Building Change: Architecture, Politics and Cultural Agency

Building Change Building Change provides a vision of a revitalized role for architecture as a critical cultural and spatial practice. It discusses the dynamic between power and building and lays out the spatial strategies those in power use to manipulate and control the physical world. These include segregation, marginalization, construction of hierarchies and the spatial transformations of mechanisms such as colonialism and globalization. The book goes on to investigate the shifting relationships among power, space and architecture in a world where a number of subjected people are reasserting their political and cultural agency. Lisa Findley argues that architecture, as a primary participant in the production of space, has an important role to play in supporting these changes. The question is how, within the scope of the design and making of buildings, can this be done? To explore this question, the book describes and analyzes four recent building projects embedded in complex and diverse historical, political, cultural and spatial circumstances: the Tjibaou Cultural Centre in New Caledonia; the Uluru-Kata Tjuta Cultural Centre in Australia; The Museum of Struggle in South Africa; and the Southern Poverty Law Center in the US. While the context of each project is unique, Findley finds that inherent in the agency of architecture itself there are numerous opportunities and strategies for architects to actively support the goals of social change. They do this while still embedded in the primary pursuit of architecture: the making of real inhabited buildings in specific settings. While the examples in Building Change are in highly charged environments, the lessons learned from them are applicable across a range of architectural projects. Lisa Findley is an architect, writer and teacher who has an academic background in architecture, environmental studies and political theory. She is an Associate Professor in Architecture at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco, where she coordinates the Master of Architecture program and teaches design studios and seminars. She is a contributing editor for Architectural Record and has written for numerous other publications including Architecture, Harvard Design Magazine, Architecture Australia, Architecture South Africa and Baumeister.

Building Change Architecture, Politics and Cultural Agency

Lisa Findley

LONDON AND NEW YORK

In memory of my parents, Geraldine Warren Findley and William Scott Findley.

First published 2005 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 270 Madison Ave, New York, NY 10016 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to http://www.ebookstore.tandf.co.uk/. © 2005 Lisa Findley All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Findley, Lisa, 1955– Building change: architecture, politics, and cultural agency/Lisa Findley. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Architecture and society. 2. Architecture—Political aspects. 3. Architecture, Modern—20th century. 4. Architecture, Modern— 21st century. 5. Social change. I. Title. NA2543 . S6F533 2004 720′.1′03–dc22 2004012504 ISBN 0-203-60149-1 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0-203-33781-6 (Adobe e-Reader Format) ISBN 0-415-31876-9 (pbk) ISBN 0-415-31875-0 (hbk)

Contents Acknowledgments Introduction 1 Power, Space and Architecture

vii x 1

2 Building Future: Tjibaou Cultural Centre

37

3 Building Visibility: Uluru Kata-Tjuta Cultural Centre

77

4 Building Memory: The Museum of Struggle

124

5 Building Presence: The Southern Poverty Law Center

166

6 Architecture and Change

200

Appendix: Project Credits

215

Notes

218

Bibliography

222

Index

227

Acknowledgments This book has grown out of the generosity and support of numerous people, some of whom I include here. Reed Kroloff, during his tenure as Editor-in-Chief of Architecture magazine, triggered the whole process when he sent me to New Caledonia to write about the Tjibaou Cultural Centre. Long, winding conversations and short, incisive observations over the years have had critical impacts on this book. I am indebted to Craig Barton, Haig Beck, Dana Buntrock, Paul Carter, James Clifford, Jackie Cooper, Mark Cottle, Rodolphe el Khoury, Jane M.Jacobs, Sabir Khan, Lesley Lokko, Iain Low, Paul Memmot, Leslie Musikavanhu, Jennifer Taylor, Vikram Prakash, Samia Rab, Sandra Vivanco, Mabel Wilson and many others for these crucial contributions. Of course, this project would not have been possible without the enthusiastic cooperation of the offices of the architects, their clients, and many people at each project locale. William Vassal, site architect for the Renzo Piano Building Workshop (RPBW), introduced me to Kanak food, buildings and the landscape and to the Tjibaou Cultural Centre. He patiently answered questions and gave me full run of the voluminous files of drawings in the construction office. Gionna Justo, Stefania Canta and Chiara Casazza of RPBW facilitated my visit to New Caledonia, a subsequent visit to Genoa and the generous loan of visual materials for this book. Renzo Piano carved out precious time in his schedule for conversations with me about the project. Emmanuel Kasaherou, Cultural Director at the Tjibaou Cultural Centre provided invaluable insight into the Kanak participation in and perceptions of the project. Greg Burgess, architect of the Uluru-Kata Tjuta Cultural Centre, generously opened up his project and slide archives to me, spent hours in conversation, and provided visual materials for this book. I am indebted to the Anangu women elders who entrusted me with their stories about the project. Tina Bain walked me through the Park Service’s archive on the project and, based on her years of experience in the region, increased my understanding of the Anangu. Tracey Holbrook, Caroline Parsons and Christine Templeton, also of the Park Service, facilitated my visit and the permits for research and photography. I want to thank the Anangu for permitting me, through their trust in Greg Burgess, to tell their story, show Uluru and the Cultural Centre, and to use some of their words and names in the book. In South Africa, Jo Noero and Heinrich Wolff also gave me free range of their archives and have continued to answer endless questions and keep me posted on the construction of the Museum of Struggle. Nadia Dick of their staff became my guide to both the physical and cultural sides of Cape Town and environs. McCoy, with remarkable frankness, shared much about the brutality of apartheid during the time we spent in the townships of the Cape Flats. Members of the Red Location Museum Project Committee, Vuyisile Pandle, Tobeka Scolotela, Tozama Scolotela, Celia Mtati and Pumla Mngadi provided a lively history and tour of New Brighton, and Neal Langeveld and Gerhy de Bruin of Mandela Municipality filled in crucial background for understanding the project.

Jo Noero, Heinrich Wolff, Leslie Musikavanhu, Iain Low, Piet deBeer and Albie Sachs granted important perspectives on the role architecture has to play in post-apartheid South Africa. Scott Erdy and David McHenry set me loose with the project archive in their Philadelphia office, answered questions and provided visual materials for the book. Joseph Levin and Morris Dees of the Southern Poverty Law Center provided crucial background on the SPLC along with stories of the making of the building. Penny Weaver, of the SPLC, graciously facilitated my visits to the Center, and provided background materials, press clippings and visual materials for the book, along with an introduction to a great Thai restaurant in Montgomery. Norwood Kerr at the Alabama Department of Archives and History patiently helped me navigate the materials in the collection. The extensive travel and research required to complete this book would not have been possible without the generous financial support of the Graham Foundation for the Advancement of the Fine Arts. The California College of the Arts, where I teach, helped as well with a faculty development grant to cover research travel to the Renzo Piano Building Workshop. Caroline Mallinder of Routledge had faith in this project, my first book, from the time she read the proposal. Michelle Green, also at Routledge, kept me on course, and Donna Gregory of Florence Production patiently saw this book through production. Kim Ramos provided essential support in preparing the maps and finalizing the images. Kimberly Naumann digitized other images. Robert McGiven in the office of Noero Wolff triumphed in his persistent efforts to digitally convey to me the latest drawings and photographs of the construction of the Museum of Struggle. My remarkable colleagues at the California College of the Arts also provided a range of support for this book. In particular, my thanks go to Rodolphe el Khoury for his useful and insightful reading of an entire draft and to Zsuzsanna Listro, Sandra Vivanco and Mabel Wilson for their faith and encouragement. Throughout the long process of researching and writing, Brit Andresen, my mentor and dear friend, asked her usual incisive questions, encouraged me with outright faith tempered with wise advice and read and commented on the book in draft from her perch on the edge of Australia. My family and friends were steadfast in their enthusiasm and encouragement and were good-natured about my frequent disappearances on research trips and into the studio to write. Finally, without the remarkable and humorous common sense, keen mind, editorial eagle eye and unflagging support on every possible front from my husband, the architect Rod Henmi, this book would, quite simply, never have happened. Three of the four case studies in this book have been presented in embryonic forms as papers at academic conferences. I am indebted to those who provided feedback in each instance—challenging assumptions and directing me to references and resources I had not been aware of. In addition, portions of some of the chapters have been previously published. Parts of Chapter 2 on the Tjibaou Cultural Centre were published under the title “Representing Culture: Resisting Globalization through the Transformation of Tradition”, in Traditional Dwellings and Settlements Working Paper Series, vol. 123, (2000). Portions of Chapter 4 on the Museum of Struggle were published as “A Tale of Two Apartheid Museums” in the 2003 Annual Meeting Proceedings of the Association of

Collegiate Schools of Architecture, and as “Red and Gold: Two Apartheid Museums and the Spatial Politics of Memory in the ‘New’ South Africa”, in Architecture South Africa (the journal of the South African Institute of Architects), no. 10, July/August 2004.

Illustration Credits Photographs 2.1, 2.10, 2.17: John Gollings, courtesy of Renzo Piano Building Workshop 2.4: James Clifford 2.14, 2.20, 2.24: William Vassal, courtesy of Renzo Piano Building Workshop 2.15: Pierre-Alain Pantz, courtesy of Renzo Piano Building Workshop 2.26, 2.28: Tim Griffith, ESTO 3.3: Craig Lamotte 3.7, 3.9, 3.14, 3.15, 3.19, 3.20, 3.21, 3.23, 3.24, 3.26, 3.27, 3.30, 3.33, 3.35: Gregory Burgess 3.8: Warlayriti Aboriginal Artists Corporation 3.10: John Gollings, courtesy of Gregory Burgess Architects, Pty 3.12: Sonia Peter 3.29; Jimmy Yang 3.28, 3.32, 3.34: Trevor Mein 4.13, 4.22, 4.23, 4.24: Jo Noero 4.2, 4.9, 4.10, 4.11, 4.14, 4.15, 4.20, 4.21, 4.22, 4.23, 4.24, 4.25, 4.26, 4.27, 4.28, 4.29: courtesy of Noero Wolff Architects 5.3, 5.4, 5.16, 5.19, 5.20, 5.21, 5.22, 5.24, 5.27: Tim Hursley, courtesy of the Southern Poverty Law Center Drawings and Maps 1.4 from the collection of Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris 2.7, 2.8, 2.9, 2.12, 2.16, 2.18, 2.19: courtesy of the Renzo Piano Building Workshop 3.11, 3.13, 3.16, 3.17, 3.18, 3.22, 3.36: courtesy of Gregory Burgess Architects, Pty 4.7, 4.12, 4.16, 4.17, 4.20: courtesy of Noero Wolff Architects 4.27: Robert McGiven, courtesy of Noero Wolff Architects 5.9, 5.10, 5.11, 5.12, 5.13, 5.14, 5.15, 5.17, 5.18, 5.23: courtesy of Erdy McHenry Architecture While the author and publisher have made every effort to contact the copyright holders of material used in this volume, they would be grateful to hear from any they were unable to contact. All photographs not credited are by the author. All drawings not credited are by the author and Kim Ramos.

Introduction After twenty-two hours in transit it was hard to tell if the apparition before me in the tropical twilight was real or a figment of my jet-lagged imagination. Rising out of the dense vegetation was a line of giant gently curving forms reaching tapering fingers toward the deepening sky. I had never seen a building that looked like this. It was like a dream of a distant planet, or a glimpse of a different future. And yet, its uncanny beauty persisted as I approached and only became muted as I entered and began to wander through the exhibition rooms with the crowd of other awestruck visitors. Something about the place made everyone speak quietly. It was June 1998, and the first night of the public opening of the much-anticipated Tjibaou Cultural Centre for the indigenous Kanak people of New Caledonia. I had just arrived via Sydney from the US to write about the building for Architecture magazine. After a quick stop at my hotel to change, I had hurried to the site for my first look at this latest project by the Renzo Piano Building Workshop. While I had seen photographs of the building before coming, I was not fully prepared for its reality. That first evening I turned off my critic’s voice—there were several days left for that—and simply wandered, enjoying and joining in the bewildered and delighted reactions of the other visitors. I left with that immense happiness and satisfaction an architect feels after experiencing a masterfully done building. The following morning I was met at my hotel by William Vassal, the young French architect from Piano’s office who had spent the previous three years overseeing the construction of the project. He had proposed an agenda for the day that left the Cultural Centre for last, after visits to the countryside, villages and traditional buildings that served as important inspirations for the project. This was, for me, a perfect introduction. My interests in architecture, and as an architect, rest heavily on the relationship of buildings to culture, politics and landscape. Hours later, after an enthusiastic introduction to the history and culture of the Kanak people that included lessons at deciphering the Kanak landscape, stops at three rural Kanak villages and a seaside lunch of traditional Kanak food, William and I returned to the Centre. While I had read several things about the history of the French colonization of the Kanak people before embarking on this assignment, I saw the building differently now that William had given it a context within the specifics of the experiences and perspectives of the Kanak. That afternoon, sitting on the shady terrace of the Centre’s café, I realized that this building was not only technically inventive and formally poetic, but that it was also a glimpse of an expanded possible future for Architecture as a whole. The discipline of Architecture has, for most of its history, been at the service of those in power. Indeed, it might even be argued that it was invented by those in power. Yet, here in remote New Caledonia was a world class building, by one of the planet’s premier architectural practices, for the indigenous people who only received the right to vote in this still French-controlled island group in 1957. The entire project, like its context, was fraught with complex tensions, both cultural and political; evolving, but far from

resolved. While the particular history of the project explains how the building came to be, I wondered how that history was also tied to fast-paced and profound changes in the larger political and cultural arena of the globe—changes most often explored through the lenses of geography, anthropology, and cultural and postcolonial studies. Recent work in these fields has emphasized that the processes and formal qualities of space are a location and indicator of power relationships just as surely as are historical events and social and economic dynamics. It is obvious to apply this thinking to the field of architecture where it has the potential to be more than simply an analytical tool. How might it also be applied to the process of design and the making of buildings—single buildings in particular circumstances? It also struck me that while architects are certainly tangled in the web of power, the entanglement has both positive and negative implications. In the case of the Tjibaou Cultural Centre, the Renzo Piano Building Workshop (RPBW) had used its position, and the cultural power and prerogatives of the architect, to support the progressive social change agenda of the Kanak and the Centre. This was possible in part due to the shifting location of power in New Caledonia. The RPBW could certainly have made a building that essentially responded to the French government (who was paying for the building) as the client, but they did not. Instead, they made the Centre their client, leveraging the power, abilities and production of the architect to enhance the cultural agency of the Kanak. In this way, the building became a significant addition to the emergence of the Kanak as serious and important cultural participants in New Caledonia and in the Pacific region. It made them visible in a profoundly new way—a way understood in a global context and in the global language of architecture. These realizations, jotted in my notebook while sitting on the terrace in the cooling sea breeze, framed my review of the Tjibaou Cultural Centre for Architecture magazine. However, it was clear that an abbreviated piece for a professionally oriented architecture magazine could never contain the complexity of this bigger picture. Clearly these ideas needed further exploration in order to understand the implications of this unique project. Within months of leaving New Caledonia, I encountered two other architectural projects that seemed to me caught up in similar circumstances of evolving political and cultural agency: the Uluru-Kata Tjuta Cultural Centre for the Anangu people of the central desert of Australia and the Museum of Struggle, a project memorializing the struggle against apartheid in South Africa. While profoundly different in their particulars, both projects contain programs that address a range of unresolved cultural and historical tensions. The architects of each project took on these tensions as an essential part of their approach and solution, using their position as architects to support the emergence of previously marginalized people. And, in both cases, the resulting building is simultaneously bold and modest and defies formal expectations. At the same time, both projects raise unique issues related to the question of cultural agency and its relationship to architecture. These projects, along with the Tjibaou Cultural Centre, formed the beginnings of this investigation. Yet, it seemed to me that something was missing from the range of case studies. I wondered how a project on the margins of power, but where race, ethnicity, and a cultural gap between architect and client were not so prevalent, might stack up against the three already selected. I wanted to use such a project to understand how the dynamics of building within a climate of cultural and political tension would change if race and

colonial history were not pivotal to the reason for the project. The new office for the Southern Poverty Law Center is an ideal project in this sense. The non-profit SPLC and its work are supported by a huge loyal coalition of small donors, yet it pursues its national agenda in the often-hostile local environment of Montgomery, Alabama. Spatial transformation and social change are at the heart of this book: architecture, as a vital spatial practice, has the potential to be a key player in the re-calibration of space when power shifts. This may not be obvious since architecture, by virtue of its patronage and resource requirements, is intimately entangled with political, economic, social and cultural power structures and their widespread strategies for encoding that power onto physical space at multiple scales. This book begins with a look at this intimate relationship between built physical space and power. It looks at the spatial strategies those in power use, as well as the historical and cultural conditions that have justified such strategies. The discussion then returns to architecture and architects and, ultimately, to detailed studies of the four architectural projects. These projects demonstrate that, in this world of shifting power dynamics, architects do not have to be servants to any cultural hegemony. They can, through their role as imaginative producers of culture, participate actively and constructively in the reallocation of cultural agency and power. Architecture, like no other form of cultural production, can manifest renewed cultural agency by making it spatial, material, present and, in that sense, undeniable. This is a sobering responsibility. While many architectural projects may happen in less dramatic and less tense circumstances than those in this book, there are often opportunities for architects to leverage their production for social change and the goals of a larger cultural good. This provides a new arena for architects willing to use their own cultural power strategically and, perhaps more importantly, it suggests a revitalized role for architecture as a proactive cultural practice.

Chapter 1 Power, Space and Architecture It is no coincidence that one of the most enduring ancient stories about human hubris in the face of power is about building. In constructing the Tower of Babel, humanity, united in language and purpose, set out to build their own addition to creation: a tower to heaven. In this way they could join God in His aerial perspective of the world. The story, from the eleventh chapter of Genesis, goes like this: And the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech. And it came to pass, as they journeyed from the east, that they found a plain in the land of Shinar; and they dwelt there. And they said one to another, Go to, let us make brick, and burn them thoroughly. And they had brick for stone, and lime had they for mortar. And they said, Go to, let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth. And the Lord came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of men builded. And the Lord said, Behold, the people are one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do. Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech. So the Lord scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth: and they left off to build the city. Therefore is the name of it called Babel; because the Lord did there confound the language of all the earth: and from thence did the Lord scatter them abroad upon the face of all the earth. (King James Version) God, apparently jealous, watched as humanity began to build a tower at Shinar. He was infuriated by this effort, sure that these humans would attempt further acts of arrogant defiance. So God invented myriad languages, dividing them among the builders so they could not understand each other, and therefore could not communicate to complete the tower. One can imagine the chaos on the building site—it is hard enough to get a building done when everyone speaks the same language. Obviously the project was abandoned. Then, just to make sure these troublesome humans did not reunite, God dispersed them over the face of the earth. While the Tower of Babel story is meant to instruct about the dangers of human arrogance in the face of God’s power, it also illustrates the ancient association of buildings and power. Indeed, in most of the world one of the most enduring activities of power—political, cultural and economic—is building. Not only building, but building well—extensively, extravagantly, durably. It takes tremendous wealth, time, cooperation

Building change

2

and labor to secure, organize and deploy resources in such a way as to make a significant work of architecture. The Tower of Babel is the perfect example of such power. It was perhaps because of this that Hegel claimed this was the first recorded act of architecture. In this way, architecture gets bundled up with power and building from the very foundation of our imagination about human culture. Few people in positions of significant power can resist the urge to build. Monuments, palaces, governmental centers, corporate headquarters, temples, palatial residences and even entire cities reflect the sensibilities and organization of power long after the individuals and entities that wielded them are gone. By contrast, the humble dwellings of the vast majority of the world’s inhabitants are remarkably impermanent—washing away in floods, crumbling in earthquakes, disintegrating over time or disappearing under further layers of building. In these instances, what survives may not be the actual building, but the practice of making and renewing, the patterns of habitation, the craft of ornamentation. One other lesson endures in the story of Babel: the lesson of the potential of agency. Agency, the power to act on behalf of someone else, or on one’s own behalf, is a prerogative of certain kinds of freedom. It assumes that one has the right to pursue what can be imagined, what can be undertaken. In the case of the tower at Shinar, the people imagined a tower to heaven—something they had the power and freedom to pursue on their own behalf. God, however, quickly came to realize that He had given them too much autonomy, and just as quickly took away the agency they had assumed. He made them speak different languages; dividing them through an inability to communicate. Then He scattered them to the corners of the earth; dividing them spatially as if to emphasize in the physical realm what had already happened in the social. In this way, the agency of the people to build the tower was taken away in the most overt terms. And we are given a definitive lesson on how power operates through the control of agency. In his book about power and the architecture of national capitals, Lawrence Vale warms up to his subject with a quote from Lewis Mumford on the role of the citadel in a city: In the citadel the new mark of the city is obvious: a change of scale, deliberately meant to awe and overpower the beholder. Though the mass of the inhabitants might be poorly fed and overworked, no expense was spared to create temples and palaces whose sheer bulk and upward thrust would dominate the rest of the city. The heavy walls of hard-baked clay or solid stone would give to the ephemeral offices of state the assurance of stability and security, of unrelenting power and unshakable authority. What we now call “monumental architecture” is first of all the expression of power, and power exhibits itself in the assembly of costly building materials and of all the resources of art. (Mumford 1961 cited in Vale 1992:13) What drives this desire of the powerful to build? Some have attributed it to an arrogant need to make physical the power that is wielded. Others think it is a desire to leave a permanent marker of greatness that will communicate forward into history the power of the moment; like procreation, it is an attempt to ward off the annihilation of death by

Power, space and architecture

3

leaving a mark on the physical world. On a more basic human level, as it was for those at Shinar, it is also a way for a person to extend themselves into a larger, built scale—a way of declaring presence in the current moment. Indeed, it may be that the desire to build has little to do with power—but power gives access to the resources to build large and in ways that survive time. For many architects, the usual discussion about space and power has to do with the organization of architectural space to facilitate vision or surveillance. Most famous is the example of the work of Jeremy Bentham, and his work on the idea of the “panopticon”: the arrangement of spaces so that they can be seen, therefore controlled, from a central point. Bentham’s theories, usually resulting in a radial plan, were most effectively applied to prison design. François Mitterrand, father of the stunning French “Grands Projets” of the 1980s and 1990s, clearly understood the importance of architecture in this context. He is quoted by Julia Trilling in Atlantic Monthly as saying, “an epoch is inscribed in its monuments [so] architecture is not neutral[;] it expresses political, social, economic and cultural ‘finalities’” (Goodman 1988:43). Architects are deeply embedded in this power structure. We provide services to those who can pay and to those who command the

Figure 1.1 The Maya built this temple complex at Uxmal on the Yucatan Peninsula resources to build the expensive cultural artifacts we design. Yet, this connection between architecture and power is a part of the much larger entanglement between power and the control of space. That is, buildings are only a portion of the way that power operates spatially, since power extends to scales both smaller and far larger. At the smaller scale, power controls human bodies through spatial strategies of segregation (that is, making

Building Change

2

and labor to secure, organize and deploy resources in such a way as to make a significant work of architecture. The Tower of Babel is the perfect example of such power. It was perhaps because of this that Hegel claimed this was the first recorded act of architecture. In this way, architecture gets bundled up with power and building from the very foundation of our imagination about human culture. Few people in positions of significant power can resist the urge to build. Monuments, palaces, governmental centers, corporate headquarters, temples, palatial residences and even entire cities reflect the sensibilities and organization of power long after the individuals and entities that wielded them are gone. By contrast, the humble dwellings of the vast majority of the world’s inhabitants are remarkably impermanent—washing away in floods, crumbling in earthquakes, disintegrating over time or disappearing under further layers of building. In these instances, what survives may not be the actual building, but the practice of making and renewing, the patterns of habitation, the craft of ornamentation. One other lesson endures in the story of Babel: the lesson of the potential of agency. Agency, the power to act on behalf of someone else, or on one’s own behalf, is a prerogative of certain kinds of freedom. It assumes that one has the right to pursue what can be imagined, what can be undertaken. In the case of the tower at Shinar, the people imagined a tower to heaven—something they had the power and freedom to pursue on their own behalf. God, however, quickly came to realize that He had given them too much autonomy, and just as quickly took away the agency they had assumed. He made them speak different languages; dividing them through an inability to communicate. Then He scattered them to the corners of the earth; dividing them spatially as if to emphasize in the physical realm what had already happened in the social. In this way, the agency of the people to build the tower was taken away in the most overt terms. And we are given a definitive lesson on how power operates through the control of agency. In his book about power and the architecture of national capitals, Lawrence Vale warms up to his subject with a quote from Lewis Mumford on the role of the citadel in a city: In the citadel the new mark of the city is obvious: a change of scale, deliberately meant to awe and overpower the beholder. Though the mass of the inhabitants might be poorly fed and overworked, no expense was spared to create temples and palaces whose sheer bulk and upward thrust would dominate the rest of the city. The heavy walls of hard-baked clay or solid stone would give to the ephemeral offices of state the assurance of stability and security, of unrelenting power and unshakable authority. What we now call “monumental architecture” is first of all the expression of power, and power exhibits itself in the assembly of costly building materials and of all the resources of art. (Mumford 1961 cited in Vale 1992:13) What drives this desire of the powerful to build? Some have attributed it to an arrogant need to make physical the power that is wielded. Others think it is a desire to leave a permanent marker of greatness that will communicate forward into history the power of the moment; like procreation, it is an attempt to ward off the annihilation of death by

Power, space and architecture

5

What does Le Corbusier mean exactly when he talks about the “occupation” of space? The inhabitation of space (and here we must assume he means more than simply replacing some volume of air) is intimately connected to the exercise of individual liberty. Conversely, not having control of the space one is occupying is in some way demoralizing—depriving life of one of its essential modes of existence. To remove from a person her or his right to act in space is to deny that person any kind of spatial agency. That is, it is to take away the power of individuals to determine movement through the world and to rob them of the dignity of the spatial aspect of free will. Indeed, throughout human history one of the most effective means of exercising power has been to conquer, circumscribe and control a people’s space. In addition to actual movement through and occupation of space, possession of space might extend to how one represents oneself in space. This representation can happen at multiple scales: from the level of the body, through hair, clothing and adornment, to the level of the landscape, through buildings and gardens. While individuals can exercise some level of control over their body, the degree of control decreases with the increase in the scale of the space where one is attempting to be represented. Architects take for granted that the term “space” means actual physical volumes of air, perhaps circumscribed by walls and a roof, or by edges of buildings, or even a chain of mountains. Henri Lefebvre’s seminal 1971 book The Production of Space significantly widened the discussion of space by directly relating social constructions and relationships to the production of physical space at a wide range of scales. This analysis was part of the shift in the use of the term “space”. A number of disciplines outside of architecture began to describe as “space” non-physical ideas or social constructions that flow from place to place almost as if they were molecules of air caught on a prevailing wind—and in this way operate as if in a unique world with its own laws of physics. The word “space” then is used to reinforce the ubiquitous nature and fluid distributions of certain concepts and conditions discussed. And the word “flow”, with its image of water or hot lava, introduces the element of time to such discussions. Geography is a discipline explicitly interested in space of all kinds, from the kind of spatial “flows” that political economists address and the “social space” of sociologists, to the manifestations of natural systems, culture, money and power in actual physical space. For geographers the idea of flow reiterates the importance of the dimension of time when discussing space. Geographer David Harvey puts it this way: Armed with the right kitbag of tools, it is possible to set up common descriptive frames and modeling procedures to look at all manner of flows over space, whether it be of commodities, goods, ideas, energy, ecological inputs. The diffusion of cultural forms, diseases, biota, ideas, consumption habits, fashions; the networks of communications, energy transfers, water flows, social relations, academic contacts: the nodes of centralized power, of city systems, innovation and decision-making; the surfaces of temperature, evapotranspiration potential, of population and income potential; all these elements of spatial structure become integral to our understanding of how phenomena are distributed and how processes work through and across space over time. (Harvey 2001:223)

Building Change

6

These flows, however, are slowed down by physical distance: the greater the distance, the slower the flow. A letter containing vital information that used to take weeks to cross the Pacific by ship can now be zapped in an instant via the Internet. Harvey goes on to join in the widely held speculation that much of the human agenda driving invention is to lessen the physical drag of space by continually reducing “the friction of distance”. Attempts to deal with these dynamic systems of spatiality—generally under the rubric of the “social construction” or “production” of space— are now legion. The whole history of capital accumulation which, as Marx long ago observed, has embedded within it an historical tendency towards the annihilation of space through time, points to an evolutionary process in which relevant metrics and measures of both space and time have been changed significantly. Speed-up of turnover time and reductions in the friction of distance have meant that spatio-temporality must now be understood in a radically different way from what was operative in, say, classical Greece, Ming Dynasty China, or mediaeval Europe. (Harvey 2001:224, emphasis added) Just as technology has allowed physical objects to move faster through space, it has also allowed for information, ideas, capital, communications and other non-physical entities to move faster as well. In these ways, as Harvey says, the general term “space” applies to all kinds of networks: financial, informational, social, intellectual, cultural and so on. However, this now widespread use requires that we now must qualify the word “space”: space of flows, economic space, social space, and so on. A common example of the wider applications of the term is “cyber-space”—a conceptual location made very real by the social and cultural interactions and economic transactions that take place through digital connections. This is a growing world parallel to, and often separate from, physical spaces. While architecture, as a profession, may not deal with non-physical space very often, some of the ideas about “space” from the various thinkers about its different modes have value for our current conversation. This is particularly true when it comes to the discussion of the relationship of power and these spaces. And, indeed, discussions of space and power ultimately return, most notably in Lefebvre, to buildings. This analysis leads back to buildings…. In their pre-eminence, buildings, the homogeneous matrix of capitalistic space, successfully combine the object of control by power with the object of commercial exchange. The building effects a brutal condensation of social relationships… It embraces, and in doing so reduces, the whole paradigm of space: space as domination/appropriation (where it emphasizes technological domination); space as work and product (where it emphasized the product); and space as immediacy and mediation (where it emphasizes the mediations and mediators). (Lefebvre 1991:227)

Power, space and architecture

7

Once again, recent work in Geography is of particular interest to this discussion. In a logical extension of their field in the era of deconstruction and postcolonialism, geographers came early to the analysis of the affects of power on physical space. As David Harvey observed in 1973: “Dominant organizations and institutions make use of space hierarchically and symbolically. Sacred and profane spaces are created, focal points emphasized, and space is generally manipulated to reflect status and prestige” (Harvey 1973:280).1 Geographers have also made important contributions toward the analysis of how power is embedded in various representations of space. Harvey writes that “map-making and cartography have been central to the history of Geography…. Cartography is about locating, identifying and bounding phenomena and thereby situating events, processes and things within a coherent spatial frame. It imposes spatial order on phenomena” (Harvey 2001:219–220). Noted cartographic historian, J.B.Harley was among the first to view maps as texts that could be deconstructed with a view toward understanding the underlying motivations within them. This led him, naturally, to write extensively about the connection between cartography and power: Cartographers manufacture power. They create a spatial panopticon. It is power embedded in the map text. We can talk about the power of the map just as we already talk about the power of the word or about the book as a force for change. In this sense maps have politics. It is a power that intersects and is embedded in knowledge. It is universal. (Harley 2001: cover flap) In describing a map as a tool of power, Harley provokes thoughts of looking past the power itself to the techniques power deploys to achieve its ends. There is a difference between describing the physical results of power in the landscape and addressing the time-based relationship between space and power on a strategic and tactical level. By understanding what strategies power uses to affect space, to control it, to possess it; it is then possible to contemplate counter-strategies to undo coercive spatial practices and to restore spatial agency. The Spatial Strategies of Power On the level of culture and society, there are four broad categories of spatial strategies of power: (1) the construction of hierarchies, (2) segregation, (3) marginalization, and (4) long-term, large-scale mechanisms of spatial transformation like apartheid, colonialism and globalization. Each of these has a particular paradigm of operation, and each impacts at various scales of physical space. From the scale of the body, up through the scale of buildings and cities to the scale of the landscape, power exercises explicit and implicit control over the shaping and occupation of space. While separated out here for the sake of discussion, these spatial strategies used by power are often employed in combination. For instance, it is impossible to discuss colonialism without including the construction of obvious hierarchies and the violent racism and attendant segregation that accompanied it in every corner of the globe. And it is difficult to discuss globalization truthfully without discussing those who are

Building Change

8

systematically placed on a wide range of different kinds of margins by its spatial impacts. Finally, every place is subject to several scales of power at any given time. Spatialization of Hierarchy Perhaps the most fundamental expression of spatial power is when social, cultural and economic hierarchies are translated into physical and spatial hierarchies. These include not only the organization of space for visual supervision like Bentham’s panopticon, but also a wide range of other spatial configurations in buildings and in cities and landscapes. These are the most easily perceived and understood of the strategies of spatial power— and many are nearly universal in human cultures. These are powerful strategies because of the way they are invisibly integrated into daily lives. They are so common and so ubiquitous as to be practically unnoticed and unquestioned. The range of spatial forms this strategy takes is treated thoroughly by Thomas Markus in his book Buildings and Power, but here we can discuss a few such configurations. For instance, in almost every corner of the globe a person on a dais or raised platform is in some power relationship over the audience. Those who are more important are raised up; literally elevated. Likewise, the front center of a room is often dedicated to the most important person or event, it is a place of attention and honor. In other places it is the actual center of the room. This occupation of the center is extended in many cultures to include the reservation of the center of an axial approach for only the most important personage. Only the emperor was allowed to walk up the carved dragon ramp that graces the central approach to the Hall of Preserving Harmony within the Forbidden City in Beijing. In the current era the ramp is closed off to prevent the feet of the thousands of liberated comrades and foreign tourists who visit every day from destroying the fine carving. This obsession with the power of the center and the axis obviously has numerous echoes at a range of scales. The host of a dinner party sits at the end, capping off the long axis of the table. The Mall in Washington, DC organizes buildings along either side with important monuments occupying spots lined up the middle. At the “top” of the Mall is the US Capitol, clearly in its position, as well as in its scale and design, the most important building in the ensemble. Likewise, some Melanesian villages are organized with the houses lined up along either side of a long open, tree planted allee, with the headman’s taller house at the end. This house is not only a dwelling, but a meeting house for the leaders of the community. In equally obvious ways, the size and height of a building, its location within a landscape or city, the materials of its construction, even the sheer amount of space it commands (both inside and outside) demonstrate power. Of course, this commandeering of space, especially large amounts of it, is often directly tied to financial power. That same power buys access to spaces otherwise inaccessible to the public: private clubs, golf courses, expensive restaurants, white sand beaches. The demonstration of this kind of economic power is not without its dangers in a world where the gap between rich and poor is increasing. However, the same money that can buy villas can also pay to secure them from envious fellow citizens behind high walls and security gates—where the inhabitants are enclosed and the premises constantly under surveillance. The exclusive colonial compound, the palace and the “gated community”: here the residents are

Power, space and architecture

9

confined by fear within walls and it makes one wonder about the distinction between “security” and “surveillance”, between safety and prison.

1.2 The great axis of the Forbidden City in Beijing leading to the dragon ramp at the hall of Preserving Harmony

Building Change

10

1.3 Only the Emperor was allowed to walk up the ramp The notion of center is also routinely applied on a global scale to describe the location of political (London in relation to the British Empire), cultural (Paris in relation to the fashion industry) or economic (New York in relation to banking) power. The rest of the world becomes “peripheral” to that center, occupying the margins of power and, therefore, influence. In reality, of course, there are many centers and the degree of removal of the periphery varies—what is crucial to those who are wielding power, however, is that the hierarchy exists and is implicitly recognized in power relationships. However, being on the periphery, on the margins, has its advantages, as we will soon see. Marginalization In recognition of the decreased influence of those on the periphery, another strategy of spatial power is to remove people who threaten those with power, or the power structure

Power, space and architecture

11

itself. Throughout history there have always been people who match the ethnicity, race and religious belief of those in power, but who still criticize the structure of power, who agitate for change or who, simply by position or belief or origin, pose a challenge to power. These critics are potentially quite harmful of power’s legitimacy and are most often constrained in some way by those with power. The most enduring constraint is, of course, death. However, less radical strategies are usually employed—ones that simply remove the threatening person or group from the coveted center. This marginalization might be physical (removal to another location) or procedural (such as the denial of participation in processes like elections), or both. The term “marginalization” itself is a spatial one—a description of being at the edge, out of the center. The point of making sure someone remains in the extreme margins is to reduce their visibility, diffuse their threat, their ability to take action, and their ability to stir others through action or through the dissemination of information. Clearly, this was the strategy God used at Babel: introducing myriad languages was a way of marginalizing through procedure, and scattering humanity furthered this marginalization through spatial action. A commonly used tactic in marginalization is quite simply removal of access to mainstream society through imprisonment. This is a first line strategy meant to simultaneously silence through removal, while also threatening in unambiguous, physical terms possible larger consequences. Imprisonment is used regularly by all kinds of governments all over the world to silence opposition. A less drastic measure often used by the apartheid era government of South Africa was “banning”. This was a kind of house arrest used specifically for political agitators and leaders that confined them to home under surveillance, and forbade them from meeting with more than one person at a time. In Myanmar, the military regime has now held democratic rights activist Aung Sun Suu Kyi under various levels of house arrest for most of a decade. This effort has backfired on the regime, however, since the house arrest has significantly raised her visibility in the international community and has gathered increased admiration and sympathy for her local supporters. A more effective strategy of marginalization is to physically remove the critic to the actual spatial margins of the territory; to unimportant, remote, and often harsh, locations. This exile might be to camps or prisons, like those in Siberia maintained by the former Soviet Union, or (during colonial times) to penal colonies half a globe away. Three of the four case studies in the later chapters of this book are located in places that were at one time used by their colonial powers as penal colonies: Australia (England), New Caledonia (France) and the US (England). Exiling uses time and distance to dampen the challenge, and is usually accompanied by procedural marginalization through silencing as well. This strategy was particularly effective when the friction of distance was enormous. It would be ineffective in today’s world of instant communication through the Internet and mobile phones. While spatial marginalization acts on the body and on the ability to communicate, procedural marginalization stops critics through institutional action such as the stripping of citizenship, the suspension of voting rights (disenfranchisement), and the silencing of platforms for communication (closing newspapers and shutting down radio and television stations). This kind of action, still commonly used, works in the invisible, but critical, space of political agency and information.

Building Change

12

Of course, those on the margins are not always forced to be there by those in power. Many people choose the margins for the degree of freedom a low profile allows. Others drift to the margins exactly to avoid the constrictive control of those in power. Still others can be found there because they, very simply, do not fit into the center because of beliefs, personality or behavior. Not everyone on the margin is a noble fighter for civil rights or against a fascist regime. They might not be advocates for women in poverty or for gay rights. They might, instead, be extremists—a term that signals working at the margins of the margins, both right and left—who advocate anarchy or terrorism. A system of power that tolerates and even protects the right of people to noisily occupy the margins runs certain risks, as the US found out with the 1995 bombing of the Oklahoma City Federal Building by extremist Timothy McVeigh and his cohorts. On the other hand, a power system that systematically silences all dissent also eventually pays the price. Oppression is a tactic that requires great skill. A curious aspect of marginalization is that a person or group at the center in one place may be marginalized in another. This is the case with the Southern Poverty Law Center, founded in 1971 in Montgomery, Alabama in the US. The SPLC’s programs, which include litigation on issues of constitutional and civil rights, tracking hate groups across the country, and promoting the widespread educational program “Teaching Tolerance”, is generously supported by individual donations from all over the US. However, its staff and attorneys must take every precaution to guard their physical safety at their headquarters in Montgomery, a bastion of resistance to civil rights reforms since the early 1960s. Despite its seeming desolation, the margin has the potential to be a place of great cultural creativity. For it is in the margins that taste, style, and other confining conventions are either not known or can be readily ignored. It is in this context that true creativity can come into play. It would be an extremely odd and peculiar history of this part of the twentieth century if we were not to say that the most profound cultural revolution has come about as a consequence of the margins coming into representation—in art, in painting, in film, in music in literature, in the modern arts everywhere, in politics and in social life generally. Our lives have been transformed by the struggle of the margins to come into representation. Not just to be placed by the regime of some other, or imperializing eye but to reclaim some form of representation for themselves. (Hall 1997:34) Here, Hall suggests what will be explored later in this chapter: that the margins are not only a place of huge creativity, but also of potential revolution. Segregation Just as marginalization usually works at the scale of the body, so does segregation. This old and enduring strategy of spatial power admits that sometimes it is necessary to have

Power, space and architecture

13

groups of undesirable people nearby due to economic or political need. However, these undesirable people should be, to every extent possible, out of sight, out of contact and, therefore, to some extent, out of mind. Segregation works to make sure this happens. “I am invisible”, are the first three words of African-American writer Ralph Ellison in his epic Invisible Man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allen Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids—and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. In its maneuvering to accomplish this disappearing act, the scale of segregation rapidly expands beyond the body, however, to include buildings, neighborhoods, cities and, even, regions of nations. At these larger scales it becomes increasingly difficult to make entire groups of people invisible, resulting in ever more desperate and elaborate strategies on the part of those in power to achieve separation. The criteria for segregation has ranged widely in human history to include class and caste, religion, gender, ethnicity and, most commonly and enduringly, race. The word “ghetto” comes from the local name for the enclosed neighborhood where the Jews of Venice were forced to live, locked within the gates after dark. The term rapidly spread throughout Europe as a term for Jewish neighborhoods, only later to be applied to impoverished concentrations of given non-majority ethnic groups in cities around the world. The insidious argument that people prefer to live “with their own kind” has often been deployed to justify religious, racial and ethnic segregation. There is a huge difference, however, between people freely choosing to live close to those who share certain cultural characteristics and people being forced by legal restriction to confinement within a bounded place because of some defining characteristic. Women all over the world have been routinely segregated in different ways by different cultures at different times. In some cultures, women are rendered invisible at the scale of the body by clothing—as in the Muslim practice of purdah. When every woman looks like all of the others, each becomes invisible. Women, then, literally all look alike to the (male) observer. Within some cultures, women are separated in certain settings: banished to the balconies or standing on the edges of the room to look on silently, riding only in the last car of the train or the left side of the bus. In other places, they are simply not allowed in certain places: bars, clubs and other bastions of maleness. In still other places and times women are made invisible by the spatial organization of the domestic realm—the separation of the kitchen and the laundry in traditional house plans in Europe and America are prime examples. Here, once again, there is an argument for the segregation: the supposed protection of women from unwanted attention, even violence, from men. The patriarchal segregation, covering up, shutting up, hiding away is justified as being “for their own good”. Among all the motivations for segregation, race is the most pernicious motivator for segregation the world has ever seen: while ethnicity comes in a close second. In dealing with race, segregation strategies reached heights of ridiculousness during the Jim Crow era in the US. In 1896 the United States Supreme Court handed down a decision in the case of Plessy v. Ferguson that allowed for the establishment of “separate but equal”

Building Change

14

facilities for whites and blacks. This resulted in the passage of wide ranging “Jim Crow” laws that codified “separate but equal” into actions that separated the races but did not provide equal facilities.2 In his incisive essay “Duality and Invisibility”, the archi-tect Craig Barton shows how these laws extended into city planning and policy to reinforce spatial segregation at the larger scale as well. But what happened in the inevitable situations when blacks and whites could not be separated? Whites and blacks often were required to inhabit the same physical space. The necessity to co-exist in the same room, building or city required strategies for the construction of space, which by delineating social and spatial hierarchies could differentiate visibility. These spaces reiterated the relationships of power to space and obscured the presence of the black population. (Barton 2001:4) What developed was what Barton goes on to call a “double landscape” of separate drinking fountains, separate benches at the bus depot, separate entries to the theater (where blacks were relegated to the balcony), seats in the back of the buses and separate communities confined within given boundaries by city legislation. In Montgomery, Alabama the bus company added the theater strategy to the buses: black riders would enter the front door, pay their fare, then exit the front door to re-enter the bus by the back door to take their seats. Invisibility takes a toll on those rendered invisible through racism and its attendant segregation. Barton, writing on the affects of racial segregation on cities of the American South, argues that: “Negotiating both the concept and the realms of invisibility became central to a construction of black cultural identity.” This invisibility expanded far beyond the body to reach all the way to the scale of the landscape. Barton continues: “In Selma (Alabama), the spatial legacy of Plessy v. Ferguson and the various ensuing Jim Crow statutes led to an urbanism of duality, and a city of two distinct urban landscapes, which as they evolved became codified by race” (Barton 2001:5). As Barton notes, ethnic and racial segregation is often readily visible at the scale of the city. Those meant to be invisible live in degraded areas that tend to be below the radar of city services—streets go un-repaired, median strips unplanted, and infrastructure unmaintained. It is very clear, in most American cities, when one moves from the “white” part of the city to the “black” neighborhood. In South Africa, with the black population in an overwhelming majority, the radical racist segregation strategies of apartheid are written at all the scales of segregation in America—but extend even further and more graphically across the entire landscape. Here, from the air, one sees that each city and town are quite literally two slightly separated towns: the well-maintained and perfectly-serviced white town and, some distance away, the poor black town with dirt streets, outhouses and wild tangles of illegal electrical lines. Under apartheid, a black person was forbidden in the white town unless she or he had explicit business there, and a written pass to prove it. While such legal segregation is no longer in place, the Barton’s “double landscape” with its separate towns remains (see Figure 4.4, p. 134).

