Everyone who has lived in an apartment has a story to tell. Gothamberg is a place to read, interact and exchange stories of lives in apartment buildings. Together, these tales of unwanted sounds and smells, lobbies and bathrooms, laundry room gossip and unexpected favors form a single collective building, Gothamberg. The stories describe characters immersed in social dilemmas - guilt, responsibility, legalities and banality. Voyeuristic or chance encounters are concocted from the daily habits of the story makers. Their experiences form the elliptical threads of inhabitation, a mnemonic quality expressing something of the shared nature of dwelling.

This blog was set up to document the process by which Gothamberg was derived. These included meetings with a group of people, each meeting they would either write a story about Gothamberg, or analyze the stories and their relationship to eachother. The group also discussed the first interfaces .

Our assignment:
Make a sketch, diagram or other of the building Gothamberg. Include all the current apartments and other building spaces as defined in the texts. Do not add more than what has been described.

Left
Johanna created a series of tableaux that illustrate each story and tried to assemble them into a diagrammatic building.
Left middle
Warren:
This skeletal sketch is based on the idea of the Gothamberg being a vessel for stories, and like an organized painter’s storage space each piece can be stacked and stored (in their respective places) and the longer the painter paints or the older the building gets and more people live there (and the more people visit the Gothamberg on line or on-site) the more each space fills up with stories and if necessary certain areas, rooms, spaces could morph larger (I don’t show this in my diagram) but for some reason if there were a lot of elevator stories the elevator might have to be taller than the building itself or if apartment 11C has a lot more stories than say apt. 10C or 11B it may have to just be bigger because its dimension/scale is determined by the amount of story memory/activity it needs to hold as one accesses each story (which could stack as they were entered chronologically) the story unstuffs itself from it’s angled and skewed orientation and becomes legible in orientation and size (tip of the hat here to David Small but also to others including Marek’s own apartment project and my own 1983 typographical playbook called “I mean you know?” which scores the interior monologues of seven characters who all inhabit the same building) anyway, this here, I submit as a text as image based approach.
Right middle
Christiane assembled the stories into a structure that at first sight looks like a realistic cutaway of an apartment building. However, as you cast your eye around it you realize that the building cannot make sense. As more and more stories are added, the building will make it even harder for a 'real' 3D visualization. Drawing by John Klima.
Right
Vivian used a standard visualization software to place the various stories in relation to each other.

Our assignment:
Using characters already created in any of the existing stories, write a new story that places any of them in a different context in the building.

Notes:
The goal here was to see how the characters would develop if put in a different situation. Christiane placed Johanna's Smelly Man into a doctor's office. This is currently the oldest story in the 'timeline' of the building. We discussed time, both the order in which posts have been made and the timeline of the narratives themselves. It seems like time will simply be another dimension in the building. Already there will be several dimensions, as the building will perhaps not fit into the standard 3. So to look at an apartment is a little like looking at a 'slice', a panning section as used in some films. Warren wove as many characters as possible into an elevator story. Johanna's character had to walk to the courtyard to take a shower. Vivian took the letter form and wrote about olfactory excess - smell and noise seem like a big deal in the building, as they are ways people sense others. Marek tried to write a nasty story, and Chuck took the Sleeping Man to the top of the building. So the elevator appears twice this month. Chuck also had a 'story' which was about the computer's context: word processor/xml/stylesheet and machine code. Finally, he had a soundtrack of lint, another popular character in the building, which had mad static cling.

Sitting in the waiting room, again. The doctor wants me to come in every month now, for check up, he says. What’s the point, I know I have a bad heart, and he ain’t making me any better. As long as Medicaid pays for it… They always make me wait forever. The girl at the desk keeps telling me “The doctor will be with you soon, please take your seat.�? Pretty young thing but I can tell she doesn’t like me, doesn’t want me to approach. Reminds me of the girl next door, the one I share the toilet with, I sometimes watch her through the peephole in the door when she passes by in the hallway. She looks at my door funny.

