Over ten years ago, when I was studying graphic design, I found myself submerged in articles about “hostile” or “defensive” architecture. Not that this was a new thing then. In 2005, works like “Archisuits” by Sarah Ross already existed. Right across from the university where I studied in Mainz (DE) stood a branch of the discount supermarket chain PENNY. In front of it there was a large wooden platform, one of many communal architectural structures that invited people to dwell by sitting, lying down, or standing. As I was approaching the end of my studies, the city decided to add metal bars over it, constraining how one could interact with it and how long sitting or lying there remained comfortable. This measure was the consequence of complaints about the number of people, most of them unhoused, experiencing psychological distress and struggling with addiction, who would spend their days in front of the supermarket. The platform provided comfort, and its proximity to goods made it convenient. The city’s response was not public policy, but architecture. The addition of the metal bars did more than deter use. It retrained it.

At the end of my graphic design studies, “graphic design memes” were gaining traction and memes were becoming more of an academic topic in general. In almost every graphic design conference, at least one keynote speaker would show an image of a cross-shaped pathway forming a 90-degree corner on a lawn. A diagonal, “well-trodden” path cuts across the lawn, forming a shortcut between two concrete lanes. A person is shown walking down the grass-turned-soil pathway. Right below the person’s shadow is the caption “User experience.” Next to it, looming over the concrete lane, another caption reads “Design.” This meme is still used as shorthand for the idea that no matter how carefully something is designed, people will bend it to their needs.

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I get suspicious when I see an image, like the “User Experience vs. Design” meme, elicit the same response over a long period of time. While reading Sara Ahmed’s book What’s the Use? I was very happy to find the image of the “well-trodden path” under the spell of different words. Ahmed brings the image of the “well-trodden” path not to contrast alternative use with programmed use, but rather to think of the repetitive, mimetic quality of use. The path exists because people have used it. The more a path is followed, the easier it is to follow, I hear her saying to an audience. There is a tension in these sentences that I would like to transpose to the discussion of public space I am opening through this experiment. To follow a path that is already there can be seen as a normative act, a form of “walking the right way.” At the same time, following the path can be an act of care, and an act of maintenance. The way in which this city we co-inhabit works its paths, sidewalks, streets, and bike lanes spills into both directions. The fenced lawn is one such worked path.

There is a connection between interventions such as Sarah Ross’s and the “well-trodden path” meme that I would like to explore in relation to Rudolf von Alt-Platz. I am thinking of a specific image from documentation of the Archisuits project: a person lies across a bench wearing a blue tracksuit. Attached to the suit are protrusions that fit precisely against the bench’s surface and arms, resulting in padding that allows the person wearing the suit to lie flat on the bench. This wouldn’t be possible without the suit. This image materialises a tension that I often see performed in Viennese public space: it makes space for leisure while quietly managing posture and duration, training users through form.

There are five benches here. Two on one side, three on the other. Two of them stand almost directly opposite each other, while the remaining three are staggered. From here, sitting opposite each other, we can speak while looking into each other’s eyes. From there, on one of the other benches, I can have a moment to myself. In Vienna, the ground plane is rarely used as a space for dwelling, unless demarcated by function or a change in material. When I see the ground plane being used, it is usually by people kneeling on the sidewalk, in subway stations, or as an unmediated occupation of public space: a protest, an exhibition opening, or a street party.

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Writing for me is a way of dealing with attention. In the case of this text, I think attention was borne out of annoyance. My irritation may be less about prohibition than about being positioned. I rant to you on the phone that I cannot quite articulate what makes me annoyed by this place we are standing in and many other places in the city where we can’t simply hang out wherever without feeling as though we’re breaking some rule. Some rule that is only whispered by our socially engineered landscape. I notice that my irritation may also be informed by ignorance. Not allowing our feet and bodies to enter a lawn populated mostly by trees could also be read as a gesture of care, an act of maintenance that keeps the weight of our feet from displacing the air between the grains of soil.

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In the process of writing this text, I have tried to contact the MA42, the City of Vienna department responsible for the maintenance of the city’s gardens and green areas. While I was unable to learn why the lawn is enclosed, the attempt reoriented my perspective. Care and control often share the same vocabulary. Maybe the question is not why we cannot step on the grass, but who benefits from us not being able to?

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I have this dream-like image of an impossible picnic blanket stretching from one side of Rudolf von Alt-Platz to the other. Beginning on one side of the lawn, it climbs over the small fence, across the concrete path, over another small fence, and extends to the far edge of the second lawn. But what would such an intervention be good for other than aesthetics? Going back to where I began in this text: when can an act of leisure, like a picnic, become an act of transgression, even civil disobedience? And when does transforming its architecture so it conforms to the rules of the built environment become an act, not of complacency, but of care?