Power, space and architecture

15

In terms of culture and community, segregation has a curious double edge. For any group of people who lack power in a larger culture, the removal to a parallel world can provide important opportunities for cultural development and production. The pressures to conform with the norms of the culture in power only exist when a segregated person is visible to that culture. “It is sometimes advantageous to be unseen”, Ellison continues on the first page of his book, “although it is most often rather wearing on the nerves”. Invisibility can allow for a secret life that no one notices, and therefore is not interfered with. Segregation, when not based on class, also often erases class boundaries, making lively communities out of people thrown together by social and spatial constraints. This has the salutary effect of allowing certain cultural forms and practices to survive and thrive. Nathanial Belcher, in his work on Miami, Florida’s “Colored Town” discusses the vibrant cultural developments that took place there. In the final analysis, however, this sense of community is bittersweet: A bustling community of commerce, cultural exchange, and housing that continues to evoke strong memories today. Colored Town was also a product of vicious labor practices, rank opportunism and inconspicuous manipulation. It emerged as an essentially quarantined community, whose physical area failed to expand proportionally with the dense population growth of a booming city. Strangely, Colored Town was a vital product of the segregation that existed during the first fifty years of Miami’s existence, and it is ironic that it was destroyed by the effects of desegregation and the tremendous physical and cultural changes that occurred in its wake. (Belcher 2001:37) This sense of community was small compensation for the isolation, degradation, disenfranchisement, denial of spatial freedoms and reorganization of space that segregation supports. In such situations, once active segregation ends, and the community disperses, people who were once part of it are left stranded in a world where the attitudes that led to segregation continue. Also left behind is the physical imprint of the spatial practices of segregation. Both the attitudes and the spaces take a long time to change. Transformation of Space at Larger Scales There are certain categories of activities of power that operate on space with such systematic and widespread effects that they demand a focused discussion here. These include national strategies like apartheid (that take the strategies of segregation and marginalization to extremes), and international strategies like colonization and globalization. While apartheid has been discussed in the context of segregation and marginalization and is treated in greater depth in Chapter 4, we focus now on those activities whose spatial impacts happen at the sweeping scale of geography. The strategies power uses at this scale are brutal and lasting.

Building Change

16

If there is anything that radically distinguishes the imagination of antiimperialism, it is the primacy of the geographical element. Imperialism after all is an act of geographical violence through which virtually every space in the world is explored, charted, and finally brought under control. For the native, the history of colonial servitude is inaugurated by loss of locality to the outside; its geographical identity must thereafter be searched for and somehow restored. (Said 1993:225) While colonization of one place by people from another has gone on throughout the history of humankind, the period of European colonization from the sixteenth through the early twentieth centuries reconfigured the entire world. This reconfiguring was done from a position of assumed superiority on the part of European colonizers. If the period of the Renaissance marks a qualitative break in the history of humanity, it is precisely because, from that time on, Europeans became conscious of the idea that the conquest of the world by their civilization is henceforth a possible objective. They therefore developed a sense of absolute superiority, even if the actual submission of other people to Europe had not yet actually taken place. (Samir Amin as quoted by Perera 1998:18) This certainty of superiority framed the spatial as well as racial, political, economic and cultural consequences of the colonialism that followed. It affected huge areas of the planet. And we continue to live with the fallout of its violence. Nihal Perera, in his excellent analysis of the spatial effects of colonialism and its aftermath in Sri Lanka, discusses the importance of maps to the colonial endeavor (Perera 1998). He argues that the great leaps in cartography in the sixteenth century, brought about by the new information being brought home by explorers, allowed Europeans to understand exactly how large the world was—and how small their own particular corner was in comparison. However, through mapping, the relative smallness of Europe could be counterbalanced by placing it at the center of the maps, thereby literally marginalizing the rest of a world growing larger with each exploratory expedition. New dimensions of the world dismantled the cardinal directions and erased the spatial inscriptions of old power centers. Placing Europe firmly in the middle of the world map and naturalizing it through the institutionalization of the prime meridian and a dateline—later, by West European powers—produced a modern but familiar world for them. Such a map would provide both geometrical and power based frameworks within which to locate existing places, as well as new places that were yet to be “discovered”…. In producing a centralized world, west European powers eventually constructed radically different forms of spatial boundaries, frontiers, centrality, and marginality. In the process, the historical space of west European supremacy was invented through the naming, ordering, and classifying of places and, most crucially, the

Power, space and architecture

17

bringing of this knowledge into cultural circulation in Europe. World space was represented as something that could be read and explored, and, in the long run, re-structured. In the future, any child brought up in this context, whether in Europe or Ceylon, would automatically learn that western Europe occupies the center of the world. (Perera 1998:19) Maps from the early European colonial era clearly illustrate that the land the colonizers imagined from their ships anchored offshore was seen by them as empty. Just as terra incognito lurks as wide red zones at the edges of knowledge coinciding with the edges of the parchment sheets, terra nullis occupies the interiors of vast continents. While coastlines are minutely drawn, these interiors are blank except for illustrations of fantastic creatures and improbable “men” placed there as if they might erase the anxiety of the huge gaps in the mapmaker’s knowledge. This blankness was a kind of invitation. In Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad’s tale of the brutal colonization of the Congo, Marlowe remembers: “At that time there were many blank spaces on the earth, and when I saw one that looked particularly inviting on a map (but they all look that) I would put my finger on it and say, When I grow up I will go there.” Geographers call this desire generated by maps “the geographical imagination”. And, of course, the emptiness that colonial powers saw on these documents also led to what J.B.Harley calls “the image of a dehumanized geographical space—a land without the encumbrance of the Indians— whose places could be controlled by coordinates of longitude and latitude” (Harley 2001:187). Maps, then, became crucial tools of very large-scale thinking about the acquisition, control, dividing up, and taking theoretical possession of huge tracts of completely unknown land. They were a political and cultural representation of attitudes about the space that would, ultimately, become colonies. Edward Said, in his critical work on postcolonialism, Culture and Imperialism, lists three primary ways that colonization spatially changed the colony (once the landscape was brought under colonial control): first the introduction of foreign plants, animals and building habits and methods imprinted the culture of the colonizers on the landscape. Second, since colonialism was primarily about economic gain, the landscape was radically transformed in order to yield profit. These first two strategies led to the third, which is more general and even more lasting: “colonial space must be transformed sufficiently so as to no longer appear foreign to the imperial eye” (Said 1993:226). All three of these strategies had the direct consequence of displacing indigenous people from their lands and, often, their uses of the land. Sometimes this displacement happened rapidly, through direct removal, and sometimes it happened more slowly, as the entire political and economic structure of the landscape was transformed. This displacement was usually done with little regard for, and great ignorance of, the differences among indigenous people that might occur even within a small geographical area. It is only natural that someone far from home for an extended period of time might long for the familiar. But the goal of colonization went far beyond this simple desire. The colonists were not merely visiting, they were there to stay. And their actions in transforming the landscape from its indigenous state were meant to make the new place represent home as completely

Building Change

18

1.4 Portion of sixteenth-century world map showing the detailed coastal Knowledge of the continent of Africa and the relative ignorance of the interior

Power, space and architecture

19

as possible. One visitor to New South Wales commented in 1821, only thirty-three years after the arrival of the First Fleet to Australia: “I could hardly believe I was traveling in New Holland this day; so different—so English—is the character of the scenery—downs, meadows and streams in the flat—no side scenes of eucalyptus” (Lines 1991:49). Since colonization was primarily an economic endeavor bent on expanding the resource base of the colonial powers, it is not surprising that the other goal in the widespread modification of the landscape was to organize it in order to maximize profit. This prosperity, in turn, fueled European wars and power struggles as well as great building and cultural booms in the home countries. The impact of the blunt mind-set of wringing profit from the colonized landscape and peoples demolished local spatial practices, landscapes, towns and dwellings. The “blank” space on the map of the colony was seen by the colonizer, quite simply, as a potential producer of economic value. As an economic tool, it was to be maximized. And, since it was “blank”, the native people who happened to live there were thought of as part of the economic package: as conveniently available labor to extract the economic value from the land. The colonists, as a whole, lacked any sense of sentimentality, reverence or reserve about the native landscape and the accumulated wisdom about living in it. There were colonial situations where the landscape of Europe was not able to be established due to climate or due to the fact that the landscape was required to produce economic value. For instance, in colonies where climate and landscape were suitable to produce an agricultural commodity for the colonial power, monoculture plantation systems replaced highly varied subsistence agriculture. Displaced farmers became plantation labor. If these were not available or uncooperative, labor was imported from other places. The result was a radically altered landscape. Tea, coffee, rubber and indigo were among the most desired of these commodities from the colonies. And they were all products that could not be produced in Europe. The plantations became microcosms of the colonial project, reflecting spatially— through their layout, allocation of space and architectural design—the relationships of power, the assumptions of cultural superiority and the preference for things European. Nihal Perera’s description of a British coffee plantation in Sri Lanka illustrates this point. Forming the plantation complex, each estate was organized as a production unit with processing facilities and with the factory and office at the center of the estate…. Each estate was organized both hierarchically and as a divided settlement, spatially evident in the forms of accommodation and their location. The types of accommodation these estates produced, both for planters and estate laborers, were evolved forms of shelter particular to metropolitan and colonial cultures. (Perera 1998:70) Perera goes on to describe the luxurious living of the planters or their representatives in dwellings that were “political- and culture-specific forms known as bungalows”. These grand houses had “spaces for domestic servants and individual services such as water, sewage, and later, electricity”. They were set apart “on spacious sites”, and “built for the conspicuous consumption of space, views, scenery, time, goods, and money” and surrounded by gardens “landscaped with ‘exotic’ plants”.

Building Change

20

By contrast, accommodations for the plantation laborers constituted “a completely different world”. Accommodation was in “lines”, narrow rows of rooms up to about one hundred yards long and ten feet wide. Each block was divided into approximately 10′×10′ rooms opening onto a common verandah, in each of which lived six to ten people. Unlike the extensive consumption spaces of the bungalow, lines were mere “shelters” of a purely utilitarian nature, with cooking done mostly outside. Some used the verandah to keep cattle while others enclosed it … Without windows and doors, but having a mere opening to enter, rooms were gloomy, dismal, and unhealthy. (Perera 1998:70) Perhaps the most lasting of the spatial practices of colonialism is the introduction of the spatial practices and types of the colonizer to the colony. These go far beyond the actual results of modifying the landscape or introducing building types, to the embedding of certain spatial practices—through education and habit as well as through actual construction. When combined with the routine degradation of indigenous spatial practices, such as village and house forms, the colonizers’ modes of spatial habitation were not only constructed, but then became the preferred “civilized” models for all future construction. There were some spatial practices, however, that very clearly did not make any sense in some of the colonies. Some of these had to do with materials of construction and the way buildings respond to their climates. Others had to do with the way that people lived in spaces, particularly domestic ones. Eventually the very different conditions of the colonies caused a modification of usual spaces and building techniques so that a hybrid architecture emerged, usually better adapted to the climate of the colony. In the case of the British in India, colonization continued for so long that a particular architectural style evolved. This exotic British colonial architecture was later transplanted into Malaysia where it made little sense in the tropical climate. The same is true of practices and the scale of the landscape. At some point the colonized place pushed back in a way that could not be overcome. For instance, while European plants and animals survived, even thrived, in the temperate environment of Australia’s southeastern and eastern coasts, they did not do well in the less well-watered inland mountains, the damp hot tropics or the vast deserts. And while the gardens around the big house on a British rubber plantation in Malaysia may have contained many specimens from Europe, rose bushes would often rot and the rows of scarred rubber trees marching in grids across the surrounding rolling hills were clearly not a fruit orchard. The sense of entitlement of the colonist to transform the space was, to some extent, based upon the arrogant belief (or justification) that European culture and religion were undeniably superior to those of any other place. One of the goals of colonization, therefore, was supposedly about giving the great gift of that civilization to the entire world, regardless of whether anyone wanted it or not. With encountered cultures, the degree of respect they were given was, to some extent, based upon features of the native culture that were understood as “civilized” by the European invader. Did they have cities, recognizable religious practices, compassionate family lives, agriculture, animal

Power, space and architecture

21

husbandry, art and craft? How was leadership exercised? Of course, the measuring stick for all of this was the British or French or Spanish or Dutch culture of the time. The colonists were looking for what they recognized as culture. However, this recognition often did little to actually protect the native culture. Hernan Cortés, in a lengthy report home to Charles V of Spain, described how the city of Tenochtitlán, the great Aztec capitol, appeared in 1520 when he first arrived in what would later become Mexico. With a population of 200,000, the city was larger than any in Spain at the time. In the following sentences excerpted from the letter, Cortés tries to describe the city in relation to the Spanish cities the king knows. The city is a large as Seville or Cordoba; its streets, I speak of the principal ones, are very wide and straight; some of these, and all of the inferior ones, are half land and half water, and are navigated by canoes…. There is one square twice as large as that of the city of Salamanca, surrounded by porticoes, where are daily assembled more than sixty thousand souls, engaged in buying and selling; and where are found all kinds of merchandise that the world affords… Different kinds of cotton thread of all colors in skeins are exposed for sale in one quarter of the market, which has the appearance of the silk-market in Granada, although the former is supplied more abundantly…. This great city contains a large number of temples, or houses for their idols, very handsome edifices, which are situated in the different districts and the suburbs…. Among these temples there is one which far surpasses all the rest, whose grandeur of architectural details no human tongue is able to describe; for within its precincts, surrounded by a lofty wall, there is room enough for a town of five hundred families. The report ranges from descriptions of the wide array of goods for sale in the bustling market, the splendor of the palaces and temples, and the great aviaries kept throughout the city, to the fine clothing, good table manners and extensive ceremonies that surrounded Moctezuma, the Aztec king. It also includes a description of Moctezuma’s hospitality toward the Spanish, and willingness to consider Catholicism to replace the traditional Aztec religion. Not long after Cortés wrote this praise, Moctezuma was dead and the Spanish had systematically razed the splendid city building by building. In just 30 short years, Mexico City, built on the ruins of Tenochtitlán, and with some of the same stones, was the thriving capitol of New Spain. Of course, colonial control and Said’s three spatial strategies of colonialization were far easier to implement in places where the local population was not urbanized, was split into tribal groups who did not trust or did not communicate with each other or was sparsely settled across a large landscape. These places, where immigration from the colonizing nation was encouraged, are known in postcolonial discourse as “Settler Colonies”. In these places, European immigration eventually overran the landscape and decimated the native people. They include the territory that is now Canada, the US, Australia, New Zealand, Chile and, in some parts, Mexico. Other places posed very different challenges. If the new colonies were, like India, already densely populated or, like much of the interior of Africa and South America, had landscapes and climates

Building Change

22

incredibly hostile to European colonists, they required different approaches. Nevertheless, wherever the colonists set up residence, the spatial activities of colonization followed to the greatest extent possible for that particular place. It is not difficult to understand how colonialism established the networks and set the political, cultural, economic and spatial stage for the attitudes of globalization. In effect, the west Europeans were developing a “whole” new world. The transfer of people and plants are examples of a much larger distribution and reorganization of the elements of space—also including animals, food types, and diseases—all of which helped to incorporate an extant “natural” environment into a European “manmade” one. By the last quarter of the nineteenth century webs of long spanning and complex socio-spatial chains were being produced, restructuring world space. (Perera 1998:71) While many forms of spatial power are slowly being dismantled, globalization continues with great, unfettered ferocity. At the geographic scale, uneven geographical development is one of its primary spatial impacts—this uneven-ness does far more than what Harvey laments as “render(ing) whole populations to the violence of down-sizing, unemployment, collapse of services, degradation of living standards, and loss of resources and environmental qualities” (Harvey 2000:81). And it goes beyond poverty, starvation and devolution into lawlessness. Spatially, globalization extends the project of colonialism by transforming local landscapes according to some global formula for efficiency and profit. No longer bound by the inconvenience of national allegiance that limited colonial empires, today’s economic interests operate almost free of national boundaries. They dictate which crops are planted, the rate at which timber is cut and minerals are mined, the prices commodities bring and the dynamics of trade. A recent advertisement on National Public Radio from agricultural products giant ADM (Archer Daniels Midland) features a woman’s gentle voice inquiring: “What if we think about the world as one giant farm field? When crops are grown where they grow best, we improve agricultural efficiency, make food more affordable and help feed a hungry world.” This is globalization in a nutshell: posing as humanitarianism, what it is really doing is continuing, in a slightly different guise, the plantation system of colonialism. A growing number of people, including national leaders, are unconvinced by this rhetoric. The growing international opposition to the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund is increasingly articulate about the political, economic, societal, cultural and spatial impacts of globalization. And the World Trade Organization, formerly under the control of the developed world, is moving toward a wider, more egalitarian stance in applications of subsidies and tariffs. Among the numerous objectionable aspects of globalization is the continued assertion of the superiority (and desirability) of Western European and American models of organizing space, making cities, constructing buildings and consuming resources. These models are being adopted even in places where there is no particular external pressure to accept them, or despite direct conflict with local politics and culture. For instance, in China where communism is still the official political/economic system and where there is

Power, space and architecture

23

still an emphasis on the extended family, globalization has hit hard. The venerable city of Shanghai is being surrounded by suburbs and gated communities that look as if they were transplanted from Southern California—the prototypical model of capitalism, consumerism and single family living. This model of living is only available to the small percentage of Chinese who have managed to achieve a middle-class standard of living. However, the huge majority of people still live in poverty: a perfect example of the uneven geographical development Harvey refers to. Given the widening impacts of globalization, it is not surprising that the discourse on space is becoming increasingly sophisticated and widespread. This is one place where the various definitions of “space” from a range of disciplines converge, overlap and become irrevocably tangled. Technology is allowing a collapsing of space and time so the networks of economic (and therefore political and cultural) control are tighter than ever. The friction of distance is constantly being reduced. However, this same technology is also allowing for the dissemination of information and ideas at a speed and scale never before imagined. Indeed, within the strategies of globalization are the seeds of its own destruction. As with colonialism before it, globalization eventually makes available to those it controls the thinking, technology and strategies it deploys. These are picked up and transformed into tools of resistance to various kinds of economic, cultural and political power. While globalization threatens us with a kind of homogeneity and numerous other acknowledged ills, the gradual breakdown of political and cultural hegemony means that local circumstances are simultaneously becoming more explicitly diverse through the disaggregation of power. For some peoples this disaggregation has brought enormous opportunity, an opening of horizons, and a chance to forge a future for their culture. In other situations, the benefits are far less clear. While spreading localism grants the basic human respect for the right of a people to self-determination and agency, it also opens up enormous possibilities for widespread destruction of cultural diversity and human practices. This is especially true for indigenous peoples who have been isolated from outside culture. A tribal group in the rainforests of Brazil, no matter how intelligent and wise, is ill-equipped to negotiate on its own behalf with international timber companies. Nor can they understand the effects of the blindingly rapid environmental and cultural impact of clear-cutting and introduction of monetary systems and outside technologies that accompany it. Within half a generation the remnants of the tribe may find itself as disenfranchised poor living in squalor on the fringes of some middle-sized Brazilian city. The spatial strategies discussed here are not without their weaknesses; their hidden underbellies of advantage and perspective. In discussions of colonialism and globalization, for instance, there is often a great deal of time given over to setting up dualities between the center and the periphery, or North and South, or First and Third Worlds. These dualities, while providing a handle on some basic dynamics of certain kinds of power in these large-scale systems, oversimplify the spatial complexities and presume a directionality and segregation of influence that is now discredited by many. Indeed, by assuming that the basic good-bad dynamics of situations are simply reproduced at ever-larger scales, these kinds of analyses miss the crucial subtleties that exist on the actual ground, in actual space and in lived time. While the main thrust of the spatial strategies of power is to control, reshape and make invisible, they also open up advantages and strategies of resistance to the very power that creates them. And, in the

Building Change

24

end, often those who are subjugated have enormous influence on those in power. There is a reason, after all, that there is an entire genre of literature and film centered around the transformative effects the “colonies” have on the colonizer.

Reclaiming Space How is it that people resist or reverse these deeply embedded spatial strategies and practices of those with power? Despite setbacks and attempts to stop it, the dynamics of political and cultural power throughout the world have been shifting rapidly over the past fifty years. Indigenous peoples, like the Kanak of New Caledonia and the Aborigines of Australia, who have been systematically sidelined in their own lands, are regaining their voices as they refuse to remain on the cultural fringes any longer. Minority peoples, like African-Americans in the US, who have been silenced or ignored are also asserting their presence and their rights. Small, previously marginalized, political action groups and non-governmental organizations, like the World Wildlife Fund, Doctors Without Borders and the Southern Poverty Law Center, have gained legitimacy through perseverance and success. Finally, people who comprise large proportions of populations, but who have through colonial occupation, law or custom been relegated to the fringes of power, are dismantling the systems that kept them from fully participating in determining their own lives. A striking example of this is the 1994 emergence of the black and “colored” people of South Africa after decades under the thumb of apartheid. To be sure, the emergence of these previously powerless groups does not happen easily or peacefully. Nor is their progress always forward, for ground gained is sometimes lost. But the movement is generally toward an increasingly broad distribution of power, particularly in the cultural and spatial arenas: the dismantling of colonial rule (with ground lost to globalization); the reassertion of political, cultural and territorial control by indigenous peoples; the surge of civil rights and political power for those in the minority; and a continuing support for the crucial role played by many non-profit organizations in implementing progressive societal and legislative agendas despite conservative efforts in the opposite direction. This redistribution of power places high value on maximum individual liberty for each person—tempered by a limited responsibility to a larger community. The movement toward this particular vision of how power is organized might be seen as the outcome of the past 900 years of European-driven history. These ideals reached an important level of refinement with the birth of democracy in France and the US in the eighteenth century— that each person has equal rights, protections and privileges. This is a deceptively simple notion. Indeed, the previous belief (not entirely eradicated) that the definition of a “person” includes only those who are white, of European-descent, male and landowners has been the source of inestimable grief. This is born out in the history of European expansion and colonization, of slavery, racism, women’s rights, segregation, apartheid, anti-Semitism, voting rights and civil rights. And it continues to this day. This grief is further expanded by the not necessarily logical coupling of the idea of democracy with the unfettered practices of capitalism. The Enlightenment experiment with equal rights has not yet fully proved its value to the vast majority, who continue to live without true political or economic power.

Power, space and architecture

25

It is not surprising that those with power are most reluctant to give any of it up. Nor is it surprising that those without power have become increasingly sophisticated and more insistent about getting it—supported by the logical conclusions that must be reached about the extension of rights embedded in the primary democratic constitutions and institutions. It is unclear if the goal of this redistribution of power should ultimately lead to a democratic form of government, at least as practiced in the world today. However, the principles of early democratic ideals are still deeply relevant and have had a profound impact on the active critique and challenge to dominating powers. The struggle mounted by colonized, segregated and marginalized people is, along with the desire for spatial freedoms, a struggle for agency—that is, the power to act on one’s own behalf in daily life as well as in the nation’s political and cultural arenas. Edward Said implies that the cultural agency needs to come before the political for “the slow and often bitterly disputed recovery of geographical territory which is at the heart of decolonization, is preceded—as empire had been—by the charting of cultural territory” (Said 1993:209). This is a pivotal idea: that the idea of political change and the reclaiming of spaces is brought about first in the cultural production of a group of people through writing, art, music; and then it is acted upon in the real world, with the ideas turned into spatial reality. Later in the same text, Said suggests a more poetic source for resistance to colonialism: “Because of the presence of the colonizing outsider, the land is recoverable only through the imagination” (Said 1993:225). The imagination would seem an inadequate tool to undo the hegemony of a colonial power or any other power strong enough to curtail the ability to act in space or to rearrange an entire landscape. Yet, the imagination is the place where resistance, and even revolution, begin. Even in the most brutal of regimes, the interior life of the mind is not completely controllable or knowable, and so it is the one place where the human spirit can exercise its will toward independence. In most situations where power abusively controls how space is used, the power is either not strong enough to, or not interested in, controlling other aspects of the subject people’s imaginative life, as long as it is not perceived as a direct threat. This life can be experienced through small things like food, poetry, clothing or music—activities that can be more broadly defined as cultural practices. Cultural production, things made in a particular cultural context, is a complex and powerful expression of human life. It is complex in that it involves a number of scales and strategies. At the most intimate physical scale it can include clothing, hairstyles, tattoos and adornment. Tools and utensils, weapons and containers, ritual and aesthetic objects are also forms of cultural production. Food and its preparation is a more transitory or performative form of cultural production, as are literature, dance, music and ritual behavior. At a larger scale, cultural production includes buildings, the organization of towns and villages and the landscape. It is, in part, in this multi-scalar and enmeshed condition that the radical potential of cultural production lies. The power of cultural practices also lies in the way they sustain cultural identity. Throughout the world, certain kinds of cultural practices and making help people maintain their sense of separateness during years of being controlled by others. In less confrontational settings, it helps cultural distinctions to be drawn and cultural bridges to be built. It communicates values and sensibilities in ways that are absorbed through exposure over time. In cities all over the world, ethnic restaurants are often the outposts

Building Change

26

of minority cultures. Likewise, literature, music and film convey aspects of cultural sensibility and sophistication that may not otherwise be visible. In this way, cultural practices reinforce a sense of agency—the ability and power to act on one’s own behalf— even for those who may be on the fringes of mainstream cultures. Cultural production also has power as a location for the formulation of objections to domination. Through the use of practices from their own cultures, dominated people can voice their opposition through the often-encoded forms of the things they make. For instance, the women of the Ivory Coast have long had a practice of block printing cotton, then sewing the yardage into skirts, headscarves and other clothing items. The printing has always told a story or recorded an historical event. But it has also poked fun at political figures, particularly the French colonials. While a block printed skirt is not apt to foment rebellion, the practice of expressing political views through this seemingly innocuous form of decoration keeps alive a practice of criticism and an attitude of resistance. It also affirms the agency of the women—a small realm where they can act for themselves. That cultural production can be a tool of political change is a notion that has also been more cynically used. In many places, the idea of a discreet cultural “tradition” has been invented or elaborated in order to build support for nationalism and to counter the overwhelming surge of global culture. Often, this sort of nationalism has allowed a disparate group of people to bond together to get rid of a conquering or colonial power. However, if cultural “tradition” is invented, then what is to keep it from being reinvented, causing continuing waves of political and cultural upheavals? This question is as unanswerable as the invention that prompts it. This twentieth-century phenomenon of the creation of “tradition” has been usefully analyzed by a number of scholars, while it continues today. The rejigging of the map of the earth’s human cultures is proceeding apace. The geographical bounding being striven for and the numerous inventions of tradition that are occurring indicate that this is a dynamic field of human activity which is moving in somewhat unpredictable ways. (Harvey 2000:67) A final way that cultural production is used for resistance is through the adoption of the cultural forms of the dominant culture in order to undermine it. This strategy might best be illustrated by the way the literature became a critical weapon in the dismantling of colonialism and in the reformulation of a sense of power for those newly de-colonized. V.S.Naipal, Salman Rushdie and Chinua Achebe all transformed the novel into tools for making those previously colonized vivid and present in the rarefied world of “European” literature. But what does all this discussion of political change have to do with space? Henri Lefebvre brings us back around to the crucial relationship between space and power. A revolution that does not produce a new space has not realized its full potential; indeed it has failed in that it has not changed life itself, but has merely changed ideological superstructures, institutions or political apparatuses. A social transformation, to be truly revolutionary in

Power, space and architecture

27

character, must manifest a creative capacity in its effects on daily life, on language, on space…. (Lefebvre 1991:54) How is it possible in the midst of these changes to undo the spatial legacy of segregation, marginalization and the spatial manifestations of colonialism? Is it possible to resist the spatial practices of globalization? Clearly, for South Africa to make a full transition from its apartheid past into the imagined race-blind future, the double landscape must be undone. Architecture is a visible, spatial, high profile form of cultural practice that deals directly with space. As such it is intimately tied not only to power, but also to cultural agency—for while agency is necessary to advance an architectural project; architecture, as we have seen, lends credence to that agency. It is the primary spatial way for people to represent themselves in the world. And it is in this connection that architects have the opportunity to participate in the restructuring of the spatial and physical world toward a goal of greater equity and justice. In terms of its relationship to power, however, architecture is suspect as a form of resistant cultural practice. It has never been a practice of “the people”. Lefebvre sees the architect as a recipient of the favors of developers, who give an architect a slice of land to work on. And he sees the practice of architecture as self-contained and aloof: “It may thus be said of architectural discourse that it too often imitates or caricatures the discourse of power, and it suffers from the delusion that ‘objective’ knowledge of ‘reality’ can be attained by graphic representations” (Lefebvre 1991:361). A page later, Lefebvre turns from the architect to those who inhabit architectural space. Let us now turn our attention to the space of those who are referred to by means of such clumsy and pejorative labels as “users” and “inhabitants”. No well-defined terms with clear connotations have been found to designate these groups. Their marginalization by spatial practice thus extends to language… The users’ space is lived—not represented (or conceived). When compared to the abstract space of the experts (architects, urbanists, planners), the space of the everyday activities of the users is a concrete one, which is to say, subjective. (Lefebvre 1991:362) Indeed, few people in the world exercise direct agency over the production of the buildings that make up their worlds. Rather, non-residential buildings and the forms of towns and cities are usually the result of collective cultural and economic action and behavior by those in power. In many places, people—those without power—still make their own dwellings, sometimes using forms and construction techniques hundreds of years old. More often, however, people build shelter out of whatever materials they can find with an urgency and need that has little to do with consideration of culture. Even in these circumstances, however, people assert small gestures of individual agency, giving the most provisional of dwellings dignity and individuality. For instance, in the stillimpoverished townships of post-Apartheid South Africa, the interiors of cobbled together shacks are often carefully and elaborately decorated—as if the spatial restrictions outside

Building Change

28

of the house could be counterbalanced by the lively expression inside. The exteriors of the shacks are usually less attended to, but are sometimes brightened with a bit of paint, flowers growing in a pot, or small decorations. These small gestures of dignity signal that someone lives in these places—individuals with thought and sensibility. Even the grinding dehumanization of poverty seems unable to take away the expression of what Le Corbusier calls this “first proof of existence”, this “taking possession of space”. So, “the people” seem to be getting along in their lives, and they are finding small, yet meaningful ways of resisting the spatial depredations of power without the help of architects. From the perspective of the slum dweller in Jakarta, architects and architecture have nothing to do with daily life and, if they are thought about at all, they are simply an extension of the existing systems of economic and spatial power. This is a fair assessment of a discipline created to serve these interests. Given the relationships of architecture to these structures, what are the implications for architects of the changes in who holds power? The traditional relationship between architects and the old power authorities is complicated by the fact that as political, economic and cultural power is more widely distributed, so is the power to command architectural production. To be sure, a majority of architectural commissions are still for those who have traditionally held the power: governments, major religions, wealthy corporations, cultural institutions and individuals. However, an increasing number of building projects are being initiated and commissioned by those who previously would not have been able to even imagine such a visible, proactive and permanent assertion into physical space. It is here, in particular, that architects might find strategies for involving architecture, as cultural and spatial production, in social change.

Architecture’s Role To agree with Le Corbusier’s observation about the primacy of space in existence, is also to find brutal, inhuman and ethically questionable the spatial consequences of centuries of colonialism, racism, segregation, tribalism, globalization and economic imperialism. And yet, as stated above, architecture is implicated in these consequences through its intimate relationship with those in power. Architects, perhaps unwittingly, have helped to make, building by building, the landscapes and cities and neighborhoods that embody, literally impress on our bodies, the power relationships that surround us. Kim Dovey, in his provocative book Framing Power, discusses the theoretical nuances of the connections between built space (particularly architecture) and power and does not mince words about this connection. The built environment reflects the identities, differences and struggles of gender, class, race, culture and age. It shows the interests of people in enpowerment and freedom, the interests of the state in social order, and the private corporate interest in stimulating consumption. Because architecture and urban design involve transformations in the ways we frame life, because design is the imagination and production of the future, the field cannot claim autonomy from the politics of social change. (Dovey 1999:1)

Power, space and architecture

29

For we are engaged, whether we like it or not, in “the politics of social change”. What can we do to wiggle free of all the economic and societal ties that bind us to those in power and begin to apply our skills to re-distribute both space and power? How is it that the buildings we design can support the general trend toward more widespread cultural agency and spatial manifestation of peoples who have been systematically made invisible or excluded from representing themselves in the built world? Dovey reminds us, in his Afterword, that even as cynical an observer of culture as Michel Foucault wrote that “architecture ‘can and does produce positive effects when the liberating intentions of the architect coincide with the real practice of people in the exercise of their freedom’” (Foucault as quoted by Dovey 1999:192). Here we pick up this topic where Dovey leaves off: once an architect accepts this potential of his or her role, how does one become an agent for social change as an architect? After all, architecture and architects would seem to have little ability to alter the world in such a significant way. Indeed, architecture has no ability to affect the imperial ambitions of the US. It cannot restructure the inequitable global flow of resources and food. It cannot disarm a tyrant, halt a civil war or end terrorism. It cannot restore tropical hardwood forests or stop global warming. It is not even apt to change people’s minds about the ideas and values they hold. This truth about the inability of architecture to make rapid, large-scale changes often frustrates architects and, particularly, students of architecture. There is a sense of powerlessness in this—and a resulting urge toward resigned retreat into the old dynamics between the traditional powerful patrons and the architects who serve them. What kind of social change is actually within the grasp of practicing architects to accomplish? To get a fresh look at what architecture as an agent of change can be, it might be useful to take a step back and see architecture through the eyes of someone who thinks about space, but from outside the world of architecture. In his important book, Spaces of Hope, geographer David Harvey envisions a cultural actor he calls the “insurgent architect”. He is emphatic that he is not referring to the professional architect here but, rather, to the architect as a metaphorical figure. His insurgent architect has great potential as a proactive participant in the questioning, and even rearranging of what he terms contemporary socio-ecological life—the temporal and spatial consequences of current economic, cultural and political power. While Harvey is addressing every person who is actively concerned with these issues, his thoughts are also useful for practicing actual architects who aspire to change the world. This is because he sees the potential of architecture with fresh eyes, letting us see ourselves in a new way. Harvey splits open that feeling of impotence that so often surrounds working architects. He does this by articulating a vision of architecture as crucial to human society. I begin with the figure of the architect. I do so in part because that figure (and it is the figure rather than the professional person of whom I speak) has a certain centrality and positionality in all discussions of the processes of constructing and organizing spaces. The architect has been most deeply enmeshed throughout history in the production and pursuit of utopian ideals (particularly though not solely those of spatial form). The architect shapes spaces so as to give them social utility as well as human and aesthetic/symbolic meanings. The architect shapes and preserves longterm

Building Change

30

social memories and strives to give material form to the longings and desire of individuals and collectives. The architect struggles to open spaces for new possibilities, for future forms of social life. (Harvey 2000:200) Harvey continues that the architect is “a metaphor for our own agency as we go about our daily practices and through them effectively preserve, construct, and reconstruct our lifeworld”. We should be flattered by—if not a bit disbelieving of—this generous reading of the pivotal role of the architect in society. We know all too well how our work is compromised by the context that surrounds and sometimes overwhelms architecture. But Harvey is not uninformed about these difficulties of making architecture. He readily acknowledges the complex systems within which architects have to operate: laws and regulations, planning policy, economic markets, site constraints, technological challenges, material difficulties, and the wide cast of characters, each with his or her own motivations: from developers to financiers, from contractors to laborers. He concedes that often these entities “have more to say about the final shape of things than the architect”. But it is exactly these external pressures and complicating relationships that reinforce Harvey’s attachment to the metaphor of the architect. “‘Doing architecture’”, he asserts “is an embedded, spatiotemporal practice. But there is, nevertheless, always a moment when the free play of the imagination—the will to create—must enter” (Harvey 2000:204). In fact, it is this very experience of juggling pressures and still breathing poetry into our work that Harvey finds so inspiring. Finally, Harvey’s advocacy for the figure of the insurgent architect rests also on the fact that architects take action; we make things. That is our job. As real architects of our future we cannot engage in endless problematization and never-ending conversations. Firm recommendations must be advanced and decisions taken, in the clear knowledge of all the limitations and potentiality for unintended consequences (both good and bad). (Harvey 2000:245) This fascination with “action” grows from Harvey’s own field, geography, which, along with anthropology and political and cultural theory, contemplates the need for cultural change. Each of these disciplines is involved in analyses of problems—offering elegant, insightful and intelligent discussions of the subtleties of causes and effects. But it always stops there; with a definition of the problem. Architecture, on the other hand, is about solving problems, about making a different spatial reality. It does this in the face of uncertainty, knowing that it will not be perfect. This reminds us that architecture is, in its essence, an optimistic, action-based endeavor. Harvey seems to admire both this action and its hopefulness. So here, according to Harvey, are four tools architects have in their hands: (1) an explicitly spatial and physical cultural practice; (2) a practice fortuitously embedded within (and experience working with) a network of power and information; (3) imagination and effective techniques for envisioning alternative futures; and (4) actual

Power, space and architecture

31

spatial and physical action. Each of these tools is a routine part of the larger puzzle of architecture and those engaged in its daily practice often forget to think of them in these general terms. Yet, stating them in such general terms allows us to step back from their real-life implications to reframe them within the concerns of this book. What Harvey is reminding us of is that architecture is not powerless. It has, within the discipline and the way that it is embedded in culture, its own cultural agency. And that agency is predicated on the tools Harvey has so eloquently identified. In order to use the agency of architecture, however, it is critical to know exactly how, at what scale and through what sorts of strategies, architecture can produce social change. To accept the limitations of architecture in this sense, is to learn to work with its true potential. Within a definition of architecture as the design and making of individual projects, there is the scale of real space and the heartbeat of lived time—Harvey’s “actual spatial action”. This is a far smaller scale than the grand sweeping dynamics of the power of nations. The Swiss architect Peter Zumthor puts it this way: “when we, as architects, are concerned about space, we are concerned with but a tiny part of the infinity that surrounds the earth, and yet each and every building marks a unique place in this infinity” (Zumthor 1998:21). It is exactly here, at this small scale, that architecture can and does support change. It does this by doing what it does best: by enclosing a series of human uses adjusted to the particular conditions of a specific place. These include the historical and cultural context, the site, the nuanced dynamics of the various people involved, the unique technological and material possibilities, and the daily rhythms and dreams of the people who will inhabit the building. It is not easy to do this well, for it requires not only architectural skill, but also that magic component Harvey refers to as “imagining…alternative futures”. Imagination, seen by Said as the first location of resistance to the hegemony of power, is here applied to the specific problem of transforming space. Indeed, another physical reality must be evoked—first in the minds of architects, then in representations of those ideas through drawings and models, and, finally, full-scale in real space. South African Iain Low, writing of the role for architects and architecture in remaking the spaces of South Africa highlights the importance of imagination in this endeavor. If architecture is to gain a new transformed identity, then architects must take a stand on the side of imagination and of the possible. In South Africa this necessarily means engaging in the unknown; with the otherness that has ensured our divides for so long. It requires the exercise of a capacity for critical reflection that locates our imagination probably best in between the grassroots and the global. In this way we might claim a new identity for architecture and contribute to meaningful production of the project of spatial transformation… (emphasis added, Low 2002:36) This use of the imagination of the architect as a key location for architecture’s engagement with social change is not a new idea. Over the past 150 years, architects have used architectural imagination to actively question and engage the existing structure of society. Certainly architects have aided advocates of utopian orders (including fascist utopias) of all descriptions by supporting their social, economic and political ideals with

Building Change

32

visions of cities, towns and neighborhoods that might readily contain them. In the fifteenth century laques Perret drew the “Ideal City” and Bartolommeo Delbene made an engraving of his “City of Truth”. Much later, in the late eighteenth century, Claude Ledoux developed a town plan and detailed architectural configurations for his town of Chaux. Likewise, futurists have often used architecture as a vehicle for envisioning a technologically transformed urban life. From Le Corbusier to Super Studio, architects, themselves, have happily participated in these ventures, convinced of the potency of space and form to reflect and support social, even political, behavior. Certainly in these cases the architectural vision has been important to rounding out the picture of an idealized future. Look, here is what this new life will look like. Here is the tidy town with decent housing, communal fields and places of shared leisure. Can’t you picture yourself there? But even then, architecture is still not the agent of change. It can be a supporter, an advocate and give spatial definition to change, but it will not cause change itself. In the twentieth century a handful of architects began to use their imagination and skills to try to change the physical circumstances of those who could not afford their services. Sometimes these efforts were supported by the government, notably in government-supported Socialist worker housing schemes in Europe in the 1920s. These arose from the well-intended visions of architects who believed that industrialization could yield important progress in housing workers in affordable and efficient residential buildings. This effort at providing decent affordable housing is continued today in a wide range of ways. In many places, governments continue to be the prime motivator of such residential projects. In the US, as the government has withdrawn from this role, private non-profit developers have moved into the void. There was a time, as global colonial practices began to collapse, and former colonies emerged as new nations, when architecture got very involved in politics—but only as it always has: as a reflection of power. In this case, however, the power had been transferred to new governments that were anxious to demonstrate their separation from their former occupiers.3 For this task—to symbolize the radical departure from these European links—some nations chose a supposedly neutral modernism as a style for the new buildings. This style was also meant to communicate the fact that the new nation was technologically and aesthetically advanced; ready to join the modern community of nations. And so, Brazil, with Oscar Niemeyer’s Brasilia, India with Le Corbusier at Chandigarh, and fledgling Bangladesh, with Louis Kahn’s capitol building in Dacca, all proclaimed their independence from the colonizers’ vision of space. By the mid-twentieth century, some architects began to look not only at the products of their practices, but at the accepted structure of practice as well. Challenging the positioning of architects as only serving the wealthy and powerful, some architects, mostly within the support structure of universities, tried launching community design centers and providing pro-bono services. Motivated by an intense desire and motivation for social change, these “storefront” practices attempted a new form of practice providing architectural services to those who could not otherwise afford them. While many good projects have come from these efforts, projects that have significantly improved communities, the role architecture plays in the larger context has continued unchanged. This tradition of work has been extended most recently by design-build work of architecture schools across the US. Most notable among these is the Rural Studio at Auburn University and Studio 804 at the University of Kansas. The format of these