The questions are always the same: “How have you been? Are you still experiencing shortness of breath? Are you taking your medications? Is there anyone, a family member, who could look after you?�? Told him a number of times, “The wife is dead, and my son and I, we’re not talking.�? But he keeps asking. “You need to take better care of yourself, pay more attention to your hygiene.�? None of his business, as far as I’m concerned. I don’t like to take showers and smell all soapy. I like to smell like myself, reminds me of who I am and where I belong. I like it when I come home and can smell myself long before I reach my apartment door.

The people in that building, they have no idea what I’m doing for them. Spent my life delivering their mail. Now I pick up their garbage for them, the brochures and delivery menus they just let pile up in the hallway at the entrance. And how many times have I chased away the homeless guy who tries to sneak into the building to sleep there. I bet he’ll just move in once I’m not around any more, but that’s their problem.

It’s Monday early evening, sometime after 6pm, and both elevators are backed up at the Gothamberg. Four residents of the co-op are waiting in the lobby to finally get home after a day’s work. Only one is an actual co-op member, two are sublettors, and one is the Super’s sleepover girlfriend. Waiting affects everyone differently. Two of them are resigned to the wait, having waited already for the subway which was late, and waited all morning for lunch, and then for five o’clock. One is pacing back and forth, tapping his fingers against his pants like a nervous drummer, and the other has forgotten that he’s waiting for the elevator and is lost in thought, composing a story in his head for some crazy interactive art project. There are five people now, waiting. Six. No one knows any one else’s name. One person recognizes everyone by sight. Another one recognizes four people. Two recognize three people. One recognizes two people. And the one lost in thought isn’t recognizing any one at the moment. If he were to look beyond the world inside his head, then every one would at least recognize one person in common - the Super’s girlfriend. It’s understood that the Super bears some responsibility for the elevators being messed up like they’ve been since Sunday afternoon. Two or three awkward glances have already been directed towards the girlfriend since the beginning of this story, even though she’s not her boyfriend’s keeper. There are eight people now waiting for the elevator, only now, five people know someone’s name - Melinda, the graduate student working on the research project about Lint. Of the five, two people think she’s crazy but nice, one thinks she’s a geek and a dyke, but nice, one thinks she might really be FBI or is it Homeland Security these days, and one would like to get a couple glasses of wine into her, pull those chopsticks out of her hair, and see what she’s like in bed. If the guy lost in thought was noticing anything other than the story he’s composing in his head, he’d recognize her too, only he wouldn’t remember her name, though he does know the guy named Shaun who used to be a chef but is DJing now at a club downtown. They talked about the club in the elevator one time last month. A young woman enters the scene talking loudly on her cell phone, saying, “Yeah, that’s what I told her — Harvey’s an idiot! But she’s like, no, the presentation’s on THURSDAY and Harvey will definitely show up with the whole thing done ……….. Exactly! That’s what I said to her. But she’s like… hello?, hello!, Marla, can you hear me? Marla? Shit!�? She closes her phone, sees there’s nine people waiting for the elevator, reaches into her bag and goes outside to smoke a cigarette. Back in the lobby by the elevator, there’s some talk about the weather, the elevator, the game last night, and that it’s only Monday. There’s little eye contact, and lots of attention to numbers moving very slowly (the elevator on the left), or not at all (the elevator on the right, stuck at 12). There’s also much attention to shoes. Of the nine people, oh, ten people waiting for the elevator in the lobby, three are wearing sneakers, two are wearing boots, two have shoes with velcro, one medium heals, one pair of sandals, and one Chinese slippers. Shaun sneezes loudly into his hands. Two people say, “Bless you.�? One says, “God bless you,�? even though she’s an atheist. The elevator on the left (which officially is a freight elevator) appears to be on 2 and heading towards the ground floor. Finally, the elevator door opens, and there’s no one inside except for the Labrador Retriever that lives on 7. The dog looks up at the crowd, grins, then runs into the lobby and out the front door of the Gothamberg onto the sidewalk.

