What If We 💋💋 Kissed… At The Business Park
Nicholas Hayden
When I began to think of how ventilation systems affect us day to day, I felt an initial mental block. After some rumination, the subject of ventilation systems conjured up vast metallic structures and mazes. The kind that we as organic matter can bypass, or pass through, in the osmosis of our individual schedules without any deep thought. These ever-present and significant spaces that we just don’t see but would perish without. Now, I know it sounds like this is veering into copy for a housing contractor but it really does get wild when you think about it more widely. It’s the idea of forced air in an enclosed circuit. Oxygen mindlessly moving from point to point while simultaneously decreasing the richness of the atmosphere. It’s steady, reliable (to a point) and can be implemented in varying and numerous ways. It’s when you think of these key and marketable elements that you begin to see just how much the idea has expanded into our modern lives. From a different point of view, it’s like when Carrie Bradshaw learns Big had a threesome before they met and then spends the episode seeing 3s constantly. Look around and ventilation systems are everywhere, depending on what we see being vented.
No one in the UK will be unfamiliar with the concept of the business park. They are peppered through the cities and towns, usually in a gaggle of corrugated warehouse buildings, car parks and stationary lorries. Unglamorous and undeniably functional. Traditionally these spaces have been linked solely to trade and transit - companies that operate on a more openly tertiary scale. In today’s circa 2023 world, however, it is only becoming more popular to create these parks as destinations for the young white collar professional to work and commune over their Pret-a-Manger lunch. You see these vast, glassy sites that were once remote or hard to reach (relative to the city), in which it has suddenly become very normal to do the majority of your living and existing. Rather than the air, it is the people who pass through in an organised fashion to provide relief to their effected areas. It is mindless and yet extremely purposeful on the part of its creators. Yet if you take yourself out of the equation and step back: is it not simply odd that these compounds are where we’ve come to spend our days?
Have you ever been to Canary Wharf? Not to work but just to see it? The chances are that unless you have a vocation there you probably haven’t but I promise you it is sublime. It is sublime in the sense that all of it has been completely inorganically created for the purpose of creating a hub and a system for the banks of London. It wasn’t vital - the banks originally had homes in the historic City of London, but this is why this is such a good example. You take a business or a brand or concept that is already prosperous, and then isolate it in its own area. It is magnified in the new space, and then that space becomes its own breathing body which only serves that function. Think SpongeBob losing all abilities besides fine dining and breathing. All non-profitable functions are dimmed. Because that’s the other thing you see about Canary Wharf; no one is there. Yes you will see people commuting, yes they work in the high rises surrounding, yes the jubilee line at rush hour is heaving with crowds, this is true. But by virtue of the fact that it is a space designated for business, even the people who live there aren’t living with any imprint. They move through the channels getting inexplicably dryer and not knowing exactly why.
It’s the idea that the more efficient way to regulate a space is through an artificial invisible system rather than opening a window. Creating the illusion of everything being temperate and organised will be more readily accepted by the people who occupy the space than what was naturally there. As a young professional, having access to a tiered artificial pond with ducks and koi should make me forget all life’s other ills. And when I’m finished sitting by the pond with my Pret, I can go back inside to the fluorescent lights until much later I’m allowed to make my 1 hour commute home. I will see the koi again tomorrow so all is well.
In the not-too-distant past I had a conversation with a friend in banking who at the beginning of their career had said their goal was to do it for a big paycheque so as to give themselves “exit options”. As of our last discussion, this aspiration has been reversed and they are now content to continue. When you are in a closed circuit, where is the opening for you to leave should you want to? That is not to say that this is negative, but rather a pattern I've noticed here and there more and more frequently as my generation moves into their 30s. This begs the question: are we flowing through life as we desire, while being aware and conscious, or are we telling ourselves that the koi in the anachronistic pond will make it all better tomorrow. With such an intense focus on meeting milestones given to us by generations who lived differently, it seems increasingly important to occasionally ask: is this what I want, or what I am supposed to want? Am I bouncing through a labyrinth that I had no say in the making of?
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