Power, space and architecture

33

studios is to design and build homes for families in poverty. While the poor “client” is consulted during the design, the houses they receive far exceed what is needed as shelter, or even as home. The thinking is that the client receives a tremendous value added through design. A scattering of other practices engaged directly in social change are tied less to a tradition of work than to intriguing individuals who have simply made up their minds to do something. Cameron Sinclair has founded Architecture for Humanity, a non-profit organization that has sponsored design competitions for a mobile AIDS clinic in South Africa and transitional refugee housing in Kosovo. The Korean-American architect Jae Cha designs ethereal community buildings and churches out of ordinary materials for impoverished rural communities in Latin America. And the revered Japanese architect, Shigeru Ban, has applied his interest in technology to design refugee housing out of giant paper tubes manufactured by the same factories that make the tubes for toilet paper. After the devastating earthquake at Kobe, he scaled up the technology even further to build a temporary Catholic church. In addition to practicing architects, a number of historians, theorists and critics have, over the years, made lucid arguments about how architecture and urban form are the spatial results of a complex set of social, economic, political and historical interactions. But what are architects, those who are actively involved in the making of buildings, to make of these important analyses? How can this thinking be brought forward to inform the daily practice of architecture? As is usually the case in architecture, there is no formula for this; nor is there a specific process. In fact, projects that explicitly take on the issues of cultural and political power, that are an overt reassertion of cultural agency and dignity, that seek to symbolically represent a formerly invisible people, or that have overt agendas for social change are, by their very definition, unique in almost every way. Such projects cannot be solved by the standard design and constructional processes and procedures of architecture. Instead, they require risk-taking, rethinking, reinventing—bold acts of faith and imagination. They require dealing spatially and materially with the consequences of political, economic and cultural power in the context of the project. And they require intelligence, patience and, perhaps most of all, persistence. In order to understand how architects might creatively operate in such circumstance, might re-imagine the architecture in specific situations, or might even re-imagine architectural practice itself, it is useful to look carefully at specific examples of projects. In the past decade, architects have been repeatedly commissioned to design significant buildings for people who previously did not have cultural or political access and who could not have afforded the opportunity—including the architects in this book. Through a series of political shifts these people now have real cultural agency—to act in their own behalf, to represent themselves in a larger physical and social context through building projects. For instance, many of these projects are cultural centers or museums that have as a mission nurturing a local culture, revealing that culture to others from the global community, or reconciling aspects of cultural or political interaction. Such building programs are not benign. Usually the projects are for institutions that explicitly or implicitly address issues of inequality and historical disproportion—but may also be unfamiliar or even antithetical to the culture of the people they are meant to serve. Usually these projects threaten those who used to hold power by making physical and

Building Change

34

spatial the revised structure of power—raising the possibility of backlash. Usually racism has been a key factor that must be recognized and addressed in the cultural and political tensions. And usually the architects for these new places are at the very least educated in the framework of the white Western European culture that has been the primary source of the tension in the first place. The architectural questions these situations raise are messy and difficult. There is no way to avoid the fact that the structures that house such institutions are symbolic on many levels. Their mere existence is political, much less their form and expression. In some instances, the building is the first time that the people have had an opportunity to represent themselves in the contemporary world. This places particularly heavy demands upon both the architecture of such buildings and the architects. Each instance of this kind of project is unique. While they may share many of the same issues, the architectural strategies for addressing these issues are by necessity different in each situation. Indeed, these strategies must be fine-tuned to the politics, history, context, decision-making strategies, cultural and spatial habits and modes of interaction of the particular group of people involved. The buildings themselves become part of the process of telling more complete histories, of giving voice to the silenced, of reconciling historical victims and victimizers, and of manifesting in physical, lived space the presence of once-marginalized people. At their best, these projects complicate accepted history by asserting the agency of those often thought to be victims. By translating the complexities of the situation into built form, they are given depth, dimension, individuality and physical, spatial solidity. These kinds of projects are also, of course, implicated in the processes of apology, guilt, restitution, reconciliation and profound cultural change. They are sometimes happening at the same time as the reclamation of “tradition” for the people: a process that selectively winds back the clock to a particular period (sometimes a different period for different slices of culture—this era for clothing, this for dwellings, this for dance and ritual). Simultaneously, there may be an attempt to revitalize languages, often all but lost to daily usage. The selection of architects for such projects, the strategies they use in design, and materials and techniques of construction they employ are implicated as well. Can an architect from outside of the culture really understand the subtleties of the project? Are the usual practice modes of architecture appropriate for these projects? How far does an architect go in trying to adapt “traditional” building techniques and materials to the new building? Is this appropriate? Desirable? Even reasonable? What about a culture that has little or no practice of building, like the Aborigines of Australia? To frame and focus the wide range of architectural issues the contemporary shifts in spatial power and cultural agency suggest, I have tracked the stories of four recent buildings.4 The projects were selected because each has an overt cultural and political purpose deeply linked to historical conflicts, shifts in power and to future hopes. In each case the project is located in a physical place with profound historical and cultural connections. In each case, the architects took on these complex circumstances as the crucial context of the project and deployed the cultural agency of architecture in service of proactive social change. This decision led to a distinct design process as well as a highly specific architectural product. These four projects are discussed not only in terms of the global issues surrounding them, but also in specific terms of the physical, political,

Power, space and architecture

35

spatial, cultural and historical setting, the selection of the architect, the process of design, the construction and use of technology, the qualities of the finished project, and the way in which the project operates on a day-to-day basis. While they share a great deal in common, however, each project is unique. And each allows a different perspective on the rapidly changing political dynamics of cultural agency and spatial power that continues to unfold across the globe. The case studies presented here are: The Tjibaou Cultural Centre in the French Overseas Territory of New Caledonia for the Kanak people by the Renzo Piano Building Workshop; The Uluru-Kata Tjuta Cultural Centre at Uluru (Ayers Rock) in Central Australia for the Anangu Aboriginal people by Melbourne-based Gregory Burgess; the Museum of Struggle in New Brighton, Port Elizabeth, South Africa for the Citizens of South Africa by South African architects Noero and Wolff; and the new headquarters building for the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, Alabama by Erdy McHenry Architecture of Philadelphia. The Tjibaou Cultural Centre project raises the question of how an architect represents an oppressed and tattered culture primarily to itself, as well as to outsiders. How does one create a context for the revitalization of cultural dignity? What exactly is represented in the building, who chooses which aspects of culture are embedded, and what role can architecture play in reviving a culture? Its role, as the only one of Mitterrand’s Grands Projets outside of France requires a close analysis of the idea of agency, as well as motivation, in

1.5 Locations of the project in the following chapters the instigation of such projects. Finally, the Tjibaou Cultural Centre’s startling form, imported, highly crafted materials, and advanced structural system calls into question the appropriateness of certain globally available means of production while simultaneously representing contested aspirations to cultural global sophistication. Like the deployment of cell phone technology in India, this technological strategy leapfrogs over locally available, but comparatively crude, imported construction technologies. The Uluru-Kata Tjuta Cultural Centre makes the Aboriginal people of Uluru visible in a way they have not been before. The project leads to a discussion of how a culture with an extremely limited building practice is manifested through architecture and how a

Building Change

36

building explicitly for a particular culture—but not representing it—can have direct relevance for it. In such a case, how is one to understand strategies of technology and construction, materials, and form? These questions are intimately bound up in issues of tourism in this case, as well as in the issues arising from a gross historical imbalance of physical, political and cultural power. In addition, the reclaiming and exercise of cultural agency, in all aspects of such a project, is highlighted. This project also raises the question of how an architect from outside the culture can serve as a translator in a cultural context. And finally the question of what is revealed and what is concealed about a culture through architecture is explicitly embodied in this project. The Museum of Struggle, while not an active cultural center, is built in memory of the latest raw and unresolved cultural conflict in the tragic history of South Africa: apartheid, and the sustained resistance against it. The project raises in the most overt terms the issues of power and how it is represented in architecture through the materials and stylistic references of the building and its construction technology. Here, the relationship between constructed space and the cultural and curatorial program for the building is raised as an explicit political issue. Here also, the notion of a single interpretation of culture and politics portrayed through a building is explicitly called into question. Finally, because the Museum is about an ongoing cultural process of the architects’ own place, the project brings up the issues of how architects become citizen activists in this sort of politicized environment and project. The inclusion of the Southern Poverty Law Center expands the discussion by introducing a range of issues raised by private, non-governmental institutions working for legal, cultural and political change. While this is a far different situation than a sanctioned cultural institution, these organizations often occupy the margins of power and operate in an unfriendly atmosphere. How can such institutions make their presence known in physical space? Like the Museum of Struggle, the SPLC project raises issues of the representation of power, but here the context is an ongoing adversarial one. The question of the authority carried by architectural style is also raised here with modernism and neoclassicism face to face. In addition, the possible power and symbolic nature of the site, and the relationship between the larger context and the building, is highlighted with this project. Finally, the controversial SPLC raises the all-too-current issue of providing, through architecture, security for a building and its inhabitants, while also projecting a civic image. Since these are ongoing stories with unknowable outcomes and with multiple points of view that are unlikely to be reconciled in the near future, it would be unwise and unjustified to claim any kind of singular set of insights from these investigations. Taken together, however, the projects reveal a world where the imaginative capacity of architecture is fundamental and is reinvigorated by new inspirations and challenges. It also provides architects a new perspective on where they might make, through their work, a significant contribution to the spatialization of political and cultural change. Finally, these projects suggest that for those architects willing to proactively wield its agency, architecture is not just a slave to those in power. Indeed, it has the potential to be a vital and significant cultural practice that contributes to positive social change.

Chapter 2 Building Future Tjibaou Cultural Centre The return to tradition is a myth. No people has ever achieved that. The search for identity, for a model, I believe lies before us. (Jean-Marie Tjibaou as quoted by the Renzo Piano Building Workshop 1998)

In June 1998, while Renzo Piano was in Washington, DC to receive the Pritzker Prize, his newly completed Centre Culturel Tjibaou (Tjibaou Cultural Centre) opened to the public half the world away. The project for the indigenous Kanak people of New Caledonia had been anticipated by the architectural community worldwide since the Renzo Piano Building Workshop had won the commission in a 1991 competition. The competition and the development of the project were the subject of numerous articles in international architectural journals through the early and mid-1990s. Upon project completion, a steady stream of architectural journalists and photographers made the pilgrimage to New Caledonia to document and report on the building. And the resulting steady stream of articles praised the project from the usual formal perspectives for its startling invention, its skillful siting, its refined construction and its unabashed beauty. Due to the setting, history and nature of the building program, many of these articles step beyond the usual analysis of building-as-formal-product to praise Piano’s dedication to working with the Kanak people throughout the design of the project to ensure that their culture would be embodied in the result. In fact, it is quite clear that the project could never have taken on its distinctive form if it were not for its cultural and political context. Despite the critical acclaim, it is these particular cultural and historical circumstances that call into question the formal qualities, technology and

Building Change

38

2.1 Aerial view Looking past the Jean-Marie Tjibaou Cultural Center of the quiet lagoon beyond means of production of the project. At second look these appear to be fraught with environmental, cultural and postcolonial difficulties. A number of scholars have asked difficult questions of the project. Is this, as one of Mitterrand’s Grands Projets, only a new, passive-aggressive extension of 150 years of colonialism? Is it postcolonial patronizing? What purposes do Piano’s technological innovations serve in this context? Why did he not use local building materials and technology? What, after all, are the implications of designing a project that requires, for example, mahogany cut from forests in Africa to be shipped to France for intensive shaping, gluing and forming, then to be shipped again half way around the world to New Caledonia where it is moved by truck to the site of a building whose purpose is to house the continuing cultural development of a people whose culture was severely injured by the French in the first place? These questions cannot easily be answered given the complex relationship between the Kanak, the French and the continuing colonial exploitation of New Caledonia. New Caledonia sits on the western edge of Oceania, about 1,000 kilometers off the eastern coast of Australia. In 1999, it ceased to be a French Overseas Territory, but remains an entity within France. It consists of a main island, Grande Terre, over 480 kilometers long, and several outlying islands. When Captain James Cook, the first European to come to the islands, arrived in 1774, at least twenty-seven distinct languages were spoken among the indigenous Melanesian peoples of the islands. Related ethnically and culturally to the people of New Guinea, where half of the world’s languages still reside, the people of New Caledonia divided and differentiated themselves by developing distinctly different languages and by maintaining rigid territorial boundaries and systematic isolation. The rugged terrain of the islands was perfect for this strategy. The

Building future

39

clans lived in fertile valleys and cultivated yam, taro, manioc and other crops. The ridges became natural boundaries, crossed only by raiding parties or for inter-tribal marriage. Cook, with his open mind and wide experience at first cultural contact, found the people “robust and active, courteous and friendly, of honest nature and the women modest”. Cook clearly did not encounter the cannibalism of enemy dead that was a ritual part of life on the island; a practice that appalled subsequent European visitors. In a perpetuation of the colonial tendency to name places, Cook dubbed the islands New Caledonia because they reminded him of the rugged Scottish highlands, named Caledonia by the conquering Romans. However, the history of the indigenous people of New Caledonia after this initial contact with Cook is shamefully similar to the stories of colonized indigenous peoples worldwide. The French, searching for colonial opportunities in the Pacific, arrived fourteen years later with a very different agenda. Early curiosity on the islanders’ part quickly gave way to hostility when the occupation by foreigners led to decimation of the population through introduced diseases, removal from ancestral lands, desecration of sacred sites, destruction of cultural artifacts and traditions, and insistence on the superiority of the introduced culture.

2.2 Location of new Caledonia Additional calamity for the indigenous people set in when the island group became a French colony in 1853. During this process, the French finally destroyed tribal groupings and resettled individuals from different tribal and language groups together onto reservations. In less than two years, the local chiefly system was destroyed, and the Melanesians were dispossessed of nine-tenths of their best land and pushed into the mountain interior. Assuming that the Melanesians would soon disappear, the French employed a policy they had used in Algeria— refoulement—which meant that Melanesians were regrouped arbitrarily

Building Change

40

and stationed on limited reserves which in fact were infringed on little by little, or were situated in infertile zones not favored by the colons. (Myriam Dornoy as quoted by Davis 2001:97) Given their strong tribal allegiance as well as language diversity, this random assignment to reservations was particularly disruptive for the indigenous people. However, it was also a particularly effective way of diffusing resistance. It is impossible not to think of God and the people of Babel. The Melanesians, with a warrior tradition, often violently resisted the treatment by the French. Many armed skirmishes and conflicts occurred. Perhaps the most bloody was the uprising of 1878 when the previously divided tribes undertook a unified effort to get rid of the French. Over 200 colonists were killed in raids on cattle stations and settlements. The colonists response was a slaughter of the native peoples regardless of their involvement in the revolt (the number of native dead was never tallied) as well as devastation of agricultural fields and the landscape. The historical memory of the whole ordeal is complicated by the fact that a number of native Melanesians from the more French-influenced west coast tribes participated as mercenaries in the retaliatory strikes. While the Melanesians were defeated in their attempts to regain control over their land, they learned an important lesson through this uprising: there is great strength in unity, in numbers. This required, however, a new way of thinking for the highly tribalized people of the islands. It required that they put aside tribal distrust, conflicts and differentiation in order to form a singular entity to resist continued French incursion. It required them, in the end, to become “The Canaque”—the term used by the French to designate all of the indigenous people of what became New Caledonia regardless of their home territory or of the previous elaborate language distinctions among them. So, in the effort to resist the colonization, dehumanization and purposeful dissolution of their tribal associations, the indigenous people of New Caledonia became the singular, seemingly undifferentiated “natives” that the French perceived them to be. While originally meant as derogatory, the Kanak have co-opted this term and have turned it into a label of pride and unity. When independence from France, targeted for 2008, is finally achieved, the island group will likely be renamed “Kanaky”. For the French, the 1878 uprising signaled a need for much greater scrutiny and control of the indigenous population. The result was the indigénat system that legalized segregation, excluded the Kanak from French common law, halted inter-island trading, confined the Kanak on their reservations, instituted a system of forced labor and continued the destruction of ties to sacred sites. This system remained in place until 1946. Only then did the Kanak begin to move freely off the reservations. While the plight of the Kanak became somewhat better when the world began to decolonialize after the Second World War, history, racism and lack of educational and economic opportunity continue to plague their position in the modern life and prosperity of New Caledonia. The Kanak only automatically became French citizens in 1946 when the status of New Caledonia was changed from a colony to a French Overseas Territory. The general right to vote was granted only in 1957. Still, today, the Kanak remain a predominantly rural people, working as farmers, miners and laborers. In the capital, Noumea, where rural Kanaks flock to try to find work, they are exposed to the latest in international technology: imported BMW convertibles, the fastest computers, French

Building future

41

high fashion and domestic conveniences of every description. However, due to economic stratification and the high prices on imports, these things are almost categorically out of the reach of the Kanak. It might initially seem puzzling that the French have held on so tenaciously to New Caledonia, especially in the face of such stiff protests from the Kanak and pointed international criticism. However, the island group contains thirty percent of the world’s nickel deposits—a fact that led to huge profits during the nickel boom of the 1950s and 1960s. The boom transformed both the landscape and the social dynamics of the island group. Kanak farmers left their villages to work for wages in the mines. Grazing land became strip-mined moonscapes. And Noumea became a more prosperous city. The French government remains in strict control of the nickel industry even today. In addition to nickel, Grande Terre has large deposits of iron, manganese and chrome. In the course of the development of international discourse about civil rights in the 1960s, certain Kanak leaders became quite articulate about their place, not only on the political margins of New Caledonian life, but also its geographical and cultural margins. Edward Said’s point about colonial transformation of landscape is evidenced in subtropical and rugged New Caledonia where the environment has been transformed during its 150 years of colonial rule to reflect France as much as possible. This transformation of the landscape, along with the imposition of the French language, and imitation of the cultural spaces, activities and behaviors of the colonizing nation made the

2.3 Surface nickel mine in new Caledonia grazing land and urbanized parts of New Caledonia foreign to the Kanak. The Kanak were pushed off their traditional lands on the fertile and less rugged west coast and resettled on marginal lands in the steep interior. The villages and small farm plots of the coastal area were replaced by vast ranches and plantations owned and operated by

Building Change

42

wealthy European settlers. As for Noumea, while it was a very long way from living up to its name as “The Paris of the Pacific”, it was significantly larger and more sophisticated than any other town on the islands. The Kanak became completely marginalized. Their own landscape, languages and cultural spaces were systematically destroyed and devalued in the process—held to be “primitive” in the terms of the imposed French culture. As a key leader of the Kanak Liberation movement, Jean-Marie Tjibaou put it, “While I can share what I have of French culture with a non-Kanak in this country today, it is impossible for him to share with me the universal aspects of my culture” (RPBW 1998). Today, Kanaks make up only forty-five percent of New Caledonia’s population of approximately 200,000. Of the remaining fifty-five percent of the population, thirty-four percent are of European descent (roughly half of French descent born in New Caledonia (known locally as the Caldoches), the other half mostly recent French arrivals posted to the Territory for high-paying jobs). A clear cultural and attitudinal schism separates these two European groups, with the Caldoches being far more conservative. The remaining twenty-one percent of the non-Kanak population is made up of the various communities who have come over the years to find work in New Caledonia, mostly in mining. These include Indonesians, Polynesians, Vietnamese and Japanese. In 1988, the most recent outbreak of violence between the Kanak and the French threatened the Territory with outright civil war. This round of violence was the result of years of political struggle on the part of the Kanak to reclaim their land, throw off French rule, gain greater equality in education and access to power, and so on. The struggle took on a particularly keen edge when the Kanak population fell to less than half the population. It also had within it a range of factions who were often rancorously divided on the extent of accommodation to the French occupation. The most radical Kanak wanted to see all white people thrown off the islands. Others wished only for full independence from France along with equal participation in the cultural and governmental life of the nation. The civil war was averted by the negotiation and signing of the Matignon-Oudinot Accords. The leader who negotiated the Accord for the Kanak was Jean-Marie Tjibaou who argued unrelentingly that cultural production and presence was essential to Kanak political inclusion. “For me”, Tjibaou said, “culture is capital; it is the thing which gives sustenance to life.” The Accord included, at the insistence of the Kanak, the explicit support and development of Kanak culture as an integrated part of the dominant French New Caledonian culture. This was to be achieved through the establishment and funding of the Agence de Development de la Culture Kanak (Agency for the Development of Kanak Culture (ADCK)). Tjibaou was adamant that this Agency should have a cultural center, and that it must be located in Noumea, the mostly white capital, and not in some remote rural location where it would be marginalized from the beginning by its geography. The center would not only present and preserve what was left of traditional Kanak culture, dance, art and language, but would allow for its development and interaction with other Pacific Islanders and the world.1

Building future

43

2.4 Jean-Marie Tjibaou Photo by James Clifford A cultural center, as an idea, is not Kanak. However, because of the marginalization and homogenization of the Kanak over 130 years of colonial rule, the reconstitution of Kanak dignity, in part through the formulation of a living cultural identity, was a key first step. The Kanak needed to understand and believe that their culture was not dead; killed off by colonization and by the seeming irrelevance to international culture. Tjibaou began, as early as 1975, to prove this point when he gathered over 15,000 Kanaks from all over New Caledonia for a cultural festival called “Melanesia 2000”. The festival included performances of dance and music, ritual exchanges and recognition and feasting. Tjibaou clearly understood Said’s point about cultural activity prefiguring the repossession of land and was also interested in the repatriation of cultural artifacts carried off over the years by the Europeans. He worked tirelessly toward the idea that a key to a vibrant future for the Kanak was a kind of cultural reinvention that brought forward what they had into a constructive dialog with the present. A former priest and passionate advocate of the non-violence of Ghandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr, Tjibaou was assassinated by a Kanak extremist one year after the signing of the Accord. This assassination shocked everyone and demonstrated the need for an immediate gesture from the French to avoid a new cycle of violence. In 1989, the French government committed to building a cultural center, which appropriately bears Tjibaou’s name. In a move that might be interpreted either as a masterful public-relations pseudo-

Building Change

44

apology, as cynical postcolonial grandstanding, or perhaps as both, François Mitterrand included the cultural center for the Kanak on the list of major building projects that would serve as a legacy of his government. As noted in Chapter 1, Mitterrand was acutely aware of the cultural power of architecture, and the Tjibaou Cultural Centre is the only one of the so-called Grands Projets to be located outside France. And so the colonizers co-opted the project that the Kanak had to threaten violence in order to achieve. The building could, in this way, appear to the outside world to be a gift from the kindly, paternalistic French to exhibit an enlightened postcolonial attitude. The high profile international competition for the building only further emphasized this grandiose gesture of the French. As he began the competition, Piano was compelled to address with this building the exhausted, cynical and justifiably angry Kanak people. Marginalized for generations in their own land to the point of taking up weapons in order to make themselves heard, the Kanak had little reason to believe that this project was going to serve their best interests. It must have been hard to accept this French gesture, no matter how large, when it was made under duress, and seemed so small in comparison to the size, duration and brutality of colonial offenses—the most recent one a massacre of some twenty Kanak rebels in 1988. “Ambiguity haunted this facility”, writes Alban Bensa, the anthropologist who worked with Piano throughout the project (Bensa 1996).

2.5 Tjibaou Cultural Centre from across the bay When Piano assembled his Building Workshop team for the competition for this project, it included Paul Vincent, his Associate in Paris, and Alban Bensa, the noted anthropologist with specialized knowledge of the Kanak people. The inclusion of the articulate and politicized Bensa on the team assured from the outset that Piano, already sensitized to the issues, had an understanding of the highly politicized situation he was entering. There was no way to avoid the fact that the building would be taken symbolically: for better or worse. “I had to create a symbol”, says Piano, “a cultural center devoted to Kanak civilization, the place that would represent them to foreigners and that would pass on their memory to their grandchildren. Nothing could have been more loaded with symbolic expectations” (Piano 1997:174).

Building future

45

With this, Piano entered the difficult terrain in today’s poststructuralist world and committed himself to a politicized and symbolic project. The story of how the project came to look like it does demonstrates that Piano sought to return the building to the Kanak; in concept, in space, and in expression. He took to heart Jean-Marie Tjibaou’s declaration that the path to take in the search for identity was one that led forward into the future, not backward into some unknowable and idealized past. The Kanak people hold Piano in continued respect for the way that he approached the project. In particular, the consultative way the Building Workshop operates—with meetings, workshops and dialog—was particularly successful. Emmanuel Kasarherou, Cultural Director of the Centre said: From the beginning, Renzo Piano had a deep understanding of the need for a unique building. He understood the Kanak spirit in a way that the other competitors did not. He was open-minded and could admit when he needed help. (Kasarherou 1998) Before European intrusion, a Kanak’s particular geographical place was a defining quality of his or her being. With a rugged landscape and a culture that incorporated suspicion of strangers, Kanak language groups grew up isolated from one another; confined and identified by geographical enclosure. The extent of this interaction with the landscape is made vivid in the writings of Maurice Leenhardt, a French missionary to New Caledonia who, because of his time there, later became an anthropologist: Where each stone has a name, a history, a life, we might even say a personality, resulting from the spirit enclosed within it. Often in [remote] valleys I’ve asked the name for every detail of the land, each notable tree; and the landscape transposes itself into a scheme it would be impossible to transcribe on any map, in which each name is title to a chapter. (Leenhardt as quoted by Clifford 1982:169) This attachment to place, and the language that went with it, made the displacement imposed by the French particularly devastating for Kanak identity. People were removed from the valley or mountain shoulder that was the center of their world and placed on reservations with strangers. However, the embedding of the culture in the landscape, a way of living primarily outside of buildings, and the use, appreciation and cultural signification of stones and plants, has survived beyond forced removal into the present day. This connection to the land is one of the primary ways that Piano connected the project to the Kanak people.

Building Change

46

2.6 Large rock outcrop on the rugged east coast of Grande Terre The site for the project, the Tina Peninsula, is on the outskirts of Noumea, New Caledonia’s unsentimental capital of 70,000 inhabitants. The Agency for the Development of Kanak Culture (ADCK) had initially wanted the project in Noumea proper as a forceful cultural presence in the midst of the very French city, and were at first dismayed at the relative remoteness of the site ten kilometers from the city’s center. However, they ultimately accepted the site, since it was also the location of the Melanesia 2000 festival organized by Tjibaou. Given the Kanak tie to landscapes that carry memory, the Tina Peninsula had real power. The slim finger of the peninsula divides a tranquil lagoon from a bay connected to the ocean. The quiet lagoon side is lined with dense mangroves rising out of the water’s edge. Originally other native trees covered the peninsula, with the exception of a wellworn path along the small ridge that ran the length of the peninsula, and a clearing off the path near the center of the site. The bay side of the small ridge was more wind-swept and showed signs of having survived fierce storms. On his first visit to the site Piano sketched three ideas that were woven with a number of Kanak traditions about nature and the landscape throughout the site development: the intense heat of the subtropical sun; the almost constant presence of wind; and an image of the cross-section of the site in which the building would reinforce the natural protection the ridge provided for the ecology of the lagoon—giving the site two very different faces. In addition, Piano saw the many existing trees as a site asset that should be kept. Maintaining the vegetation suggested that the building should keep to the path and clearing.

Building future

47

2.7 Sketch done by piano during his first visit to the building site

Building Change

48

Alban Bensa helped the Workshop to understand that buildings were not primary to the way the Kanak conceptualized their space. With the mild sub-tropical climate of New Caledonia, there was little need to develop elaborate buildings. Instead, the Kanak developed and constructed a deep and subtle relationship with the landscape. Large stones, great trees and rock outcroppings bear proper names and have important stories that accompany them. Native vegetation is used not only for food and medicinal production, but is transplanted and used as cultural markers of boundary, places of taboo, entrance, greeting, and occupation as well. For instance, the towering thin columnar pine, the male symbol, is planted alongside the female symbol, the coconut tree, wherever there is a settlement, thus marking human occupation in an otherwise low-growing landscape. A low long-leafed cordilyne plant, with red coloring, marks the thresholds and edges of places that are taboo, warning people away. A similar plant without the red but, rather, with extravagant green coloring, keeps out bad spirits and serves as a sign of welcome at entrances where a stranger may set foot. This plant language of inhabitation and boundary is legible in the landscape. It’s [the landscape] not wild, it has been used for 3000 years by people and if you know a bit about the plants you will notice plants which indicate where the villages were, where the old gardens were, where the cemetery was and so on…. You can read it. You can read the landscape if you know it. Because for us our history is not in books, it’s just in the knowledge of people and the landscape. Everything is in the landscape, even our names. Our names are of very specific places in the country and we are linked with it. So this is very very important to us. I think it’s the kind of thing you can see all over the Pacific. (Emmanuel Kasarherou quoted by de Blas 2000) While the Kanak had no monumental or permanent buildings, they did have a technique of building passed on through generations—one of small, wood-frame buildings erected on earthen bases and topped with thatch roofs. These buildings were called cases by the French—a word used specifically for South Pacific island huts. Due to the sub-tropical climate and the limited durability of available building materials, these structures had to be renewed periodically. The form of the buildings differed from island to island; while on some islands in the group they were rectangular in plan, on Grande Terre they were round with conical roofs (Miyake 1998). The Kanak also had a pattern for grouping buildings into villages, with the head man’s house (or grande case) at the end of a long, open public allee (again, a French term) formed by other houses lining either side. The allee was a well-tended, closely cropped lawn

Building future

49

2.8 Section drawing of the traditional Kanak case lined with trees, providing a shady central gathering place. Buildings were seldom placed close together, and the landscape always slid between them. Due to the nature of the buildings and the lush vegetation, the village was always being renewed, and was never completed. As long as this pattern of inhabiting a place was unbroken, there was little need for a heritage of permanent buildings. The activity itself served as the cultural link to the past. The landscape focus of the Kanak people, overlaid with Piano’s experience and reading of the site, became the place where the Building Workshop began its design. First they had to devise a strategy for a building program of 8,550 square meters (85,500 square feet), that would incorporate in a deep, rather than superficial, way the landscape traditions and habitation sensibilities of the Kanak, while answering the demands of a state-of-the-art cultural center. The team began conceptualizing how to break down the scale and bulk of the building and connect its pieces to the landscape, to create a scale that would be more familiar to the Kanak who would be using it. “As an expression of a link with nature”, Piano wrote, “which constitutes age-old tradition the Centre is not, could not be, enclosed in a monumental form. For this reason, it is not about a unique edifice: it is an ensemble of villages and of stands of trees, of functions and paths, full and empty spaces” (RPBW 1998). This attitude led to a site strategy of using the existing path along the peninsula ridge as an allee, not unlike the open allees in Kanak villages. This one, however is transformed to become exceedingly long and narrow by comparison, and is covered to protect people from the intense sun and frequent rain. The program elements are strung along this allee, with openings in between them to allow the inhabitants of the building to

Building Change

50

always be connected to the landscape and the elements. On the side facing the tradewinds, the allee is lined with glass—sliding doors and glass jalousies allow visual access to the landscape, but can be closed to block excessive wind. On the leeward side, openings include atria that are open to the sky alternating with pedestrian openings onto the garden. Wherever possible there is a blurring of the boundaries between inside and outside. At these open-air points, the concrete-stabilized earth floor of the allee moves seamlessly out from under the roof into the gardens to become meandering paths. Natural ventilation is used wherever the building program would allow, further obscuring this distinction. Service and storage areas, along with the vast space of the state-of-the-art 400-seat auditorium are pushed into the ground to reduce building bulk and leave much of the site unbuilt. Parking is moved off the peninsula toward the mainland so that people can approach the building on foot through the landscape. Of course, placing so much of the building program underground meant that an enormous hole had to be excavated during construction—not exactly the gentle gesture on the landscape the Kanak might have wished for. Today, however, the site wound is healed, and the project appears as a collection of light pieces gathered along the allee and opening onto the site. Further refinements were made to the basic landscape ideas after Piano won the competition. At this point he was able to include the clients on the Workshop Team. Octave Tonga, the Director of the Centre, Marie-Claude Tjibaou, President of the Agency for the Development of Kanak Culture and Jean-Marie’s widow, and other Kanak people provided new insights into Kanak understandings of dwelling in the landscape. As a result, the deeply embedded relationship to nature is further cultivated at the Centre in the Kanak Path, an interpretive path that organizes a series of landscapes along a wandering walkway between the building and the lagoon. The Path ties large, carefully placed rocks and local vegetation to the Kanak creation story—particularly the arrival of Téâ Kanaké, the first person and the creator of the world. Further along the Path are plants that are in symbolic and daily cultivation including taro (a wet plant, grown by women) and yam (a dry plant grown by men). A third section of the Kanak Path demonstrates the plants and landscape organization around dwelling places. The fourth addresses the Kanak understanding of the relationship between the visible and invisible world. Here, too, a number of plants contain this meaning. Finally, at the end of the Path, is a garden of rebirth—a place that recognizes that the historical ancestor, Téâ Kanaké, after he made the world, died, but then came back to life. This, explains Emmanuel Kasarherou, is a kind of allegory of the Kanak history and also, here, everybody thought at the beginning of this century that at the end of the 20th century there wouldn’t be any Kanak people who will be still living. Everybody would be erased because of colonization, health problems and so on. This is our statement to say we are still here and we come back with our cultural hero and when we come back we see the cultural centre. (Kasarherou as quoted by de Blas 2000)

Building future

51

2.9 Site plan of the Cultural Centre showing two approaches: the normal pedestrian path and the Kanak Path

Building Change

52

2.10 Interior allee of the Cultural Center, with shaded, open-air atrium

2.11 Looking through the allee from the windward exterior lawn

Building future

53

2.12 Section through Cultural Centre showing 400-seat theater excavated into the ground

Building Change

54

2.13 Aerial view of Cultural Centre showing parking at distance from building. Visitors approach by foot along roadway to the left, then wind to the right just before the building During the opening days of the Centre, the Kanak Path was crowded with Kanak people clearly excited by the recognition of their well-known stories and their landscape at this

Building future

55

new place. For non-Kanak people it unveils and makes more legible the rural New Caledonian landscape as well as the deep violence done to the Kanak through colonial displacement. Kanak ways of moving through the landscape are also incorporated. Kanak tradition holds that an indirect path is the proper way to approach a building, especially the dwelling of an important person. As a result of this, the entrance to the Cultural Centre is not at the end of the allee, where conventional Western architectural logic would have it. Instead, one follows a path that approaches the end of the building, then swings away from it, wanders through a garden and toward the lagoon, up a small rise, then turns toward the building to enter it under a wide porch along the side. For an even more meandering approach, one can take the Kanak Path, which wanders three-quarters of the way around the building, allowing entry mid-way along the bay side, under the café porch. While first time non-Kanak visitors search in goal-oriented confusion for the entrance, Kanak visitors walk calmly toward it (see Figure 2.9). Finally, many mature tall columnar pines and coconut trees have been transplanted to the site, and the building is surrounded by lawns. The fully mature trees were donated by several Kanak villages and shipped by flatbed truck to the site. These crucial elements of an inhabited Kanak landscape are essential to making the Kanak feel “at home” with the project. The vertical pines mark the inhabitation of the site, while the coconuts symbolize sheltering female qualities. Emmanual Kasarherou states: “It was very intelligent to use the landscape to introduce the building. This is a way the Kanak people

2.14 Entry to building, with theater to the right can understand” (Kasarherou 1998). This sort of embedding of the project in the landscape would not have been possible on a more limited site in the center of Noumea.

Building Change

56

In the end, the Tina Peninsula has turned out to be the ideal site—rural enough to be comfortable for the Kanak who come to it from small towns and villages, yet close enough to Noumea to be easily accessible to visitors, tourists and participants in cultural activities, and to provide access to urban infrastructure and services. So Piano appears to have found an appropriate site strategy through the disposition of the building on the site, the development of the landscape, and the inclusion of familiar elements. However, the site strategy as stated does not yet hold anything that would suggest building form or technology—except for the suggestion that passive strategies for ventilation should be used to help maintain connection to the landscape. Much more difficult, and perhaps more controversial, was discovering the form and materials the building should take. The local building industry in New Caledonia has a very limited repertoire of construction materials: almost every building is made of reinforced concrete frame with terra cotta or concrete block infill. Local steel fabrication is limited primarily to the rough, functional work needed by the huge nickel mining industry of the territory. The only refined building craft tradition found locally is carpentry and cabinet-making. This dearth of construction options made two things clear: first, that such an impoverished material range was not likely to supply the symbolic and cultural presence needed in this project, and second, given Piano’s obvious dedication to elegant buildings, local skills and technology could only make a limited contribution. It was almost a foregone conclusion that much of the building materials and

2.15 Transplating pines technology would have to be imported, especially if the building was to live up to its French role as the last of the Grands Projects. This did not create an obstacle for Piano—instead it points to another reason why his selection as architect for this project was fortuitous. The RPBW commonly uses a kit-ofparts approach for its projects. This derives in part from a refined modernist sensibility

Building future

57

about repetition and pattern, as well as a concern about quality of construction. The repetition and prefabrication achieves economy of scale and efficiency of construction, freeing up a larger portion of the budget for investigation and invention. In New Caledonia, it also comes from a commitment to designing connections and details specifically for the poetic forms of the cases. In this sense, Piano seems to have integrated into his ongoing work lessons from Peter Rice, the engineer and Piano’s collaborator on the Centre Pompidou in Paris. While he could just as well be speaking about the Tjibaou Cultural Centre, Rice explains the casting of important building components of the Pompidou in this way: By using the castings as the main building joints, the shapes and form were liberated from the standard industrial language. The public could see the individual design preference. Modern computers and analysis techniques and modern testing methods made this possible. We were back to the freedom of our Victorian forefathers. The individual details were exploited to give a personal design philosophy full rein. The final design was of course the work of more than one person. Many architects, engineers and craftsmen at the foundry contributed to the actual shape of each piece. And each piece was subject to the rigors of detailed structural analysis to ensure that it was fit for its purpose in every way and this too influenced the shape and final configuration. But this does not matter. The pieces are indeed better for all the different expertise which went into their make-up. They are more logical, more self-evidently correct in their form. What matters is that they are free of industrial tyranny. (Rice as quoted by Frampton 1996:386) With the kit-of-parts approach, the pieces could be fabricated overseas, then shipped to the site, where less-skilled local labor could put it all together. This is the very practice that was used by Gustav Eiffel for his many train station projects in South America. It allowed the latest in building technology to be used to create large buildings in parts of the world where the technology would not otherwise be available for buildings of such scale. It might be argued that this view of technology and building is a type of colonization: that it Europeanizes a response to place and to a people, ignoring local sensibilities, scales and patterns of use. In the case of Eiffel and

Building Change

58

2.16 Kit-of-parts for the base of the glulams that make up the cases

Building future

59

2.17 Base of glulams the trains that were being introduced to South America at the turn of the century, there was no local tradition of building that could possibly contain the huge machines. This is also the case, in a different sense, for the Tjibaou Cultural Centre: there is no precedent in Kanak building technology for a large building that accommodates computers, large works of art, studio space for visiting international artists, telephone and fax services, or contemporary dance performances. Historical Kanak construction materials and methods are patently unsuitable, and the locally available imported construction technologies, functional in the extreme, were not any better from either a conceptual or material point of view. Clearly, these technologies also were culturally inappropriate to a building that aspires to contemporary international importance. In addition, the pieces fabricated for the Centre were not “universal” in any sense. They were designed and fabricated specifically for the cases. What is universal, or at least embedded in the processes of globalization, is the fact that the materials and production took place at the locales globally where they might be most efficiently achieved. Then they were delivered to New Caledonia by a global system of transportation.2 At this point in time, the Kanak culture has already been irretrievably altered—it exists right now only in an internationalized condition. It would be patronizing to expect these people to return to their pre-colonial era way of life or technology; to not share in the material prosperity their land has created. Not only would it be patronizing, it would, according to Jean-Marie Tjibaou in the quote that opens this chapter, be unrealistic—and perhaps not even desirable. With the previous life of the Kanak so utterly destroyed, there is only sketchy information on what exactly that life was. In fact, James Clifford suggests that much of what the Kanak now know as their customs was rescued from obscurity by the missionary-turned-anthropologist Maurice Leenhardt who worked in New Caledonia off and on from 1902 right up until the beginning of the Second World War. Clifford transcribes a 1978 testimony from Kanak grand chef Mus:

Building Change

60

From what I know, the old pastor worked for [us] natives, especially in religion, customs and all. So much so that nowadays, for example, if we old ones know pretty well what custom, as they call it, is all about it’s because he sought out our custom and inquired from old people who were knowledgeable; he search deep, deep down. Me, I’ve read his work and that’s how I know. And so I rediscover what our elders used to say, the ones who didn’t tell, and who forgot to tell. That’s where I find this knowledge—such as on the clan, on the family, on customs… Now I can tell you things because I know Leenhardt’s book where you find out about customs before the whites arrived here in Caledonia. (Clifford 1982:225) This is a poignant reminder of the fact that for the Kanak, as for indigenous people all over the world, attempting to reclaim any cultural behaviors and activities as “tradition” is a form of fabrication. It simply cannot be done. Putting aside the rhetoric around the political uses and abuses of the notion of “tradition”, Tjibaou, perhaps from his unique position as a Kanak, ordained as a priest who then studied anthropology in Paris, found the very idea suspect. One always speaks of traditional culture. But what is traditional? It is how others lived before us. But in one hundred years it will be how we are living today that is traditional, and in one thousand years, what we are living today will perhaps be worth its weight in gold! I believe we always have an overly archeological conception of culture; the culture of the past is considered authentic, but that which is of contemporary creation must be proven authentic, perhaps by time. (Tjibaou as quoted by Bensa and Wittersheim 1998:380) Yet, while mounting this criticism of the idea of “tradition”, Tjibaou was adamant about the need for the Kanak people to be actively engaged in the continuing invention and production of the culture of New Caledonia. Bensa and Wittersheim elegantly argue that he understood that for the Kanak to survive and flourish they needed to find a way that was in between some sentimental return to a non-existent past and the adoption of global, internationalized contemporary culture. Tjibaou was seeking a politics that would “allow the new people of Kanaky to edify themselves, and to create an image of themselves which is well rooted, but also new, favorable, and influential” (Tjibaou as quoted by Bensa and Wittersheim 1998:384). And so Piano searched for architectural and tectonic expression that negotiated this difficult path. It has to be said that, quite apart from good intentions, from the rejection of any form of colonialism, and from the respect due other cultures, there was no alternative. A proposal based upon our own models would simply not have worked in New Caledonia. It was not feasible to offer a standard

Building future

61

product of Western architecture, with a layer of camouflage over the top: it would have looked like an armored car covered with palm leaves. (Piano 1997:180) Alban Bensa suggests that the Building Workshop accomplished even more than that: “Local traditions are not copied but transfigured by contemporary architecture, which draws its substance from what is specific in Kanak culture, giving it universal legibility and thus turning towards other civilizations and the future” (Bensa 1996). This suggests that the Cultural Centre proposes a new approach to building in the region. As Piano has proven over and over in his career as an architect, there is no line for him between design and the technical manifestation of the design. The modification and invention of building technology and detail is part and parcel of how he works as an architect, and of how he runs his practice as the Building Workshop. For him: technique means knowing how to integrate the most sophisticated technology with the creative, manual, and intellectual input of the individual; from the architect to whoever participates in the construction and, if possible, also he for whom the architecture is intended. (Zagari quoted by Frampton 1997) With this set of interests, Piano looked to Kanak technology for clues about where to begin. Throughout New Caledonia, one can locate a Kanak house or a village by looking for the great columnar pines that they plant upon occupation of a site. These rise as distinctive vertical markers of inhabitation in the sometimes rugged landscape. Likewise, particularly on Grande Terre, traditional Kanak grande cases are capped by a tall conical thatched roof many times the height of the building. For the competition, Piano took the pine tree and the case as a point of departure for what came to be the iconic forms of the project. He found in the modernist notion of material and structural expression a place where the old might become new. The Kanak cases are circular wood framed structures that rise from a built-up earthen base. Pole rafters rest on exterior walls and meet at the top of a towering central pole. Cross pieces are then lashed between wall posts and between rafters to support the deep thatch of the exterior. The structural dynamics and methods of making are easily discernable in the unfinished interior (see Figure 2.8). Adapting these huts risked a competition entry that might be deemed too picturesque or “folkloric” by the jury. However, the Building Workshop pursued it. They stripped off the thatch and refined the cross pieces as battens with rhythmic spacing. They removed the central pole, opened the pole rafters like petals of a flower to become vertical structures with their tips no longer meeting, and changed the rafters into curved glulam ribs that step down in height as they form the circle, with the tallest opposite the circulation allee. Unlike the Kanak version, however, these did not complete a circle but, rather, only three-fifths of one. These odd new cases, twenty-one of them in all, clustered close together on either side of a long central circulation spine.

