Useless and Defunct City Objects Should Be Called... 'Thomassons'
In an architectural jungle as large as a city there are bound to be a few... mistakes.
We're talking about doors hovering on the exterior second floor of a building without staircases. If you were to use it, you'd sprain both ankles falling to the ground. Or a big brick pedestal for a statue that never got put up. Or a flight of stairs leading into a blank wall. ...
In this day and age, we might refer to these glitches in the city matrix as Urban FAILS. But Japanese artist Genpei Akasegawa has been thinking about such objects for more than 30 years, and has already given them a name. They're called "Thomassons," and you can find a delightful collection of them in Akasegawa's 1985 book, Hyperart: Thomasson, recently translated into English.
A Thomasson is any kind of "useless and defunct object attached to someone's property and aesthetically maintained," according to Akasegawa's definition. A publisher's blurb states that this includes the "doorknob in a wall without a door, that driveway leading into an unbroken fence, that strange concrete... thing sprouting out of your sidewalk with no discernible purpose." Learn more about what makes a Thomasson in the video below, which includes quixotic footage of real-life examples like a stairway ending in a window.
The artist, who's birth name is Katsuhiko Akasegawa, picked the word in tribute to Gary Thomasson, an American baseball player who whiffed on so many balls during his 1980s stint with the Yomiuri Giants that the Japanese media took to calling him the "Electric Fan" or "Giant Human Fan." Akasegawa was wowed by the innate conundrum of Gary Thomasson, who (according to the video) "had a fully formed body and yet served no purpose to the world." Interestingly enough, the term has been repurposed by author William Gibson in the sci-fi tome Virtual Light to denote a "useless and inexplicable monument."
Once you know about Thomassons, it's impossible not to think about them while strolling down the block. An observant spotter can catch one or two on the daily commute to work. ...