OFFICE-PARTY

It’s 5:45. Almost everyone has left... the computer screens have flickered into static and the hum of the office has died down... OFFICE-PARTY is not a proposal but a condition, a condition of illicit glances and stolen dances. It’s that moment of complete anomic abandon —— a condition of lawlessness, disobedience, and disorder. It’s a moment in which the rules can be set aside, the desks reconfigured, and the suppressed desire to move can be surrendered to. Defying the cybernetic flows of efficiency and logistics in the bürolandschaft office landscape, the workers can remake the frenetic jumble of desks and filing cabinets, creating a clearing instead of a careful row. As the workers gather, at first sheepishly but with increasing eagerness, the fluorescents flick off and the music starts… “A fit of shaking passes over the group” (Dan Graham, Rock My Religion). The dance begins. As the demarcation between life and work slips back and forth, the office-party is a radical reformatting of the culture of labor. The day-time spatial obedience to the economies of production is the necessary alibi for a night of pleasure. Pushed to the extremes between the managed and the deviant, the OFFICE-PARTY offers a possibility of refusal within the regimes of work.

2018 Non Architecture Competitions: ‘Dancing’