Clinic of the Cool

In the early months of 2008, nearing the completion of my Master of Architecture degree, I began my final project—an exploration of the concept of identity within an increasingly globalized world.

This project was a response to a broader studio subject—Mind the Gap, run by Peter Raisbeck & Dennis Prior, which used a proposal of a Dialecial Bridge between the fictional cities of Nostalgia and Zeitgeist as a departure point to investigate how the conditions of contemporary society can be examined through architecture.

My interest at the time, from an architectural perspective, was based on the symbiotic relationship between human behaviours and the built environment. In particular, around topics such as prospect/refuge, surveillance, comfort and branding as our global culture moves towards living between the digital and physical realms.

Drawn towards the boundaries and thresholds between these worlds in which we currently live, and the way they shape our sense of self as individuals and collectively, this topic has been an ongoing area of interest, continuing into the work I do today, with businesses and brands through Somewhere—Something.

Overview—

An increasingly globalized world is characterized by its transient populations and consumer culture, with the restless need to establish identities. The consumptive product has evolved beyond merely consumer goods incorporating lifestyles, experience, nostalgia, and identity in our insatiable quest for cool.

Retro branding is the marketing of an associative device that retails the experience of time through an aesthetic. It breeds context with the adoption of a legacy or identity with "the same casual commitment as putting on a t-shirt".

Clinic of the Cool, an image consulting research agency, actively encourages the selling and consumption of an experience, lifestyle, and identity. Through its architecture, it provides and serves as a training ground for the act of people watching and the celebration of 'a changing face'.

As a research agency, it requires a collective group of interventions that enable this act of social surveillance on a pedestrian everyday scale. It alludes to an informal social institution which frames the relationship between the consumer and the consumed.

The base for these interventions is located on Burke Street, Melbourne between Elizabeth Street and Swanson Street. Its location becomes pivotal as it is within proximity to services that enable the transformation required in this 'Quest for Cool'.

Chapter 2 “Commodity as Spectacle”
42.
The spectacle is the moment when the commodity has attained the total occupation of social life. Not only is the relation to the commodity visible but it is all one sees: the world one sees is its world. Modern economic production extends its dictatorship extensively and intensively. In the least industrialized places, its reign is already attested by a few star commodities and by the imperialist domination imposed by regions which are ahead in the development of productivity. In the advanced regions, social space is invaded by a continuous superimposition of geological layers of commodities. At this point in the “Second Industrial Revolution,” alienated consumption becomes for the masses a duty supplementary to alienated production. It is all the sold labor of a society which globally becomes the total commodity for which the cycle must be continued. For this to be done, the total commodity has to return as a fragment to the fragmented individual, absolutely separated from the productive forces operating as a whole. Thus it is here that the specialized science of domination must in turn specialize: it fragments itself into sociology, psychotechnics, cybernetics, semiology, etc., watching over the self-regulation of every level of the process.”

— Gud Duboard, Society of the Spectacle