to clear huge swathes of Paris, replacing
slums with boulevards sparkling with
shops, cafes and apartments for the middle
classes: the original gentrification paradigm.
Unsurprisingly, the notions of air, light
and health are a key part of Ou1· Happy
L i.fe's 'happiness manifesto' ('#24: Live in
a big enough house'; '#41: Reduce
particulate 1natter in ambient air to 40
micrograms of P~l10 per cubic meter'; '#32:
Participate in sport for at least 30 minutes
once per week'). As Garutti points out, t he
rash of popular 'house-flipping' reality TV
programmes, which spawned significantly
in the wake of the financial crisis, promote
the idea that smashing through a fe·w walls
and a lick of paint 'can really "open up"
an interior to better support the pursuit
of happiness'. There's a strange r esonance
with Matta-Clark's architectural slicing,
particularly as, somewhat il'onically, the
artist worked on traditional construction
projects and loft renovations in New York,
alongside his artworks.
Picking up where Matta-Clark's
sledgehammer left off, Our Happy Life
exposes property as 'a market of dreams':
the home is
'ideally, the place
where we act out
our own scenano •
of happiness'.
The dawn of
emotional
capitalism has
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revolutionised the way space
can be sold to consumers,
imitating h ow Instagra.m
influencers and reality TV
stars p lug beauty products
and fashion labels through
their social media platforms.
A 35-storey apartment block
in Brooklyn, New York - 300
Ashland Place - designed by TEN
Arquitectos and Ismael Leyva Architects in
201 6, sold the idyllic lifestyle it had to offer
through the Instagram feed of one of its
inhabitants, 23 year-old actress and writer
Tavi Gevinson. Quietly identified as a 'paid
partnership', the series of posts vary from
piles of designer shoes and deliberately
casual assemblages of candles, books,
posters and pot plants to panoramic scenes
viewed from her window: all accompanied
by the hashtag #apartmentstories. The
premeditated marketing campaign of a real
estate developer can now assume the form
of 'authentic' snapshots shared by a young
woman on social media - highly constructed
and monetised 'images of happiness' hiding
in plain sight in the endless digital scroll.
The question of aut henticity, of the
'real' in real estate, was challenged
by ~1:atta-Clark in 1973, when he
purchased 15 tiny parcels of land -
sliver s of drive-way, alleys
between houses or tiny
residual patches
around New
..
York - bought at auction for
between $25 and $75. These
Fake Estates were 'left-over
properties from an architect's
dravving' and decidedly
unusable and undevelopable :
'fake commodities' in
Rosalind Krauss and
Yve-Alain Bois's words.
Documented in a series of photographs and
maps, Matta-Clark sought 'to designate
spaces that wouldn't be seen and certainly
not occupied'.
Rather than 'usability', Ou1· Happy Life
argues that today it is social media and
reality TV that drive real estate markets
and its images. Architects are the masters
of constructing and selling images of
a happy life. Bovenbouw and Maria
Malgorzata Olschowska's City Scenes is
a series of collaged reliefs commissioned for
Our Happy Life, capturing different aspects
of the exhibit ion's 'happiness manifesto'.
Simultaneously beautiful and unnerving,
these images are t h e pinnacle of current
architectural image-making - a rejection of
hyper-real CGis in favour of consciously
na1ve, handmade-style collages. Look closer
and they include all the tropes of a
desirable, Instagram-able life: MacBooks,
a bottle of wine, a bicycle (unlocked), toys,
children playing, dogs being walked.
These constructed images of happiness are
a disconcerting mirror to the profession's
complicity in the selling of aspirational
Matta-Ciark's Conical
Intersect (left)
deconstructed two houses
in Paris, exposing their
insides to air and light and
evoking Haussmann's social
cleansing of the city in the
19th century. The rhetoric
of 'opening up' spaces also
resonates with the craze for
home improvement and
'house-flipping' TV shows
such as Changing Rooms
(above) and LoveitorListlt