Building Change

62

2.18 Competition entry showing twentyone first generation cases scattered throughout the site After winning the competition, the Building Workshop began to refine the design of the cases in terms of both their disposition on the site, and their formal expression. The dread of falling into the trap of folkloric imitation, of straying into the realm of kitsch and the picturesque, was a constant worry throughout this work. At a certain point I decided to tone down the resemblance between “my” hut and those of local tradition, by reducing the length of the vertical elements and giving the shells a more open form. (Piano 1997:180) Through a series of disciplined study models the Renzo Piano Building Workshop (RPBW) transformed and further abstracted the cases. They tilted back the glulams so that they no longer met at the top, but rather opened even further. This made the new cases even less like the ones built by the Kanak. The resulting interior space is a circular room opening onto the allee and roofed with a tilted disc sloped from the entrance toward the high point of the ribs. Once this general form was achieved, the RPBW further refined it in response to the tropical climate and widely varying wind conditions of the site. They developed a double skin system on the walls of the cases to allow the exterior wall to shade the interior wall and leaving a space for a thermal chimney in between. Their wind tunnel tests demonstrated that all the cases should be oriented with their highest sides toward the prevailing wind which gave them both structural and ventilation advantages, and

Building future

63

provided the logic for the spacing of the exterior battens. This orientation would also allow the cases to ride out the typhoons that sometimes strike the islands. This decision resulted in the final strategy of lining up the cases on the windward side of the allee. The architects also tied the glulams together with galvanized steel bracing to form a threedimensional circular truss designed to withstand hurricane force winds. The interior skin consists of louvered panels that are operated by computer to maximize natural cooling. At one point in the design process, the architects, engineers and Kanak on the Building Workshop Team were reviewing the design of the transformed cases. William Vassal relates the story this way: Renzo began to explain all the details, and when he stopped speaking, the main director [Octave Tonga] said, “Yes”, and after a silence, “but no. Maybe it’s very good what you say and what you did, maybe it’s very clever, but it’s not me. I do not recognize myself in what you say and what you show me.” It was a structural meeting, so we were engineers, researchers, contractors, and the client said, “It’s not me.” Can you imagine how amazing it was? Then the anthropologist [Alban Bensa] went into the library, took a small book, looked for pictures with details, and he explained them to us. It was crazy. It was in Paris, with the engineers from Ove Arup, and the anthropologist was explaining about the rope with coconut. But this question remained, how can you translate this in the building? So we stopped the meeting, and a few days later Renzo came back with some small drawings he did, in which the structure he drew was much more easy for us to understand…. He did sketches, we redid drawings and models, and once again there was another meeting with the director. He said, okay….

2.19 Section of building reinforcing the section of the peninsula When you see that steel structure, you can’t say it’s just a redrawing of a traditional hut. But the way the parts go together is easy to understand and logical, like the traditional hut, so it works. We didn’t work in a basic

Building Change

64

way just to copy it, but we tried to understand the spirit and work with that. (William Vassal as quoted by Miyake 1998:108) In the end, the cases have a deep reference to their predecessors, yet become something equally authentic while completely new. They have lost their earthbound sensibility and their solid silhouette. Now they soar up from the ground and, like the pines, their tops feather out against the sky. The edge of building and sky seem to shift over the course of the day and in different light: sometimes making a distinct lace-like pattern, sometimes appearing to blend almost seamlessly. The interior of the new cases, however, lack the mysterious quality of the interiors of the Kanak cases. With the center pole removed and the conical roof replaced by a tilted disc, the height of the ceiling in Piano’s cases is readily discerned. In the Kanak grande cases, the ceiling is lost in the dimness of the tapering depth surrounding the top of the pool. The highest point in the ceiling is lost in the gloom and in the imagination, the space might go on forever.

Building future

65

2.20 Detail of structural expression withen a case

Building Change

66

2.21 Overview of cases with reconsructions of Kanak huts in the foreground The transformed cases by themselves were not sufficient to contain the symbolic and the programmatic demands of the Centre. There needed to be something else, something of the world beyond the shores of New Caledonia—beyond the specific history of this particular colonial occupation. For this Piano chose a clear international vocabulary of horizontally proportioned glass and steel flat-roofed boxes, modified for the climate. The double roofs, for instance, extend far beyond the glass walls to form deep shaded porches. These provide a visual and cultural foil for the soaring curving shapes of the cases. Piano says: Above all, (it was) to be a project synonymous with peace, enabling valuable dialogue to be established with the other communities in the territory and throughout the Pacific. It should enable the Melanese to express their cultural roots and to empress upon this magical location their identity and their open-mindedness with regard to the future. The strength of the building and of its setting must be inherent in the gentle but clearly affirmed transition between the earliest Kanak culture and the innovative demands of modernity. Indeed, we must bear in mind that we are at the threshold of the 21st century and that we can use a certain type of technology, advanced but kind, compatible with the notion of memory, not opposed or unsuited to it. We have to reconcile modernity and technology with nature and tradition. (RPBW 1998)

Building future

67

Having determined that minimal construction and fabrications skills and technology existed in New Caledonia, RPBW began looking globally for

2.22 View of wide porches at the water end of the building the best materials possible. For the cases they wanted wood that was sustainably harvested, was unusually stable and therefore could be laminated in large pieces, had natural insect repelling qualities, and would require little maintenance. They found iroko, a kind of mahogany grown in Guinea that is insect and moisture resistant and ages to a silvery gray over time. The fabrication of the wood into the giant “glulam” ribs used for the cases could only be accomplished at five fabricators world-wide. The largest of these ribs is thirty meters (100 feet) long. Piano’s Paris-based team sensibly chose to work with a fabricator in France. After the ribs were fabricated they were slung onto specially designed saddles on the deck (as they could not fit into the opening of the hold) of the only ship large enough to take them that plied the waters to New Caledonia. Even with this arrangement, the ship could only bring one case worth of ribs in each trip. The cast steel connectors and footings of the cases as well as all of the other major building components were likewise prefabricated and shipped to the islands. One doesn’t need much experience with building site problems to imagine the continuous headaches the remote fabrication and shipping schedules created on the construction site. Mid-way through the fabrication of the ribs, for instance, the yard in Guinea where the wood was stored and drying burned. A mad scramble ensued to locate another source of sufficient wood. Later in the project, as the site architect waited on the dock with a flatbed truck for the ship to arrive with the ribs for a case, the ship’s captain decided to honor a strike by the local dock workers. He turned the ship around and steamed off over the horizon. The captain later unloaded the ribs on a remote Pacific island to take on more cargo. It took extensive negotiations and a large sum of money

Building Change

68

2.23 walkway along case of the Cultural Centre to convince the captain to retrieve the ribs from the island on a later trip and return them to Noumea.

Building future

69

The running of the construction site is the final place where Piano’s sensitivity to the historical and cultural context of the project played out. He sent as his site architect a Frenchman named William Vassal, who had worked closely on the design of the project for years. Young for such a job, Vassal quickly proved himself. Among other things, he set a collaborative tone on the first day when he insisted on walking the heavy equipment operators over the site before they started clearing and grading. He explained to them the project and why certain trees should be maintained. In exchange, one of the operators invited Vassal up into the cab of a huge scraper poised at the edge of the site, so he could get a sense of the point of view of the operators trying to maneuver such a massive and powerful piece of equipment. Vassal’s lesson about protecting the trees was so effective in getting the operators to work carefully with the existing vegetation of the site, that he later had to negotiate with them to remove a tree or two for aesthetic reasons. Vassal continued this interactive mode of supervision of crews not used to the daily presence of an architect on the site or to reading drawings prepared for unique building systems: explaining, demonstrating, collaborating, providing unconventional drawings, and always insisting on the best work possible under the circumstances. He says in retrospect: “Everyone was proud to work on the project. They all went the extra distance to make sure it was a good building” (Vassal 1998). The completed Tjibaou Cultural Centre nestles among the transported pines and subtle topography of the small peninsula. The experience of the place is of a series of small buildings clustered together in the landscape. Ten of the transformed cases line the bay side of the central allee. They clearly symbolize the Kanak—radically changed from their pre-colonial past and looking toward the future. The allee itself and the pieces that line up on the lagoon side of it, are an international-style assembly of steel and glass, with interior finishes of wood, except in the galleries, where white walls are the rule. The double layered flat roofs of these pieces are held even, with the bulk of the spaces pressed underground so that the cases can soar above them. The flat roofs extend beyond the building to make great shaded porches on the northwestern side of the building. The galleries inside are great high clean

2.24 Cultural Centre from bay

Building Change

2.25 Aerial view

70

Building future

71

2.26 Library inside one of the cases

Building Change

72

2.27 Flat roof over galleries with cases soaring behind

Building future

73

2.28 Interior of flatroofed gallery with atrium, allee and entry to a case beyond galleries, full of filtered daylight and bringing to mind Piano’s 1986 galleries for the Menil Collection in Houston. Clearly this part of the building symbolizes the international community which the Kanak are entering. The project is remarkable for the fact that it avoids international arrogance and picturesque sentimentality, both clear dangers in designing for indigenous communities. Instead, it boldly takes the ideas of traditional practices and transforms them through a contemporary, global lens. It is also remarkable that throughout the process of integrating Kanak spatial traditions and responding to their tragic history, the RPBW has created a unique building of international stature. Standing next to the cases of the Cultural Centre is a fresh experience—one that cannot be duplicated in any other building anyplace else in the world. William Vassal tells the following story: We were showing the building site to a group of Kanak people, with (Director of the Center) Octave Tonga, and I was explaining to them the work of Piano and the team, and we arrived in front of a case. I said, ‘here is a hut’. The Kanak said nothing and spoke together in the Kanak language, and Tonga translated that they were asking where the hut was. I tried to explain in place of Renzo that this was the remembering of a hut. He wanted to do the transition between modernity and tradition. Also he uses this sentence from the South American writer, Borges, that the work of the creators, like architects, is just on the border between memory and

Building Change

74

oblivion. When Piano explained that it was the remembering of a hut, it was just what you remember of a hut before you begin to forget it and you begin to do something else. So this is what I said to the Kanaks, and they talked together again, and the oldest one said, “This hut is like ours, before we put the thatched roof on it.” He stopped speaking and started again, “this is not us anymore, but it’s still us.” (Vassal 1998a) The Tjibaou Cultural Centre sits outside of easy politically correct condemnations, either cultural or environmental. Its form is derived from Piano’s innate technological curiosity combined with his dedication to making the building legible to the Kanak and revealing and embodying their current culture—so drastically transformed from what it once was. It is neither patronizing nor picturesque. It avoids sentimentality. Instead, it is powerful in its radical formal transformations of the remnants of Kanak ways of living in the landscape and in its inventive strategies for expression and construction. The Centre exists in the swirling cross-currents of the rapidly changing structures of power in New Caledonia, and the world. Piano accepted this flickering con-

Building future

75

2.29 Case, pine and lagoon beyond dition and strove, with his collaborators, to make the building that is a sensitive container for the fragile, battered, but optimistic spirits of the Kanak. The project goes a small

Building Change

76

distance in helping to recover the dignity of a people as they move forward to become full cultural participants in their own land, in the Asia Pacific region and in the world. Alban Bensa, with characteristic clarity, sums it up this way: For Kanaks, the cultural centre is like the sculpted prow of a canoe heading for independence. But while it projects an ultra-modern image of “custom” for the purposes of international media, it also unsettles a population still composed mainly of farmers and workers, and thus figures the deep social and ideological currents that are changing the Kanaks. As for the public authorities, they seem intent on making this monumental facility (which Mitterrand had already foreseen on a postage stamp design) the flagship for the new role France hopes to play in a Pacific at long last nuclear free and calm. Cutting across anti-colonial feeling and continued French presence in New Caledonia, midway between a tribute to Kanak civilization and progressive European architectural thought serving our modernity, and amidst the difficult coming together of living traditions and those that are represented, the Jean-Marie Tjibaou Cultural Centre focalizes the tensions of its own ambiguity. (Bensa 1996)

Chapter 3 Building Visibility Uluru Kata-Tjuta Cultural Centre That tourist comes here with camera taking pictures all over. What has he got? Another photo—take home, keep part of Uluru. He should get another lens—see straight inside. Wouldn’t see big rock then. He would see Kuniya living right inside there from the beginning. He might throw the camera away. (Anangu Elder as quoted by Burgess 1990:4)

Viewing Ayers Rock at sunset is such a popular ritual that the Australian National Park Service has inserted parking lots specifically for it into the desert landscape at just the right spot a few kilometers to the west. Shortly before sunset, cars begin to arrive; then tour buses wheel into specially designated places. Everyone piles out to line up facing the Rock. Soon all the parking places are full. Clean-cut tour bus operators turn into caterers; setting tables with white linen cloths and pouring chilled champagne as the sun drops lower. Not to be outdone, a rough looking Aussie rummages around in the back of his beat up old Land Rover, pulls out a tin folding table, a propane stove and a dented billy can, and begins to make tea for the six wilted young clients of his “authentic” bush tour. As the sun continues lower, a few camera shutters start to click. Soon the clicks reach a kind of frenzy while a hush falls over the crowd gathered from all points of the world for this spectacular sight of the great sandstone Rock glowing brilliantly red at the end of a hot day. Within minutes the warm sunset glow turns to a discernable cooler, blue twilight, the rock fades to a deep purple and the crowd begins to disperse. Camera clicks

Building Change

78

3.1 Uluru at sunset

3.2 Tourists line up to view Uluru at sunset

Building visibility

79

are replaced by cricket chirps. Cars and campers pull out onto the road. While the tour bus operators herd their clients aboard to move on to the next item on the itinerary, the bush tour operator makes another round of tea, as if to emphasize that a bush tour is not a bus tour. While this scene takes place every day, the tourists who are taking the pictures now have a very different understanding of the Rock than those who came to the Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park before 1996. For instance, they know that for 10,000 years the Rock has been called Uluru and is held sacred by the indigenous people of the area who call themselves Anangu. Some of this they may have learned from their tour guides and guidebooks, but the enduring lesson came from a visit to the undulating Uluru-Kata Tjuta Cultural Centre near the base of the Rock. The unusual building, commissioned by the Anangu, is an attempt to make visible to the tourists the vibrant landscape of the Park and the way the Anangu are deeply engrained in it. Through the Centre the Anangu share some of their closely held secret knowledge of the Uluru; knowledge they have passed with care to a trusted few from generation to generation for centuries. Their willingness to expose this knowledge to the indiscriminate eyes of thousands of tourists is an act of generosity, cultural vulnerability and faith in the future that few of the tourists comprehend. Uluru, in its guise as Ayers Rock, is imagined as the navel of the country by white Australians. With a circumference of 9.4 kilometers, it rises abruptly 340 meters above the flat floor of the bleak central Australian desert.

3.3 Uluru-Kata Tjuta Cultural Centre Along with its sister formation, Kata Tjuta (meaning “many heads” and known to whites as The Olgas), they combine to create Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park. Uluru sits in the center of a continent almost the size of the continental US, and the Park is second only to

Building Change

80

Sydney as a draw for tourists, both internal and international. This is no coincidence since the Sydney Opera House and the Rock are icons of Australia for people all over the world. While tourism at Uluru started as a trickle for a hardy few in the early 1940s, today almost 500,000 tourists a year make their way, usually by air, to this remote location. They arrive by the thousands in jets that land on a dedicated runway twenty-two kilometers from the Rock. They stay at the well-watered oasis of the Yulara tourist village (with accommodation and dining ranging from four-star elegance to camping). And they troop onto air conditioned tour buses that take them to climb the Rock, hike to the waterholes around its base, and to watch the red sandstone monolith glow in deep dazzling colors at sunset. The rigorous “Climb” up the steep side of the Rock, in particular, is understood by many white Australians as a kind of rite of passage. Additional attractions in the area have expanded to include camel rides and helicopter tours, bush camping, and hikes around the nearby Kata Tjuta. Everyone, even backpackers, ends up spending lots of money and, of course, everyone is taking lots and lots of pictures.

3.4 Location of Uluru

Building visibility

81

3.5 Uluru shown on a postcard of tourist destinations in Australia Invisible to all these tourists until quite recently is the ancient and very different understanding of the place held by the Anangu. Uluru is a profoundly sacred site for these Aboriginal people whose ancestors have lived in this landscape for over 10,000 years. Anangu is “people” in the Pitjantjatjara language they speak.1 The tourists, likewise, are called Piranpa (non-Anangu), or, more locally, Minga (the word for ant, but now used for the tourists because they become tiny scurrying specks as they climb the massive flank of Uluru). Since the arrival of the first tourists to Uluru in the 1940s, the Anangu have watched tourists tramp over this and other nearby sacred sites. They have also regularly and without their consent been photographed as “savage” curiosities, and have been mistreated on all fronts by tour operators and the Australian government. This situation began a slow change in 1984, when control of the Park was returned to the Anangu in the early days of Australia’s national attempt to reconcile centuries of dehumanizing and savage treatment of the Aborigines.

Building Change

82

3.6 Kata Tjuta from the north

Building visibility

83

3.7 Tourists climbing up Uluru look like ants (Minga) to the Anangu When Europeans first arrived on the shores of Australia, they encountered indigenous people who had little material culture aside from basic tools, weapons and vessels. This material austerity led the literal-minded Europeans to mistakenly assume that the Aborigines, as they came to be called, were primitive people with no developed culture at all. Among early Europeans to come into contact with the first people of Australia was

Building Change

84

Captain James Cook, who was one of the few to recognize their seeming detachment from the material world: They may appear to some to be the most wretched people upon Earth, but in reality they are far more happier than we Europeans: being wholy unaquainted not only with the superfluous but the necessary Conveniences so much sought after in Europe, they are happy in not knowing the use of them. They live in a Tranquility which is not disturb’d by the Inequality of Condition: The Earth and sea of their own accord furnishes them with all things necessary for life…. They seem’d to set no Value upon anything we gave them, nor would they ever part with any thing of their own for any one article we could offer them: this in my opinion argues that they think themselves provided with the necessities of Life. (Cook quoted by Horowitz 2002:177–178) More typical of early European reaction to the Aborigines was William Dampier, the widely traveled English buccaneer, who had this to say of the people he met in northwestern Australia in an early visit in 1688. (T)he inhabitants of the country are the miserablest people in the World…. They have no houses, but lye in the open Air, without any covering, the Earth being their Bed, and the Heaven their Canopy… The Earth affords them no food at all. There is neither Herb, Pulse, nor any sort of Grain, for them to eat, that we saw; not any sort of Bird or Beast that they can catch, having no instruments wherewithal to do so. I did not perceive that they worship anything. (quoted in Hughes 1986:48) In fact, the Aborigines had a highly developed culture. It was based upon relationships, process and an understanding and experience of the landscape and time that was outside the grasp and experience of the European invaders. In other words, objects and material goods were of little importance except in how they might contribute to either survival or religious ritual. This a-material culture was manifested in process, performance and interpersonal behavior; stories, gatherings, rituals, dances, obligations and songsactivities that disappear once completed. It was also embedded in the landscape and the profound and subtle sets of relationships between people and nature. The Aborigines rarely engaged in agriculture, built mostly temporary provisional dwellings and almost never altered the landscape except through regular brush burning. This made the 40,000year-old Aboriginal culture essentially invisible to the materialistic whites for whom buildings and settlements, farms and animal husbandry, clothing and craft items were all indicators of culture. This vast schism over the value of modification of the land in order for it to be productive and of the significance of material possessions makes the two cultures so distinctly different as to be essentially incomprehensible to one another. This incomprehension led to disaster for the Aborigines, their attachment to the land and, ultimately, their very survival. It meant that when the better armed Europeans started to move onto the continent, they would completely disregard the Aborigines as having

Building visibility

85

any claim to the land. This led to an official colonial policy that treated the land as uninhabited, despite the estimated 750,000 Aboriginal people who resided on the continent at the time, living in regular migration patterns and confirmed territories (Lines 1991).2 “Nothing can stay the dying away of the Aboriginal race, which Providence has only allowed to hold the land until replaced by a finer race,” wrote one early observer (quoted in Hughes 1986:7). The relatively unworldly settlers that followed the first explorers onto the land in the late eighteenth century held the Aborigines in contempt, calling them “no better than monkies” and “brutes” (Hughes 1986; Lines 1991). The fate of the Aborigines at the hands of the occupying Europeans is not hard to imagine, given the history of similar occupations of what are now North and South America. Decimation by murder, starvation, forced removals and introduced diseases rapidly wiped out the indigenous population of the temperate southern and eastern coasts of Australia, where European settlers desired farmland. For instance, a 1789 smallpox epidemic killed at least 125,000 Aborigines (Lines 1991:42). Wholesale butchering and poisoning was common. Groups of mounted men, known as extermination parties, regularly terrorized Aboriginal encampments, sparing no one. The result was nothing short of near annihilation in the arable portions of the continent. In Queensland, in the sixty years between 1840 and 1900, the population of an estimated 200,000 Aborigines dwindled to a mere 15,000 (Lines 1991:109). These numbers tell a tale of brutality and systematic murder. The Aborigines often tried to resist this treatment, but the colonists had such superior weaponry that, along with being mounted on horses, they nearly always had the upper hand in any confrontation. It should also be remembered that the British by this time already had experience with controlling “native” populations. However, the Aborigines, with little of the material or cultural production that had led the British to at least have some respect for the “noble savages” in other places, were utterly incomprehensible to the invaders in almost every way. This led to exceptionally inhuman treatment by colonists and the British government alike. Aboriginal communities survived much more intact and for longer in areas less desirable to the colonizing whites: the vast waterless expanses of desert that make up a majority of the continent and the dense rainforests were inhospitable to European agriculture and animal husbandry. While the tropical areas were well populated by Aborigines, the population in the desert areas is estimated at only 18,000 at the time of European contact. In the central desert, water was so scarce and the climate so extreme that it protected the people from European contact until relatively late in the exploration of the continent (Lines 1991:11). Yet, even the Aboriginal communities in these places were ultimately affected and infected. Prior to the arrival of Europeans to the vast central desert at Uluru and Kata Tjuta, the Anangu did not build permanent structures. They did erect temporary shelters made of brush for shade or rain protection, but would abandon them to the elements when it was time to move on. They migrated in small family groups, coming together at intervals for ritual purposes. While their lives were nomadic, the Anangu, like other Aboriginal groups, had distinct seasonal patterns—moving regularly between the same places year after year. For the Anangu the first white contact came in 1872 when Ernest Giles first “discovered” the area while exploring. By the 1940s the sheep and cattle grazing that

Building Change

86

began in the region in the 1920s had pushed out the plants and animals that the migrating Anangu depended upon for sustenance. While able to still glean some food from the changing landscape, the Anangu began to rely on work at the cattle and sheep stations for part of their livelihood. Many Anangu abandoned their regular migratory patterns and settled at stations and in fixed locations—only going “walkabout” for ceremonies or when hunting might be particularly good. The stations provided reliable water from well bores and ready access to supplies that the Anangu could purchase now that they participated in the cash economy. During the Depression in the 1930s, the Anangu used their excellent tracking skills working for “doggers”, white men who hunted dingoes for the bounty on their pelts. Some tourists began to enter the region in the mid-1940s, and by the 1970s the Anangu learned that they could supplement their cash income by selling the few artifacts they produced to these visitors. This led them to make other nontraditional objects as well such as decorated carvings of animals, miniature spears and so forth to sell to the tourist from roadside locations. In this way, in each era, the Anangu devised strategies of survival in the midst of a rapidly changing landscape (Layton 2001; Parks Australia 2000). When tourism to Uluru began to flourish, around 1960, the Anangu began to settle at Uluru, living at water bores and later at the tourist center just to the east of the Rock. In the 1980s the tourist center was moved eighteen kilometers away to a place called Yulara and the Anangu established a fixed community to the south of the Rock named Mutitjulu after a waterhole. Now 180 people live in this collection of corrugated tin-roofed houses. In such a remote location, with their traditional livelihood bounded, and with limited means of participating in the economy, these people mostly live in poverty. Such a proximity to Uluru, however, has allowed the Anangu to keep a watch over their sacred sites, despite the constant trespass on them by the growing numbers of tourists. The millennia of inhabitation of the region by the Anangu is nowhere marked by human gesture in the landscape that can be seen by the untrained eyes of these tourists, except for occasional rock paintings found tucked in shady overhangs scattered around the base of Uluru.3 It is not that the Anangu did not change this landscape. In particular, their custom of burning off the dense undergrowth in order to encourage the presence of game animals and allow for easier hunting is millennia old. This land management strategy has been reintroduced in the Uluru area in the past decade, with the Anangu teaching the Park Rangers how, when and where to burn. But burning is not understood or seen as a human cultural intervention by the tourists who visit only once for a short stay. Indeed, until recently, Anangu culture, with its semi-nomadic existence and emphasis on process and relationship over product and object, was essentially invisible to the materially minded tourists. These same tourists see the desert landscape around Uluru as a threatening and uninhabitable wasteland, while the Anangu, who continue to have deep knowledge of it, see an enlivened landscape rich in food and useful materials, and marked by the passing of their ancestors. For the Anangu, animals have known characters and habits and are each related to a sacred Ancestor who once roamed the earth. Each plant has a use as food, medicine, mastic or other necessity. The Anangu see in the landscape, in the shallow desert washes and hillocks and on the undulating face of the great Uluru, the tracks, traces and countenances of their Ancestors from the time of Creation.4 Paul Memmott describes these ancestors as “supernatural entities which were synthesized

Building visibility

87

partly of human qualities and partly of qualities derived from natural species of phenomena. Hence there were kangaroo-men, yam-women, rain-men, sugar ant-women, and so on” (Memmott 1996). The activities of the ancestors not only inscribed the landscape with the events of the creation of the world, but they imbued it with power as well. The land is written over by sacred stories, and it yields food, tools and weapons. The Aborigines’ role in all of this is as custodians of this creation—they must guard it, maintain it and honor it. The sacred stories are solidified into the landscape and passed on as an oral tradition, sometimes illustrated with sand drawings. The stories also form, along with the landscape, the moral and ethical structure for life known in the Pitjantjatjara language as Tjukurpa. While Tjukurpa is often translated as “Law”, it is more than that: it is a way of being, believing and behaving; it defines relationships and obligations; it informs vision and speech and action (Layton 2001). A 2002 brochure produced by the Anangu and available at the Cultural Centre states: Tjukurpa is not written down, but memorised. It is our cultural obligation to pass on this huge volume of knowledge to the right people. Ceremonies play an important role in passing on of knowledge. Specific people or groups in our kinship system have responsibility to maintain different sections or “chapters” of Tjukurpa. The chapters may relate to a specific site, or a section of an iwara (ancestral path). This knowledge is carefully passed on to people who have inherited the right to that knowledge by, for example, their birthplace, or earned that right, for example, by progressive attendance at ceremonies. There are many interrelated devices for remembering Tjukurpa, such as specific verses of inma (songs), site-related stories, ritual dances and rock art. The iwara (ancestral paths) are recalled in long sequential lists of sites, sometimes including sites beyond country which has been visited, and including sites belonging to other people. Tjukurpa may also be recorded in physical forms such as ritual objects. Some objects are created for specific ritual, then destroyed, others are very old and passed on from one generation to the next. These objects are extremely important, and knowledge of their form and existence is highly restricted. They are not discussed in front of children, and may be specifically restricted to men or women. Tjukurpa may be recorded in various designs and paintings. These designs, such as the “dot” painting of the Western Desert, are often sacred. Use and creation of these designs is restricted to specific groups or individuals who have inherited or earned the rights to use them. Some sounds are particularly associated with particular Tjukurpa. The sound of the bull roarer, for example is associated with men’s secret ceremonies. It is for this reason that Anangu don’t want bull roarer-like objects sold to tourists. Tjukurpa is extremely important to us. We can share some of its information with non-Aboriginal people, but the secret sacred information must stay only with Anangu.

Building Change

88

Given the fact that for the Aboriginal people the landscape is the sacred embodiment of Tjukurpa and creation, then, it makes sense that they would develop a culture that did not modify in major ways the features of that landscape. Nor would such a culture develop a significant demand for material goods, since everything material comes in some way from the landscape. This points to a particularly violent additional spatial impact of the colonization of Australia: every road, railroad, building, mine, farm and town changes this sacred landscape. The culture of the Australian Aboriginal people has become more respected in the past forty years. This is a slow transition that began very gradually during the 1960s when the so-called dot paintings of Aboriginal artists began to gain attention in the metropolitan areas of Australia. Aboriginal artists were producing cultural artifacts that (white) people could take home with them. They were participating in making material culture of immense visual sophistication. This gave white people a glimpse of one of the ways Aboriginal culture operates—it made the culture visible to most white Australians for the first time. The international art community rapidly picked up the work and they now command handsome prices in New York, Paris, London and Tokyo. It is important to note that this phenomenon of the paintings is not really about white Australians and foreigners coming to understand Aboriginal culture but, rather, about their enthusiasm for the work produced by Aborigines in a European art form: paintings on flat, transportable surfaces. These non-functional, decorative objects made only to be sold and hung on walls are new to Aboriginal culture. The materials and tools used to create them are often new—board or canvas, and commercially produced paints and

Building visibility

89

3.8 Aboriginal “dot” painting by George Wallaby paintbrushes. In the past, paintings were done on functional objects as decoration and on bark or even the ground for particular sacred purposes. With commercial dot painting the Aborigines have adapted to Western European culture, producing objects that further their participation in the cash economy. However, this particular adaptation has opened a window into Aboriginal culture that did not exist before. In this way, it has also raised the Aboriginal profile within the culture of Australia and, at a time when Australia is considering becoming independent, has contributed to the development of a national cultural identity distinct from that of Britain. Not long after Aboriginal painting was “discovered”, the music and dance also began to attract outside attention beyond a small circle of anthropologists. The music, in particular the heart-vibrating voice of the didgiridoo, has now been heard around the world.

Building Change

90

Simultaneously, in the 1960s, the spreading influence of both Civil Rights and postcolonial thinking that critically examined the past and illuminates the current plight of indigenous and minority peoples began to have significant influence in Australian politics. The effect in Australia has included an official nation-wide effort at “Reconciliation”. Reconciliation, in this case, includes: an acknowledgment of past wrong-doing by individuals and the government; an acknowledgement of and, in some cases, the return of sacred sites and traditional lands; and a proactive attempt to begin to redress the effects on the Aboriginal community of centuries of racism, segregation and poverty. This reconciliation has been widely criticized and, while it has had some beneficial effects, has been derogatorily dubbed by the Aborigines as the “Sorry Movement”—seen as a pathetic and late effort incapable of appropriately making up for the brutality of past behaviors. Nor has it manifested itself in the movement of the Aboriginal population out of poverty and the other dead-ends perpetuated by racism and the resultant lack of opportunity. In the end, the Aborigines feel their culture remains unvalued, unseen and misunderstood by European-based cultures except as it has been captured in the commercially successful “dreamtime” dot paintings and carvings and a few other cultural artifacts now produced for the rapidly expanding international art and tourist market. It is ironic that dot painting has become a style and that the style as been appropriated to promote Australia and to represent things Australian. As with other nations that have decimated their indigenous people, now there is a sentimentality among many white Australians about the Aborigines and things Aboriginal. Aside from the curious animals and strange plants of the vast continent, the unique Aboriginal visual sensibility is something that sets Australia apart from mother Britain. Now key chains and t-shirts with dot paintings are as common as those with kangaroos and koalas in tourist shops around the country. In terms of the Creation stories, Uluru is a particularly significant site for the Anangu. “It’s only recently that visitors and the Park have been here,” says Nellie Patterson, an Anangu, “but we have always looked after this place, this place of great Tjukurpa.” While many other landscape features hold the story of a single ancestor, or of the meeting of two ancestors, Uluru is a “way station” or terminus for the stories of myriad beings. Since each Anangu is tied directly to one of these ancestors, the custodianship of Uluru is in the hands of a large number of people. Simultaneously, this conceptualization of certain places in the landscape as the repositories of sacred events also means that these places are off limits to those who are not their particular custodians. In addition, some of the ancestors are associated with women and others with men. A person who is custodian of the Blue Tongue Lizard story, for instance, cannot usually go to the most sacred places of the Liru (carpet snake) story and vice versa. This prohibition extends not only to Anangu who are not the custodians of that particular set of stories and events, but also certainly to minga (literally “ants”, the non-aboriginal visitors to Uluru). The landscape in between the sacred sites, while the location of the sacred paths of the Ancestors, is available to everyone. This careful system of custodianship allows a wide range of people limited access to the base of Uluru, where the only sources of year round water for a hundred miles sit in quiet still pools. Since the advent of tourism at the Uluru, the “Climb” has been a source of constant friction and sorrow for the Anangu. The top of the rock is a sacred site of one of the

Building visibility

91

Ancestor Beings. It is a men’s site which, prior to the arrival of the tourists, was only visited on rare occasions by men fully initiated in that site. The sides of Uluru are quite steep and there is only one safe route to the top. This is the path the initiated Mala (the rufous hare wallaby—a small kangaroo-like marsupial) men traditionally followed. It also became, not surprisingly, the route tourists take to the top. The climb is steep and hazardous. Footing is easily lost on the red surface of the rock worn smooth by wind and water. Once on the flatter area near the top, the gently curving sides are deceptive in the bright desert light and make it difficult to know when the rock becomes so steep that one will fall. Finally, it is easy to underestimate both the desert heat and the physical demands of the climb. Scores of people have died on the “Climb”—some by falling, others of heat exhaustion, stroke and heart attack. These deaths, as well as the injuries that regularly take place, have an impact far beyond their immediate tragedy. According to Tjukurpa, the men who are custodians of the path to the top are responsible for these accidents and deaths—as well as for preventing and punishing the trespass of non-owners on a sacred site. In the context of the complex relationships of exchange and obligation, this is an extremely serious matter for the Anangu. Ordinarily just the trespass the tourists commit each time they climb the rock would require some form of punishment. But the responsibility becomes more complex if someone is injured or dies. While it is obvious that the Anangu do not punish the ignorant tourists, it is equally clear that Tjukurpa is violated each time one of the Minga climb. Over the years a number of strategies have been employed to try to make the “Climb” safer. In 1966 chains were installed to aid climbing the two steepest sections. Several years later a dashed white line was added from the top of the last chain across the flatter upper portion to guide people to the summit and, finally, in 1976, the two sections of chain were connected (Parks Australia 2000). A huge sign at the bottom of the “Climb” warns of the rigorous requirements and recommends extreme caution. It also encourages people to take enough water with them, and suggests not climbing in very high temperatures. As late afternoon approaches, tourists are warned not to start up, since they could get caught up top by rapidly descending nightfall. The Park Service also began to regularly close the “Climb” when there are very high winds or exceptionally hot days. All of these strategies help to reduce injury and death. In the early 1970s the Anangu began the long process of gaining back some control over their sacred places. This began with a number of the men elders attending meetings held by different agencies to discuss Aboriginal development in the wider area. At these meetings, the men ignored the agenda and instead began to ask for help in protecting the sacred sites at Uluru from tourist intrusion. Slowly, with good leadership, they gained the ear of those with the power to do something. Over the next several years, some acknowledgment was made of the Anangu right to have some say over the management of the land around the Rock. Almost simultaneously, the Australian government formed the federal Parks and Wildlife Service, and placed the already existing National Park at Uluru and Kata Tjuta under their jurisdiction to protect the area from the harm that the rapidly increasing tourist numbers were sure to inflict. At that time it was acknowledged that the Anangu should have some input into how the Park was managed, with some members becoming Park Rangers and others sitting on an Advisory Committee.

Building Change

92

In 1976 the Northern Territory Land Rights Act was passed. The Act, according to Layton, acknowledged that ties to the land were an essential and continuing force in Aboriginal society. It also began a process of giving control of certain reserve lands back to the “traditional owners”. When the Anangu filed a claim under the Act in 1979, however, it was denied because the land had been transferred to the Park Service. So began a frustrating number of years where Anangu were repeatedly called to give testimony about their connections to the land (Layton 2001). In 1983, the Anangu finally won their land right claim. And, finally, in 1985, early in the “Sorry Movement”, the ownership of the National Park that includes Uluru was returned to its “traditional owners” through national legislation called the Land Rights Act. The Anangu, understanding the importance of Uluru to all of Australia, then leased the Park back to the Park Service and it is now operated by a Joint Management Committee comprised of six Anangu and four Park employees. The “handback” of this important site was a significant event for the Anangu: I’ve been talking about this place for a very long time and at last my whole spirit is relieved, that finally we’ve got Ayers Rock back. Uluru and Kata Tjuta are safe at last. The elder women and elder men are happy. The children and the dogs are happy. Everything is happy because we Anangu have been given back our Aboriginal land. We’ve been given back our Aboriginal spirit. (Nellie Patterson quoted in Australian Nature Conservation Agency, 2000) The Anangu immediately put into place a series of restrictions on photography and tourist movement to protect their sacred sites around Uluru and Kata Tjuta. The management strategies of the Park were also radically reconceived: Tjukurpa now guides them. Many Anangu are now on the staff of the National Park. The value of Uluru-Kata Tjuta to Australia is demonstrated by its inclusion as part of the National Estate under the Australian Heritage Commission Act of 1975 and, in more enlightened terms, it is protected under the Australian Environment Protection and Biodiversity Act of 1999. The site also has international recognition: it is listed as a World Heritage Site for both its cultural and natural values and is a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve. However, until recently, the Anangu culture continued to be an abstract notion to most of the tourists. At some point in 1985, the Anangu set up a compound that included large wiltja, a conical structure made of brush leaning together at a center point, and meeting places for senior men and women near the National Park Headquarters. This became Maruku Arts and Crafts Centre, a successful enterprise that is now located in the Cultural Centre. A year later the Anangu established the Initi kiosk selling food, drink and souvenirs. Initi is now also housed in the Cultural Centre. In the late 1980s, however, the Anangu decided they needed a more substantial place to serve as a kind of translator of what they are willing to reveal of their culture to the minga, who come to Uluru with the express purpose of climbing the Rock, of violating Tjukurpa. They could afford to do this because of the fund the Community had been accumulating since the establishment of Joint Management when the Anangu began getting one-quarter of the entry fee receipts. The Cultural Centre would be owned,

Building visibility

93

managed and operated by the Anangu. This control gave the Anangu the agency to present themselves, their culture and their Tjukurpa to the tourists. The building would make solid, in a way people from the wide global culture

3.9 Typical temporary Anangu wiltja could see, the ancient and wise ways of the Anangu and their custodial care of the land. We want tourists to learn about our place, to listen to us Anangu, not just to look at the Sunset and climb the puli (Uluru)…. In the Cultural Centre we will teach the minga (tourists) better. We will teach them about Tjukurpa (law, creation period), teach them inma (dancing), show them how we make punu (woodcarving). We will teach them about joint management. We are always saying, “Pukulpa pitjama Ananguku ngurakutu”—Welcome to Aboriginal Land. (Tony Tjamiwa, Senior Anangu Traditional owner, Uluru, from National Park Visitor Information handout, 2001) The idea for a Cultural Centre was incorporated in 1986 into the first Plan of Management for the Park, prepared under the joint control of the Anangu and the Park Service.5 While the Anangu had a fairly clear idea of what they thought should happen in the new Cultural Centre and what purpose it should serve culturally, they had no idea how it should look and only a vague notion of where it might be placed. There was certainly no precedent within Anangu culture for such a building, or even such a place. The building would serve as an in-between zone of meeting, a hybrid space. The community engaged Paul Pholeros, an Australian architect well known for his work with Aboriginal communities all over Australia, to write the initial brief for the

Building Change

94

project. Early in 1990, an ad was placed in the major Australian papers for expression of interest in the project, with a first phase being an elaborated project brief and concept plan. After reviewing the qualifications of twenty-five architects, the Anangu hired Greg Burgess, an architect with experience working with Aboriginal communities since the early 1970s. Prior to the Uluru project, his most notable project for Aboriginal people was the Brambuk Cultural Centre at Halls Gap for the people of the Gampians range in Victoria. Greg Burgess is an Australian architect whose award-winning Melbourne-based practice is known throughout Australia and much of Europe. He is the recipient of the 2004 Gold Medal from the Royal Australian Institute of Architects. The work of his small firm appears idiosyncratic in comparison to that of most contemporary architects. Burgess’ organic forms and improvised detailing come from deeply held beliefs about the nature of architecture and its role in the world. He explains his point of view this way: “Architecture is a social art and one has to be faithful to that. While buildings are static, they can have a charged energy for the body and the psyche, rather than just to the eye and the mind.” He continues, “[An] intellectual understanding is not really the purpose of architecture. It bypasses the intellect, like a poem, to get to the heart and the body.” Burgess contends that this basic role of architecture is often undermined by a disproportionately heavy role for aesthetics, form and composition. While these qualities are part of architecture, according to Burgess they are not its basic reason for being (Burgess 2001).

3.10 Brambuk Cultural Centre, a 1990 project by Greg Burgess This attitude leads to an architecture that is formally unpredictable. “My work is not compositionally driven,” explains Burgess, “instead I use as a starting point the human

Building visibility

95

uses of the project as fields of activity, with the architecture negotiating the boundaries of those activities, making edges.” Once Burgess determines the fields of activities, then the form most appropriate to those activities is evolved. He believes that this strategy leads to a “charged, enlivened, energized and breathing quality, rather than the deadness of a preconceived container” (Burgess 2001). What emerge often are spaces wrapped and connected by curvilinear walls and soaring ceiling planes. These spaces are deceptive in their appearance of gentleness. They are actually very powerful and open-ended as they slide past or merge into one another. Moments of rest and stillness, often scooped up into the ends of sweeping spaces, provide repose amid the activity. Burgess’ buildings are also powerfully associated with the landscape on multiple scales—in terms of formal kinships, climatic adaptation, selected views, subtle movement with the ground and human interactions both physical and visual. Burgess was honored to have been awarded the project. He brought on board Sonja Peters, who is an Environmental Designer based in Alice Springs, the nearest town to Uluru of any size, located 450 kilometers away. Peters had lived in the region for many years, attending Aboriginal women’s ceremonies and working regularly with other Pitjantjarjata people. In September, early spring, 1990, they set up a design workshop and drop-in space in the Mutitjulu Community Centre. During this time, they were joined by landscape architects Kevin Taylor and Kate Cullity. From his work with other Aboriginal people, Burgess knew that he could not simply set up shop, interview the clients and get on with the project. Such a direct and linear process is not how they operate, and neither is it Burgess’ style. To have open participation by the Anangu so that he could design a project that would be meaningful and connected to the Community, he knew he would have to earn their respect. And in order to design a building that would become part of the landscape and Tjukurpa, he would have to spend time at Uluru acquainting himself with the Anangu, the Rock and the desert. This was not necessarily a foregone conclusion, given the natural reticence of the Anangu as well as the mistrust contact with white men has taught them. Getting to know the Anangu, and the land, becoming part of the daily scene of the community and gradually being respected and trusted to work closely with them, was a fundamental first step. Hunting trips, talking and joking over many cups of coffee and being invited to camp out and collect fire wood, were some of the ways we were able to establish relationships of mutual warmth and relaxed openness. Sonja was remembered by some of the women for having danced at Townsville with Aboriginal women from Balgo—doors opened! (Burgess 1997) The inclusion of Peters, along with the skills she brought to the design team, was an essential component of the success of the project in other ways. Aboriginal life is often divided along gender lines—with men and women having distinct roles in day-to-day and religious life. Burgess talked and worked with the men elders in the community, while Peters met with the women elders. On many occasions they came together for collaborative conversations.