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This text is a slippery experiment in relation and scale, I say with a soft grin to my left cheek.

The experiment starts with a paused image. Two people are having a picnic on a saturated green lawn. We see them from above, as if from a bird's eye. A man wearing a rose-colored buttoned-down shirt and khaki pants lies on a striped blanket. A woman sits against his stretched legs and reads a book. Their blanket is made from two striped blankets layered together, forming an almost perfect square. Food, drinks, and books are arranged in an orderly manner. When I press play, the idyllic scene becomes contaminated by a slowly appearing cityscape. Chicago. In ten seconds the next square will be ten times as wide, our picture will center on the picnickers, even after they have been lost to sight, the voice of the narrator speaks inside my laptop. The narrator is Dr. Philip Morrison. The film is Charles and Ray Eames’s Powers of Ten™.^[ii]

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The animated film explores “the relative size of things in the universe and the effect of adding another zero.” It zooms up and out from the picnic scene, taking us into the depths of the universe and back into the picnicker’s body, piercing through his cells and into the atoms that compose his body. The nine-minute film has always had a calming effect on me. Its beauty lies in the steadiness of its framing. The camera zooms smoothly out and back in, focusing attention with a recurring square that scales exponentially. The square is empty and constructed from a thin white outline. The image is accompanied by the narrator’s voice, explaining in a soothing and measured tone what unfolds before us. He clearly knows what is going to happen before we do, you whisper to me. The frame is centred on the man’s hand. Even when we can no longer see it, his hand remains the frame's focal point, the axis along which we zoom in and out. This was 1977. Now, at Rudolf von Alt-Platz, the question is where the square was drawn in advance.

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In 1968 there was another man in the frame. He didn’t seem to have a companion, or maybe they left while he was asleep in the park. This time we’re in Miami. The 1968 version of Powers of Ten™ I was able to watch on YouTube is titled A Rough Sketch for a Proposed Film Dealing With the Power of Ten, and was shown at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC, from 1976 to 1979.^[iii] If the aesthetics were what first drew me in, the venue of the work’s first presentation along with the later involvement of IBM tipped me off to the ideology behind the film. As Professor Courtney Bender writes in an essay about Powers of Ten, the film is a fable that aestheticizes, celebrates, and universalizes an expansive postwar American-political-scientific empire.

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In her essay, Bender points to another moment in time when the frame was somewhere else. In 1957, there was a young girl holding a white cat in the suburbs of Utrecht, in the middle of a U-shaped building constructed during the German occupation of the Netherlands. After the liberation, a man beside me reads from a children’s book, the U-shaped structure was rebuilt and enlarged to become the central building of the Werkplaats Children’s Community. The scene is made improbable through a series of unlikely encounters. A dead whale lies in front of the young girl, while a malaria mosquito lands softly on her hand. This is the first strange coincidence, for we know that it was in December that the scene occurred, and this insect is rather rare in Holland in winter, the narrator reminds us.

We meet the girl, the whale, and the mosquito in Kees Boeke’s Cosmic View: The Universe in 40 Jumps (1957). This meeting and journey through multiple scales of encounter is very different from the one we have with the picnickers in Miami and Chicago, not only because of the parties involved. In Eames’s world, an angry audience member calls out, not even ants were featured. The Eames films are animations, and Boeke’s book is composed of drawings. As I mentioned before, the smooth zoom in the Eames films makes them aesthetically interesting. It is also what gives the viewer (in this case myself) a calming effect, a feeling of safety in a world one can both account for and be located within. When I search for the definition of the feeling I think I feel, Google offers commensurability: the ability for systems to be compared, measured, or evaluated according to a common standard or scale. What appears universal from a distance is always drawn from somewhere.

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There is a problem with this notion of scale. Movement is an illusion here, since the zoom does not imply actual motion, but a change in resolution, I hear someone behind me say.^[v] Seeing something does not mean we can control it. The man opens the children’s book and starts reading again. Around the young girl are the things that form her world. We see her also as it were from within, showing the parts she is made of.

I was a big fan of the series Mad Men when it aired.^[vi] As I was in the process of developing this project, there was a scene that I kept going back to. A picnic scene. In it, Jon Hamm’s anti-hero character Don Draper is having a picnic with his wife and two children.^[vii] The scene’s ending is very matter-of-fact. Betty Draper, played by January Jones, finishes packing up by waving the picnic blanket in the air, and shaking all the paper and plastic trash onto the lawn. She then heads to the brand new family car, where she and Don put the picnic blankets into the trunk. They enter the car and drive away.

