEN
HOPE AND
WAIT
Author
Mustafa Faruki
I.
In one of my more exotic undergraduate misadventures, I enrolled in a summer Spanish course at New York’s Hunter College. Every afternoon for six weeks, I boarded the M66 Crosstown bus—iced latte in one hand, my copy of ¡Hablemos Español! in the other—overflowing with that effluent of self- indulgence normally mistaken for youthful optimism and naiveté.
My efforts at learning the language ultimately resulted in failure, not in the least because of my inability to grasp a very basic (and non-linguistic) rule: that midday Midtown traffic tends to be a bit of a bitch. The rapidity of my memory to unlearn this simple truth led to a series of late arrivals, class disruptions, disapproving looks, failed exams, and other assorted embarrassments that I continue to associate with that summer specifically, and with the Spanish language in general.
I did manage to retain a few, more positive nuggets of the experience, albeit in varying states of dormancy. One of these was my introduction to esperar, a Spanish verb that spans (precariously, in my mind) the distance between its English equivalents of “to wait” (to remain stationary in expectation) and “to hope” (to desire with expectation).1 On learning these competing definitions, I remember being confused, but I was reassured by our instructor that any potential discrepancy would immediately be resolved through context.
II.
Esperar was roused in my mind years later when I was visited in my Brooklyn studio by an agent of the United States Department of De-Celestialization (USDoDeC) regarding the design for an Intake Facility. The Facility was to be sited on Lower New York Harbor’s Governors Island. It would receive and serve as a holding area for a substantial number of anonymous clients in transit between Heaven and Earth. The clients’ journey was not instigated by one particular event; instead, I was told, they were reacting to a series of degradations, humiliations, and restrictions resulting from a servitude to God that was both eternal and uncompensated.
To make matters worse, the clients’ obligations to God and His praise included a life devoid of sexual desire (or desire of any kind, for that matter.) And, as if the notion of unending celibacy was not enough to make me recoil in horror, the agent added that her clients had no sexual organs to speak of, thus precluding even the possibility of masturbation entirely. (2)
2. The celibacy and inability to desire associated with the anonymous client has been widely speculated on and debated. One of a great number of helpful sources is The Muqaddimah of the 12th century historian and jurist Ibn Khaldun of Tunis. In this account, the world of creation is organized into levels, beginning with minerals and continuing upwards, through the stages of man (who is able to think and reflect), and ending at the highest level, occupied by the client. The moment when “the third kind of soul” (prophet), by way of receiving a message from the Heavens, must adopt the attributes of the client is telling: we learn that prophets must “slough off humanity in that moment which is the state of revelation. God freed them from the lets and hindrances of the body by which they were afflicted as human beings.” In this state, all human functions including desire are necessarily redirected towards a desire for God. See: Ibn Khaldun, The Muqaddimah, ed. N.J. Dawood, trans. Franz Rosenthal (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 74-78.
Normally, this would be the type of project I would dodge outright with vigor: it’s well known that public agency work is often less than lucrative, and even more often winds up in litigation and net loss. However, my arm was twisted by my USDoDeC visitor’s particular turn of phrase to describe the condition of her anonymous clients.
She explained that they were caught up in an unfortunate and frustrating trap, where an outcome was initially anticipated, but then dismissed as soon as its impossibility as an object of desire was made apparent. And so they waited in place for the desire that might offer them hope. “It’s too bad,” she concluded, “they’re stranded somewhere between waiting and hoping...”
On hearing the melancholy predicament of the anonymous client expressed in this way, I was made nostalgic. It reminded me of esperar, and that elusive connection between hope and wait. But more than that, I was entranced by the possibility of the architect-as-magician, incarnating the change of state from wait to hope, where a once stranded expectation crosses into the dominion of desire.
III.
Our proposal for an Intake Facility for an Anonymous Client in Transit Between Heaven and Earth takes several steps to re-orient the condition of its planned dwellers from wait to hope.
Design endeavors include a genitalia-attachment assembly, as well as associated suites for sexual urge detection and testing. We also look forward to working closely with mobile applications such as Grindr and Bumble to create a fully integrated apparatus of desire. But at the center of our strategy for the facility is the development of a completely new type of drawing—something necessitated by our engagement with a completely new type of desire.
At the present stage, elements of the Intake Facility’s design emerge as composite axonometric as well as hybrid axono-perspective drawings. These and other innovative representations start to chronicle the transition of the client’s condition from waiting to hoping.