Building Change

96

Burgess tells of camping with the men one evening, and having a friendly conversation with one of the white-haired men elders. At some point the man stopped, and looked Burgess directly in the eye. This uncustomary affront startled Burgess. Aboriginal people, like the Kanak, consider it rude to look anyone in the eye. But Burgess held the man’s gaze. He then began to feel as if the elder was silently probing his brain, his heart, even his soul. He felt violated, but also knew that this was a critical test of some sort; a measure of his trustworthiness to take on the project. But it was also, in the tradition of Aboriginal men, a challenge. Burgess called up all his strength, and returned the stare with full force. The elder broke the eye connection with a quick sound of rough approval and the moment was over. Burgess had apparently passed some unspoken test. Once a basic trust was established, the first project meetings were around an aerial map of Uluru. While the Anangu told their Tjukurpa stories about the places around the base, Burgess and Peters marked the map. Dotted around the base of Uluru were the sacred places of myriad ancestors including the Mala (hare wallabies), Kuniya (pythons), Liru (the poisonous carpet snake), Mita and Lungkata (two blue-tongue lizard men), the Bell Bird brothers, Tjati (the red lizard), Kartaya (emu), and Kurpany (dingo). This dense accumulation of stories illustrates the extraordinary nature of Uluru to the Anangu and reveals a place no tourist can see. The exercise also illustrates something about the way that the Anangu envision their place; the use of an aerial photograph, with a view that most of the Anangu had never actually seen, did not cause even a moment’s hesitation in their ability to read the map and discuss individual places around Uluru. Aboriginal people illustrate the landscape from this point of view in all of their representations. While significant landscape features are often abstracted—Uluru is usually drawn as a circle rather than as the tattered ameba it appears from above—they are easily understood. When Burgess and Peters arrived, the site for the Cultural Centre had not been determined. There were several possibilities. However, it was

Building visibility

97

3.11 Drawing of Uluru Burgess made with the Anangu, capturing many of the Ancestors’ locations around the Rock

Building Change

98

quickly decided that it should be located somewhere near the current Park Ranger’s Station, about one kilometer from Uluru, in part to mitigate and concentrate disturbance of the desert, but also to emphasize the working relationship between the Anangu and the Park. The exact location was determined during a series of women’s meetings. The women elders led Peters to a stand of mature desert oaks not far from the Ranger’s Station, where they sat in the shade of one and talked about the ideas and program needs of the project. One elder, Nellie Patterson, put it this way: “We need a place to teach minga about the Anangu way. A place where they can see Punu (plants/landscape) and hear about Tjukurpa and see that this land belongs to Anangu.” Barbara Tjikatu elaborated: “Tourist come into Cultural Centre and first things they see are Anangu things, what Anangu make and they see the tracks of the animals (related to Tjukurpa for Uluru) and they hear and see about Tjukurpa.” While the women were talking, they were drawing into the fine red sand. There was clear consensus among the women that one of their primary desires for the Centre was to make the Anangu visible. However, their emphasis on having the tourists “see” is also about how the Centre might help to change the actual way in which the tourists look at both Uluru and the Anangu. In the midst of the site, one of the largest of the desert oaks was dead, leaving its looming skeleton. It was a powerful presence for the women elders who, when imagining the building, thought it should be the center point of a wiltja. In their drawings, a dot at the center of a circle began to represent the dead oak and a space around it. The women traced the possible movements of tourists, talking about what they were doing, what they were seeing. A diagram began to emerge: gathered around the circle were semi-circular spaces, like petals of a flower, which would contain other functions. Nellie Patterson saw it this way: “Maruku number one, the t-shirt shop, office, painting, food, drink…. Tourists can come along and look around…get information, reading and walking around…sign about inma (dance). Palya (literally ‘straight,’ meaning something that is correct, good, true).” The women also thought to add an area for dance, an inma ground—with separate enclosed changing areas for men and women. There was also a clear notion that while the Cultural Centre itself would have no admission fee, the tourists would be charged for watching the dances. “Art and Craft inside. All tourists going inside and get information from Rangers. Going inside and looking for animals (craft). When starting inma some Aboriginal lady collecting money for that dance” (Elsie Malbungka).

Building visibility

99

3.12 Women elders discussing the Cultural Centre

3.13 Early diagram of project The conversations over the aerial map and the siting and uses of the building gathered around the dead oak led the design team to commission two paintings from the participating community members. One, by Barbara Tjikatu and her husband Nipper

Building Change

100

Winmati, records several of the major Tjukurpa stories of Uluru. The Rock occupies the center of the painting, while Kuniya and Liru, both snakes, converge upon it. Kurpany (dingo) and Mala (hare wallaby) are also shown, but as the tracks of these animals, rather than as illustrations of the animals themselves. The energy of the Rock is stippled into the background as concentric circles, then gives way to fragmented patterns of the land. This lively painting shows the Aboriginal use of multiple strategies of representation (abstracted rock, literal snakes, the evidence of pawprints) and multiple scales (tracks, snakes, Uluru all the same size) within a single image. This abstract and metaphorical thinking comes easily to the Anangu, and is important to remember when imagining how they understand the environment around them. Visual representation among Aborigines is generally a flexible rather than fixed thing. Each painter represents stories in different ways, with interpretation based upon reading the assembly of contingent elements to tease out the meaning. The scholar of Aboriginal architecture, Paul Memmott, terms

3.14 Painting showing Liru and Kuniya, along with other Ancentors associated with Uluru, which is depicted in the centre as circular this “polysemy”, or numerous meanings for a single kind of mark, and notes it in a wide range of Aboriginal depiction practices. For instance, he finds that a set of concentric circles on ritual objects from the Arrernte people of the Central Desert can mean, among other things: a wild plum tree, a swarm of flies, a frog, a Hakea tree, a young woman or a gum tree (Memmott 1996:89–97). But this signification system goes beyond depicting only a literal meaning. It can also imply abstract meaning:

Building visibility

101

The meaning of a symbol such as a circle or a depiction of a snake is not simply the object it represents; it is also what the object itself stands for. The circle may represent a waterhole, but the waterhole is also a powerful symbol of life, a home destination, and frequently the focus of mythically significant events…. The snake may be a water python, but because of that it may also be a symbol of life-giving water, an engorging mother, a penis. (P.Sutton as quoted by Memmott 1996:92) The second painting commissioned during the design of the Cultural Centre, this one painted by Nellie Patterson, shows the spatial ideas for the Centre. It condenses and formalizes the sketches the women were making in the sand. The small white crescent shapes are people sitting cross-legged in the arcs of spaces opening off a circular gathering place, the large dot in the center is the dead oak. The wavering lines trace paths of the visitors as they slowly approach the Centre. Slowing down the tourists is a central desire in the conversations about the Centre. To the Anangu, the minga move about very quickly, darting in and out of tour buses, snapping photos and staying such a short time at Uluru that they surely cannot really see the place. One of the elders began to act out the slowing down, making it physical in the space around the oaks. Barbara Tjikatu wove slowly, rhythmically with smiling enthusiasm through the ancient oaks, lovingly touching this one, that one, walking, walking, looking, looking, imitating the minga arriving. She wants them to experience the beauty and power of her place… slowly, deliberately, with depth of feeling, keenness of observation. (Burgess 1997) While the site is a kilometer from the Rock, the women spoke often about Kuniya, the python, whose Uluru-related Tjukurpa story can be seen eroded into the monolith from the building site. At Uluru, Kuniya fought a mighty battle with another snake, Liru. The Kuniya converged on Uluru from three directions. One group came westward from Waltanta, and Paku-paku; another came south through Wilpiya; and a third, northwards, from the area of Yunanpa. One of the Kuniya women carried her eggs on her head, using a manguri (grass headpad) to cushion them. She buried the eggs at the eastern end of Uluru. While they were camped at Uluru, the Kuniya were attacked by a party of Liru (poisonous snake) warriors …At Alyurunga, on the southwest face of Uluru, are pockmarks in the rock, scars left by the warriors spears; two black-stained

Building Change

102

3.15 Painting of Cultural Centre, with dead oak in the middle and people (white “c” shaped objects) occupying the spaces around it watercourses are the transformed bodies of two Liru. The fight centered on Mutitjulu. Here a Kuniya woman fought using her wana (digging stick); her features are preserved on the eastern face of the gorge. The features of the Liru warrior she attacked can be seen in the western face, where his eye, head wounds and severed nose form part of the cliff. (Layton 2001:7) After the long, winding process, the elders finally had enough of the talking—they wanted to see what Burgess would do with all he had heard. Elder Tony Tjamiwa urged him on: All stories round up like horses and put in yard…talking about making room…whole of the Mutitjulu community…talking to put it all together. Make sure all given, nothing left out. We are still happy…being happy…we are listening…you get it straight. You are inside…no words…draw now…put it on paper. Make drawings… I can’t wait to see it drawn on paper. (Tawa) So Burgess and Peters got to work. They began with the several important points agreed upon by the Anangu: the desire to show the way Joint Management was working; the

Building visibility

103

power of the dead oak as a center of the site; a sense of the functions of the Cultural Centre as gathering around and opening onto the oak; and the connecting of the site to the larger landscape through the Tjukurpa tale of Kuniya and their battle with Liru. Burgess now spent some quiet time on the site, trying to understand its subtleties and to feel the energy that passed through it. He sat under the big oak where the women had held their meetings with Peters. He walked slowly toward the dead oak, using a pendulum to detect the smallest of energy movements within the site. His early sketches for the buildings are a modification of the early diagrams the Anangu women drew: the spaces of the center form a continuous loop around a central courtyard that contains the dead oak. The Anangu, with their ability to read diagrams as metaphors, immediately saw in this the Kuniya snake. This powerful connection to the Liru and Kuniya stories struck a chord with everyone. One of the Anangu, Malya Termay, made a sketch plan of the building more literally as the body of a snake. Soon afterward, Burgess made a rough paper model of the project as two buildings forming between them a large open space around the dead oak. The elders were excited by this initial model, immediately seeing in it Kuniya and Liru glaring at each other across the space of the courtyard. This model was refined a bit further with the Anangu, then Burgess went back to his

3.16 Modified project diagram showing opening up of central court toward Uluru

Building Change

104

3.17 Snake diagram of Cultural Centre by Malya Termay

3.18 Rough site plan showing building as two snakes across from each other

Building visibility

105

3.19 First model

3.20 More refined model beginning to look at roof forms

Building Change

106

3.21 Anangu study project propals

3.22 Site plan at end of workship time at Uluru Melbourne office where, over a period of months, it was developed into the architecture for the building. While the site and the general formal strategies of the building were drawn from conversations with the Anangu, the material and technical strategies had to be developed through other means. This is due primarily to the difference between Anangu technologies and experience with buildings and to the lack of durable examples to either draw from or to seek, as Piano did in New Caledonia, to transform. The only built hint for Burgess was the Anangu’s elegantly simple and temporary wiltja (see Figure 3.9). This is

Building visibility

107

a structure composed of leaning branches or strips of bark against each other so that their tops meet at a single, peaked point and their ends form a circle. The wedge shaped opening is made by leaving out some of the branches. The wiltja is made of non-durable materials and intended for temporary inhabitation while the Cultural Centre required a much more durable construction that would last for many, many years. However, the spirit of the straightforward constructional approach of the wiltjas was adopted by Burgess along with the general Aboriginal attitude of frugal use of resources, both for construction and operation, and the lightest possible impact on the landscape. At the same time, he was looking for materials and technology that could withstand the desert climate and any onslaught by the ever-present “white ants” (the Australian term for termites). The only locally available source of building material of any quantity was earth—and Burgess used a lot of it: 90,000 adobe mud bricks. This brings the rich red of the desert floor up into the walls of the building and grounds the building in the site. Adobe is an ideal desert building material, providing good insulation from the daytime sun and releasing accumulated heat from the day at night due to its long lag time. Where possible, the floor is also made of earth. Throughout the project compacted red desert sand with oil surfaces meet cement-stabilized rammed earth floors to create continuity from walkways that are outside in the direct sun and those that are inside under the deep eaves of the building. Other places the floors are made more formal and clearly “inside” through the use of plywood, timber or terra cotta tiles. The rest of the structure is made up of termite-resistant Australian hardwood brought long distances to Uluru from the more temperate part of the country. Columns are made up of entire tree-trunks, stripped of their bark and smooth. Radially sawn timber is used for cladding, rafters and interior

3.23 Making adobe on site. Uluru in the distance

Building Change

108

3.24 Bush fence over adobe

3.25 Bolt and wire detail boarding. Radial sawing is a process that drastically reduces wastage at the sawmill and that results in slightly wedge-shaped pieces that have a less formal appearance and a geometry that is more difficult to work than square sawn lumber. Its use here is an attempt to be consistent with an ethic of land stewardship so central to Anangu culture. Connections between wooden members are made in visible, purposefully provisional-

Building visibility

109

looking ways. Nail heads show, pieces meet in slightly skewed manners, and in one detail, heavy wire wound around bolts makes up a structural strap. The tectonic manifestation of the project teeters between control and chaos, yet has a kind of self-possessed repose. The structural system is direct and self-explanatory. The geometries are casual and organic, the detailing seemingly improvisational. All of this is not random, however. Rules for the way certain kinds of materials are put together were invented and then followed throughout the building. Yet, individual joints at intersections of complex geometries were seemingly worked out in the process of construction. There is an internally consistent, if not readily apparent, logic to this. It is as if the process of building melded the temporal, in-the-moment sensibility of the Anangu with the permanent, pre-planned aesthetic of European architecture. As a result, the building looks like nothing we have ever seen: a hybrid between some unknown, mysterious building sensibility and known pragmatic ones. In this way it is like the cases at the Tjibaou Cultural Centre: like something from another planet or another reality. However, unlike the cases at Tjibaou, the technology applied at Uluru is not the result of high tech experimentation and production but, rather, of a parallel sensibility and a far less exacting and controlling construction mentality. Each piece at Uluru is hand cut for its exact location, while at the much larger Tjibaou project, each piece is

Building Change

110

3.26 (left) Structural intersection

Building visibility

111

3.27 (right) Framing model ofone of the two “snake” buildings part of a pre-planned system, a kit-of-parts produced in Europe and shipped halfway around the world to be assembled in New Caledonia. The comparison with the Tjibaou Cultural Centre raises important issues with the architectural expression and detailing of the Uluru-Kata Tjuta Cultural Centre. At Tjibaou, Piano employed the most recent technologies to create a building of immense structural and material sophistication. By comparison, Burgess’ less well-funded project at Uluru appears awkward in its apparent technological innocence. But Greg Burgess is an award-winning architect who knows how to build with refined contemporary materials and how to create precise details. What, then, is going on with the technological expression of this project? It is clear that Burgess had other purposes in mind—he is saying something else through the sensibility and making of the project. He is struggling with the other issues that this project brings to the foreground; profound historical and cultural issues that supersede those of the sophistication of the architectural detail.

Building Change

112

Kenneth Frampton, in Studies in Tectonic Culture, sees this struggle as one that plagues all architects: The full tectonic potential of any building stems from its capacity to articulate both the poetic and the cognitive aspects of its substance. This double articulation supposes that one has to mediate between technology as a productive procedure and craft technique as an anachronistic but renewable capacity to reconcile different productive modes of intentionality. (Frampton 1996:26) At Uluru, Burgess knew that the provisional nature of the construction of the building would be read as having meaning by the foreigners who visit the Centre. They experience an unconventionally made building with winding spaces that are almost disorienting. They notice the rough finishes, the exposed nail heads and the odd intersections of materials. These signal a kind of naiveté, an innocence about the sophistication of making and an unfamiliarity with refined surfaces. It is precisely through these aspects of the project that Burgess conveys to the visitors the relationship of the Anangu with the material world. That relationship is, literally, less refined. Things made by the Anangu are taken from the environment around them and worked to be precisely tuned to what they need to do—carry water, perform a ceremonial function, bring down a kangaroo for dinner—and no more. While the Anangu have pride in what they make, little value is placed on refinement or an overly crafted object. There was little surplus energy in the stark survival equation of the desert landscape to spend on non-productive work. Of course, in the contemporary world, this attitude toward craft is shifting as Anangu carvings, weapons, ceremonial objects and implements earn money, the new necessity for survival. In the end, the long curving shapes of Liru and Kuniya were built into the building, not only in plan, but spatially as well. Two long continuous undulating roofs snake across the desert. They scale down the mass of the building against the expanse of blue sky and echo the rounded shapes of Uluru in the distance. The roofs make enormous patches of shade in the red desert. Under them, curving adobe walls with few openings are interspersed with wooden ones to encircle cool, dimly lit spaces for exhibition, café, gift shop, work rooms and offices. Deep porches surround most of these, keeping the walls cool, pro viding for shaded passage and creating a zone of transition as eyes adjust to the unforgiving desert sun. Most of the spaces have evaporative cooling, while a few have air conditioning. “This building is for us all. Our beautiful shade house has the Kuniya python built within its shape. Its body is made of mud and its roof is the spine of the python” (Topsy Tjulyata as quoted in Tawa 1996). This reading of the building by the Anangu is quite straightforward. They have no problem seeing in it their Ancestors Liru and Kuniya. Their tradition of loose representational strategies and vigorously engaged interpretation allows them to easily understand this symbolic intention of the project. However, the more literal-minded tourists squint, stand back and shrug their shoulders when they are told by a guide that the building is the embodiment of the snake Ancestors. “I guess I can see it”, was the uncertain reaction of one German tourist. “Umm, well”, hedged a visitor from Argentina,

Building visibility

113

“it is not really so clear to me.” “Where did you say the head was?” asked a woman from the US, looking up and down the length on the building. “I understand, Father,” said a young English child, tugging on her father’s pant leg. “Those boards up there are the ribs of the snake, like on a skeleton.” Her father, sweating and sunburned, took off his hat and looked blankly up, not answering.

3.28 Roof forms sympathetic to the undulating form of Uluru, one kilometer away

3.29 View of the Cultural Centre from a distance, with dead oak protected in the courtyard

Building Change

114

3.30 Layered roof allows for ventilation of central rooms and shading of various wall planes For the tourists, the Uluru-Kata Tjuta Cultural Centre is not like anything they have ever seen. And in this sense Burgess’ design is a powerful contribution to the desire of the Anangu for their culture to be visible and to be distinguished as unique. The way spaces are made and materials are treated, finished and joined reinforces the perception of the Anangu as a people with a particular sensibility and tradition. However, it is unclear, as suggested by the reaction of tourists, that the culture of the Anangu, even to the extent they are willing to share it, is really made visible by the building. This is not the failure of the architecture but, rather, a result of the non-material, process-oriented qualities of the Anangu life. Seen from the point of view of process and experience, rather than as an architectural object, the Centre articulates some of these processes by the way that it unfolds as a linked sequence of curvilinear spaces enclosed by adobe walls, grounded and specific, tucked under the serpentine roofs. Visitors leave their buses or cars in the hot sun of the parking areas spread out among native grasses and desert oaks. The entrance to the Centre is not readily apparent—and, in fact, is almost hidden within the overlapping curving adobe walls and deep shadows of the overhanging roofs. While similar to the Tjibaou Cultural Centre in the sense of indirect path, the motivations here are more complex. While the Anangu also avoid direct approaches, the wandering here is also about drawing out the entrance, slowing down the visitor, and seemingly to remove the confident certainty that most of the tourists are used to having as they move through the world. The Centre makes it clear that here the tourist is in another world entirely—one that does not work by the usual rules and the usual knowledge. To get the minga to the hidden entrance, compacted sand paths lead the fifty meters or more across the desert landscape, then converge to a single path that swings to follow the curving line of an

Building visibility

115

adobe wall. The path hugs the wall and is soon immersed in the welcome shade of the overhanging roof. As eyes adjust to the dimness, the visitors are led into a dark, cool tunnel between two adobe walls, and then taken on a sharp left u-turn through a small foyer that forms a light-lock into the magical world at the heart of the Centre. This long sinuous space, known simply as Tjukurpa (simultaneously sacred law and creation), is dimly lit from above and brightly decorated on all walls with dense Tjukurpa paintings by Anangu women. The paintings include animal tracks and images, decorative fields of marks and words. The words, dancing across the wall in Pitjantjatjara, include: Ananguku ngura nyangatja ka pukulpa pitjama (This is aboriginal land and we welcome you),

3.31 Path approaching Cultural Centre from the parking lot Tatintjala ara mulapa wiya. Ara mulapa ngaranyi pulkara kulintjaka (Climbing is not a proper part of this place. The proper thing is to really listen), Tjukurpa panya tjamulu, kamilu, mamlu, ngunytjulu nganana ungu, kurunpangka munu katangka kanyintjaku (Tjukurpa was given to us by our grandfathers and grandmothers, our fathers and our mothers, to hold onto in our heads and our hearts). Other information is included on smaller signs that translate the wall text and explain Tjukurpa. There is a small rounded theater cradled by the Tjukurpa space that shows video loops about Anangu life and sacred beliefs. Again, most of the images are of women elders. The sounds from the video, speaking and chanting, spills into the Tjukurpa display. After the harsh bright desert light, heat and vast horizons of the outside, the shadowed, cool and intimate curving place filled with the tumbling sounds of Pitjantjatjara transports the visitor into a dreamlike world. Long benches invite tourists to linger in this world, to take their time. At the end of this sinuous space is a sign that reads: “If you worry about Aboriginal law, then leave it, don’t climb it. The chain is still there if you want to climb it. You

Building Change

116

should think about Tjukurpa and stay on the ground. Please don’t climb.” This sober ending note about climbing is indicative of the way knowledge is dealt with in Anangu culture. Knowledge is given, then it is up to each individual to act responsibly in relationship to it. Therefore, rather than simply closing the Climb, the Anangu explain why it is important not to, then leave it to the individual to behave properly in response. Once the tourists know what a sacrilege it is to climb the Rock, reason the Anangu, they will not

3.32 The cool, dim, painted world of the Tjukurpa exhibition space

Building visibility

117

3.33 The coutyard dead and oak do it. After reading this final sign, minga leave the Tjukurpa through another half-lit foyer to emerge out onto a wide covered porch that opens up to the enclosed world of the Centre. Here there are a range of choices of where to go and what to do within the cloister of the Centre. To the left is a courtyard for storytelling, and to the right is a long, open courtyard with the ancient desert oak flanked by the inma ground, shaded picnic tables and a traditional wiltja. Straight ahead is the popular room where the Joint Management of the Park is exhibited. The information desk here is staffed by the Park Service who keep liaison offices in the Centre and make sure visitors have information brochures, maps, information about Anangu Tours and helpful hints about dealing with the desert heat. In the welcome dim coolness, interpretive displays discuss the flora and fauna of Uluru and their uses by the Anangu. There is also information about the handback, the design of the Centre, and the ongoing efforts of the Anangu to bring the Park into balance with Tjukurpa. In one alcove there is a strange pile of miscellaneous small rocks stacked on a low shelf. These, it turns out, are pieces of Uluru that tourists from across the world have carted home. Later, plagued by guilt or unexplained calamity, they have hastily returned them to the Cultural Centre, asking forgiveness from the Anangu. Forgiveness is also asked for in numerous passages in the prominently placed guestbook. These entries are from tourists who came to the Centre only after an early morning climb up Uluru. Upon walking through the Tjukurpa and finding out that the Anangu did not want them to climb Uluru, these well-meaning tourists are struck by guilt. Among the brochures at the information desk are those from Anangu Tours. This commercial operation by the Anangu community provides alternative activities for tourists to the Park as well as offering opportunities for those who wish to know more about Anangu culture. Billed as “the only way to experience the real Uluru”, the tours range in price, duration and physical

Building Change

118

3.34 Light filtering into the information gallery demands. Among the tours are two-hour walks, led by an Anangu guide and an interpreter, from the Cultural Centre into the bush for lessons on bush survival, bush tucker (food), and some of the Tjukurpa related to Uluru. Another takes visitors on a long

Building visibility

119

3.35 Walking in shade under the protecting roofs

Building Change

120

walk around the base of Uluru, stopping at particular sites to tell the basic creation story of a waterhole or rockslide. Opening off the central court of the Centre are a number of commercial activities. Among these is Maruku Arts, an Aboriginal-owned cooperative that sells mostly locally made wooden crafts. The cooperative, selling work from Aboriginal communities spread throughout the Central Desert, began in 1984 in the wiltja next to the Park Office. It sells traditionally made hunting spears, spear throwers, shields, boomerangs and other tools (all made by men) along with carved and decorated bowls and wooden animals (crafted mainly by women). While most of the carvings are made for the tourist market, many are exquisite and of museum quality. Across the court is the Walkatjara Art Centre, a pottery cooperative launched by a ceramic artist from Sydney. Here tourists can buy ceramics manufactured in Sydney and shipped after a first firing to Uluru for the women of the cooperative to paint. These are then fired again and sold, earning important income for the artists. Pottery is not a traditional craft of the Anangu, but the drawing and painting traditions translate with glaze onto the surface of ceramics just as they did with acrylic onto boards and canvas. The white woman who runs the cooperative takes obvious pride in having taught the Anangu painters (primarily women) how to render Uluru as one sees it from the Sunset viewing point and on postcards rather than as the circle they have always used to depict it. Clearly this is work conceived and done for the tourist market. However, many of the bowls and platters—when free of the formula of Western perspective view—show the remarkable inventiveness, color sensibility and ease of reinterpretation that Aboriginal representational systems allow. There is also a more traditional tourist gift shop selling t-shirts, jewelry, keychains, postcards, camera batteries, film, sunscreen and hats, books and CDs. Next to it is the Initi café where hot food, including hamburgers and french fries, are served with ice cold Coca-Cola and other beverages. The huge majority of the employees of both the gift shop and the café are white. After a few dance performances early in the life of the Centre, the inma ground is for the most part abandoned to the desert grasses, which are slowly re-establishing themselves there. I was warned it is also inhabited by snakes. In the traditional wiltja and under a ramada erected next to it, Anangu occasionally show up to demonstrate some carving or painting for the tourists.

Building visibility

121

3.36 Plan of Uluru-Kata Tjuta Cultural Centre, with coutyard opening off to the right of the plan Leaving the Centre is even more casual than entering: an opening in the walls between Walkatjara and the Gift Shops leads outside the compound to a path that winds back around the buildings to the parking areas. The Anangu are pleased with the Cultural Centre as a place. They understand it metaphorically and see the process of designing and building it as successful. They are also pleased that the minga who visit the Centre take to heart what they learn about Tjukurpa, that they see the landscape differently, and decide not to climb Uluru. What is less successful, however, is how the Centre functions in the day-to-day life of the community and how it functions in relationship to the larger political and cultural hopes that spawned it. This has little to do with the architecture. Instead, it has to do with the location of the Centre and the cultural abyss between the Anangu and minga. The Centre, as a built place, serves as a kind of cultural bridge, like the “Dreamtime” paintings. Like the paintings, however, it is also a form of cultural production that is not indigenous to the Anangu. Instead, once again, the Anangu have taken on a way of making that operates in the realm of understanding of the minga and of all globalized European culture. While this is perhaps a wise thing, given the context of the National Park and the half million tourists that visit every year, it is also one more case of the Aborigines closing the cultural gap from their end. The original vision of the Cultural Centre as a location for both ceremonial and craft activity for the Mutitjulu Community has proven to be overly optimistic. This is due in

Building Change

122

part to the distance between the Centre and the Community—thirteen kilometers of desert blacktop. Few of the Anangu can afford cars, and there is currently no regular Community-owned transport. While in pre-contact times, Anangu regularly walked these kinds of distances and more in a single day of tracking game, it is not exactly convenient for their lives to use the Centre in any routine way. The Anangu are also, by white Australian standards, reticent. There are many reasons for this. It is due, in part, to their culture in which much is sacred and secret and is only shared when the bearer of the secret is ready. In addition, the Anangu, who live mostly in small family groups, are not used to interacting regularly with strangers, especially Piranpa with whom they have no way of establishing relationship. For decades the Anangu have been treated without respect by outsiders—or as objects of curiosity. Finally, there are the insensitive and awkward intrusions by tourists who feel it is a birthright to snap photos of anything and anyone, to walk anywhere they like and to use money to gain access to any place they want to go. As a result of these cultural concerns, and of the distance between home at Mutitjulu and the Centre, actual contact between Anangu and the minga at the Centre is fairly minimal. While owned and operated by the Mutitjulu community, the commercial ventures at the Centre are staffed almost entirely by Piranpa (non-Aborigines). A few Anangu regularly participate in tours of the Centre’s interpretive display—giving a talk in Pitjantjatjara while a Piranpa guide translates for the visitors. Some Anangu come at irregular intervals to demonstrate some traditional carving and weaving techniques in the wiltja in the court between the buildings. And a few women participate in the Walkatjara Pottery Initiative, which gives them an opportunity to earn some much needed income. For the most part, however, these Anangu are not particularly receptive to having idle conversations with tourists, and they usually refuse to have their pictures taken. They have found the experience of superficial interaction not at all rewarding, and in some cases, intrusive. The Uluru-Kata Tjuta Cultural Centre serves as an important introduction to Anangu culture and beliefs for the Piranpa who visit Uluru. As the women elders envisioned in the early days of working with Burgess and Peters, it reframes the experience of the entire Park for the minga. Many of these tourists begin to see the place in a radically different way, and their behavior shifts accordingly. As a result of their visit to the Centre, some people do not make the “Climb”. Some decide to spend their time at Uluru participating in one of the several Anangu-led bush walks. However, architecture here cannot redress or resolve the intractable social, cultural and historical issues that continue to plague the Anangu. Kim Dovey, visiting the Centre four years after its opening, found a number of dissatisfied members of the Anangu community. The unhappiness comes not from the building as a work of architecture but, rather, from the failure of the building as an object of cultural exchange. The community design process generated expectations of a place of genuine cultural exchange, economic development, and equal recognition—and, on this, it has largely failed to deliver. Instead there is a perception that Anangu culture has been packaged for the tourist market while broader social inequities remained—Aboriginality is consumed rather than recognized…“up there performing, no clothes on, doesn’t get

Building visibility

123

the recognition…they just want to put you on display or find out about all your stories.” There is resentment that, despite the formal success of the project, it has not produced an equality of recognition of opportunity in socioeconomic terms…. Much of the frustration about how life has not improved for the Anangu people has been transferred onto the building. Architecture has failed, again, to solve social problems. (Dovey 2000:63) A few years later, some of the women elders were more philosophical. They believe that the Cultural Centre is having an important impact on the tourists, and think more stories might be shared, more of their culture revealed through videos, performances and story telling. They see that the attitudes of tourists are slowly changing. They see more and more visitors taking the Anangu bush tours and showing polite curiosity and deep respect for Anangu culture. These women would like to see the Cultural Centre more actively used by the Mutitjulu Community, particularly for inma (dances) and other ceremonies. They are non-committal as to whether these should be open to minga. In some ways, they think the Centre might be used as a place to develop and maintain Anangu cultural practices—a role it could play without the presence of tourists. Other elders are more guarded; disappointed by what they see as continuing rude behavior by tourists. Among the elaborate Aboriginal systems of relationship there is an important set of principles about reciprocity. According to these customs, the important sacred knowledge and knowledge of survival in the landscape that is shared in the Cultural Centre demands reciprocal action on the part of the tourists.6 It is unclear what exactly that should be, since the relationship between tourist and the Anangu is a new relationship not explicitly addressed in Tjukurpa. What is clear is that simply spending some money on food, souvenirs and craft items is not sufficient reciprocity for some Anangu. Deciding not to climb Uluru is also not sufficient—since not doing so is expected as appropriate behavior according to Tjukurpa. And what will become of the Anangu and their intimate knowledge of Uluru and Kata Tjuta? The women elders are saddened by the fact that there are too few of the next generation that meet the severe criteria to be recipients of the entire body of sacred knowledge about the land. In the tumbling Pitjantjatjara language, they say that most of the younger women are either not interested or not trustworthy to receive and care for that knowledge.7 Their concern is more subtle than it first appears. They are not worried that the knowledge will be lost—one gestures toward Uluru and says, “It is always right there. Any person who can see palya (correctly or straight) can see it. And if they can see it, then they will know.” The problem is that there will be no Anangu there to be custodians of this landscape and of one of the oldest continuous human cultures on earth. Today we are in a different kind of place—an earth house. It has Liru Tjukurpa. We drew it in the sand, thought and learned about buildings and said “maybe a design like this would be playa—straight”. The Kuniya and Liru are put here together. The Cultural Centre is here for Piranpa—for all the tourists. (Anangu Elder)

Chapter 4 Building Memory The Museum of Struggle “I told you the Truth”, I say yet again, “Memory’s truth, because memory has its own special kind. It selects, eliminates, alters, exaggerates, minimizes, glorifies and vilifies also; but it creates its own reality, its heterogeneous but usually coherent version of events; and no sane person ever trusts anyone else’s version more than his own.” (Salman Rushdie Midnight’s Children as quoted by Burgin 1996)

To many South Africans, the end of apartheid is almost unbelievable. After decades of unscrupulous and merciless racial oppression, white-only rule is gone. As the realization of the new political and spatial freedoms sinks in, the people of South Africa are beginning to formulate how to commemorate and curate the nightmare of apartheid. It was a defining era in the developmental arc of South Africa, a span of years that defines all that came before and after. As with other atrocities in human history it is crucial to remember apartheid, for in such memorialization there is the hope that it will not be repeated. And in this hope lies the slow healing of the deep wounds it inflicted and the optimism to make a national commitment to a race-blind future. However, the complexities of the era, along with the history that unfolded both before and after, make memorializing apartheid a complicated and controversial challenge. The strategy of using museums as institutions for this effort is not an obvious solution for a country where a majority of the population was denied access to the nation’s museums until 1994. Instead, oral histories made up the bulk of memorialization among this non-white population of South Africa. But the impact of apartheid goes beyond that population. It includes the white population—Afrikaans and English, and it includes the international communities that participated in both its propping up and its tearing down. It is a history that must be remembered all over the world—for its insidious legalism, its official lies and brutal repressions. And so, inevitably, museums dedicated to apartheid will be built—probably one in every major town in the country. Already in cities all over South Africa there are small communitygenerated museums that document the local impacts of some aspects of the apartheid era. In Cape Town the District Six Museum commemorates the vibrant section of the city which was bulldozed in the 1970s to make way for new white development. That development was never built, and the land that was District Six sits as a vast gap in the Cape Town fabric which, while still contested ground, is slowly being filled with educational, residential and public facilities. In Soweto, there is a moving museum/memorial named after Hector Peterson,

Building memory

125

the best known of the 200 black students shot in the 1976 student protest against continually degraded education. In another part of Soweto, an impromptu community center museum documents the neighborhood of Klip Town that will be the location of a large project subject to an international competition. None of these important museums attempts to take on the entire scope of the history of apartheid. Rather, they, perhaps wisely, focus on the local scale or on specific events. A decade after the end of apartheid, there are only two museums that are formally dedicated to this larger apartheid story. The first of these, known as the Gold Reef Apartheid Museum, was opened near Johannesburg to great fanfare and acclaim in 2001. This project is an exquisitely detailed work of architecture but its curatorial strategy is un-nuanced and predictable. In addition, it is located in a completely inappropriate context on the outskirts of Johannesburg on land reclaimed from a played out gold mine, a fifteen minute drive from the center of the city, and a twenty-five minute drive from Soweto. The Gold Reef Apartheid Museum was built as part of a deal made by the Krok brothers, scions of a wealthy family who made their fortune developing and selling toxic skin-lightening creams to a nation where light skin was a precious cultural commodity. The brothers wanted to build a huge casino in tandem with a themed amusement park, Gold Reef City, which “recreates” old Johannesburg of the gold boomtown era complete with Las Vegas style amenities like roller coasters and other rides. The City of Johannesburg was happy to see such a project, but demanded a “giveback” in exchange for development assistance. In response, the Krok brothers started with imagining a re-creation of tribal villages— but were challenged to go far beyond such a trite vision by the excellent team of architects and planners they hired to visualize the project.1 The idea then evolved into a “People’s Museum”—a step up from the village recreation scenario—addressing the history of the various peoples of South Africa. The theme of a Museum to Apartheid was settled on only after a trip to Washington, DC to see the Holocaust Museum as a model for museum excellence. This is how the Gold Reef Apartheid Museum ended up isolated in a landscape of endless parking lots which it shares with the real attraction at this suburban locale: the theme park and the casino, which shout for attention with huge colorful signs and a giant Ferris wheel. The Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC did more than just inspire those who programmed the Gold Reef Apartheid Museum. It provided a prototype of how architecture might be deployed to create metaphoric spaces of oppression. The notion is that the architectural qualities of the spaces act in concert with the content to generate an almost visceral experience of the events described in the displays. Here, movement up and down is used metaphorically. Ceiling heights and corridor widths are deployed strategically to compress and release the visitors’ bodies as they move through. Lighting dramatizes. In some places sound design encompasses the visitor. The little material evidence of apartheid that exists is mostly two-dimensional documents. So these, along with photographs and text are displayed on, and sometimes within, a winding path bounded by wire boxes intended to remind us of cages. While all these dramatic devices are often effective in terms of evoking emotion, in the end the visitor starts to feel suspicious. What is the

Building Change

126

4.1 Gold Reef Apartheid Museum from parking lot goal of all this staging? What are we meant to believe? What has not been included? This single-narrative curatorial style by nature leaves much unsaid and many points of view unrepresented. The museum has been criticized by many as omitting all but a handful of the thousands and thousands of white members of the ANC and other antiapartheid groups, many of whom were imprisoned, banned, or killed for their stances and actions. It has also been criticized for its un-nuanced version of the conflicts between the ANC and other black organizations during and after the apartheid era. It eliminates almost entirely the role the Communist Party played both in supporting and drawing suspicion to the ANC. Many black South Africans who lived through the apartheid years and suffered under the Nationalist regime find the museum exhibits melodramatic. How is it possible to construct a history out of so few artifacts—a history that was lived daily as an experience and is already written on the landscape of the site? The Gold Reef Apartheid Museum has been mistaken by many South Africans and most foreigners as “The Official” Apartheid Museum—the single and governmentsanctioned effort to interpret the scope and impact of apartheid. This is not the case. While the National Museum in the capital, Pretoria, is curating materials and mounting focused and limited exhibitions on particular events, the national government has avoided such a certainly contentious “official” project. No doubt the politically savvy leaders of South Africa are waiting for the years to give perspective and for time to heal some of the most grievous wounds before undertaking to build the consensus around such an institution. So the new museum near Johannesburg, by virtue of being the “first”, has gained great prominence. For architects and those interested in the relationship between architecture and power, the Gold Reef Apartheid Museum offers one perspective on the power of architecture in these circumstances. Here architecture is wielded in a muscular way for its dramatic and emotional effects.

Building memory

127

However, another museum dedicated to apartheid is, as of this writing, also under way. This one is located in a much less visible and more remote location and is only just now under construction due to delays that grow out of its political and cultural context. When seen in light of the Johannesburg project, this museum is a radically different institution; physically, culturally and architecturally. The project, by Noero Wolff Architects of Cape Town, calls into question the internationally accepted and seemingly natural strategies of presentation and memorialization of eras of profound upheaval as embodied in the curatorial and architectural strategy of the Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC. This questioning is particularly relevant in a country where ninety percent of the population has been excluded from these types of institutions until quite recently, and in a place where oral traditions of memory sharing are still alive and vivid. An important step in this questioning has been to rename the project, originally called The Apartheid Museum. Just as construction began, the museum received a new name: The Museum of Struggle—focusing not only on the struggle to end apartheid, but also on the long and continuing fights for equity, freedom and justice that have taken place in the region over the past 300 years. The architectural strategy of the Museum of Struggle, proposed by the architects within their winning entry to the competition for the building and its precinct, is radically different from that of the Gold Reef Museum. Noero Wolff designed a system for displaying the materials of apartheid that removes hierarchy and provides for multiple and simultaneous narrative points of view. In this case, architecture becomes a powerful spatial container that nevertheless remains somewhat distant from the curatorial content of the museum. This strategy allows for the communication of the diverse and subtle range of perspectives among those who experienced apartheid. It also allows for an evolution of the cultural weight of certain aspects of apartheid and the evolving perspectives on certain events. This new Museum of Struggle began construction in 2003 in the heart of the former black township of New Brighton, near the small south

Building Change

128

4.2 Competition model of Museum of Struggle coastal city of Port Elizabeth. The entire area was consolidated politically soon after apartheid ended and is now known as Mandela Municipality. New Brighton is one of the oldest black townships in South Africa. This is due to the fact that unlike most of the black townships, which were completely new communities built in one moment on barren soil, it was an existing mixed-race working-class town. When the Group Areas Act, which separated people into living communities by race, was passed in 1950, the non-black residents of New Brighton were forced to relocate, leaving behind the remains of an already intact community. New black residents, displaced from their homes, soon joined the old population. This history is often cited by the people of New Brighton when they are asked why they think that many of the early anti-apartheid civil disobedience actions were planned in the shacks of the community, beginning in 1952. While this was only four years into the apartheid regime, the legacy of segregation and forced removals go back to 1847 in Port Elizabeth, and appear much earlier in other places in the country. In fact, the entire history of South Africa is marked by tensions over ethnicity and race that quickly resulted in spatial consequences. While race and spatial movement are key factors in the history of many places in the world, in South Africa they are played out with such force and complexity that they warrant explicit discussion. For in South Africa, the conflict between black and white, while severe, is complicated by tensions within the ethnicities in each racial group. Layered on to this were two other racially defined groups: the Indians, who were people descended from immigrants from India, and those defined by apartheid as “colored”, who consisted of people descended from a wide range of non-white nationalities, races and ethnicities—including those of mixed race. The

Building memory

129

apartheid government became adept at playing off one non-white group against another in order to prevent their unification to

4.3 Location of Mandela Municipality overthrow the racist white rule. A grasp of the outline of this history is key to understanding the enormous current undertaking of the nation to build a colorblind democracy and of the people of Mandela Municipality in attempting to commemorate apartheid as a strategy for moving forward.2 Ever since Dutch and English ships began to stopover at Table Bay (the place that would become Cape Town) in the early 1620s, South Africa has been defined in large part by displacements and migrations—the people subject to constant historical spatial pressure. This pressure came not only from the colonizing Europeans on the southwest and southern coasts, but also, later, when the forward edge of spreading African tribes from the east met the eastward movement of the white colonists. At first the land was big enough to absorb some of this migration, particularly in the southwest where the indigenous people were the Khoikhoi, migrating herders, and the Bushmen (San), migrating hunters. Here, also, the first white colonists wanted only to establish a provisioning station to re-supplying ships on the long, lucrative journey to and from “The Orient”. To this end a trading relationship grew between the Europeans (mostly Dutch) and the Khoikhoi for cattle to supply beef to the ships. It did not take long, however, for the white colonizing populations to grow and the small shifts gave way to major displacements. A subculture of Dutch transient stock farmers emerged in eastern Cape by the end of the seventeenth century. These nomadic trekboers lived beyond the mountains which bounded the region of Cape Town, and resided either in crude, temporary huts or in their ox-drawn wagons. The cattle of the trekboers soon began to push out the game animals

Building Change

130

that were the mainstay of the hunter/gatherer San people. The San organized an effective guerrilla resistance to this encroachment. While early on the San were sometimes successful in pushing the trekboers off their traditional hunting grounds, retaliation against them was ruthless. The San, on foot and armed with bows and spears were ultimately no match for the mounted, rifle bearing impromptu commandos formed for retaliatory raids. The informal war against the San, begun in the early years of the eighteenth century, continued for generations. Walsh cites a Commander Collins, who “making a tour in 1809, met two commando leaders who claimed ‘bags’ of 3,200 and 2,700 Bushmen each” (Walsh 1999:76). Often Khoikhoi would join the San in their reactive raids against the whites (Walsh 1999). Later, the Khoikhoi became adept with horses and rifles, skills which, along with their expertise with cattle, made them valuable employees of the trekboers. Over time a close, yet uneven, relationship developed between the Khoikhoi and the trekboers, with the Khoikhoi moving with the trekboer families from place to place. While the Khoikhoi were capable and loyal stockmen, the trekboers adhered to a severe biblical interpretation that placed anyone of color below whites. In spite of the overt racism, miscegenation often occurred, ironically coloring white Afrikaners’ genetic purity. This, of course, was a fact the Afrikaners later tried to write out of history. Meanwhile, in the eastern part of the country, the slow and natural 1000-year migration of the Bantu-speaking people from the lakes of Central Africa had reached the southeastern coast. It was the furthest outposts of these Xhosa people that Europeans first encountered in 1702 when they first crossed to the east of the Gamtoos River, east of Cape Town (Walsh 1999:69). Because of the gradual nature of the Xhosa migrations into the region, there were still pockets of people of other ethnicities scattered in this area as well; they included Khoikhoi and Venda people. in the seventy years between these first interactions and the 1770s, independent (and illegal) hunters and traders ventured further and further into Xhosa territory, with little negative effect. But the sophisticated Xhosa people were slowly moving west, and the trekboers slowly east. It was only a matter of time until armed clashes began to occur. The history of South Africa might have been radically different had this conflict with the independently minded trekboers not occurred at about the same time as Xhosa unity, held firmly together for two centuries, began to unravel. Or, if almost at the same time, the Dutch had not begun to lose their grip on the colony as its East India Trading Company began to fail and as internal Dutch politics led to a brief civil war leaving the Netherlands open to foreign interference. With no centralized Xhosa authority and no firm government from Cape Town, the relationship between the Xhosa and the trekboers was left up to the good behavior of individuals. Some of the rough and tumble Afrikaners, who were convinced that God had preordained their inhabitation of the land, rustled cattle and stole women from the Xhosa. Retribution inevitably followed, prompting in turn more violence and so a cycle of devastation began. The sides were fairly evenly matched: Boer weapons and horses against Xhosa numbers, fighting skill and adaptable tactics (Walsh 1999:81–87). The clashes between Boer, Xhosa and, later, the English would go on, in various forms, for almost 100 years. By 1795, enmity between the English and the Dutch in Europe spilled over into South Africa. Not wanting to lose the important provisioning outpost of Cape Town, the British mounted a nearly bloodless takeover of the city. This led eventually to the turning over of