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The episode, directed by Andrew Bernstein, is built around the acquisition of the new family car. Don Draper’s object of desire, the car, is a very blatant metaphor for his ascension, both in capital as well as in structural power. There are few people who get to decide what will happen in our world. You have been invited to join. As he hears this from his boss, he is ready to purchase the car. As I re-watch the episode, I notice a fear from Draper of letting anything contaminate his new possession. Nothing may touch it. Neither spit nor cum from a quickie with his wife to celebrate the new ride. Not the dirty hands of his children post-picnic. His rules, however, don’t last the whole episode. Towards the end of the episode he is confronted with the fact that Jimmy Barrett, a comedian played by Patrick Fischler, knows that he has been having an affair with his wife. As Betty and Don drive home, they sit in silence, looking straight ahead toward the viewers. They look uncomfortable. The camera cuts to Betty’s profile from a lower diagonal perspective and she vomits. The episode closes with a shot of Draper’s reaction. It is unclear if he is concerned about his wife or how easily the power he thought he possessed might slip away. The fence here is not as discreet, when it needs to decide what must remain outside of the frame.

A young woman sits next to one of her girlfriends in the high school cafeteria. She has blond hair and wears an open, wine-red coloured zip-up hoodie and a bright pink top that matches her lipstick. She has hoop earrings on and a sparkly necklace holding a thin pendant with the letter “R” on it. “R” stands for Regina. Her tray is filled with half-sliced buns and a bowl of butter. Candy and chips wrappers populate the bottom-right edge of the frame, along with a red can of regular Coke. Two other girlfriends arrive, closing the friends’ circle as well as the space around the table. Regina’s tray stands in direct opposition to the norm of her girlfriends, whose lunches are composed of one small plastic salad container, a fruit serving, and a diet Coke. Gretchen, one of the two girlfriends who have just joined, looks concerned as she lays her tray on the table and announces that we need to talk to you. You are wearing sweatpants. It’s Monday.

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Regina, or, to be more precise, Regina George is played by Rachel McAdams in the 2004 teen comedy Mean Girls.^[viii] She is the leader of “The Plastics,” a small group of popular girls inside of the microcosm of North Shore High School. They take a shine to new student Cady Heron, played by Lindsay Lohan, who, motivated by her “dorky” friends, upsets the group’s dynamics and manages to push McAdams’s character out of the circle.

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The movie came out when I was 10 years old, but its wave of influence over my generation came through its television distribution. Mean Girls used to run almost every weekday on the TNT Channel in Brazilian television at around 6pm. As a dorky teen, the film was a revenge wet dream. It showed in a very smart and funny way the arbitrariness of social inclusion. Whatever, these rules aren’t real. But even if they aren’t actually real, they are performed in a way that feels as if one’s life depended on it.

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Every invitation draws a boundary. I tell you as an excuse that as promiscuous as it may be to mix a discussion on the urban politics of inclusion with the dynamics of power and social relations with examples from pop culture, there is something about the way such examples talk about the way we humans manage our relationships to other humans and non-humans through the social- and materially built environment. As much as arbitrary social cues become rules, the built environment can be as harsh as our laws.

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In August 2019, Shawn Walker wrote an article for the Guardian titled “How a Pan-European Picnic Brought Down the Iron Curtain.” I found this article during a Wiki-Wormhole I stepped into while looking for performative acts of civic disobedience. In the text, Walker puts the picnic, which took place in 1989, in the context of the summer of migration of 2015, which propelled Viktor Orbán’s government to construct a fence along Hungary’s southern border to Serbia. The framing device of the article is Angela Merkel’s commencement address at Harvard University, in which the then Chancellor advocates for listeners to tear down the walls in their minds, a thinly veiled rebuke of Donald Trump’s politics, Walker whispers to the readers.

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I was really interested in the Pan-European Picnic as an act, because it happened so close to the place that I now call home. On August 19, 1989, Austrians, Hungarians, and East Germans met at the Austro-Hungarian border for a picnic, which included cutting down the fence between the two countries. The fence, which was the dividing line between both nations, also represented the line between the West and the East; between Communism and Capitalism. Even though the fence was rebuilt after the event, it marked the beginning of a process that was sedimented by the fall of the Berlin Wall only three months later.

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The Iron Curtain was built to imprison us, the fence in 2015 was built to protect us by a democratically elected government, Walker quotes a member of the Pan-European Picnic Foundation saying.

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Who was invited to the picnic then? Who is invited now? I ask in the middle of Rudolf von Alt-Platz. I only hear the birds singing in response.

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