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Joyspace is a new book by Adam Rolston. His ambitious text, in part a response to Rem Koolhaas’s 2002 essay “Junkspace,” surveys modernism’s discontents, contemporary media addictions, and the dissolution of the binary fields of architecture and interior design. The two sections below bookend the publication: After quite literally asking “How did we get here?” Rolston provides expert answers before filing a final chapter that illuminates how Joyspace is resistance.
I Like Therefore I Am (Disrupting Forces)
I have been up all night with my smartphone gleaming on my face, casting inverted, gravity-defying shadows on the walls. I am as bright as the dopamine rushing through my synapses. I have been wrapped in the limits of logic, posting feverishly to the ends of the Earth, connecting across space with time-bending speed, love, and endless hope for a blindingly bright and beautiful future.
Social media is the end of authorship again. Authorship is dead—long live authorship. On the superhighway of digital image exchange, there is no speed limit. Every pixel is curated, edited, and thrust forth in an endless visual thirst trap. Online, there is an unceasing tsunami of taste. An arms race of the aesthetic is on. A global feedback loop has created subculturally defined communities. We all look at and like images in a self-affirming orgy of autonomic admiration. It is a searchable firehose of beauty. Here, the spectator and the maker alike circulate art, architecture, and design in an infinite stream. Everybody is an author, and nobody is an author in a flood of influence. A tidal wave of ideas is up for grabs. Ideas that exist before we have them. Virtual spaces.
Buildings of the mind. Unimagined art and artifice. All these ideas belong to all of us and no one.
In the future, everyone will be famous for a fraction of a second. Taste is in the eye of each community of beholders. The consensus of aesthetic opinion is roadkill on the virtual asphalt of the internet. We have never been more connected and self-sorted into cul-de-sacs of aesthetic affinity that we define and are defined by. In the future, innovation will only be situational. We will have a global view but create locally. We will ride the wave of ideas and images across the planet but surf it home. I like; therefore, I am.
A wormhole in your pocket collapses and warps all time, place, and history. There is no now or later, nor here or there. Past and present have been bent upon themselves. We live in a world where binary code has made the collapse of ridged binaries possible.
We live in a fourth dimension with almost all of human history, culture, and fantasy available in the palm of our hands. Our smartphones are a prosthetic memory palace that contains and spreads our histories and dreams infectiously across a planet of cultures to be consumed, sampled, absorbed, reconfigured, and reincorporated into a global creative production that reaches ever more deeply into our collective unconscious. It is a glorious, unstoppable wave of imagination.
Like a fever dream, the twenty-four/seven digital image distribution of imagined and in- real-life architecture and design has distorted the field of play. Buildings have begun to look like renders. Renders are indistinguishable from real-life objects. The design of an interior in Bahrain shared on social media can influence one in Baltimore in real- time. Intellectual property in the designed and built environment has become risible in the context of digital all-access. Social media and digital collaborative tools are transforming how we work and create with yesterday’s top-down strategy of aesthetic leadership, giving way to new forms of collective creativity. A new networked model of the twenty-first century has replaced the hierarchical, linear, siloed, industrial production model of the nineteenth. AI has changed the game. Our creative cultures are shifting. Disruption is the zeitgeist. Do we need to rethink our definitions of value in the built environment? How is the role of the architect and designer changing in this new, radically different context, and how did we get here?
Joyspace (Possible Futures)
Aesthetics are the new non-planimetric nationalism. We love to murder to dissect. In a blink, we unconsciously divide our world into tribes within tribes. Today, form follows habitus. Taste is the new world order. Our habitus is the passport to territories of enfranchisement. We wear our boarding passes on our backs. We fashion fashion to communicate access and belonging. We journey to Joyspace. We congregate in places that reflect our inner selves. Joyspace brings us together. Creative selfhood is the vaccine for the ubiquity of the techno-capital pandemic of sameness. Joyspace is the immune system of subcultural coherence. A radical disruption in the fabric of dominance has emerged. Joyspace is resistance. Joyspace is time travel. Joyspace is polymorphous.
Positive space is the new negative space. We dream ourselves into the spatial languages of the unconscious. Hyper-referential, self-constituting physical and virtual environments manifest ideas about ourselves materially. Joyspace is a field of thought and action. I occupy Joyspace; therefore, I am.
Joyspace is the libidinal weaponization of habitus against the corporate war on humanness. It is the erotic iron dome that defends against the monetization of desire. It is impossible to bomb Joyspace out of existence. It is noncontiguous, transferable, and peripatetic. We move between our social territories, inhabiting culturally defined spatial configurations born of our collective unconscious. Search engines connect us globally in a strategic network of spaces, places, signs, and symbols. We find each other through form. We see ourselves through symbols. Our bodies are a battleground. Our spaces are our ramparts. Joyspaces are the SPF that protects us from the monetization of our corporal habitus, our bodies, and ourselves.