Building memory

131

colonial control of the region to the British. While the early British administration did little to change the status quo, later administrators did. Conflicts over religion, culture, language, relationships with the indigenous people and many other things eventually arose between these two white “tribes”; those descended from Dutch settlers, the Boers (later called Afrikaners for the language they spoke—a hybrid of old Dutch combined with words from Xhosa, Malay and Khoikhoi) and the English. The first few decades of the nineteenth century saw enormous and violent upheaval among the African tribes further to the east. The fallout from the dissolution of the Xhosa resulted finally in several new young chiefs rising to local power and, in competition with one another, setting off to conquer and reunify their people. While the exact reasons for this time, known as the mfecane, “variously translated as ‘clubbing’, ‘crushing’, ‘scattering’, ‘time of emptiness’” are debated, the result was nothing short of catastrophic. “From an epicentre in the lands of the northern Nguni, shockwaves shot out for more than a thousand miles, displacing hundreds of thousands, with accompanying violence, death and painful readjustment” (Walsh 1999:136). From this chaos emerged the overwhelmingly powerful Zulu nation, as well as the Basuto and the Swazi. Many other peoples were so radically displaced that they reconstituted as new tribes, evolving new customs and settling in places distant to their original homes (Ross 1999). Throughout the nineteenth century hundreds of skirmishes took place between these groups of every description as everyone jostled for space, resources and security across the southern end of the continent. Among the jostling was the establishment by the Boers of independent republics: The Orange Free State and the Transvaal. The Transvaal, in the remote high veld with Johannesburg as its capital, later became the South African Republic (ZAR). The discovery of gold in this area prompted a series of events that led to the bitter Boer War between the English and the Afrikaner Boers (1899 to 1902). While the main fighting ended within six months of the beginning of hostilities, the Boer mounted an effective guerrilla war for almost two more years. During this time, the British invented the concentration camp. They rounded up Boer women and children, along with Khoikhoi women and children whose men were working with the Boer, and locked them up in residential camps so that they could not provide material support for the Boer fighters. At least 26,000, most of them children, died of hunger and disease in these camps. This devastation is often credited for ending the war with the result that the Boer Republics became British colonies (Ross 1999). In 1910, the former Boer Republics and South Africa were consolidated to become a member of the British Commonwealth under the name of the Union of South Africa, where only whites could sit in Parliament. While tensions continued between those of English descent and the Afrikaners, the whites banded together to make their tentative political hold stronger through a set of segregationist and racist policies and laws. Among these was the 1913 Natives Land Act that confined black South Africans on small reserves, and forbade their owning or even renting land outside these reserves. This led to further displacements, unsustainable densities on the reserves, and landless rural poverty for those who lived and worked outside the reserves. This law and others laid the groundwork for the spatial strategies that would characterize apartheid. By the mid-1920s the Afrikaners political strength grew and the agenda of their Nationalist Party was increasingly radical about freedom from Britain, separation of cultural development of the Afrikaners and English, and strict racial segregation. By 1929

Building Change

132

this platform was explicitly racist and made it natural for the far right of the party to identify closely with the Nazi agenda in the 1930s. This led certain segments of the nationalist party to campaign against South Africa’s eventual involvement on the side of the Allies during the Second World War. In 1948, the Nationalists swept into power and introduced the era of apartheid. “Apartheid” is an Afrikaner word meaning “separation”, and a large proportion of its laws and policies were about formalizing the already existent and longstanding practices of racial segregation in South Africa. The consequences were devastating for a vast majority of the nation’s people and for its future. Apartheid was a kind of super-segregation that also served as a strategy for economic and spatial exploitation. After the 1948 election, the Parliament rapidly passed a series of Acts that further spatialized segregation—at all scales from the body to the nation—and resulted in the transfer of huge tracts of lands out of black and colored ownership and control.3 These laws went far beyond “normal” segregation policies of previous governments, which acknowledged at least some amount of shame at some level—or, at a minimum, created an atmosphere of mild public denial. The new laws were shameless and created an enormous captive labor market with no political or spatial agency. The legislation that governed private relationships between individuals was a followup to earlier legislation. In 1927, the government had already banned sexual relations between blacks and whites. In this way, the government could preserve the whiteness of the minority white race—and punish anyone so bold as to cross the racial barrier for intimate or romantic purposes. The Mixed Marriage Act (1949) extended the ban to marriages and included in the ban those designated as “colored”—a huge multi-ethnic grouping that included anyone not “black” or “white”. This included people of mixed race, Asians and Indians. Of course, to put these laws into effect, all South Africans needed to be racially classified so that it was clear who was “white” and who was not. This led to the Population Registration Act (1950). This “basic weapon of apartheid” (Walsh 1999:430) required that everyone had to be classified as “white”, “black”, “colored” or “Asian and Indian”. Each person was then given an identity card indicating race, which had to be carried at all times. Ambiguous cases were brought before a committee of unambiguously white men who, through questioning, records and physical examination, would classify the person. Families were routinely torn apart when some members were classified in one racial group and others in another. Once individuals were racially classified, it was time to separate the “races” from one another. The Group Areas Act (1950) was a blunt, but powerful weapon in this. The Act designated areas for each racial group, giving the desirable urban and suburban areas primarily to the whites. This resulted in new dislocations of entire communities. It also broke up thriving multi-ethnic communities. Longstanding neighborhoods, with the bad fortune to be on lands wanted by the white elite, were bulldozed. The new black and colored segregated communities, moved to more marginal land some distance from the white areas, were then given separate schools and other public facilities of sub-standard quality compared to what white communities had. To further remove the undesirable blacks away from city centers, the 1951 Bantu Authorities Act established a series of “Bantustans” or black homelands to which people with no explicit purpose for being near the cities were required to move. These were almost never actual homelands for any tribal people, and were on marginal, usually

Building memory

133

undeveloped, land. Suddenly, seventy-five percent of the population of the country was to live on thirteen percent of its land. Again, massive migrations took place. Countless families were broken up when wives and children were shipped off to “homelands” where they were expected to eke out a survival while husbands stayed behind to work at the only jobs available. Other families were allowed to stay in the black townships with their men, but the threat of removal was always present. Then, in 1952, came the Abolition of Passes and Coordination of Documents Act. This required every “black” and “colored” citizen to carry a passbook at all times which had to be presented upon request by any person in authority. The book included not only the racial designation and personal details of the holder, but also information about where the holder was allowed to be and at what times. It was illegal to be without a passbook. And it was illegal to be in a place that the passbook did not explicitly permit. Each of these actions had deep spatial implications that went hand in hand with the political, cultural, economic and psychological ones. The goals were those of segregation in its most complete form. The undesirable blacks should be invisible: completely out of sight unless performing necessary physical labor. Out of sight ideally meant far away in the overcrowded Bantustans or homelands. But the townships, shack settlements close to the cities, factories and mines, would do if need be. It is not at all surprising that resistance by the non-white majority to these patently unfair laws would emerge. The African National Congress (ANC) was a 1929 outgrowth of a political party formed in 1912 to represent the interests of blacks. Immediately after the 1948 victory of the nationalists, the ANC began to organize non-violent activities to protest the policies and laws of the new government. Over the next fifteen years they had the crucial effect of gaining international visibility for the injustices of apartheid. As apartheid policies became increasingly draconian and various anti-apartheid political leaders were banned, exiled or went into hiding, the protests grew increasingly more intense and, ultimately, violent. Nelson Mandela and other activist leaders of the ANC and the sympathetic Communist Party were arrested in 1963 and sentenced to life in prison. This did little, however, to curb the backlash that was building against apartheid. For a while during the height of the Cold War, South Africa’s argument that the communists were behind the ANC activities gained it some support from the US and other nations. However, the 1976 Soweto massacre of black students protesting the new, lowered standards for black education, a renewed round of internal strikes, riots and demonstrations, and the ugly death of the charismatic Steve Biko while in police custody finally led to widespread international condemnation and a series of economic boycotts and sanctions (Ross 1999; Walsh 1999). The 1980s were a brutal time in South Africa. The white government, increasingly isolated and besieged, became even more aggressive in tracking down, torturing, imprisoning and killing its enemies. Violence was not just limited to white on black. Conflicts between black groups with differing ideologies and goals also led to bloodshed and death. An appearance of political appeasement by the government was attempted. In 1983 the constitution was rewritten to expand representation to Indians and “coloreds”, by giving each group a small, token legislative chamber. Of course, the real reason for this move was to further fracture the non-white population of the nation. The ploy did not work. Protests, violence and economic instability continued. Beginning in 1985, the cornered government declared a state of emergency that lasted for the next five years.

Building Change

134

Finally, in 1989, a new president, F.W. De Klerk was elected on a reformist platform. Less than ten days after taking office in 1990 he freed Mandela, legalized the ANC and other previously banned political parties, and began to roll back the apartheid laws. Late in 1991, a convention of all of the political players involved gathered to draw up a transition plan and a new constitution. On April 24, 1994, the new constitution went into effect and, between April 26 and April 30, millions of black South Africans voted for the first time in their lives. On May 10, Nelson Mandela was sworn in as President of the renewed South Africa. While apartheid ended in South Africa legally in 1994, its policies still affect everyone spatially, socially and economically. From the window of an airplane it is easy to see how deeply apartheid is written into South Africa at the more grand scale of the landscape. Even the smallest towns appear as two towns. One consists of a grid of tree-lined streets and comfortable houses surrounded by lawns. Its shriveled twin, always some distance away, but connected by a well-traveled road, has a much tighter grid of dirt roads lined with

4.4 Spatial impact of apartheid visible from the air. At the centre, a small country town, with the black township to the left tiny houses or shacks. Here, trees are a rarity and lawns non-existent. This pattern appears no matter the size of the population: here, the white town and, over there, the black “township”. The effects of this separation are compounded in large cities: huge distances separated the black townships from the jobs in the “white” city. While no longer prohibited from living inside these cities, many working-class blacks cannot afford to move closer to

Building memory

135

work, and many do not want to leave their communities. So they remain in the township locations where transportation to work remains inconvenient, expensive and overcrowded (and therefore dangerous). Other black citizens are simply leaving the townships and squatting in the formerly all-white urban centers. The urban settlement pattern is the largest scale of the compulsive racist neatness of apartheid that was played out in so many other ways as well. Not only was dwelling separated, but of course so were schooling and health care and all other services and activities. No commercial facilities were allowed to service the townships without permission from the government. The pass laws meant that anyone of color had to have explicit permission and reason to be anyplace outside of his or her residential area. Access to a public library or museum was automatically out of the question. One government strategy of containing people deemed to be politically dangerous was “banning”, where the person was confined to a given area and not allowed to be in a room with more than one person at a time. Defiance of banning was a popular resistance strategy during The Struggle (as the movement against apartheid was known). Steve Biko, in particular, used this to great effect. During apartheid the townships were giant bedroom communities for the essentially captive, underpaid labor that built the prosperity of South Africa. Now, as middle-class blacks are able to move to formerly all-white neighborhoods in the cities, the townships are poor working communities struggling to make themselves into towns. Shops for food and basic necessities are just now establishing themselves in a convenient manner in the townships. Rather than abandon the township locations, the new government is building houses there by the thousand—but few other new buildings. It is an odd policy that reinforces the separation from the hearts of the cities and perpetuates the transportation fiasco. However, there is intense demand for the new houses in the former townships. Certainly part of the demand is from existing residents wanting decent dwellings. However, there is also increased demand as rural residents, no longer constrained by apartheid laws, converge on cities in search of a better life. Still, the policy of adding dwellings in these remote locations causes one to wonder about the perspective of the new government. In what appears to be an effort to avoid confrontation with the already nervous white community, as well as to protect the sensibilities of the new black upper and middle classes, the current administration seems unwilling to forcibly reverse this segregation by building this new housing closer to employment and within the cities. Regardless of the wisdom of the current government policy, everyone in South Africa who experienced apartheid seems to understand the language of space and architecture. At the time, blacks lived their lives within the tight confines of the small houses of the townships, the factory and the path between them, unless employed as domestic workers or gardeners in the homes of the wealthy whites or as cleaners and errand “boys” for offices. Today, while movement is not circumscribed by law, it is often limited instead by economic means.

Building Change

136

4.5 Some of the one million houses built in the former township by the post-apartheid goverment since 1994 Architects, planners and urban designers in South Africa are acutely aware of the importance and necessity of undoing the spatial legacy of apartheid and all of the previous decades of segregation. Iain Low, a scholar in architecture at the University of Cape Town, puts it this way: “Space is the construct that most effectively realised and maintained apartheid’s grand plan and continues to ensure the endurance of its legacy. Consequently, architecture is clearly a crucial measure in our transformation” (Low 2002:34). However, just as it took decades to put the spaces of apartheid in place, it will take decades to undo them. Perhaps nowhere else in the world is it so vivid for architects that spatial and physical change has to happen project by project, building by building, until this slow accumulation adds up to a reconfigured landscape that reflects the democratic hopes of the nation. The Museum of Struggle, part of a larger redevelopment scheme in the former township of New Brighton, is just such a project. At the heart of New Brighton is a grid of unusual shacks made of very thick, oldfashioned corrugated iron. They are rusted red with age. These are the remains of barracks, originally constructed to house Boer women and children when the English invented concentration camps during the Boer War. Later the buildings were used as army barracks, then relocated to New Brighton in 1903 as the beginning of a “model native settlement” that anticipated the effective date of the Native Reserve Locations Act—a precursor to apartheid-era legislation (Mandela Municipality 1998). The red color of the rusting iron gave the area the poetic name of Red Location. Most of these historic buildings have been much modified, added onto over the decades, with bits and pieces of the red iron hauled off and reused in other parts of the township. Most are now unsafe and barely habitable. In 1948, at the beginning of apartheid, however, Red Location was

Building memory

137

the heart of the much larger township of New Brighton and a center for anti-apartheid political activity.

4.6 Former barracks turned into houses at Red Location New Brighton residents actively resisted apartheid from the early 1950s. The early actions followed Ghandhi’s non-violent model of passive resistance and civil disobedience. The African National Congress (ANC), the largest and most organized of the efforts to resist apartheid, termed these actions the “defiance campaign”. In June of 1952 a group of local ANC members marched to the New Brighton Train Station and entered the platform through the “Europeans Only” entrance. The leader of the group was arrested and sentenced to a month of hard labor. This action led to a steady increase in the number of “defiers” who continued to use the “European Only” entrance. Tension increased between the white police patrolling New Brighton and the residents. Four months later, the passive resistance ended after a policeman confronted a black man on the Railway Station platform, whom he accused of having a gallon of stolen paint. A scuffle followed in which the policeman shot and killed the man with the paint. This triggered a full-scale riot that left eleven people dead (seven black and four white) and twenty-six people wounded. There was also significant property damage and loss. The ANC took careful notice that the riot had gained far more local and international attention than any of the previous non-violent activities (Pandele et al. 2002). The national ANC leadership (which included Nelson Mandela, Walter Sisulu, Govan Mbecki and many others) was quickly banned after the riot and the legislature passed laws giving the government new powers to curb civil disobedience. The ANC, in response, reorganized their activities through a more decentralized “cell” system, which was uniquely effective in New Brighton. By 1956, the ANC had become such a threat to the Apartheid Government that it was banned altogether and driven underground. In New Brighton, this did little to stop the organization, activities and educational programs of the ANC. Meetings were held in a different location each evening. ANC leaders and members were hidden by residents in shallow basements excavated under the Red

Building Change

138

Location houses. And the white police assigned to New Brighton patrolled in frightened knots through the unpredictable streets of the township (Pandele et al. 2002). New Brighton continued to be a center of anti-apartheid activity, extending beyond the ANC to include more radical groups. When Umkhonto we Sizwe launched its sabotage campaign in 1961, over one-quarter of the sabotage attacks nationwide occurred in Port Elizabeth. Over the ensuing decades, New Brighton, home of Govan Mbecki, continued to serve as an active center and supporter of anti-apartheid activists. It is a testament to the standing of New Brighton that the ANC’s party leader after Nelson Mandela, Thabo Mbecki, Govan Mbecki’s son, is now President of South Africa. After forty-six long years, apartheid ended and Port Elizabeth was the first city to install a non-racial local government dubbed the “Transitional Local Council”. The municipal body has now consolidated the surrounding communities and townships into the Nelson Mandela Municipality. A few years after the end of apartheid, a group of community leaders in the Port Elizabeth Area, including Govan Mbecki, began work on a scheme to preserve Red Location and the history it represents and use it to attract tourists and their dollars to the still isolated New Brighton township. In 1998, a national competition was announced for the design of a town center precinct that would restore some of the corrugated iron houses, and include new housing along with a library, art center, gallery and markethall, a conference center and accommodation and, as a centerpiece, an Apartheid Museum. The competition was won by the small South African firm of Noero Wolff Architects, led by principals Jo Noero and Heinrich Wolff. The firm of Mashbane Rose, architects for the Gold Reef City Museum, was awarded second place. The winning scheme envisioned a bustling precinct centered on a large plaza with bus and taxi ranks, open-air vending and informal trading. These would take place among and alongside the civic buildings and new, higher density housing that are arranged along tree-lined roads leading away from the plaza. Three things stand out in this scheme over the others proposed. First, the proposal is carefully scaled and conceived of as a part of the existing physical and cultural fabric of New Brighton. This is a difficult task. The buildings and spaces requested in the competition brief are quite large, especially when imagined in the context of the former township that is almost entirely small single-story family houses or shacks on tiny fenced or walled lots. There is currently no formal public space, only the unkempt land between the house walls where, in the older part of the town, the common water pumps are located. (The newer concrete block houses, built since the end of apartheid, have running water and indoor plumbing.) The short sidewalk outside the food market is the location of many chance encounters, and wide dirt aprons along the roads provide space for informal traders. A handful of new two-story houses recently completed were designed by Noero Wolff as part of the competition scheme and were funded by the Swedish International Development Agency (SIDA). In the Noero Wolff scheme, new public space is carefully sized to become open, but not vast. The height of the new buildings along the street is kept low or stepped down. The street edges are reinforced by the buildings, but also graciously allow for occupation with shaded porches for walking, sitting and talking, and trading. This is one of many places the architects created for the architecture to support and improve the difficult lives of the residents of the township. Other places are less readily apparent, like the waiting benches at the taxi and bus ranks that include metal

Building memory

139

armatures that can become hanging and display areas for the informal traders who inevitably show up at these kinds of locations all over the world. As Noero wrote in the statement that accompanied the competition entry: The first proposition is to locate the museum and the new buildings in a neighborhood close to where people who were once victims of apartheid live. The buildings are integrated into the neighborhood so that they become part of the daily life of the people. In this way, the horror of apartheid becomes more apparent simply by the presence of, for example, the Apartheid Museum within a functioning community. (Noero 1999)

4.7 Competition site plan

Building Change

140

4.8 The new bus rank built in anticipation of future activity

Building memory

141

4.9 Detail of east elevation of the Museum of Stuggle showing concrete block construction, with corrugated tin and some stucco, and wide public porch along the street

Building Change

142

The second thing that characterizes the Noero Wolff scheme is that the architectural language deployed over the site is one of a straightforward, slightly industrial aesthetic. It is a celebration of the ordinary materials that the local people have scrounged over the years to keep out the rain and hold the Red Location shacks together. And it is a nod to the factories across the railroad tracks from Red Location where the ANC first began to form among auto-workers. It is also an acknowledgment that the architectural language of museums, libraries and other kinds of existing civic buildings in South Africa, have little positive resonance with black and “colored” South Africans. These represent, instead, the language of exclusion from public life, and of officialdom and long waits for revised passbooks. Noero puts it this way: The site is located alongside a large industrial area. It was the Trade Unions that largely shaped the internal struggle for freedom in South Africa. As a result many people tend to associate the workplace with civic virtue. This is important since most public buildings in South Africa were viewed with distrust since they were associated

4.10 Painting of ANC activists. Note factories, dormitories and shacks as iconic building in background with the ruling apartheid government. The language of the new buildings is utilitarian and industrial and it is hoped that this will act as a

Building memory

143

connection to a proud union past and seek to remember the labor of those people who gave up their lives for the struggle. (Noero 1999) This foray into an industrial aesthetic is not new for Noero Wolff. Throughout their South African practice they have built often in the townships, usually using the humble materials these people were able to procure for themselves. The architects speak passionately about wanting to demonstrate that these modest materials—including corrugated tin and cement board—could be used in a beautiful way: that they could be elevated to become the materials not only of making do, but of choice. In this project, the architects continue this exploration, testing the idea in a very large and important civic project. At the same time, the building gains solidity and a sense of permanence and dignity through the extensive use of poured in place concrete columns. Third, and finally, the winning scheme proposed an original and explicit spatial and curatorial strategy for the museum that honors the history and accomplishments of the struggle against apartheid. This is the most moving aspect of the project. For while it is clear that the curatorial content of a museum can trigger memory and record it for the future, it is much less clear how architecture can meaningfully participate in the orchestration of this memorialization. Noero Wolff sought a strategy for the telling within the museum that would allow the adding and shifting of content and the evolution of stories that inevitably happens with hindsight and with new developments. “It is apparent”, Noero writes in the competition statement: that it is very challenging and complex to give appropriate expression to the very palpable need to make monuments and museums to remember and learn from the apartheid past…. [H]ow does one deal with the exhibition of material from the apartheid past so that it does not become in the words of Baudrillard “a burial chamber for dehistoricized and frozen secrets”. (Noero 1999) There was also a danger, in the minds of the architects, of the Museum quickly becoming about the victory of victim over victimizer. This was a completely understandable urge on the part of the Museum’s competition organizers: after a long and bloody struggle to break the strangle-hold of forty-six years of apartheid and another 250 years of segregation, exploitation, white racism and supremacy, it was finally over. It is only natural to want to declare victory, to erect monuments to the effort and the fallen, to boast of the

Building Change

144

4.11 Range of buildings by Noero Wolff using readily available materials successes. However, Noero pointed out that large permanent gestures of victory have a habit of creating bitterness later on when society has actually moved on. James Young, in his work on Holocaust Museums and memorials, makes a similar argument: “that public

Building memory

145

memory is constructed, that understanding of events depends on memory’s construction, and that there are worldly consequences in the kinds of historical understandings generated by monuments” (Young quoted by Wilson 2001). A worldly consequence of fixing an interpretation of apartheid at the present moment is likely to arise from the fact that the processes of ending, dismantling and coping with it are still under way. The fragile experiment of South Africa to undo centuries of raceconscious policies, to avoid simply shifting the target of racism from black to white (as has happened in neighboring Zimbabwe), to ride out the huge social and human crisis of a fifteen percent AIDS infection rate, and to negotiate the political, economic, educational and social transition it is so bravely attempting, is not a foregone conclusion. The Struggle undertaken in the face of apartheid was the first step of the larger struggle that continues today. The Museum of Struggle must, therefore, be not only about memory, but about current events, about the history that is being created daily in the nation. In addition to the concern about using the Museum to freeze a short-sighted notion of the history of the struggle against apartheid, Noero Wolff needed to break new architectural ground with this project, for there were no museums they felt were appropriate precedents. Of memorial museums to date, Jo Noero, paraphrasing Andreas Huyssen, writes “we should move beyond the museum’s present role as a giver of canonical truths and cultural authority, duping its visitors as manipulated and reified cultural cattle.” This is clearly a reference to the curatorial and spatial strategy adopted by museums like the Holocaust and the Gold Reef Apartheid Museums, where a single narrative strain is coordinated with space, light, movement, texture and sound to instill in the viewer, through the physical power of architecture, a simulation of bodily experience. Combined with disturbing curatorial content, this experience can be a powerful one. It is, however, theatrical—a simulation to make us feel oppressed here, or sad there, or trapped over there. It is hard to shake off Huyssen’s image of museum-goers as cattle moving inexorably through chutes toward slaughter. What, then, is an appropriate architectural strategy for such museums? Henri Bergson, whose important work simultaneously seeks to codify and mystify memory—and also to be very clear about its relationship to the present moment, provides an opening: Whenever we are trying to recover a recollection, to call up some period in our history, we become conscious of an act sui generis by which we detach ourselves from the present in order to replace ourselves, first, in the past in general, then, in a certain region of the past—a work of adjustment, something like the focusing of a camera…. Little by little it comes into view like a condensing cloud; from the virtual state it passes into the actual; and as its outlines become more distinct and its surface takes on color, it tends to imitate perception. But it remains attached to the past by its deepest roots, as if, when once realized, it did not retain something of its original virtuality, if, being a present state, it were not also something which stands distinct from the present, we should never know it as memory. (Bergson 1998 [1908]: 133–134)

Building Change

146

Bergson goes on to elaborate on the point that the understanding in the present frames any memory—and that the present is also subject to shifting points of view. Noero and Wolff were keenly aware of the ways that both the past and the present can be manipulated in order to reframe memory. It was a strategy of apartheid to do exactly that. “The Museum seeks to remember the past in ways that are both familiar and frightening,” says Noero, “One of the horrors of apartheid was the sense of normalcy—the ability of its perpetrators to shut out from memory the ghastly consequences of institutionalized racism. And yet, at the time, the sense of impending terror in the country was undeniable” (Noero 1999). Noero knows this from personal experience. He was involved in the struggle against apartheid as an active member of the ANC, architect to the Episcopal Archdiocese (with his primary client Archbishop Desmond Tutu), and a member of the Communist Party. While Noero and Wolff have their own vivid recollections of apartheid, they are also aware that there is a new generation of South Africans who thankfully will not have experienced it directly, but only through stories from relatives or from books and other media. How to keep the weight of the era alive? In his writings, Bergson makes an explicit connection between the body, the soul, and memory: “the body, always turned toward action, has for its essential function to limit, with a view toward action, the life of the spirit. In regard to representations it is an instrument of choice, and of choice alone” (Bergson 1988:179). So the body, while teaching the spirit the patience of limitations, also gives the spirit a physical form through which to act in the world. Choice and action are both joys of spatial freedom and agency. The choice of action, of resistance to limitations on spatial freedom, was a primary tool in breaking free of the hegemony, the single-minded national narrative of apartheid. And it was the memory and imagination of another way to live that fueled the action. In this regard, Noero and Wolff were clear that their Museum of Struggle needed to provide a way of spatially honoring the huge accomplishment of the end of apartheid. Since the majority of the people of South Africa have had quite enough of being told what exactly their history is, the new Museum needed to avoid the narrative hierarchy of the Gold Reef Museum, the Holocaust Museum, or many other contemporary memorial museums around the world. Similarly, with the new spatial freedoms opened up after centuries of racial segregation, strict spatial sequences and maneuverings within the Museum would have been symbolically blind to one of the greatest new liberties achieved—freedom of movement. Instead, the architects devised a spatial network for the main exhibition that presents multiple points of view on the same oppressive era. This is achieved through the creation of a huge, undifferentiated space with no windows, the only light from saw-tooth skylights covering it all. Within the space are twelve equally sized rooms called “memory boxes”, closed on all sides except for a door, and open on the top to varying degrees to allow light to filter in from above. The boxes get their name from the large, usually brightly painted, trunks that black migrant workers in southern Africa use to carry their possessions in from place to place. In the boxes are kept not only clothing, but also mementos from home. It contains the individual and personal life and dreams of the man who carries it, thus the name. In the Museum, each memory box presents a different perspective on the experience of apartheid, or tells the story of particular events or specific places. Each tells its own story in its own language. The idea is that memory is unstable and composed of multiple

Building memory

147

perspectives. These are not the narrations of victor, nor of victims. They are not official histories—though they may tell stories of things that happened. They are focused on the complex human experiences and memories of the era—and, to address the issue of fixing a narrative or interpretation, the content of individual boxes can easily be

4.12 Sketch of main gallery space showing memory boxes changed. The architects’ Competition Statement ends with these words: “Visitors will be challenged to make their own decisions about how to make their way around and into the boxes—people are asked to confront their own readings and understandings of race, class and inequality.” The space between the boxes is also loaded with meaning for Noero and Wolff. At one level, it is meant to represent the bland, normal world that hid the secrets and atrocities of apartheid: The memory boxes are entered as separate buildings contained within the larger building. The contents of each box are not revealed. One must enter to learn what is contained within—they are secret. In this way one seeks to create the sense of slow erosion of moral and ethical frameworks that was created by apartheid. There was a sense of normalcy. But there was at the same time a sense of horror and impending terror that was undeniable. The space that was created by these contradictory and confusing sensibilities created a void which was a space of disquiet in which the complexities of the apartheid world were simultaneously hidden and revealed at every turn. (Noero 1999) In addition, the gloomy empty space that surrounds the boxes also strives to achieve the very state of perceptual suspension that Piano sought in

Building Change

148

4.13 Stack of traditional memory boxes used by migrant workers to keep belongings

4.14 Section model showing possible interior qualities of memory boxes the cases at the Tjibaou Cultural Centre, citing Jorge Luis Borges as an inspiration. The idea is to evoke the half-light of trying to remember, of images receding out of focus, out of reach, of the state between a dream and waking. Andrea Huyssen refers to the gap

Building memory

149

between past and present as the “twilight of memory”. “This twilight zone”, Noero writes, “seems to constitute more of a kind of space than any kind of time. It is precisely this that we have attempted to capture in the design of the Apartheid Museum” (Noero 1999). The visitor to the museum, then, chooses his or her own path through the space, entering the boxes at random, perhaps some not at all. The appropriateness of this technique for the main part of the museum is reinforced by South African Mpethi Morojele, writing in a review of recent South African architecture. Here Morojele uses the term “sanctioned impermanence” coined by Bill Hubbard in his A Theory for Practice. “Sanctioned impermanence”, writes Morojele: as a strategic approach to the development of spatial identities in our context requires the promotion of baggy space, space that may be experienced as being significant without being prescriptive. Buildings are required to be flexible in order to encourage and allow for human agency and to anticipate the unintended. (Morojele 2003:105)

Building Change

150

4.15 Light study model for memory box

Building memory

151

4.16 Light study drawing for main gallery In this Museum, the architecture acts as a vast container—Morojele’s “baggy space”. While the language and materials of the container have meaning, the building itself does not strive to affect emotions or to construct a particular narrative. Instead, it has the abstract potential of emptiness—an emptiness to be filled by imagination, experience, inhabitation and time. The main exhibit hall is one large memory box, to be occupied without hierarchy by various points of views, stories, artifacts. Clearly, the building is an explicit critique of the very kind of museum that is at Gold Reef City and a pro ductive attempt to investigate a way of making civic architecture in a charged post-apartheid situation. Since the building is still under construction at the time of this writing, it is not yet possible to evaluate the architectural and experiential consequences of this approach to memorializing the past. There are still important curatorial decisions to be made about this project. It cannot be author free. Along with the content of the boxes, particular individuals and events will be memorialized in a “walk of heroes” and a “hall of columns” that line the large public entry lobby to the Museum. The main entry is marked by a huge porch that provides a shaded meeting place and a transition from the activity of the street with its bus and taxi ranks. The Museum of Struggle was originally intended to open in 2002. However, the complexities of the local situation led to understandable, if regrettable, delays. The formation of the Nelson Mandela Municipality out of Port Elizabeth and the surrounding townships was a way to ensure that local government represented all the constituencies of the area. As a clear indication of the change in political representation, the first mayor of the Municipality was black. The Municipality’s various agencies have many white employees of the former white government, who have an often tense relationship with the mayor’s office, with the political appointees that may head their divisions and with their new non-white colleagues. Yet, the Municipality needs these experienced civil servants as it moves forward. Capable and well-meaning, these employees of the old regime seem a bit stunned by the rapid changes happening around them. The reconfiguration of the area into a single municipality has also meant a change in the apparent wealth of the town. Formerly prosperous, Port Elizabeth is a vacation destination for South Africans as well as a major shipping port. However, by aggregating the outlying areas and the poor, former black and “colored” townships, overall prosperity is spread over a larger, less well-to-do population which results in less wealth per person. Some Port Elizabeth residents also believe that the unrestrained freedom of black people

Building Change

152

to move about the town has affected tourism. There has been a predictable increase in gated communities—not only here, but in cities all over the country.

4.17 Plan of Museum of Struggle The Mayor of Mandela Municipality has come to understand the immense importance of the Museum of Struggle project. The Municipality was taken by surprise by the opening of the Gold Reef Apartheid Museum. They were concerned that their project had the same name, and that this would cause confusion—about location, or curatorial content or both. So they began rethinking the name. This caused a larger process to unfold in which the community also began to discuss the focus of the Museum, the power of its place in

Building memory

153

Red Location and the huge untold history of the people of the region. The result of this process was not only a new name: The Museum of Struggle, but also a widening of the view of the content. After all, apartheid was only the last and worst chapter in a long history of war, oppression, racism and removals. Instead of focusing on apartheid, the museum would celebrate the strength and persistence of the struggle against it and against all forms of oppression. The community wanted to honor the people involved and commend the courage, spirit and optimism of the fight. They also began to understand the project as more localized. A broadening of the focus of the museum gave them a chance to take advantage of Red Location and of the considerable history of New Brighton. While the memory boxes remain, they will contain the stories of particular people—and then use those stories to tell about the larger historical moment in which they occurred. This way of thinking has also led to the inclusion in the Museum of an Oral History Project, a place where oral histories are collected and curated. The extensive process of collecting these stories has already begun, sponsored by the Municipal Government. This is particularly urgent given the age of many of the ANC elders, and particularly appropriate given the oral traditions of history in southern Africa. As a symbol of the coming construction, the Municipality built a portion of the paved, tree-shaded street and the bus rank that fronts the Museum in the competition scheme. Trees were planted in the tree-wells and there was a great party celebrating this first glimpse of the community life that was to come. However, even after the construction documentation was finished, ground breaking on the Museum was delayed for two more years by the workings of local politics. First, the politically savvy citizens of the former township insisted on the construction of the housing component of the competition project, along with other promised housing, before construction on the Museum was begun. Given their past experiences with broken promises from the Municipal Government, this is entirely understandable. However, they also ensured that the funds of the Museum were placed in a protected account so that they could not be raided for other purposes by the Municipal Council. Among the buildings flattened by a bulldozer clearing the site for the new houses was the hated old New Brighton police station. Even though it was located very near the center of the small township, the young white policemen that had been stationed there usually patrolled in vehicles, afraid of walking their rounds. Before the rubble was cleared away, residents were happy to show visitors the remnants of the place where they endured humiliating questioning about apparent discrepancies in passbooks and where suspected ANC collaborators were often first imprisoned before being trucked to undisclosed locations.

Building Change

154

4.18 New street, with trees, connecting railway station to Museum The second delay in construction was in 2001 when it seemed for a brief moment that the project might not happen at all. The funds earmarked for the Museum were eyed by Municipal Council members representing white neighborhoods who have had difficulty living on their reduced portion of the area’s wealth. These members attempted to redirect the funds to other projects. However, partly because the Museum had the strong backing of both the mayor and some members of the Council, their attempt failed and the raiding of the fund was forestalled. The Municipality has showed its continuing support by dedicating operating funds for five years, including money for two curators. However, the fate of the balance of the competition program, the library, the community sports center and so forth, is not clear, but will likely be tied to the success of the Museum. Ground was finally broken for the Museum in January 2003. The Municipality hired as contractor an equity partnership that consisted of a

Building memory

155

4.19 Red Location from pedestrian bridge to railway station and factories black builder and an old, established white construction company. While this team’s bid was not the lowest, they had carefully structured their contract to include close supervision of the various trades at the site in order to make a building of the highest quality. This matched the Municipality’s ambitions for the project. Once the contractor was on board, the community organized a Project Committee to serve as representatives of the community during the construction of the project. This has become common practice in former townships all over South Africa. It gives the citizens of the place where the project is happening a clear voice in the project. This is a crucial safeguard for community concerns at a time when the townships, such as New Brighton, are being incorporated into large municipal governments, such as Nelson Mandela Municipality. In such large governmental units, it is easy for local concerns to get lost. At Red Location, the Project Committee meets weekly and also attends the weekly site meetings. In addition, the Project Committee has elected a Project Coordinator, who works on the site full-time and who serves as a liaison between the community and the builders, architects and Municipality. She also serves as a mediator for any labor issues. At the outset, the Museum of Struggle Project Committee adopted some ground rules for the builders, particularly in regard to labor. While it was assumed in the contractors’ bid that they would be hiring local men to work on the site, the Project Committee decided it needed to spread the benefits of employment during the year-long project across the community as much as possible. This led them to stipulate that the builder must hire a completely new pool of laborers every three months through a lottery system. This meant that every three months the ninety workers would rotate off the job, just as they were gaining skills. It also meant that the builders could not necessarily hire only previously skilled workers.

Building Change

156

Understandably, the contractors revised both their cost and time estimates in response to this requirement. First, they added six months to the building schedule to allow for the regular training of new workers and the slower construction time due to laborers’ unfamiliarity with their tasks. This extended the construction schedule to eighteen months. With a new labor lottery every three months, this means 540 men will see some employment from the Museum. In a nation with soaring unemployment rates, these jobs are not only welcome, but essential. The rotation of the workforce also means that many more of the township’s citizens are personally and directly invested in the building. With the rotation requirement, the builders also added to their contract funding for full-time site supervisors in each of the major building trades: concrete, block work and so forth. These supervisors could then work closely with the rotating pools of workers to insure the quality of construction. This

4.20 Museum of Struggle under construction. Note the excellent quality of the block work

Building memory

157

4.21 East elevation of Museum under constrution strategy has been extremely successful so far in dealing with the labor requirements, as the high quality of the concrete and block work shows. As the structure of the Museum slowly rises up in the midst of the former township, its scale has a surprising effect. It is huge in comparison to the shacks around it, and its solid materials make the improvised shacks seem all the more fragile. The only buildings of a scale in-between that of the Museum and the shacks is the two- and three-story housing that Noero Wolff did as the very first phase of construction of the competition. It would be reasonable to expect that the sheer size of the building would overwhelm its

Building Change

158

4.22 Red Location shack with Museum constrution beyond surroundings. However, it somehow works. This is, perhaps, because the entire town of New Brighton sits in an industrially scaled landscape: it is surrounded by factories; one edge is made by a multi-track railway; and, in the near distance, looms an enormous power plant. The Museum steps this scale down slightly and introduces into the otherwise scale-less town the first building of any significant size. From within the community, the building is big. The architects have placed it right on the property line and have designed some of the street edges with benches and overhangs to make them habitable. This is an unusual condition in the former townships where most large buildings are set well back from the property line and surrounded by a fence or

Building memory

159

wall. At Red Location, by contrast, the Museum is envisioned as the first of several larger buildings that will comprise a civic center for the town. In this way, the monumentality of the Museum has had a curious effect on the people of New Brighton. Suddenly, their neglected and marginalized town is the location of a large, serious public institution. They are now part of the metropolitan area in a way they have never been. The civic urban sensibility this brings has inestimable value. To the quality of the citizens’ pride

4.23 View of Museum under construction

Building Change

160

4.24 View from pedestrian bridge over railway in their place, once resting on the somber community achievements of resistance and survival, has been added a pride in something tangible; a visible symbol of their struggle and the freedoms it achieved. From the beginning of the competition process, the people of New Brighton had faith that this transformation would happen. The 30 million rand the project cost could have paid for 1,500 new houses for the town. At one point the mayor offered the citizens exactly that bargain: 1,500 houses instead of one Museum. The citizens chose the Museum despite the fact that a large number of them continue in desperate living conditions. Again, the wisdom earned over the decades by this community as it fought for a different future has paid off. They continue to be committed to the Museum for all of its symbolic as well as pragmatic reasons.

Building memory

161

4.25 Aerial view of New Brighton with old neighborhood of Red Location, the railway line and factories beyond

Building Change

162

4.26 Competition model veiw

4.27 East elevation of Museum under construction

Building memory

163

4.28 Unfinished Museum of Struggle in context of the Red Location Shacks The tense political and cultural dynamics of South Africa are far from resolved. Crucial to the needed resolution is the reorganizing of space to reflect the new sharing of power of life and landscape. In this context the cultural production and symbolism of architecture carries intensified meaning. It suggests that the narrative and referential power of buildings should be carefully constructed and the ethical and cultural role architects and architecture play in articulating this power. In addition, the very nature of architecture—with its emphasis on relative permanence and on material readings of identity and culture—presents possible conflicts within an African context. The traditional African notion of time as cyclical—not only at the scale of seasons, but also at the scale of generations—and of identities as socially determined are challenged by global culture and architectural production. Morojele puts it this way:

Building Change

164

4.29 Grand scale of Hall of Memory Boxes under consrtuction The cyclic nature of time and progression is now being interrupted by architecture—as permanent built form—and the ascendancy of material culture. With such a context the contemporary African personality is simultaneously emergent and residual, existing within a virtual collapse of space and time…. The quest for an African identity through an architecture that is new and distinct is complicated by an outward-looking approach: we are advanced as the rest… with the exclusive need to pronounce and maintain the integrity of our distinctiveness. For, while the

Building memory

165

emergent personality is aspirational and individuated, the residual is conserve-active and bound by the imperatives of social cohesion. (Morojele 2003:105)

Chapter 5 Building Presence The Southern Poverty Law Center Welcome to Montgomery Cradle of the Confederacy Birthplace of Civil Rights

This welcome adorns a tourist brochure available on a rack in the stale, dimly lit lobby of a downtown Montgomery hotel. This concise introduction to the troubled history of the capital of the state of Alabama in the southern US highlights the two reasons tourists might be in the moribund small city in the first place. Even though separated by a century, these two eras—the rise of the Confederate States of America at the beginning of the US Civil War and the beginning actions of the Civil Rights Movement—and the tumultuous times in between, saturate the air in this once prosperous river city. As might be expected of two such momentous events in the life of a city, they are also written into the landscape, the buildings and the street corners—and this is what tourists come to see. One street in particular registers this history in Montgomery: Dexter Avenue. Named for the founder of the city, Andrew Dexter, the broad avenue runs up the long, slow grade from the old commercial core of the town to the steps of the neoclassical State Capitol in its stately position on Capitol Hill. Among the buildings strung along this avenue is Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, where Dr Martin Luther King, Jr came to be pastor in 1955; the State Judicial Building, where in 2003 a monument of the Ten Commandments led to a national incident over the constitutional separation of Church and state; and the corner where in 1955 Rosa Parks, a black seamstress, got on the bus and where, a few blocks later, she refused to give up her seat to a white man—an incident that sparked the Civil Rights Movement into being.

