![]() It sought to supply the 20th-century figure with information about the new environment it was experiencing and creating. This was, of course, the charged point of Modern architecture. Discomfort is a message the body sends us when we require information not obtainable “at home”: it is the catalyst for heterostasis, and, in turn, for homeostasis-without the former the latter comes only as false security, which can shatter like glass at the sight of a flashlight through the window. With the explosion of such demands into the daily pattern of modern life, the maintenance of our internal equilibrium came to depend on our ability to be thrown off balance, to regard the stress of new conditions not as a signal for retreat but as a call for exploration. Heterostasis, literally “other position,” is the process by which the organism raises its level of defenses by introducing new information to meet new demands. 2 Homeostasis is the condition of internal equilibrium in which an organism’s defenses are adequate to meet routine demands. The Canadian researcher Hans Selye has formulated the terms “homeostasis” and “heterostasis” to describe the way stress can open the door to a heightened sense of wellbeing or of comfort. Stress, as Barbara Brown puts it, is the condition of “the uninformed mind”: it is caused specifically by the mind’s need for adequate information to meet the demands the environment places upon it. The view of comfort and stress as two mutually exclusive entities denies this inherent symbiosis. Rybczynski, for example, devotes page after page to lambasting Modern architects for their failure to consider comfort, but not one paragraph to current research into the way comfort coexists with stress-cannot, in fact, exist without it. It caricatures the Modern attack on bourgeois complacency as Scrooge-like contempt for human well-being. Actually, you don’t have to be post-Modern to want chestnuts roasting by an open fire, but much of this pillow talk makes it sound that way, makes it seem that the Moderns wanted to put the fire out. Much of it, in fact, is a natural expression of the cold condition Modern architecture fell into when its self-creative power relaxed into the formulas of empty mannerisms. Not all of this deep-pile thinking is a knee-jerk reaction against Modernism. ![]() In a review in early October of the Walker Art Center’s recent show of the work of Frank Gehry, the New York Times hastened to reassure its readers that while Gehry’s work could easily be mistaken for art (apparently a bad thing), in fact it really “deals in the issues that all architecture deals in-space and form and materials, and in human comfort as well.” ![]() In last year’s bestselling House, Tracy Kidder, author of The Soul of a New Machine (on the computer), soothes the future-shocked present-numbed reader with the hum of comforts for the soul to be found in ye olde design (Greek Revival). In his recent book Home, a studious exposé of the Modern conspiracy to deprive us of creature comforts, Witold Rybczynski embroiders his pillows with history, common sense, wit, and half-truths. In the form of history reupholstered with an intellectual stuffing of post-Modern polemic, the bolsters are flying through the air and the times, tossed up with great gusts of pious sympathy for the battered bones of the poor neglected modern citizen, “the actual building user” The will to comfort doesn’t always come covered in prints by Laura Ashley and Pierre Deux it’s increasingly wrapped up in words. Pillow-fighting in post-modern rings is a stock routine. Demand your rights fight back with pillows. No more architects’ raptures on a chair of beauty as a joy for backbones. They wanted us to live in a work of art even if it killed us. ARE WE COMFORTABLE? IF NOT, let’s not make matters worse by blaming ourselves.
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