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The Ethics of Plumbing
Adolf Loos’s famous essay on “plumbers” proposes a shift in architectural attention toward the invisible. Plumbing is not only purely utilitarian, unseen infrastructure, the machinic core of a building, but a life-giving force that animates the dead matter of buildings by running water and gas through them. Plumbing thus emerges as the powerful secret organizer of the social, cultural, political, and economic logics that organize architectural use. Like the Victorian mansion house, it divides the master from the servant, the girls from the boys, the public from the discreet, the clean from the foul.

This primary organizing force of pipework brings about a secondary function: sound transfer, which short-circuits the architectural sequence. Air ducts and tubes carry secret conversations from one side of the building to another. This is all-the-more interesting because Loos, who was hearing-impaired himself, depended on similar pipes and tubes.

Ines Weizman will in conversation with Milica Tomic and Dubravka Sekulic revisit the work of Adolf Loos not to examine once again his spaces or his rejection of ornament but to address the depths of the walls he designed. Focusing on the technological networks that run through his architecture will allow us to reflect on a series of methodological and theoretical questions about the entanglement of human and material life within architecture.