Greige Days Dawning: Swatch Fans, Sample Stacks, and Other Technologies of Urban Transformation Helen Runting Essay in support of the exhibition “Showroom,” Carl-Oskar Linné and Lina Kruopytė Magnolia. Cygnet. Mojave. Kashmir. Lava dust. The Formica swatch fan spreads itself open smoothly to reveal dozens of small, 0.07mm-thick squares of decorative laminate, each named in accordance with its color, texture (Microdot, Plex, or Sculpted), or material (stone finishes include Dolce Vita, Travertine Silver, and Breccia Paradiso, and woods have names like Manitoba Maple, Millennium Oak, and Avignon Walnut). The trademarked melamine-coated laminate is familiar to the touch—the samples have none of the thermal properties of the materials they purport to perform, and none of the geographic or cultural histories of use or production. They are the stuff of paper mills and oil wells, of photography and printing technologies. They are cardboard + melamine + image. Whilst the light, close-grained soft wood of the Manitoba Maple (botanical name Acer negundo) has been used by the indigenous peoples of the Americas to make bowls, dishes, drums, and pipe stems, Formica Laminate F7555 will never become a pipe, or feed a Boxelder bug, or cause a rare neurological disease in grazing horses. As F7555, Manitoba Maple will rather be mobilized as image in order to operate in other “Environments” (“Education,” “Retail,” “Healthcare,” “Office,” “Kitchen,” “Restaurant,” “Hotel,” “Elevator,” and “Washroom”), removing porosity from the surfaces we touch, and sealing them with a thin layer of highly durable plastic. Such surfaces are in turn not confined to singular interiors but stretch, in their ubiquity, across vast urban territories; the architect who picks out F7555 may be applying this laminate to hundreds of square meters of benchtop. The scale of urban transformation is only limited by a complex web of regulatory boundaries, profit possibilities, and ownership structures. Ceramic tile samples come in boxes, not as swatch fans. These boxes are browsed by the two-finger strolling which librarians once were so adept at, back before card catalogs were digitalized and vast walls of tiny drawers ripped out of libraries the world over. The Höganäs “Arkitekt” series, for instance, comes in a long, black box. Tile-sized, its samples are to scale (although you can order bigger or smaller tiles, of course—the possible sizes are printed on the back) and the names they have been given are pretty matter-of-fact—Red, Yellow, Ultra White, Grey, Light Grey, and Dark Grey. Perhaps this reflects the desensitized exhaustion of their target audience, architects who are no longer impressed by suggestive language; perhaps this is a sign of corporate hubris—in this box, “Red” means the manufacturers’ red and no one else’s, suggesting that the tile to some extent precedes or defines the concept red. It is the original referent. Despite its intended authenticity, this performative matter-of-factness can tip over into pretentiousness and ultimately promiscuity. Two desensitized architectural fingers mechanically strolling through the stack (click, click, click) can still frieze in delighted shock when they encounter a tile in the color “Greige.” Not beige and not grey, but greige. Typographer Radim Peško’s describes his typeface “Union” as being suited to “situations where Helvetica seems too sophisticated and Arial too vulgar, or”—in an ironic twist—“vice versa.” Greige performs the same trick: it fills the vacuum created when grey is too ambiguous and beige is too mundane. In this, the color greige answers a question that no-one has ever asked: How can the generic be packaged as unique? Greige brings into being the possibility of thinking varied monotony, impersonal familiarity, the specific generic, and exciting boredom. Like samples and swatches, urban development projects like the proposed redevelopment of Stavanger’s Nytorget area use tropes—figurative language, words that stand in for other words, and images built of descriptions of related concepts—in order to build a new vocabulary to describe something that is not yet present. Memory and experience are treated, in such operations, as vast card catalogs of impressions, which can be retrieved, activated, and recombined in order to produce new feelings, affects, and desires. “Placemaking” in contexts of rapid change is thus an exercise in making transformation make sense; of bringing meaning to flux and to an unknowable future by giving it a name. As a form of work, an act of “making” that is performed through the waged labor of planners, architects, marketing consultants, financiers, politicians, artists, and graphic designers, placemaking is combinatorial. It is less about small squares of laminate or tile samples than about moodboards: vast narrative assemblages that detach the names of things (Manitoba Maple, Acer negundo) from their ambiguous circumstances (horse disease, colonization) and reattach them to something far more hermetically sealed (a benchtop). In this, placemaking’s moodboards answer another question that no-one asked. When a developer poses that Nytorget will again become an attractive and vibrant square for the city’s population, we find ourselves in a greige zone, somewhere between the past and the future, within an imagined narrative of that implies former glory days, a period of downfall, and a resurrection, where things can be new and old at the same time. Development without erasure. Upgrading without gentrification. Magnolia. Cygnet. Mojave. Kashmir. Lava dust. How did these swatches get their colors? What collective solidarities might lie dormant in “lava dust”? What erasures and exclusions are present in “Kashmir”? In dissecting the material palettes, the moodboards, marketing material, plans, and architecture of contemporary Scandinavian urban development, we might start to ask some questions of our samples, which use the trope of synecdoche to substitute the whole for a part, suggesting a totality on the basis of a fragment. Beyond the click-clacking of fingers across sample stacks and swatch fans, we might even begin the far more difficult task of searching out the collective aesthetic practices that our moodboards eliminate. The future is at stake in such an operation; refusing to replace messy, lived realities with their own, sanitized, image, we might discover other forms of “transformation” that deliver more interesting, equitable, and rich “Environments”.