To have a shower I have to walk out of my apartment, down the staircase and walk cross the garden and down to the basement where the shared shower room is located. During my walk I feel changes in the weather; early morning sunshine, wind, rain or snow. Discover the first spring flowers or when the leaves start to fall in the autumn. Sometimes I meet the garbage man or if I am late the postman. Often I meet some of my neighbors on their way to work or somewhere else.

Sometimes I have to wait for my turn in the shower. That’s ok. There is a bench to sit on. When I am alone waiting I always wonder who is in there and it has become a sport to try to figure out who it is.

One morning there is a women waiting already. We instantly start talking. She is excited about something and wants to tell me immediately. It happens that the she is into lint and she collects it from people’s laundry. She opens her bag and shows me something that looks like a sausage of gray dust. Well I have heard of people collecting many things, but lint. We can both hear that the person in the shower is still not ready so I tell her that my lint looks like what she has in her bag, gray and dull as I use mostly black clothes. But it is what’s behind the lint that is interesting she tells me. And that may be dull or awful or totally amazing. The man behind this lint is…

Our conversation is interrupted when the bathroom door opens and to my surprise the sleeping man walks out. I guess next time I do my laundry and rinse out the lint I will try to guess who it came from.

Dear Alex,
Ira’s aunt entertains, even in her absence. Pearl’s annotated appliance
manuals are the best read this side of a cereal box, and her shoe
collection keeps me especially busy on those days when I just can’t
face the tramp in the hall. Who knew I’d trade in visual for olfactory
excess? Morning laundry at Melinda’s Lint Lab (why didn’t Ira mention
this???) is THE place to be where your ears drink in what your eyes
can’t take.

Pour a beer ON Chris!

’til soon,
Mariusz

Sitting every day looking out at the courtyard of Gothamberg, behind my screens. Well I don’t want to meet those bums do I? At first it was sexual, you see a nice girl all tricked out and you fantasize, you know. Then I got to thinking, these fantasies, it’s in their heads too! Men don’t have that so much. The most boring are the teen girls, they all look the same, like they belong to some clan or something, cute though. Ha, teen boys can be amazing costumers, you haven’t a clue what they are, military peacenik rappers! And then the bums, you can daydream about their past and such. Its ok. There’s this old guy, bent double, hobbles along, he wears a paper bag as a cap, like he’s in a charade, like he used to be a real worker.

Its dull when its couples, or groups, or the gossipers, the way they act kills the act. It’s only when they walk alone, then they wear their souls on their cloths. Kids too, too obvious, and the old ladies, can barely tell the difference between them. I think its death, the nearer you are to death, that kills your soul, like, you’re getting ready for the big never, what’s the point of an act?

It’s the women, between old and young, they are the best. They must have training or something. This girl who tried to get my lint, stupid! Each day, first she is a 50’s picnic, the next all in black and dark makeup like a matron, then a teenager in a miniskirt. Lint! As if you can find out anything about people with lint! You got to track them, watch them each day, notice how they move, then, boy, you get inside their minds! You do.

On the first warm day of the year, The Sleeping Man entered Gothamberg through the back door by the dumpsters on the East Wing. The storage room brought him to an elevator.

Late last night, The Sleeping Man decided to sleep outside. He found a short strip of lawn shielded by a wall of shrubbery; it was too hot in the staircase.

It had been a long winter and the staircase smells awful, he thought, facing the elevator door. Wide awake by this point, The Sleeping Man pushed the up arrow (his only choice). The door immediately opened, as the elevator rested on the basement floor from the cleaning personnel’s last use (each morning at 5 am, the trash is collected and tossed out – surely they were guilty for leaving the exit propped open). With a jerk, the elevator began its trip to the top floor. The Sleeping Man decided to watch the sun rise from the end of the hallway before returning to his belongings in the staircase many flights below.

Soundtrack of Birth of Lint