The exponential explosion of taxonomies of beauty is rendering the corporate anatomical averages of Kim Kardashian, Taylor Swift, and Beyoncé Knowles meaningless. In the future, plastic surgery, Ozempic, collagen injections, wrinkle cream, and liposuction will be the stuff of art, not artifice. The corporate conversion loop that transforms economic capital into symbolic capital via the invasive processing of physical appearance will be rendered impotent. We will craft our corporal image out of joy, not transactional necessity. When all bodies have secular worth, the religious financialization of singular physical value definitions will lose meaning. When all bodies are a Joyspace, no bodies are an ideal. In Joyspace, our bodies are a playground.
Junkspace is what happens when Modernism loses its mission, when negative space becomes a negation. Modernism without joy is a skinned rabbit walking—a Lagomorpha emperor without clothes. Joyspace is the proprioceptive skin animated by the internal organs and the muscular, skeletal, and nervous systems of HVAC, concrete, steel, conduit, fiber-optic cable, and insulation of the endless global built environment—the invasive species of Modernism withers and retreats when Joyspace provides life, coherence, and form. The corporate, scientific, and data-driven guts of techno-capital’s planetary construction infrastructure, immunized by Joyspace, become the lifeblood of cultural coherence. Wherever there is air-conditioning, Joyspace can grow. There is a contest for the survival of the fittest among a spectrum of agents, from the ad hoc habitus of vernacular Joyspace to the monetized anti-Joyspace of the techno-capital network. Anti Joyspace cannot metastasize where Joyspace flourishes. Joyspace gives. Junkspace taketh away.
Joyspace is in the liminal architectures of everyday life, like a colorful blanket spread out for a picnic, a child’s pillow fort, a hot dog cart, a street fair tent festooned with catenary lights, a chuppah swathed with flowers, a stage set on Broadway, a decorated food truck, the lost graffiti-covered 5 Pointz building of Queens, a Burning Man structure, Fusterlandia in Havana, Ferdinand Cheval’s Le Palais Idéal, Freetown Christiania, or any other place where human joy and self-expression collide with public space.
Empathy is the scalpel that sculpts the architecture of the body politic. Today, designers are Bordieusians. Joyspace is the surgical manifestation of physical habitus, “a subjective but not individual system of internalized structures, schemes of perception, conception, and action common to all members of” a tribe. There are over six thousand languages spoken on this planet. At least as many nonverbal, visual, symbolic frameworks expressive of specific cultural subject positions exist and are evolving worldwide right now. Designers of Joyspace are aesthetic polyglots. They are conjurers of symbols, close-readers of desire, and translators of positive space.
Joyspace is always negotiated with its creators, patrons, and audience regarding the past, present, and future. It is a battleground that wins an audience only through representation. There is a new ambition to connect and negotiate across cultures. An aesthetic xenophilia that is open, global, and polyvalent has emerged. Emotion is now a bona fide source of aesthetic inspiration and a functional requirement. Form now follows feeling. Joyspaces emphasize awe and wonder, especially concerning new aesthetic categories of the natural and human-made sublime. The aestheticism of Joyspace differs from its romantic predecessors because it does not relegate formalism (or form) to a secondary status but mobilizes it as the foundation of more robust, muscular, visually symbolic languages that would be impoverished without it. Here, architecture and design are approached as neither pure sculpture nor pure scenography but rather in a liminal space that can synthesize the two. Designers are now empaths and forensicists, close-reading audiences as the stuff of aesthetic drivers, both form-giving and symbol-generating.
The aesthetic pendulum swing that now travels globally at the speed of light has fostered partisan globophobia and its kinder sibling globaphilia. Petulant, fragile aesthetic xenophobia mirrors its opposite, exuberant libidinal xenophilia. This race to the extremes of isolationism and multiculturalism reflects the disruptive rush of global connectedness. But, a new nonbinary approach has emerged that fosters nuanced respect for ever-evolving cultural specificity and the hybridity born of all access. In these new ecosystems, some aesthetic species or languages flourish, some are lost, and new species are created daily in a libidinal mating of ideas flowing across the planet at previously unfathomable speeds; creating Joyspace everywhere, these ecosystems infectiously spread. Joy will out. Us is more.
I’ve seen things I couldn’t believe: metal turned to stone spinning in the Bahraini sun, a flying dome evaporating into a grass field off the coast of Alqueva Lake. I’ve seen phantoms from marginalized pasts made material in Covent Garden. All those moments across the multiverse will be captured forever in code-like tears of joy in an endless ocean of data. We are riding a swell on the outside break mid-journey toward a post-xenophobic drop where no universalisms will be needed. The craving for humanity, significance, and coherence will drive deep situational action to create architectures that are the stuff of power, poetry, symbol, and transformation. We are balancing on the crest of a bright, beautiful binary wave. We cut a line once again into a brave new nonbinary future.
Joyspace is published by Pacific Books and was released on October 1. The title is the inaugural publication in the Pacific Design Series and is available on pacificpacific.pub.
Adam Rolston, senior founding partner of INC Architecture & Design, has been shaping the built environment for over three decades. Raised in Los Angeles and educated in Connecticut, New York, and Florence, Rolston has lived and worked in Asia, Europe, and the United States.