Building presence

167

5.1 Looking up Dexter Avenue to Alabama State Capitol

5.2 Map of Dexter Avenue major buildings In 2001, a new building joined the historic landscape of Dexter Avenue. This building serves as the offices and headquarters of the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC). The SPLC is a non-profit legal and educational center founded in 1971 on the heels of the

Building Change

168

Civil Rights Movement. Early work by the Center consisted of legal cases fighting racist jury decisions, defending destitute clients, and forcing the implementation of the Voting Rights Act and Civil Rights Act and continuing desegregation of public facilities. This work has expanded to focus on hate crimes, tracking increasingly militarized white supremacist groups, and developing a nationally recognized educational curriculum named Teaching Tolerance. The Center has been enormously effective, particularly in curbing the activities of the Ku Klux Klan. While a bit late for the first round of the civil rights efforts, the SPLC has subsequently become one of the country’s most high profile actors in the litigation of civil rights cases and of crimes motivated by racial, gender, religious or sexual orientation hatred. The SPLC grew out of the tiny law practice established in 1969 by Joseph Levin and Morris Dees. The two young white Southerners, who had their perspectives and lives changed by the Civil Rights Movement, took paying cases to help support pro bono litigation that had a social agenda. The firm quickly gained a reputation in this arena, attracting more and more requests for their services. In 1971, the partners decided they wanted to spend all of their time on the kind of work they had been doing for free. They disbanded their for-profit firm and established the Southern Poverty Law Center as a nonprofit legal practice. It was important to the partners that the SPLC should not be controlled by any moneyed interests. So, instead of looking for large corporate or foundation sponsorship, they began to raise money for their work through small individual donations raised by direct mail. By clearly defining their progressive and aggressive agenda in advance through direct mailing, the SPLC continues to receive enthusiastic support from people across the US who send in donations that seldom exceed $100.1 The progressive agenda of the SPLC has often been at odds with the political and cultural consensus in Montgomery, as well as in the region. However, with a national donor base of about 400,000 individuals, it continues its activities in the face of vehement and sometimes violent local and regional opposition. Its presence serves as a reminder that the legacy of pre-Civil War era attitudes about race and the role of the national government did not end with the Civil Rights era and that constant vigilance and continued actions are needed. Like the clear-eyed and aggressive stance of the SPLC, there is nothing shy or polite about their new building. It has sleek materials, nonorthogonal geometries and contemporary detailing. “Gosh, it’s something, ain’t it? Why, there just ain’t nothing like it here in the city of Montgomery.” A hotel desk clerk responded with a shake of her head when asked about the

Building presence

169

5.3 South side of SPLC

Building Change

170

5.4 North side of SPLC with DexterAvenue King Memory Baptist Church in foreground new building. “In fact, I don’t think there’s a building like it in the entire state of Alabama.” Even though it fronts on a street paralleling Dexter Avenue, one block away, the new office building for the SPLC boldly asserts itself; its six stories of glass-walled offices hovering over the Avenue like a watchtower. With a forthrightness uncharacteristic of the polite South, the building clearly states that not only is vigilance still needed, it is taking place every day. This surveillance not only includes hate groups on the margins of society, but also the officials and institutions of government. Indeed, from the new offices of the SPLC it is possible to see the steps of the state Capitol where, on February 18, 1861, Jefferson Davis was inaugurated as the President of the Confederate States of America (CSA). Less than a month later, the first official flag of the CSA, the “Stars and Bars”, was raised on top of the Capitol building. It had only been two months since Alabama had become the fourth state to leave the US due to longrunning disagreements over a wide range of policies, including the right to own slaves and the extent of the power a federal government should have over individual states. Montgomery was the location of the convention that established the Confederacy and it served as its capital for a brief three months. After Virginia also succeeded from the Union, the seat of the Southern government was moved to the better-connected and better-positioned city of Richmond. After four bloody years of fighting, after more than 600,000 dead, the US won the Civil War bringing the Confederate States back into the Union. But the cultural and political cost of the war continues to this day.

Building presence

171

For eleven short years immediately following the end of the Civil War (1865–1876), black lawmakers, freed slaves, sat with their white counterparts in the legislative chambers inside the Alabama State Capitol. This period, called Reconstruction, is bitterly remembered by many whites in Alabama (and across the former Confederate States) as a time when Union troops occupied Montgomery, Birmingham and other cities and towns to ensure the end of slavery and impose the integration of the former slaves into society. During that period the US Congress passed the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which explicitly extended the rights of the constitution to men of all color. Black men could vote and hold office. It was the last time for nearly 100 years that the state’s black population had full civil rights including being represented by elected officials in the State Capitol. Within a few short years of the end of Reconstruction, the seats of those black legislators were once again occupied by white men who proceeded to put on the books the notorious Jim Crow laws that legalized segregation and disenfranchised black voters.2 To these white legislators it did not matter at all that, according to the Alabama State Archives, nearly half the population of the state at the time was black. What followed was almost a century of systematic oppression, degradation and racial violence that became deeply engrained in the cultural fabric of both whites and blacks in Alabama. It would not be until the Civil Rights Movement stirred in 1955 and finally woke up the nation to this unofficial apartheid that, finally, change slowly began. During the struggle over civil rights, the Capitol building continued to play an important role in the history of the city, the state and, even, the nation. In 1962, George Wallace was elected Alabama’s governor, winning by a huge margin on an explicitly anti-Federal and pro-segregationist platform. The state

Building Change

172

5.5 View toward Capitol and Dexter Baptist Church from a window on north side of SPLC

5.6 Map of the US showing Confederate States and location of Montgomery was under pressure from the Federal government to desegregate its schools—following stipulations of the 1954 US Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education that

Building presence

173

required the end to racial segregation in public schools across the US. Within the state, Dr Martin Luther King and the Southern Christian Leadership Coalition had become a powerful and popular force with their campaign for civil and voting rights, begun with the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955. Wallace’s states’ rights platform attracted huge support among fearful white voters at a time when the black voters of the state were still disenfranchised by intimidation, poll taxes and voter literacy tests. In 1963, President John F.Kennedy sent the US Attorney General, Robert Kennedy, to Alabama to meet with Wallace over the governor’s refusal to integrate the state’s schools in accordance with federal law. When Attorney General Kennedy arrived in Montgomery, he found that Wallace had the Confederate flag defiantly flying over the Capitol dome. Kennedy’s visit, needless to say, had little impact on the governor. That June, Wallace personally blocked the door to one of the University of Alabama’s buildings to stop two black students, under the sanction of the US Department of Justice, from entering. President Kennedy had to federalize the Alabama National Guard and have them enforce the desegregation. This stand-off between Kennedy and Wallace on desegregation continued, when Kennedy, a few months later had to re-enlist the Guards to enforce desegregation of public schools in a number of Alabama cities. Dr Martin Luther King, in a statement to the press in 1963, called George Wallace, the man who sat in the Capitol as Alabama’s Governor, “the most dangerous racist in America”. Back at the Capitol, Wallace’s bastion, the Confederate flag remained flying, a subject of huge controversy throughout the next thirty years. It was only taken down in 1993, when a lawsuit filed by the SPLC finally forced its removal. In March 1965, on the same Capitol steps of Davis’ inauguration and under the stillpresent Confederate flag, the historic march from Selma, Alabama to Montgomery advocating full and equal voting rights for blacks ended. Martin Luther King, who led the march, tried to continue into the Capitol with a small group of prominent supporters to hand a petition demanding the voting rights to Governor Wallace and other lawmakers. He was blocked by State Troopers. While frustrated in his attempt to deliver the petition, the violence and controversy surrounding the march drew international as well as national attention. Only five months later, the national Voting Rights Act was passed. It took litigation and court battles but, finally, black Alabamans became, once again, full participants in state politics. And, once again, black legislators sit in the Capitol’s legislative chamber. This Capitol building is only the beginning of the built history on Dexter Avenue that provides the context for the confrontational SPLC building. For the first block down from the Capitol, both sides of the street are predictably taken up with white four-story state office buildings that inflect sedately toward the Capitol. The next block is anchored on the north side of the street by the old State Judicial Building which, at one time, housed the State Supreme Court. However, across the street from the old Judicial Building is a rather surprising neighbor for these public buildings. On the southwest corner of the intersection of Dexter and Decatur is an unassuming small red brick church with a white wooden steeple. The modest old church seems a bit out of place and out of scale among all the grand State buildings and is an unlikely candidate to be considered a confrontational building. But the marquee of the church reveals just how confrontational this modest church has been during the turbulent history of Montgomery: this is Dexter Avenue King Memorial

Building Change

174

Baptist Church, a 120-year-old black Baptist church and the first church of Dr Martin Luther King. How is it possible that a black Baptist church could end up just one block from George Wallace’s Capitol and on the grand axis of the Cradle of the Confederacy? The answer is simple, but complicated at the same time: the purchase of the property and most of the construction was accomplished during the uncertain era of the dismantling of Reconstruction. Dexter Avenue Baptist Church was a spin-off, in 1877, from the First Colored Baptist Church of Montgomery and was known initially as Second Colored Baptist Church. Slightly more than a decade after the end of the Civil War, the new congregation held its first meeting just a few blocks further down Dexter Avenue in a former slave trading pen. The irony of this was not lost on its congregation,

5.7 SPLC offices and Dexter Avenue Baptist Church from Dexter Avenue infront of Capitol who counted among its members teachers, businessmen and other community leaders. In 1879, the congregation purchased the corner lot at Dexter and Decatur for $270. Initial work on the new church building began in 1883. Construction was slow as the congregation contributed work and resources as they could. The attitude of most of the white population of Montgomery to the purchase of so prominent a site by a black congregation is reflected in this politely worded, but clearly intentioned letter to the editor of the Montgomery Daily Advertiser dated May 6, 1885. Editor Advertiser; The writer has no race prejudice that would cause him to do any injustice to “our brother in black”, or throw any obstacle in the way of his advancement intellectually, financially or morally. They are here and here to stay and it is the duty of the white man to give him a fair chance in his efforts at improvement. In the years I have contributed to

Building presence

175

build churches and educational institutions for them. But, Mr. Editor, I recognize the fact that there is a propriety and fitness in all things proper to be done. It is proper for them to build churches and schoolhouses and it is right for whites to help them. But it is not right for them to build nor for us to assist them to build in every place. For example, it would not be proper for colored people to build a schoolhouse next door to any of the white churches in this city. Neither would it be proper or becoming for the colored people of this city to build a church next door to any of the churches mentioned. We all have our peculiarities. The negro is demonstrative in his nature and noisy in his religious exercises. As a general rule they are in the employ of others, and their time is taken up during the day and part in attending to their duties of their employers. Hence they will hold their night meetings at a late hour when the whites as a general rule are asleep or ought to be. These remarks are intended to apply to the building of a church, by the colored people on Dexter Avenue. The street will in the near future be one of the best improved streets in the city of Montgomery. From Dr. Gaston’s residence to the Capitol should be built up with residences, and nothing should be allowed that would deter citizens from building on Dexter Avenue. Certainly our citizens should not contribute to the building of a colored church on the Avenue. We suggest that every man approached for a contribution refuse to contribute a nickel until he finds out where the church is to be located. Fair minded and thinking ones among the colored people can readily see the justice of the foregoing remarks and the propriety of choosing some other place for a house of worship. (Dexter Avenue Church 2003) Undoubtedly there were far less circumspect criticisms leveled at the congregation than this. While I could find no documentation of the attitude of the congregation to the building of the church in this exact location, it is impossible to imagine that the members were not aware of these attitudes. They very purposely bought the lot and placed the church there in an assertion of their new rights in a post-slavery South. They knew full well that building their church on Dexter Avenue so close to the Capitol would not be found by the white people of Montgomery as the “fit and proper” thing to do. However, building the church, the only institution available at the time to the black population where they had complete agency, was one sure way they could make physical their presence, their new freedoms and their intention to be complete and visible citizens. It was an act of optimism and courage to pursue this path. And this action is a very early indication of what would, several generations later, prove to be the politely radical attitude and unbending resolve of this congregation. In this way, Dexter Avenue Baptist Church significantly altered the meaning of Dexter Avenue in exactly the way the “concerned” citizen in the letter above anticipated. The first service at the new church building was held in the basement in 1885. The first service in the completed upstairs sanctuary was on Thanksgiving Day 1889, ten years after the lot was purchased (Dexter Avenue Church 2003).

Building Change

176

Reconstruction began to lose momentum in 1876 when a change of Administration in Washington, DC resulted in the withdrawal of the last of the Northern troops and a reestablishment of white local governance in the former Confederate states. The last two decades of the nineteenth century saw a rapid deterioration of the gains the freed blacks had made as the white majority in the statehouses of the South passed laws designed specifically to limit the rights of black citizens, to make it extremely difficult for them to vote, and to impose racial segregation wherever possible. The final blows to any hope of black equality were delivered through a series of Supreme Court decisions: the most significant was in 1896 with Plessy v. Ferguson which supported the concept of “separate but equal” facilities designated by race. And so began the shameful period in American history know simply as “the Jim Crow era”—the name is also given to the segregation laws, rules and customs that emerged primarily in the former Confederate states after Reconstruction. Martin Luther King, wrote in 1967 of the time: After his emancipation in 1863, the Negro still confronted oppression and inequality. It is true that for a time, while the army of occupation remained in the south and Reconstruction ruled, he had a brief period of eminence and political power. But he was quickly overwhelmed by the white majority. Then, in 1896, through the Plessy v. Ferguson decision, the Supreme Court of the nation established the doctrine of “separate but equal” as the law of the land. Very soon it was discovered that the concrete result of this doctrine was strict enforcement of the “separate”. Without the slightest intention to abide by the “equal”. So the Plessy decision ended up plunging the Negro into the abyss of exploitation where he experienced the bleakness of nagging injustice. (Martin Luther King © 1986, in Washington 1991:6) Jim Crow was an era of sanctioned racism, where “separate but equal”, as King says, was never equal. The intentions were three-fold: to keep black Americans from participating in culture and politics as equal players, to segregate black people and white people from each other and, wherever possible, to make black people invisible. The techniques of procedural marginalization along with all the techniques of segregation, operating at all scales, were applied systematically during Jim Crow. For several years prior to Dr Martin Luther King’s arrival at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church’s pulpit, the pastor had been the powerful and controversial Dr Vernon Johns. Johns’ most inflammatory action was to post the following sermon title on the church’s sign board in response to the shooting death of a congregation member: “When It’s Safe for Whites to Murder Blacks.” Remember, this sign board is on Dexter Avenue, one block from the State Capitol building. The congregation was upset at this flagrant act, worried about the attention it would bring. The Ku Klux Klan burned a cross on the parsonage’s lawn, signaling a lynching was planned. On Sunday, the Montgomery police showed up part way through the sermon and arrested Dr Johns. That afternoon, the church’s Board of Deacons fired him (Branch 1988). The less polished and more confrontational Dr Johns prepared Dexter’s congregation for the more measured, but equally radical, positions of Dr King in relation to civil rights. Hired by a cautious congregation in 1954, King was the right person in the right place at

Building presence

177

the right time. The increasing oppressiveness of segregation, along with the growing awareness of equal rights campaigns in other places, combined with local events to push King and the members of Dexter into action. King first came into full public view when the black community organized the famous and effective Montgomery Bus Boycott in 1955. This year-long effort is often marked as the beginning of a movement, making Montgomery the “birthplace of Civil Rights” touted by the hotel brochure. Along with several other local ministers, most prominently Ralph Abernathy, King helped lead the community through non-violent mass action. His uplifting oratory style deeply moved the hundreds of people who came to the weeknight meetings in another church in the city (Dexter Baptist was not large enough to hold the crowds). These meetings served to brief the black community on events and to maintain a unity of vision for the boycott. He quickly became, even at twenty-seven years old, the leader of a movement. Familiar with the work of Mahatma Gandhi, he continued as an unswerving advocate for non-violent action. He was arrested several times, ignored threats against his life and survived bombings of his home. Along with Abernathy and several other black ministers, he formed the Southern Christian Leadership Coalition (SCLC). The SCLC became a crucial organizing network of the Civil Rights Movement. King quickly rose to regional, then national and, finally, to international prominence. Some of this rise was carefully orchestrated by using the media to spread the news of what was going on in Montgomery. Within eighteen months of the beginning of the boycott he was flying all over the country, meeting with members of Congress, and even the President. By 1958, King was out of town more than he was there. He authored the book Stride Toward Freedom, appeared on television, and survived the first of the many attempts on his life. However, the Dexter congregation stood by him, proud of his accomplishments and willing to shoulder the church work left undone because of his hectic schedule. At the end of 1959, as the Civil Rights Movement gained national momentum, King decided to move back to Atlanta to focus primarily on the SCLC and to help his aging father with the pulpit at Ebenezer Baptist Church (Branch 1988). King’s five years as pastor at Dexter was transformative for him, as well as for the Civil Rights Movement and for the nation. King went on to become one of the most famous men of the last half of the twentieth century. He returned to Montgomery many times, including for the Selma Montgomery march that ended on the Capitol steps in March of 1965. In 1968, in Memphis, Tennessee, someone finally succeeded in assassinating him. After King’s 1959 departure, the congregation of Dexter Baptist continued its active participation in the Civil Rights Movement. After King’s assassination, the church was renamed Dexter Avenue King Memorial Baptist Church. The building was designated as a National Historic landmark in 1974, and in 1976 the city of Montgomery added the building to its list of designated historic sites. While still a thriving church, the building is visited by those who come to acknowledge the sites of the Civil Rights Movement and daily tours are available through the building. Several blocks further down Dexter Avenue, at the edge of downtown, is the corner where, on December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks got on her usual bus to go home at the end of a long day at work.3 With all the seats in the back reserved for blacks filled, she sat down in the middle section of the bus, a kind of no-man’s land where blacks were allowed to sit if no whites were there to occupy the seats. As the bus filled over the next few blocks,

Building Change

178

and whites occupied all of the forward seats, a white man came back to the row where Parks was sitting. Despite the empty seat next to Ms. Parks, the segregationist expectation was that Parks should get up and go stand in the back of the bus so that the white man would not have to share his row with a black person. However, Rosa Parks, already active in desegregation activities, remained in her seat. The driver got up and came back and asked her to move. She remained in place. After several demands that she move were met with the same calm and resolute silence and inaction, the driver called the Montgomery police. They came and arrested Parks, walking her out of the bus by force. “It was a matter of dignity”; King quotes her as saying, “I could not have faced myself and my people if I had moved” (Washington 1991:76). This watershed event is now widely considered the beginning of the Civil Rights Movement. Of course, there were many prior civil disobedience actions protesting segregation, but what set the Rosa Parks action apart was that the black community of Montgomery was already aware, informed, had huge solidarity and visionary leadership on several fronts. And they clearly knew that the time had come. The Rosa Parks incident sparked a 381-day-long boycott of the Montgomery bus system by its black riders. Instead of riding the bus, most of the black community walked or took well-organized carpools to work. The action almost bankrupted the bus company. The boycott was a potent action at a crucial time. Equal accommodation on public transportation had been a deeply resonant issue in desegregation battles in the South since the end of the Civil War. The destructive 1896 case of Plessy v. Ferguson was about it. There was no doubt that this was in the mind of the thousands of black men, women and children who walked from home to work and school during that year. Because they were not in the buses as they moved about the city, as usual, the black population of Montgomery became much more visible to everyone. Their walking paths often took them through all-white neighborhoods where, prior to the boycott, the only black presence on the street would have been women working as domestic maids going to the homes of their employers. This visibility was not always desirable, since it also meant that the boycotting black men, women and children were more vulnerable to the hateful diatribes and violent behavior of active white racists. The buses, it turns out, had been a safe, if segregated, way to cross these large sections of the city. Montgomery saw a number of other civil rights confrontations, most notably the end of the Selma to Montgomery march for voting rights. It is perhaps no coincidence that the city, with its deeply racist past, was one of the first American cities where black people had simply had enough and began to push back in a systematic and organized fashion. The results of the Civil Rights Movement changed America forever. However, the work of the Movement is incomplete as Montgomery and the rest of America continues to struggle with the social and economic legacy of racism as well as deeply engrained racial, ethnic, religious and sexual preference hatred. For some people in Montgomery the defeat of the Confederacy of Southern States in 1865 at the end of the Civil War still stings like a wound inflicted yesterday. In the contemporary American South, the Confederacy represents nostalgia for a proud, gracious past before the South was humiliated by the loss of the Civil War. That past, however, is a clearly romanticized time when owning slaves of African descent was a widespread and legal practice, and when only a small percentage of the white population lived in stereotypic comfort on large plantations. This lifestyle came to an end

Building presence

179

when the outcome of the Civil War resulted in the enforcement of the Emancipation Proclamation, freeing the black slaves. Those who long for the former Confederacy have resisted the full and equal participation of black Americans in all aspects of life. While it has become impolite in most circumstances to flaunt pride in the Confederacy, Confederate flags adorn pick-up truck bumpers and portraits of Confederate generals hang quietly in public buildings. Some white Southerners still have a silent yet determined attachment to what is euphemistically called the “Southern Way of Life”—a clear reference to the “good old days” of white dominance and black subservience, of the legal segregation of the races and of unmitigated white denigration and violence against black citizens.4 Just one block down the Dexter Avenue from Dexter Avenue Baptist Church is the new State Supreme Court building where in the middle of a summer night in 2001, the Chief Justice of the Alabama Supreme Court placed a monolithic stone replica of the Ten Commandments in the rotunda. Law suits, with the SPLC among the litigants, for the removal of this patently religious statement ensued and were finally won in 2003 in the Federal District Court under arguments based on the Constitutionally enforced separation of religion and government.5 A media circus erupted in 2003 when a Federal court finally ordered the removal of the mini-monument. Supporters of the monument, mostly from the religious right, camped out for days on the steps of the building. Chief Justice Moore was suspended, and ultimately removed, from office by his court colleagues when he refused to comply with the Federal court. Moore’s refusal has made him a champion of ultra-conservative Christian advocates who insist that their God’s law is above the Constitution; a stance that allows them then to ignore the Constitutional separation of Church and state. While the monument tours the country on a flatbed truck, this recent chapter once again demonstrates Montgomery’s continuing conflict with the accepted cultural and legal norms of American national life. The SPLC stands in determined opposition to these attitudes. Throughout its history it has sought to maneuver conservative forces into line with changes in the civil, social, political and cultural norms of the nation. With its new building, the SPLC’s progressive agenda is made visible in the city of Montgomery in a way not possible in the earlier days of the organization. The SPLC began in one small room in a small office building a few blocks from its present location. It quickly grew and spread into adjoining rooms. It soon became clear that it would need larger headquarters. The Center bought an old house close by, but again quickly outgrew the space. By 1973, the Center relocated to 7,000 square feet of office space about a mile from Capitol Hill. It was from here that the Center launched some of its early, high-profile cases that resulted in such things as the desegregation of recreational facilities, reapportionment of legislative districts in Alabama and the racial integration of the Alabama State Troopers. It was also here, in 1980, that the Center took the decisive step of forming Klanwatch, a program dedicated to monitoring the activities of the ever more active white supremacist Ku Klux Klan, and to prosecuting the Klan when it stepped over the boundary that separates free speech from illegal action.6 The SPLC rapidly became a powerful opponent of Klan operations around the country. Center lawyers pioneered the strategy of bringing civil charges against the organization that preached the hate that triggered crimes, not just against the individuals who perpetrated the crimes. This meant

Building Change

180

that when damages were awarded, the organization was responsible and its assets were liquidated to settle the case. The result was the closing down of several Klan and Klanrelated organizations over a number of years. While they were heroes in some eyes, this effectiveness did not make the Center popular with everyone—especially, and unsurprisingly, with the Klan itself. Morris Dees, the lead attorney, and other staff members were the targets of threatening phone calls and Dees had the distinction of receiving a death threat from a former Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan. The Center, knowing that all the attention meant that they were being effective in their work, hired a private security company, the staff got bulletproof vests, and everyone carried on with their work. However, it turned out the threats were not idle. In the dead of night in late July, 1983, arsonists set fire to the offices of the SPLC. While much damage was done, most files and important records remained intact, including those so carefully assembled over three years by Klanwatch. The Center’s staff, feeling particularly vulnerable, camped out in offices in a warehouse with 24-hour security for the next two years. In 1985 some real estate on Washington Avenue, one block south of Dexter Avenue, and just two blocks from the Capitol became available. While it was more land than they needed at the time, the Center purchased it and constructed a new concrete and glass building on one parcel. This modest building, designed by local architect Robert Cull, had a robust structure and incorporated mirrored glass and the latest security systems. Completed in 1984, the building, located on Washington Avenue, became a neighbor to other similarly sized and placed buildings near the Capitol that house other advocacy groups such as the Alabama Cattlemen Association and the Alabama Realtors Association. The staff quickly agreed that this new location so close to the Capitol and just around the corner from the State Judicial Building (and the ten commandments monolith), where many of its cases are tried, was a more convenient place to be. They appreciated the increased security of both the building and its location. But the tough, bunker-like building was also a highly visible and public statement of the SPLC’s presence in Montgomery. This was a double-edged sword: while the new building made the SPLC visible, as a formal and formidable institution, to legislators and others who worked daily on the Alabama Capitol Hill, it also raised the visibility of the Center to its enemies. By 1989 Morris Dees began to worry that a new generation of Americans did not understand that Martin Luther King was not the only casualty of the Civil Rights Movement. It was then that the SPLC commissioned Vietnam Memorial designer Maya Lin to design a Civil Rights Memorial to be placed next to the sidewalk in front of the Center’s building. The memorial is visited by thousands of people every year and is prominently marked on the tourist maps showing points of major significance in the Civil Rights struggle in Montgomery. The success of the Center continued and by the mid-1990s the Center’s offices were again bulging at the seams. It had rapidly outgrown its replacement facilities and staff were now scattered around the neighborhood in leased space in other buildings. The dispersal of the staff at six sites was inconvenient for organizational communication and began to weigh on morale.

Building presence

181

5.8 The old SPLC building with the Civil Rights Memorial as seen from one of the libraries in the new offices It was also a serious security concern. Despite the presence of security guards twentyfour hours a day, the staff members were vulnerable to attack just walking to related offices across the street. It was time to re-evaluate the office space situation. With the goal of getting everyone back together in one building, the SPLC began to look at their options. A financial analysis revealed that in the long run leasing space would be more costly than building. So they began to investigate either purchasing or building. After ruling out some nearby suburban locations and rethinking their situation, the Center decided to build on the group of small lots they already owned across Washington Street from their 1984 building. At the time the lots had houses on them occupied by part of the SPLC staff as offices. While the total site area was small and would require a multi-story building to fill their needs, the SPLC decided they should stay near downtown Montgomery to participate in its revitalization, rather than become part of the flight to the faceless office parks in the suburbs. They were also concerned that if they left the area, the Civil Rights Memorial might be vulnerable to vandalism. The building on Washington Street has been standing as an empty presence next to the Memorial since everyone moved to the new building. The SPLC has now decided to convert it into a Civil Rights Memorial Center that will extend the Memorial by adding a wide range of exhibitions about the Civil Rights era through displays and educational programs. This will have the added benefit of giving the SPLC a readily accessible public space, while the staff are safely tucked away in the security of the new building across the street.

Building Change

182

It is interesting to note that the Center did not contemplate leaving Montgomery. At this point in its work, it litigates cases all over the US. It also draws its support nationwide. It could have easily left the sleepy former Confederate Capitol for nearby booming Atlanta, or any of a number of cities where the staff might be safer and where air connections would be easier. However, there is something about Montgomery that holds them there. For Morris Dees, it is personal. His family has resided in the area for over five generations (Dees 2003). For the rest of the staff, however, it is the daily reminders that surround them in Montgomery that keep them at their work: the Civil Rights Memorial, Dexter Baptist Church, the Rosa Parks Museum, that monument with the ten commandments on it removed from the Rotunda of the nearby court. “Given the history of this city and the work we have done here,” asks Levin rhetorically, “where else would we want to be?” (Levin 2003). The SPLC set out to hire an architect with the same rigor and view toward excellence that permeates everything else that they do. They visited a number of architects including I.M.Pei. While they were not necessarily dedicated to having a well-known architect, they were looking for excellent design as well as reliable professional service. They knew they wanted a building that was unique in Montgomery, and certainly one that did not look like any of the architecture around them. They were also looking for an architecture firm that understood office space. After years of working in enclosed offices and cubicles, the SPLC decided it wanted an open plan office to facilitate communication and interaction among its staff (Levin 2002). A local builder, who had done a school project with the Hillier Group of Princeton, New Jersey, recommended them to the SPLC. After meeting them, Joe Levin hired Hillier to do an initial schematic design. For the busy Hillier Group, the SPLC building was a small project. They assigned it to their Philadelphia office where Scott Erdy was Director of Design and David McHenry was Head of Operations. While working on the conceptual design along with other Hillier projects, Erdy and McHenry, who are an ideal team, were discussing launching their own practice. The two soon left Hillier. The SPLC had been impressed with Erdy and did not want him to leave the project. They requested that he stay on through schematics. By the time schematic design was finished, Erdy and McHenry had formed their own firm, Erdy McHenry Architecture, and they were retained by the SPLC to complete the building. At this point Hillier bowed out of the project. Erdy McHenry associated with Goodwyn, Mills & Cawood, a local Montgomery firm with an excellent reputation. While Erdy McHenry took the lead during design development, Goodwyn, Mills & Cawood took the lead during construction document preparation and construction administration. The needs for the 62,000 square foot (6,200 square meter) building were straightforward. They called for vast amounts of open office space, numerous private conference rooms, a library, a kitchen and eating area and lots of parking. All of this was to be done in a context of state-of-the-art building security. This project brief was no different than that of small office buildings anywhere, except for the rather extraordinary security concerns. Yet, the occupants of this office were doing very different work than that carried out in most buildings of this type. The architects were puzzled: how could they make this rather mundane building program into a project that in some way measured up to the aggressive progressive agenda of the Center? It also had to measure up to the high expectations of Morris Dees, who told Scott Erdy when they first walked

Building presence

183

the site, “Everything we do wins an award…this building had better win an award” (Erdy and McHenry 2003). Erdy took this as a challenge and as license to push the architectural expression of the building. And both Morris Dees and Joseph Levin stayed intimately involved in the design, debating ideas, suggesting metaphors and constantly pushing the architects to take the design a step further. One place the architects thought had potential for possible meaning was the site. Their early notion of what constituted this larger context was the across-the-street relationship to the Civil Rights Memorial and the old SPLC building behind it. Given the SPLC’s dedication to remaining with the Memorial, this was a strong place to begin. The first scheme envisioned a parking plinth that negotiated the double slope of the lot, topped with a six-story office building. The plinth not only provided parking, but helped with security by making a bunker-like base for the building. The square building was configured with a front entry on axis with the Memorial and with a square courtyard in the middle. This first scheme Joseph Levin thought looked “like any office building. It was boxy and didn’t stir anything in me” (Levin 2002). He sent Erdy back to the drawing board where the architect had to continue searching for the deeper meaning that could be drawn out of the project. Unlike the previous projects in this book, the SPLC building did not have a public component that could become a major focus of the design. Nor is the Center an institution that welcomes visitors or tries to communicate its mission through visitor interaction. There is no public space in the building. Instead, the SPLC uses direct mail, newsletters and an Internet presence to interact with its membership and the public. Erdy McHenry had to return to the context of Montgomery to look for better ways to embed the project in its specific location. Looking further afield than the Civil Rights Memorial across the street, they noticed that to the north, as the hill drops away, there was a panorama of the wooded shores of the Alabama River and a view over neighboring buildings to the Capitol. To fine-tune the building to this larger landscape, they made the building more rectangular by eliminating the courtyard. Then they raised the main body of the building up on giant pillars, or piloti, and pushed it back on the plinth toward the northern view. They inflected the building with these views through the design of a meeting room tucked under

Building Change

184

5.9 (left) Early sketch showing relationship between the Civil Rights Memorial and the first schematic of the new building

Building presence

185

5.10 (right) A digital model (south side) of the first scheme with its internal courtyard the body of the building. This room curved and stretched out addressing these newly discovered anchors in the city. Upon analysis of this scheme, two problems arose. First, it turned out that the building north of the Center’s lot would block the desired views of the river and the Capitol from the new meeting room. The architects began to wonder how they might raise the meeting room and the gap between the plinth and the block of the offices up higher so that the views would be available. Second, pushing the building back on the parking plinth had left a huge flat concrete court facing south and the Civil Rights Memorial. It seemed vulnerable from a security point of view and empty from an architectural

Building Change

186

5.11 Section sketch of second scheme on parking plinth

5.12 Second scheme responding to wider range of landmarks and views

Building presence

187

5.13 Digital model (north side) of second scheme perspective. Erdy discovered the solution by looking at the section of the building. The single gesture of raising the northern edge of the plinth solved both problems: it lifted the entire building so that the ground floor would have views over the adjacent building to the river, and it made a more defensible sloping surface of the forecourt. Taking a lesson from contemporary landscape architecture, he began to play with a series of folded concrete planes for the court—making a hardened landscape that echoed the grassy slope surrounding the existing offices across the street. Shortly after this, Scott Erdy started to focus on Dexter Avenue King Memorial Baptist Church as a more significant marker in the landscape, in terms of the mission of the SPLC, than the Capitol. He realized that if one stands at the Civil Rights Memorial, it is possible to see the modest white steeple of the church in its spot lower down the hill. “I saw the church as the beginning of the Civil Rights Movement”, says Erdy, “and, in a way, because it is circular and a closed system, the Memorial is its end. I began to imagine that the SPLC was somewhere in between. It is a mechanism for change.” If only he could devise a way to keep that view, and to emphasize it, they could anchor the new SPLC building firmly to one of the key markers of the Civil Rights history of the city. Such a gesture would, in turn, anchor the SPLC in this same legacy. This began a modification of the design that would lead to its final form.

Building Change

188

5.14 Section sketch of the final scheme showing it lifted up to views, with ramped plaza on Memorial side

5.15 Sketch showing connection between Memorial and the steeple of Dexter Avenue King Memorial Baptist Church

Building presence

189

The view to the steeple from the Memorial crosses the extreme eastern end of the building site. This meant that if the building was going to be lifted up there, the entire east end of the building would have to be supported by a structural cantilever. Otherwise the structural piers would block the view. But cantilevering the entire end of the building would be enormously expensive—excessively expensive from the point of view of the SPLC. Unwilling to let go of the idea, Erdy McHenry kept working the design, searching for a way to affordably maintain the view connection, while simultaneously looking for a way to inflect the building so that visitors to the Memorial would look toward the steeple.

5.16 View under cantilevered building to steeple A compromise solution between the view and the cost of the cantilever was found in a seemingly playful gesture that also enhances the articulation of the interior layout of the office floors. Inside, Erdy and his team had been refining the design using Louis Kahn’s strategy of service and served, modified to allocate open and closed spaces as well. The plan of a typical office floor is split in two with approximately two-thirds of each floor as open offices to the north and the remaining one-third carrying the vertical circulation, and a series of enclosed meeting rooms, library, bathrooms, work rooms and other spaces on the south. Now they employed this split in the functions to their advantage. At the eastern end, they pulled apart the building so that there was a gap between the open part of the floors and the enclosed part. They bent this toward the street slightly, at just the angle of the view between the Memorial and the steeple. While letting the two-thirds to the north hit the ground with the structural grid, they cantilevered just the one-third to maintain the view. The split has the added benefit of bringing mid-morning light into part of the open office space. The SPLC, convinced of the deep importance of building meaning into the project, agreed to the still-high cost of this gesture. The north/south division on the interior is registered in the skin and detailing of the exterior of the building. The south, street-facing, façade is stainless steel with a few carefully modulated openings. The steel is meant to reflect the color of the sky, providing a neutral backdrop to the Civil Rights Memorial across the street. It is intended, according to Erdy, to be “a closed façade, somber and reflective” (Erdy and McHenry 2003). For the SPLC staff inside the building, Erdy wanted the views out to the Memorial

Building Change

190

to be special framed events that reminded them of the history of the work they are pursuing. These views, then, happen out of large singular windows from two

5.17 Typical floor plan

5.18 Section of building different two-story-high libraries. Outside, the stainless steel skin of the southern wall wraps around the corner to continue indicating the enclosed spaces on the inside. On the eastern end it tucks into the split, and on the western end it stops at a vertical band of glass that defines the shift in functions on the inside. The stainless steel, with a matt finish, perturbs many people in Montgomery who find it too odd, too reflective or too machine-like. As one passerby told me, “It’s just the wrong thing to put on a building.” It is the northern side of the building, however, that has caused the greatest consternation in Montgomery. The entirely glass façade overlooks Dexter Avenue, Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, the Capitol and the Alabama State Supreme Court. From the upper floors there is a view north over the town toward the green edge of the

Building presence

191

Alabama River. Erdy wanted this façade to be in clear contrast with the southern one. It was to be “open and lively and about the daily ongoing work of the Center” (Erdy and McHenry 2003). The potential blandness of the all glass façade is broken up by a Mondrian-like pattern of two different kinds of glass, one clear and one reflective, and two different finishes on the mullions. The variation not only visually breaks up the massive glass wall, it makes it so that people moving inside the building are

5.19 East end of building with old building and Civil Rights Memorial to the left, and dome of the State Supreme Court building to the right

Building Change

192

5.20 Double height libraries seen from Civil Right Memorial difficult to track from the outside, particularly those moving behind the reflective panels. This is only one of the essentially invisible security strategies built into the building. But many of the people of Montgomery do not understand the aesthetic impulse for this variation in the façade. A local glass contractor got in touch with the Center and offered to fix the problem with their glass so that it would all be the same. More paranoid members of the community have

Building presence

193

5.21 Library with Memorial and old building outside declared that the pattern in the glass is a secret sign of sorts—with those who despise the work of the Center declaring it a sign of the devil (Levin 2002). The main floor of the building is raised only slightly above the level of the higher, eastern end of the site, but is accessed by a single, three-foot-wide door on the street side at the west end. Access to this door is across and up a ramping concrete plane that seems to fold up from the sidewalk. The visitor is funneled closer and closer to the intimately scaled door, so that finally he or she is trapped by the small space, yet exposed to view from all angles. “Security has been an active concern of ours for twenty years”, Levin sighs.

Building Change

194

We’ve gotten very good at it. The building is supposed to be very visible, but it is not supposed to be welcoming. It is not a public space. We wanted it to be very clear that it is not accessible for the public. (Levin 2002) The front door is locked at all hours and under video surveillance. For those with appointments, entrance is gained after speaking via intercom with the security guard at the front counter. The guard confirms the appointment and

5.22 Glass north façade with parking plinth opens the door by remote control. Once inside the lobby, visitors are politely questioned, asked for photo identification, requested to walk through a metal detector, and submitted to a scan by a hand-held metal detector. Bags, briefcases and purses are searched carefully. The photo identification is kept while a visitor badge is issued. Only then is a staff member called to escort a visitor to his or her appointment (see Figures 5.23 and 5.24). Erdy McHenry answered the other stiff security needs for the new building with numerous design strategies. Some of these provide actual protection, while others put into effect the tenants of “defensible space”. Some of the strategies are obvious, while others remain hidden—and not to be written about. The most noticeable strategy is the immense concrete base of the building, which houses three floors of parking along with mechanical and operational spaces. Cars enter through a security gate at grade on the downhill (west)

Building presence

195

side. After parking, employees take an elevator from the garage up into the building, so they are not exposed to the street. In addition to the design of the building, the Center maintains a 24-hour armed guard and employs numerous surveillance cameras positioned to keep track of activity within a several block radius. The architecture of Montgomery is as conservative as its cultural politics. The most cutting-edge building in the city is out of the postmodern era, unless you count the few scattered modernist gems left over from the late 1950s and early 1960s. Throughout the design process, Erdy and McHenry were conscious of the fact that Dees and the SPLC were at odds

5.23 Primary floor showing funnel of visitors to entry

Building Change

196

5.24 Entry plaza from above, with the State Supreme Court to left

5.25 Approach from down Washington Street

Building presence

197

with the powers-that-be in Montgomery. The SPLC had always been about forwardlooking and progressive ideas in civil rights. Conversely, the State of Alabama, was among the most recalcitrant and defiant states in the US when it came to dismantling segregation and implementing the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts. The architects sought, as they developed the building, to represent this role of the SPLC of pushing the region into the future, of insisting on change. They very intentionally looked toward contemporary architecture in Europe while designing the building. All along, they say, Joseph Levin was their greatest advocate in this (Erdy and McHenry 2003). “I liked working on the building and pushing those guys to do better”, recalls Levin. This building needed to be symbolic. It had to be different just like the work we do here is different. And it had to make a statement not just locally, but to the people from all over who support our work. (Levin 2003) On the office floors, floor to ceiling height is a full nine feet (just short of three meters). This helps keep the large open space from feeling too long and low. In addition, the sleek partitions for the desk system are low, so that when standing it is possible to see all the way across the space. Right now staffing levels allow for a generous layout of desks and group work

5.26 Dexter Avenue building landscape

Building Change

198

5.27 The new building guarding the Memorial spaces. There is room for the staff to grow. And the views and gentle light from the completely glass north wall are not far from anyone’s desk. “Even though there is a tendency to get interrupted more often, I would never want to work in an enclosed office again,” says Levin. “Even the lawyers have gotten used to it.” In the end, Levin is thrilled with the building. “I didn’t anticipate the scale and presence of the building, nor did I really appreciate what it would do for us. It has been energizing to all be in the same space.” The SPLC is not without its detractors. It is often criticized for its focus on fund raising, which is, by all accounts, profoundly successful. Yet, the SPLC spends a low percent of its income on its primary missions relative to most other non-profits. There is no avoiding the fact that the SPLC is rich by non-profit standards, causing its critics to call it by the stinging nickname of “The Poverty Palace”. The new building, with a $15 million price tag, has renewed the criticisms leveled at the Center. The project conveys a distinct image of financial success and cultural confidence. This is more typical of the image of corporate power—and one distinctly different from the usual “make-do” aesthetic of most socially centered non-profits. In other words, the building does not look like a non-profit occupies it. It is too new, too nice. In a sense, this criticism is exactly right, the building is expensive. It is well-detailed, made of elegant materials, and does not shy away from expensive structural moves such

Building presence

199

as the cantilever to clear the view between the Civil Rights Memorial and the church tower. In the spatial language of contemporary American life it declares itself as the building of a successful, permanent institution that commands the resources to represent itself fully through architecture. The SPLC understands this potent symbolism and with this building has unilaterally removed itself from its previously marginalized position in the urban landscape of Montgomery.

Chapter 6 Architecture and Change Every new work of architecture intervenes in a specific historical situation. It is essential to the quality of the intervention that the new building should embrace qualities which can enter into meaningful dialogue with the existing situation. For if the intervention is to find its place, it must make us see what already exists in a new light. We throw a stone into the water. Sand swirls up and settles again. The stir was necessary. The stone has found its place. But the pond is no longer the same. (Zumthor 1998:18)

The last chapter of a book is usually reserved for summing up, for putting forth theories, and for drawing grand conclusions. However, the lessons from the projects in this book are not of this singular kind. Rather, they are more subtle, more complicated, even more specific than that. However, this makes them more useful in understanding the complex task of proactively harnessing architecture to respond to the rapid change that characterizes our world. This change is fascinating and necessary; with clear effects but uncertain outcomes. There is no way of mapping the future that is unfolding, but stories can be our guides. The four architectural projects in the previous chapters were selected because in each project, each story, the architects mobilized their own cultural agency as architects to engage their clients’ agenda for social change. The projects they made in response show us ways in which architects and architecture can participate in the dismantling and reallocation of the spatial consequences of power. In these situations the architects were required to imagine, invent, innovate, translate and transform, reaching deep into complicated, layered and often unfamiliar histories and beliefs. However, it must be emphasized, they were still embedded in the primary pursuit of architecture: the making of real inhabited buildings in specific settings. The resulting projects have fresh aesthetics that make us see new possibilities. The originality here comes not from some willful desire by the architects to startle, but rather from an active engagement with wholly new contexts and fresh points of view combined with the immediacy of cultural change. The cultural agency of architecture, as explored in Chapter 1, grows directly out of the proactive and ordinary physicality of architectural practice. As David Harvey reminds us, it is a cultural practice that: (1) is explicitly spatial; (2) is embedded within, and works with, a network of power and information; (3) rests in the imagination and in effective techniques for envisioning alternative futures; and (4) leads to actual spatial action (Harvey 2000). While this kind of practice cannot provoke political change, per se, it has real power to engage in and enhance social change through its participation in the actual

Building Change

201

making of physical space. The scale of this architectural action is intimate and specific: the process of engaging a project, the interaction with a particular site, the struggle with the boundaries set by budget, program and timetables, the making of poetic spaces, the investigation, selection and deployment of materials and technology, the search for appropriate meaning especially within the context of spatial power, and, throughout it all, the application of the architectural imagination. None of these activities is heroic. They are the day-to-day reality of making architecture. As with all architecture, it is through the accumulation of the outcomes of these seemingly mundane operations that the buildings investigated in this book came into being. Yet, what sets these projects apart from most architecture is the specific and strategic leveraging of these actions in the service of social change.

Engaging the Process Architecture’s primary role relative to power has always been to give physical built form to political, cultural or religious ideas; to make visible invisible values, ideology and perspectives. As argued in the first chapter, for architecture the change in the location of who has the power to command the production of a building is an exciting component of the ongoing shifts in global political and cultural power. Along with these shifts come attendant challenges to conventional processes and meanings in many types of buildings. For the architects working on the buildings discussed in the previous chapters, all the usual rules about fitting within a context, about politeness and timeliness, about references to Western European architectural legacy, about reliance on particular constructional systems and technologies, about methods of interacting with the building client and about the architect’s role, were often explicitly called into question. In order to respect, promote and symbolize the client’s agency and in order to respond to the evolving political and cultural context, the architects had to rethink many of the usual processes and products of design. What kind of framework might be useful in such scrutiny? One way of looking at this is to understand that making buildings requires the architect to translate a wide range of non-physical ideas into solid spatial form in a particular context. This is no simple matter, even for an architect working within his or her own culture. For the architect taking on a project for another culture, particularly one in tension and transformation, the complexity of this act of translation increases dramatically. This is due, in part, to the fact that architecture is a primarily European cultural practice. It has particular protocols, terminology, processes and sensibilities. It assumes specific dynamics between architect and client. And it is fairly particular about the purpose and the values of buildings. While this kind of architectural practice has spread to many parts of the world, there are entire groups of people who, for historical or cultural reasons, have never experienced its processes. To these people, the culture of architecture and its processes are foreign. Yet, in order to serve them well, architects must productively engage such people, discovering their values, ways of occupying physical space, understandings of the landscape and connections to construction technology. With the exception of the Southern Poverty Law Center, each project in this book was for such people. Given the singular circumstances, each architect designed a unique

Architecture and change

202

process for working with the people who would occupy their building, seeking to comprehend and bring into focus the different cultural perspectives and expectations for the project. In each case, the architect ended up being a kind of translator. Clearly, architects are not translators in the usual sense of the word. Despite the flirtation with semiotics in the last decades of the twentieth century, architecture is not merely a linguistic sign or the spatial form of textual or linguistic ideas. As demonstrated by the architects in this book, architecture is, instead, about the translation of myriad nonphysical factors (program, culture, site, history, etc.) into building form. Nevertheless, observations about cultural and ethical dimensions of translating from those who work with written and spoken language are helpful and inspiring to an architect faced with such a project. [Translation means] confronting the unbridgeable discontinuities between texts, between languages and between people. As such it has an ethical as well as an intellectual dimension. It recognizes the other—the composer of the original text—as a center of meaning apart from oneself. It requires one to discover both the value of the other’s language and the limits of one’s own. Good translation thus proceeds not by the motives of dominance and acquisition, but by respect. It is a word for a set of practices by which we learn to live with difference, with the fluidity of culture and with the instability of the self. (James Boyd White as quoted by Harvey 2000:244) The esteem with which the architects in this book hold their clients is palpable and resulted in inventive, lively and productive design processes. There seems to have been no hesitation in accepting, working with and striving to enhance the fairly recent cultural agency these people have come to hold. However, more uncertain in these processes is how an architect attempting these translations deals with his or her own reference points both culturally and as the supposed expert in making buildings. The point of engaging in translation, White might argue, is not to obliterate the self; either the self that is a person with a particular cultural frame or the self that is an architect. This would deny completely the reason for the translation in the first place. We should not feel that respect for the other obliges us to erase ourselves, or our culture, as if all value lay out there and none here. As the traditions of the other are entitled to respect, despite their oddness to us, and sometimes despite their inhumanities, so too our own tradition is entitled to respect as well. Our task is to be distinctly ourselves in a world of others: to create a frame that includes self and other, neither dominant, in an image of fundamental equality. This is true of us as individuals in our relations with others, and true of us as a culture, too, as we face the diversity of our world …this is not the kind of relativism that asserts that nothing can be known, but is itself a way of knowing: a way of seeing one thing in terms of another. Similarly, it does not assert that no judgments

Building Change

203

can be reached, but is itself a way of judging, and of doing so out of a sense of position in a shifting world. (White as quoted by Harvey 2000:245) As White suggests, if the architect is a metaphorical translator, then an architect has a particular position in the world. And being an architect is a description of this position in relationship to discreet activities and bodies of knowledge that involve specific kinds of actions in space. As such, the architect has the duty to make sure that the processes of architecture are productively connected to the wide range of processes and understandings that inform any building project. This creation of a different process is most obvious, in this book, in the case of Greg Burgess’ project for the Anangu at Uluru-Kata Tjuta Cultural Centre. A fresh approach was necessary due to the huge cultural gap that divides the Anangu from white Australians. The two cultures have radically different notions of, among other things, time, degree of directness in interaction, perceptions of what is culturally important and relationships with the material world. The Anangu also have a century worth of experience that teaches them not to trust people of European descent. Burgess, knowing these facts, spent a full month living at Uluru with the Anangu, camping, hunting and listening to stories. Finally, they decided to trust him. He then proceeded, with Sonja Peters, to engage the Anangu in a wandering dialog about the Cultural Centre and how it might work in terms of the relationships of spaces to each other. Once Burgess had a basic sense of where the Anangu thought the building should be, how it should relate to the landscape, he began his own effort to understand the piece of ground—an effort meant to silence his more analytical perceptions through the use of a pendulum as a geomantic device. This procedure in no way resembled the way the Anangu understand their piece of “country”. However, it also does not resemble the way most architects proceed in analyzing a building site. It was, instead, an attempt on Burgess’ part to see the site in a new way. Burgess then worked in drawings and diagrammatic models. These were forms of representation familiar to the Anangu, who use diagrams and drawings with multiple meanings in their spiritual life. For instance, Burgess engaged the Anangu in a long conversation over a plan drawing of Uluru (see Figure 3.11, p. 99). The actual building site for the Cultural Centre was not on this drawing. However, since Uluru gathers to it all of the stories embedded in the surrounding landscape, the drawing became a mnemonic device for gaining a general understanding of the actions of the Ancestors that made the place. While the elders told which Ancestor stories were attached to which places around the base of the Rock, Burgess made notations on the drawing. The idea that a plan drawing at the scale of the landscape could contain this kind of meaning was familiar to the Anangu, and perhaps allowed a further development of trust. Burgess says that, looking back, he did not go into the situation with a clear idea of how the process would work. He had enough experience with Aboriginal people to know that he would have to earn their respect before any actual design work on the Centre could be accomplished. This meant remaining open-minded and relaxed, letting the Anangu take the lead (Burgess 2002). This was particularly important in terms of a schedule. The Aboriginal people operate within their own engagement with time, and would not likely have trusted someone who wanted to move with what they perceived to

Architecture and change

204

be undue haste. Similarly, they would not have responded well to direct questioning, even about something as seemingly non-personal as the program brief for the building. Because both projects were won through competitions, the Tjibaou Cultural Centre and the Museum of Struggle were less engaged with their clients in the initial design stages. This was particularly true of Piano, who had only one brief visit to New Caledonia before returning to Europe to prepare the competition entry with the Building Workshop. After winning the design, however, the Building Workshop brought some Kanak people onto the workshop team that regularly reviewed the project. In part as a result of this consultation, the competition scheme (see Figure 2.18, p. 67) was significantly altered to make the final configuration (see Figure 2.9, p. 57) of both the plan and the iconic cases. In the end, as Chapter 2 points out, Piano was successful and respected for his strategy of getting input from the Kanak. Noero and Wolff, on the other hand, are South Africans with a much more intimate knowledge of the issues behind the project in New Brighton. The Museum of Struggle underwent far less change between the competition and the final design than the Tjibaou Cultural Centre did. This is in part due to the residents’ involvement with the competition brief and judging, but also to Jo Noero’s extensive familiarity and experience in working within the townships. He also drew from his own participation in the struggle against apartheid and his personal investment in the current political and cultural processes in post-apartheid South Africa. When he entered the competition, he had already done projects situated within similar political and cultural tensions in other townships in South Africa. He knew many of the issues for the residents of New Brighton and could engage them in constructive dialog immediately. As a long-time ANC member, Noero also has well-honed political instincts and knew how to work effectively with the officials of the Mandela Municipality to negotiate the alignment of their expectations for the project with the desires of the community. This was facilitated by the formation of a group of citizens in New Brighton who oversee the Museum project on behalf of their community. This savvy group provided input to Noero Wolff, worked with the officials of the Municipality, kept the community informed, and initiated a number of ideas, such as the oral history project, that were added to the project. Noero Wolff Architects regularly leverage a project to do more for the community it is in than the initial project brief suggests. For the firm this is an ethical issue. “With so few opportunities to build,” says Noero, “one must squeeze the maximum value for the place out of each project” (Noero 2001). In the townships there are so few new building projects and so much pent-up need, that each building must do at least two things, if not more. In a project for a middle school, for instance, Noero Wolff placed some of the classrooms on the street edge, opening up the street wall with roll-up doors. In this way they could serve as adult education facilities in the evenings and as weekend workshops for local entrepreneurs. Initially, the architects encountered resistance to this idea. What were the architects doing insisting on such an addition to the project? However, through a combination of persistence and conviction, they finally convinced the local government of the wisdom of the idea. In the Museum project, Noero Wolff are translating not only the specifics of this particular building brief and site, but also the arc of South African history in relationship to cultural hierarchy and the role of cultural institutions. In the same way, the SPLC is approached with history in mind. Here, because both client and architect are from similar

Building Change

205

cultural contexts—white, educated, economically privileged—the architect’s role as translator is less difficult and the processes of client engagement and design can be carried out in the “usual” fashion.

Interacting with Site In his brief, yet profound, essay “Anchoring”, Steven Holl reminds us of the fundamental nature of site in architecture. Building transcends physical and functional requirements by fusing with a place, by gathering the meaning of a situation. Architecture does not so much intrude on a landscape as serves to explain it. Illumination of a site is not a simplistic replication of its “context”; to reveal an aspect of a place may not confirm its “appearance”. Hence the habitual ways of seeing may be interrupted…. Architecture and site should have an experiential connection, a metaphysical link, a poetic link…. When a work of architecture successfully fuses a building and a situation, a third condition emerges. In this third entity, denotation and connotation merge; expression is linked to idea which is joined to site. The suggestive and implicit are manifold aspects of intention. (Holl 1991:9) In each of the four projects in this book, site was a primary architectural motivator and key project component. Site, in this sense, operates at several scales simultaneously, with each scale having particular kinds of impacts upon the project. The scales include not only the particular piece of ground the building sits upon, but also the landscape within its view (and that can view it), the larger landscape or urban setting, its topography and its place within the nation, continent or island. Somewhere within these scales of site are the very places where the agenda of those previously in power is engraved in space. The choice of the specific building site in these projects, as with most buildings, was not up to the architects. Instead, the architects were given a specific piece of ground to work upon and their agency was exercised in the disposition of the building on the site— as well as the gathering of the meaning and energy of the site into the project. Sometimes, as with the Tjibaou Cultural Centre, the site is a poetic and powerful piece of landscape. Other times, as with the SPLC, it is just a small lot in a small city. Regardless, in each case here, the architects used the site as an important asset in the design; building upon and enhancing its physical, climatic, cultural, political and/or symbolic qualities. Any site has such potential, since every site is unique in its location on the surface of the planet. it’s a matter of discovering what the potential is, then putting it to work for the project. From other perspectives, however, the site, the landscape, is not simply a physical piece of the earth’s surface—the aging result of a singular historical act of creation by the God of the Old Testament. For the Kanak of New Caledonia the landscape is infused with living spiritual power and discernable personalities. Plants have specific meanings: symbolic (the great pines are a symbol of male energy) and actual (a certain red leafed plant means “stay away”). For the Anangu at Uluru, while the landscape was created in

Architecture and change

206

the past, it was made by powerful ancestors over time. Because of this, its actual physical shape and form is a record of this creation and is, therefore, good. Particular places in the landscape are sacred texts, revealing Tjurkurpa, the law that describes all proper human interaction, responsibility and behavior. This kind of landscape knowledge provides a radically different lens through which to view the landscape when approaching it to make a building. The relationship between site and architecture has most often been understood as architecture adjusting to or reinforcing the physical topography of the building site. A number of strategies can be used in order to accomplish this physical connection. At the Tjibaou Cultural Centre, the RPBW used the building to actively participate in the landscape of the peninsula. In his first sketch of the site, done during a visit to New Caledonia before the competition, Piano envisioned the project reinforcing and restating the section of the peninsula that protected the small lagoon and its fragile mangrove swamp from the strong trade winds and accompanying waves that sweep across the bay (see Figures 2.7, p. 53 and 2.19, p. 68). As a result, the long circulation spine of the building enhances the ridge of the peninsula and the rooms work off this spine in both plan and section. The spine also divides the building into two zones of topography and landscape: the first zone, on the steeper windward side facing the beach and the sea, is occupied by the sturdy cases that turn their high backs to the winds; the other zone is on the leeward side, where the land more gradually drops away toward the indistinct muddy edge hidden by mangroves and the small lagoon. Here the building feathers out into the landscape with wide porches and deep, shading overhangs. This blurring of the distinction between inside and outside is about more than simply reiterating the section of the site. With the Kanak’s deep attachment to the landscape, the RPBW went to great lengths to make sure the buildings afforded as much visual and physical connection to the site as possible. They did this by pushing the bulk of the building underground so that the primary program pieces could operate as a series of pavilions strung together by the allee and interspersed with landscape. The RPBW further broke down the distinction between inside the building and out by creating paving of concrete-stabilized earth from the site. This is used in the circulation allee as well as on the paths, terraces and porches that lead to and from it. This seamless walking surface makes whether one is under cover or not less defining of inside/outside. This same strategy is employed by Greg Burgess at the Uluru-Kata Tjuta Cultural Centre, where not only are the paths, courtyards and many of the floors made of the earth of the site, but also a number of enclosing walls. The site for the Uluru-Kata Tjuta Cultural Centre was seemingly far less interesting than that for Tjibaou—at least to those embedded in a European visual world. Uluru itself is visible from some parts of the site, but is a kilometer away. The flat site is undifferentiated from the rest of the red desert, where seasonal thickets of brush and spinifex close the vast spaces between the sparsely distributed desert oak trees. Near the site is the National Park headquarters building, which is a low-slung functional building painted beige. The Cultural Centre does what so many good desert buildings do: it makes a cool, welcoming place in a seemingly hostile landscape. Burgess uses a number of strategies to do this: the interiors are dim and cool, movement outside the building is often along deeply shaded porches, and while many large windows open to the courtyard, the openings to the outside are fewer and carefully placed. The buildings bracket and

Building Change

207

define an outdoor courtyard, framing and establishing a center around the venerable dead oak. Like the Tjibaou Cultural Centre, the Uluru-Kata Tjuta Cultural Centre also organizes movement across and around the site in ways unexpected to tourists and foreigners. This has the salutary effect of slowing the tourists down and making them less sure of themselves. The winding paths, hidden entrance and curving walls create a spatial sequence that makes clear to the foreigner that he or she is entering radically new and unfamiliar ground. Inside, the lack of clear hierarchy within the building also makes the tourists more tentative—perhaps a good state of mind for being open to the lessons the Anangu are willing to share. In urban settings, techniques of working with the site are different - both in scale and in categories of concern. However, there are some similarities with landscape settings. Certainly topography must be acknowledged and dealt with, and it can be used to the advantage of the project. In addition, one is looking for patterns, similarities and differences and for unique and powerful aspects that might be enhanced. However, in urban settings, other issues impinge on the site—most notably the urban fabric, daily human uses and rhythms, and other buildings in proximity to the actual building site. These other buildings were made within the constructs of spatial power and each carries that meaning forward in relation to any building that comes after. Within these built contexts, the significance of buildings varies greatly. It is therefore important for an architect to discover which buildings are important, which have histories that have been hidden or silenced, and which have relationships with what kinds of power. In this sense, New Brighton is a profound context for the Museum of Struggle. The site at Red Location is in the heart of the community, a hundred meters from the bridge that crosses railroad tracks to the train station where many of the anti-apartheid civil disobedience actions took place and to the factories where most of the New Brighton men worked. The role of the disintegrating shacks of Red Location, first in the Boer War concentration camps, then as military barracks and later as housing for black workers in a black township under apartheid, make their current function all the more poignant. They are now the homes of impoverished black families struggling for dignity in a postapartheid South Africa. Noero Wolff Architects seek to create, in the midst of these shacks, a carefully scaled center for the commercial and civic activities of the community. The addition of the Museum and the other competition buildings, along with the infrastructure that will come with them, will finally make New Brighton feel like a town. The topography of the site for the SPLC slopes in two directions, giving the architects interesting problems to solve. But this was the least of Erdy McHenry Architecture’s site concerns. Of much greater importance was how to fine-tune the building to the site so that it supported the strength of the Civil Rights Memorial, honored Dexter Avenue King Memorial Baptist Church, and made a statement about the SPLC at the scale of the city of Montgomery. This meant working carefully with the massing of the building in order to connect to the few buildings in the area that represent allies in an otherwise hostile local environment. It also meant figuring out a way to open up the building to daylight and views while maintaining security for the people who work in open offices inside. Those working at the Centre are reminded of their mission daily as they sit in these offices. Out the north windows is Dr Martin Luther King’s Dexter Baptist Church, the

Architecture and change

208

conservative Supreme Court of the State of Alabama and the looming mass of the historic State Capitol Building. On the south side of the building, visible from the two-story high libraries, is Maya Lin’s Civil Rights Memorial. Perhaps the most powerful of the building’s site responses has nothing to do with the building itself, but rather the way the building is lifted up on the east end to allow visitors to the Civil Rights Memorial to see the bell tower of Dexter Baptist Church. This view has been there since the Memorial was finished in 1989, but it is now framed by the SPLC building, making it evident in a way it was not before (see Figure 5.16, p. 183). The SPLC is an excellent example of what Holl means by “gathering the meaning of a situation”.

Deploying Materials and Technology The material and technological expression of a building are not neutral things. In fact, they are highly charged and can be critical tools for an architect interested in how architecture can participate in social change. Arnold Pacey, in Meaning in Technology, argues that there are complex layers of meaning embedded in technology. In particular, he outlines three clear ways that technology has meaning from a global and political point of view. First, advanced technology demonstrates access to the resources and association with the greatness of invention. Second, the use of this technology implies access to larger systems of production and control. Finally, it is a statement of relative position in regard to other people, other cities and other nations. These observations can certainly be applied to architectural technology. As Pacey notes, technology is most often associated with power and with the commodification of technical ideas. This commodification is derided by Kenneth Frampton in his Studies in Tectonic Culture as stifling to architecture and to the potential role of architects in culture. However, technology also has the potential for resistance to the status quo: “For all its marginality, tectonic culture still possesses a vestigially resistant core, particularly as this is manifest in its proclivity for the tactile” (Frampton 1996:377).1 What of this resistance at technology’s core? How is it that something so embedded in cultural power might be involved in resisting commodification and other forms of manipulation? In all four of the projects studied here, the technical manifestation of the building was carefully modulated to bring additional, not necessarily easily accessible or comfortable, meaning to an already complicated situation. There is no formula for how to achieve this and sometimes it happens in surprising ways. For instance, talk of the access to power and demonstration of sophistication through technology assumes that advanced technology is something inherently valued. While this is true in the culture of globalization, it is not necessarily true for all local cultures. The Aborigines of Australia have routinely shown little interest in the distinctions and innovations of technological devices such as cars. Their primary interest in them is as a functional and more rapid way of moving the long distances they habitually travel—not in their styling, horsepower or make and model. For the Anangu at Uluru, the rough detailing and assembly of the Uluru-Kata Tjuta Cultural Centre is not a critical issue to their perception and value of the Centre. In fact, this is one of their values that Burgess Architects built into the Centre. The Centre, then, is meant to convey these values to the foreigners who visit it. It references a sensibility toward making things rather than any

Building Change

209

architectural precedent: careful use of resources, non-linear geometries and workmanlike connections (see Figures 3.24, p. 108; 3.25, p. 108; 3.26, p. 109). These were natural explorations for Burgess. For instance, he has worked extensively with radially sawn lumber. This technique at the sawmill makes for more efficient and complete use of the wood in a log by sawing it repeatedly on the radius. This produces lengths of wood that are slightly wedge-shaped, and greatly reduces wastage. However, this shape makes the lumber difficult to use for wood framing of rectilinear buildings. Instead, it begs for another kind of application, even different geometries. It was ideal for the Cultural Centre. Unlike the Anangu who are a single community of Aborigines seeking visibility in a single, particularly impacted place, the Kanak are an entire, once diverse indigenous population unified in their subjugation by the French. It is important to remember that when the French arrived, the Kanak did not think of themselves as one group of people but, rather, as twenty-seven different tribal groups distinguished by completely different languages. It was only after significant death and displacement that these people adopted the singular identity ascribed to them by the colonials and became “Kanak”. Given the diverse world they have now been exposed to, they are generally willing to continue accepting this identity as a partial description of who they are. However, those who can still trace themselves to a particular location and language group, often do. One of the symbolic roles of the Tjibaou Cultural Centre is to elevate the status of the Kanak in relation to the French and in relation to other Pacific Island cultures. As Pacey suggests, the advanced systems of the building can be read as a status symbol of progress and even wealth. But this reminds us that another purpose of the building, we should not forget, is as a kind of partial compensation for the colonial past. At the Tjibaou Cultural Centre, the Renzo Piano Building Workshop composed a building out of two radically different constructional systems. One system is adopted from other art gallery type buildings Piano has designed in different (European or American) parts of the world. This system receives little, if any, attention when the building is written about and photographed. This is primarily because it is overshadowed, indeed purposely overwhelmed, by the new constructional system invented exclusively for this project. It is this new system, the soaring three-dimensional glue-laminated timber trusses braced with steel rods and cables, that commands the attention. This system is adopted from the dwellings historically made by the Kanak that use vertical members tied together on a platform foundation. The RPBW’s version retains the articulated structural strategy, but translates and transforms it into something that appears radically new. In this way the Building Workshop has honored the Kanak by making a unique constructional system expressly for them and for this building that launches them into the future. In South Africa, Noero and Wolff are clearly using technology for some other end. The history they are interested in connecting to is the recent apartheid past, when black and “colored” people were forced by circumstances to scrounge for the materials to make shelter for themselves. Over the course of their architectural practice, Noero and Wolff have made numerous smaller buildings that celebrate the common materials available to the residents: corrugated metal, cement board, plywood. They are now trying to demonstrate how those materials might be further elevated in a large public building. This, too, requires translation, since the scale jump from township shack to museum is

Architecture and change

210

enormous. In order to aid in this scale jump, Noero Wolff also looked at the factories that provided the context for the organization of the ANC and other groups resistance to the practices of apartheid. A saw-tooth roof makes an appearance, but not gratuitously. It covers the huge open gallery, bathing the exhibition memory boxes with diffuse light from above. The careful detailing of common corrugated tin elevates it, while strategically placed plaster panels give a sense of finish to the exterior. The technological expressiveness of the SPLC is deployed as part of the building’s strategy of confrontation. Erdy McHenry, as well as the leadership of the SPLC, understood quite well that the general population of Montgomery would not be familiar or comfortable with the stainless steel cladding, the cantilevered structure, the modulated curtain wall or the folded, sloping concrete terrain leading to the front door. As predicted, many people in Montgomery are baffled by the material and technical expression of the building, while others simply dislike it. Those opposed to the mission of the SPLC deplore it. Clearly, given the position of the SPLC on the margins of Montgomery’s culture, this response was intended.

Cultural Exchange Cross-cultural translation is never entirely neutral; it is enmeshed in relationships of power. One enters the translation process from a specific location, from which one only partially escapes. In successful translation, the access to something alien—another language, culture or code—is substantial. Something different is brought over, made available for understanding, appreciation, consumption. (Clifford 1997:182–183)

Clifford is no doubt influenced in his thinking about this kind of cultural translation by his extensive early research on Maurice Leenhardt. Leenhardt, the missionary-turnedanthropologist who was so affected by the Kanak of New Caledonia, summed up the universal importance of the lessons that might be learned in seriously engaging cultures different from one’s own: For if [Melanesian culture] has preserved so much of its past in its very acts of progress, this is because it holds in itself certain elements which, very ancient, are essential to mankind. To grasp these elements is to recover, perhaps, those categories, indeed values, which we have allowed to diminish or disappear in ourselves…. Through them, we rediscover elements of the affective life, the esthetic life, and the mythic life, which we had forgotten, and which were lacking in the balance of our thought. (Leenhardt as quoted by Clifford 1982:198)

Building Change

211

This quotation suggests that the projects in this book might be viewed another way: how were the architects involved changed by doing the project? In the end, complex and challenging architectural projects are not one way streets—with all the benefits flowing from the architect to the client group. While the client group gains a building that helps them move forward in their aspirations for social change, the architect is also changed by the challenges engaged in such a project. For Piano and Burgess, in particular, working with other cultures has opened parallel ways of seeing and understanding. The Renzo Piano Building Workshop was clearly affected by its work on the Tjibaou Cultural Centre. Through it Piano clarified a global perspective for his work. It was the second of what has become several projects on the Pacific Rim—the first was Kansai Airport in Osaka (1994). Subsequently the Workshop did Aurora Place in Sydney and is now working on a project for the Academy of Sciences in San Francisco. For Piano there is a profound difference in architectural strategies between Europe and the Pacific: “The European world is about stone. This is very different from the Pacific Rim where the whole sense is about remaking the gesture. In this case, lightness becomes an antidote to time” (Piano 2002, interview). One outcome, according to Piano, of the accumulation of many light pieces coming together is that the building can become “atmospheric, but still anchored to solid ground” (Piano 2002). He has furthered this appearance by developing a strategy for dealing with the heavy, solid and mechanical needs of buildings: these are pushed underground. The result is a light-weight pavilion perched on top of what Piano affectionately refers to as a “factory”. Piano also rediscovered through the Tjibaou project that the accumulation of fragments can create a visual lightness, particularly at the crucial edge where the building meets the sky. At the Centre, the vertical ends of the silver-gray glulams that make up the cases meet the sky in a feathered edge—one that transforms from strong silhouettes when backlit to fuzzy when lit from in front. This front light condition makes the ends appear to melt into the bright sky. Piano seems delighted with this uncanny effect. He has since pulled it into two high-rise projects, where the edge of the building against the sky is more dramatically observed: Aurora Place in Sydney (2001) and the upcoming building for the New York Times in New York. Piano happily admits to this carrying over of ideas, strategies and technologies from project to project. The work of the Building Workshop shows, however, that this carryover is not the conservative practice it might suggest. The startling forms, tectonic exploration, and strategy in relationship to the ground of the Tjibaou Cultural Centre would not have been possible without what Piano thinks of as one of architecture’s central allures: that each project presents a set of unique opportunities. “Architecture is an adventure. It is a challenge to measure one’s self with each new problem” (Piano 2002, interview). Working with the Kanak in New Caledonia, the problem was much larger than a set of spatial and technical needs. Here Piano discovered an additional set of inspirations and opportunities in the political and cultural history and tensions of the project. For Greg Burgess, the lessons of the Uluru-Kata Tjuta Cultural Centre are part of an ongoing exploration of a process, geometry and materiality for cultural buildings for Aboriginal people. This process was begun in previous projects, most notably the Brambuk Living Cultural Centre for the five Aboriginal communities in the southeastern part of Australia (Victoria). However, Burgess has also used these same geometries and

Architecture and change

212

methods for high-end single family houses. The Cultural Centre gave him a chance to apply these in collaboration with the Anangu who brought an overarching site sensibility to inform the decisions about form and space. The founding attorneys of the SPLC, Joseph Levin and Morris Dees, seem to have infected the brand new practice of Erdy McHenry Architecture with boldness. A close look at the evolution of the building design shows that each time the architects were sent back to the drawing board the design became clearer, more focused and much more contemporary. The confident aesthetic that emerged continues on into the other buildings the firm is designing.

Building Change Just as architecture fixes materials in time and space, it also fixes meaning. This is one of the most difficult parts of the projects in the previous chapters. When ongoing political and cultural tensions are part of what must be translated in a building through architecture, as with all four of these projects, a critical problem arises: the architect is responding to a moment in the evolution of dynamic relationships between groups of people with different visions of what the future is to be. While the siting of a building, its materials and their organization and the built space and form may have a particular meaning at the time they are conceived, that meaning may alter rapidly as circumstances change. These are impossible to predict. Despite this, the architect must, by fact of the physical reality of architecture, make decisions. In such cases, the architect exercises agency by selecting which future he or she hopes for, supports, or, perhaps, believes is most likely. Along with changes in meaning, buildings also change at the more straightforward and pragmatic level of space and programmatic needs. This is difficult even in the most stable of institutions and contexts; however, in the situations where a building is involved in a charged social or cultural situation, or being made for an entirely new institution, change is inevitable. While the change itself is predictable, what the change will entail or how soon it will be needed is not. So, while certain kinds of specificity are crucial in making such buildings work culturally, the more specific a space is for its function, the less likely it is to be easily adapted to another use. Each of the buildings in this book must be thought about from these perspectives of change. For instance, while the technological experimentation in the Tjibaou Cultural Centre appeared advanced in 1998 when the building opened, in thirty years’ time it may look dated. This means that the optimistic freshness of the building would be lost, leaving the visitor to instead wish for the innocence of the time when the project was made. On the other hand, an alternative possible future would be that in thirty years’ time the Centre is an established and mainstream institution engrained in the Kanaky (the likely new name for post-independence New Caledonia) national psyche. This scenario would unfold with the scheduled independence from France laid out in the Noumea Accord of 1998. However, we know that building construction is a very conservative practice. It usually takes years for any new technology to enter common and routine use. In the relatively remote circumstance of New Caledonia, where concrete frame with terra cotta

Building Change

213

block infill is the standard construction method, this may be particularly true. Indeed, it is likely the Centre will retain, as a handful of buildings per decade do, its cultural and visual freshness despite continually evolving architectural investigations and the huge number of buildings that will adopt the building’s technology or be inspired by it.2 This hope for a future where the culture represented in the Tjibaou Cultural Centre is no longer isolated and separated from the mainstream of national culture is also an inherent hope for the Uluru-Kata Tjuta Cultural Centre. The political intention would be that neither the Kanak nor the Anangu cultures will any longer need a designated place where they can be explicitly present. Instead, they should simply be routinely present, visible, respected and effective within their places. Such a shift would change significantly the meaning of the buildings. They would, like the indigenous people they represent, cease to be exotic in their locales, and instead be seen as obvious and integral parts of their place. In the meantime, however, the Anangu struggle with how to most effectively use the Uluru-Kata Tjuta Cultural Centre. Almost as soon as construction was completed, uses of spaces were changed. Within a few years, the toilets were moved to separate structures outside of the building, with the space they occupied being remodeled to accommodate Park Service personnel working with the Anangu. The multipurpose room became the Winkiku Exhibition space where the Walkatjara Art Centre artists work, display and sell their painted ceramics. The now unused dance ground changing rooms have become storage and offices for the Walkatjara Art Centre. Other changes will no doubt occur as the Anangu need the Centre to be different things at different times in the evolution of their growing agency in the context of the Park and the tourists. The Museum of Struggle, with its saw-tooth factory roof and its humble materials may remain a kind of prototype of South African postapartheid architecture. Or it may become a transitional architecture that bridges from the rough and tumble “make-do” aesthetic of the townships to another sensibility about making public buildings in the country. Or it may get fondly set aside as a lively example of post-apartheid township architecture by globalized architectural sensibilities. Any of these are possible futures as the meaning of the Museum changes. This meaning, like the meanings of the other buildings here, is intimately tied to the political, cultural and economic future of its place. Noero Wolff Architects were clearly aware of these possible scenarios when they were designing the building. Since the Museum has been conceptualized from its earliest design as a place of change, it may be a place of meaningful dialog about the past and present for decades to come. The primary exhibit space, with its twelve memory boxes, is very specific in certain ways: the diffused south light coming from the skylights above, and the fixed column and memory box grids. However, these spaces are otherwise neutral, allowing for their content to be adjusted and changed as history evolves and as needs shift. As for the SPLC, they look forward to a time when neither the building nor the Center’s agenda are seen as confrontational to the mainstream culture of Montgomery. In such a future, the elaborate security needs of the building would be obsolete, and the funneled entry and small front door would happily have to be redesigned to be more welcoming. This would be a triumph for the Center and its aspirations for the social, political and cultural future of Montgomery.

Architecture and change

214

For each of these projects, the future expansion and integration of the cultural agency of the client may significantly shift the meaning of the building, and perhaps many of its uses. However, despite the implications for these changes on the architecture, such changes are a welcome thing for the clients. For these buildings demonstrate that the ongoing redistribution of the cultural power around the world has altered who has the right to express themselves in space through the products of contemporary architecture. They show that when a building project is explicitly embedded in a process of political and cultural change, it demands a heightened kind of engagement by its architects. And the resulting buildings remind us that architects and architecture can contribute actively and positively to social change. This contribution is possible precisely because buildings are material objects of cultural production that are both pragmatic and symbolic. These buildings also show that David Harvey, Iain Low and Kim Dovey—authors drawn upon in the first chapter—were right in their assertion that the human imagination is the key to both architecture and cultural change. As such it becomes pivotal when contemplating the possibilities of architects, through the making of individual buildings, to engage in explicit political, cultural and social agendas. As Peter Zumthor suggests in the quote that opens this chapter, all architecture is, by definition, change. It is an essential participant in the necessary reorganization of the physical world to match changes in the political world. Because of this, it is urgent that architects recognize their own agency, and the powers they serve in the way they deploy it. As demonstrated by the architects who designed the projects in this book, this agency is not fixed in its relationship to power. Since architecture is already based upon the assumption of change, it is to a large extent up to the architect to have the courage and imagination to be explicit about what power agenda their agency serves. Architects know that to make good work is not a matter of instantaneous insight, or raw talent, or good luck—though all of these may be useful at some point. Instead, architecture is an optimistic and, yes, imaginative activity of focused daily effort sustained over long stretches of time. It is an underdog’s fight against the basic laws of physics; against both inertia and entropy. Toward the end of his life, even the great master of modernism recognized the simultaneous poetry and humility in this. Le Corbusier said, when accepting the AIA Gold Medal in 1961: There is not a breath of victory in daily life. Great things are made out of a multitude of little things, and the little things follow one upon another every day from morning till night…. Daily life is a matter of perseverance, courage, modesty and hardships.3 In this daily-ness and in the spatial reality and cultural agency of architecture, lies the power of buildings to participate in political and social change. This power is found in reimagining the ordinary activities of architecture and in leveraging these activities so that the changes they produce are consciously in service of a progressive agenda. While this potential for architecture is easier to see in the projects in this book, it does not only exist at a heroic scale or in the process of working on an explicitly political or cultural building. When actively and imaginatively engaged, every architectural project offers an opportunity to build change.

Appendix Project Credits Tjibaou Cultural Centre Client Agency for the Development of Kanak Culture (Agence pour le Développement de la Culture Kanak (ADCK)) (http://www.adck.nc/) Architects Renzo Piano Building Workshop (http://www.rpbw.com/): Renzo Piano (principal); Paul Vincent (associate-in-charge); William Vassal (architect-on-site); Antoine Chaaya, Alain Galissian, Marie Henry, Charlotte Jackman, Robert Keiser, Gianni Modolo, Joost Moolhiuijzen, Jean Bernard Mothes, Marie Pimmel, Sophie Purnama, Dominique Rat, Anne Hélène Téménidès (design team); Oliver Doizy, Andrea Schultz (modelmakers) Consultants Competition Phase (1991): A.Bensa (ethnologist); Desvigne & Dalnoky (landscaping); Ove Arup & Partners (engineers); GEC Ingénierie (cost control); Peutz & Associés (acoustics); Scène (scenography) Design Development and Construction Phase (1992–1998): A.Bensa (ethnologist); GEC Ingénierie (cost control); Ove Arup & Partners (engineers); CSTB (climate control); Agibat MTI (engineers); Scène (scenography); Peutz & Associés (acoustics); Qualinconsult (security); Végétude (landscaping); Intégral R.Baur General Contractor Glauser International

Uluru-Kata Tjuta Cultural Centre Client Mutitjulu Community and Australian National Parks (www.deh.gov.au/parks/uluru/vis-info/cultural-centre.html)

and

Wildlife

Service

Appendix

216

Architects Gregory Burgess Pty. Ltd. Architects (http://www.gregoryburgessarchitects.com.au/): Gregory Burgess (design architect); Peter Ryan and Steve Duddy (project architects); Ian Khoo, Phillip Bigg, Robert Lock, Anna Lindstad, Alvyn Williams, Thomas Kinloch (project team) Consultants Sonja Peters (environmental designer); Kevin Taylor and Kate Cullity (landscape designers); David Weston (tourist consultant); Anthony Prowse and Associates (quantity surveyors); Yttrup & Associates (structural/civil engineers) Contractor Sitzler Bros Pty Ltd, Alice Springs

Museum of Struggle Client Nelson Mandela Metropolitan Municipality Architects Noero Wolff Architects, Cape Town: Jo Noero, Heinrich Wolff (principals-incharge); Robert McGiven, Amit Patel, Tanzeem Resack, Avish Mistry, Chris Sensenig Associated Architects for Contract Administration and Site Supervision John Blair Architect, Port Elizabeth Quantity Surveyors Walters and Simpson, Guateng Engineers De Villiers and Hume, Cape Town Contractor SBT Construction in equity partnership with Bezemandla Builders

Appendix

217

Cost 23 million Rand (US $3.5 million, 2.8 million euros)

Southern Poverty Law Center Client The Southern Poverty Law Center (http://www.splcenter.org/) Architects Erdy McHenry Architecture, Philadelphia (http://www.em-arc.com/): Scott Erdy, David McHenry (project principals); Kristy Balliet, Mary Ryan Berzinsky, Paul Drzal, Scott Larkin, Jennifer Mach, Mark Miller, Jim Morrisey, Eric Oskey (design team); Hillier Group (schematic phase) Architects of Record Goodwyn, Mills & Cawood, Montgomery Consultants Pilgrin Engineering (civil); Cagley Harman Associates (structural engineering); Zgouvas & Associates (mechanical engineering); Mills-Conoly Engineering (electrical); Robert Morris & Associates (fire protection); ARCHISEC (security) Contractor Brasfield & Corrie Cost US $15 million

Notes 1 Power, Space and Architecture 1 This observation of the phenomenon of power manifested in space was commented upon much earlier by the great generalist Lewis Mumford in his books on the city; most notably The City in History (1961). 2 The “Jim Crow” laws get their name from the character played by a white entertainer, Thomas Rice, who first appeared in 1828 on stage in black face as an exaggerated black character named “Jim Crow”. He toured widely and spawned imitations with names like Zip Coon and Jim Dandy—black face white characters portraying blacks as shuffling, dancing half-wits. By the late 1830s the term “Jim Crow” was widely used as a racial epithet for blacks (Dr David Pilgrim, Ferris State University, 9/2000). 3 It should be noted that this desire to found a new government with a new architectural style is not a new phenomenon. The fledgling US invented the Greek Revival style that graces the Capitol in Washington, DC and other federal and state buildings of that era. Looking to the Greeks, the source of ideals about democracy, was a way for the US to avoid adopting any of the styles of Europe. This style was duplicated by state governments throughout the US for their Capitols, including the State of Alabama. 4 A lively array of recent buildings were surveyed as possible case studies for this book. In addition to the projects included here, these included the Inari Sámi Museum and Northern Lapland Visitor Center in Finland for the Sámi people by Juhanni Pallasmaa; The Sámi Parliament Building, Samediggi, Norway, also for the Sámi people by Stein Halvorsen and Christian Sundberg; The Bopitikelo Community and Cultural Centre for the San people of South Africa, by Peter Rich Architects; The Tr’ondek Hwech’in Cultural Centre, for the Tr’ondek Hwech’in people of the Yukon Territory, Canada by Kobayashi+Zedda Architects; The Sinte Gleska University for the Lakota Sioux Nation in South Dakota, US by RoTo Architects; and The Mashintucket Pequot Museum and Community Center for the Mashintucket Pequot tribe of New York State, in the US by Polshek and Partners.

2 Building Future: Tjibaou Cultural Centre 1 The text of the Matignon-Oudinot Accord of 1988 states that the role of the Agency for the Development of Kanak Culture is “to accord full value to the Kanak cultural heritage in all its forms: archeological, ethnographic and linguistic; to encourage contemporary forms of Kanak culture; to promote cultural exchange, especially within the South Pacific region; to define and conduct research programs of value to Kanak culture”. 2 This is not to say that there is not an important set of issues surrounding the globalization of building production and the resulting implications for economies, material invention, environmental resources, etc. These are critical to discuss in the context of contemporary architectural practice everywhere. To construct it as a specific criticism of the Tjibaou

Notes

219

Cultural Centre because of the indigenous nature of the project, is patriarchal and condescending.

3 Building Visibility: The Uluru-Kata Tjuta Cultural Centre 1 The Anangu are part of an Aboriginal group known to white anthropologists and linguists as the Pitjantjatjara because they share a common language and occupy a wide territory in what is now known as The Central Desert of Australia. 2 It should be noted that this policy of terra nullis, empty land, was not used in the Americas. There the indigenous populations had enough of what the British recognized as culture that they could be conceived of as ‘noble savages’. This led the British government to acknowledge their claims to land—even if these claims were later overrun through treaties, “purchases” and outright hostile taking. 3 No photographs accompany this description due to Anangu prohibition on photographing sacred sites. This prohibition is extended to photographs of the Anangu themselves. The photographs of Anangu in this chapter have been included with permission. 4 This time is often referred to by white Australians and general literature as the “Dreamtime” or “Dreaming”. The Anangu take exception to this term, saying it suggests that their beliefs are unreal. They speak instead of the Creation. 5 The plan states: “A Cultural Centre may be established in the park for the following purposes: Presentation of interpretive material relating to traditional culture; Display and sale of contemporary Aboriginal art and craft; Display of historical and contact history and presentation of traditional song and dance; and The conduct of other appropriate Anangu controlled cultural and/or commercial activities” (Cultural Centre Information handout 2001). 6 “Another recurring statement was to mention by name each of the white men to whom they had shown and explained these sacred sites over the past ten years or more and to ask why these men had not repaid this act by getting facilities provided for people to stay there. It is probably not fully appreciated by the recipients that the act of showing these sites to them was also a gift of great value, and a gift which carried with it a reciprocal obligation” (Brokensha 1987:15). 7 As with other indigenous communities in remote locations, there are severe social problems among the teenagers and young adults in the Mutitjulu community. Petrol sniffing and other drug abuse is widespread. Depression is rampant. On the other hand, some of the young adults are very actively and constructively employed with the Park staff.

4 Building Memory: Museum of Struggle 1 The original architectural team consisted of Mashbane Rose Architects, in collaboration with architects Sidney Abramovitch, Bannie Brits and Linda Mvusi, and the corporate design firm of GAPP. 2 The history of the land that is now called South Africa is deeply complex and the brief glimpse presented here does not do it justice. An excellent recent history, that acknowledges and thoroughly documents the various important relationships and conflicts among the African tribes, the tensions among immigrant groups from places other than Europe, as well as the more commonly known story of conflicts between the English and the Boers and the

Notes

220

whites and the blacks, is South Africa: A Narrative History, by Frank Walsh. This history makes vividly clear the sources, scope and intricacies of the dynamics among racial, ethnic and language groups in South Africa. It is infinitely more complicated than black versus white, with colored in-between. 3 The primary apartheid laws include: The Mixed Marriage Act (banning marriages between white and non-whites) 1949, The Immorality Act (extending that ban to sexual relations) 1950, The Group Areas Act (establishing laws requiring each race to live in segregated communities) 1950; The Population Registration Act (requiring each South African to be classified as white, black or colored) 1950; The Bantu Authorities Act (establishing so-called “homelands” where black people with no overt purpose to be anywhere else were required to move), 1951; The Abolition of Passes and Coordination of Documents Act (requiring passbooks for movement), 1952.

5 Building Presence: Southern Poverty Law Center 1 Direct mail solicitation for support was the idea of Morris Dees, who, along with his legal practice, had been running an extremely successful small publishing company in the years prior to establishing the SPLC. The sale of the company left Dees comfortable enough financially that he did not need to draw a salary from the newly formed SPLC. The direct mail approach, which Dees also used in his role as Campaign Finance Manager for the presidential campaigns of both George McGovern and Jimmy Carter, proved enormously effective. 2 The era gets its name from the character played by a white entertainer, Thomas Rice, who first appeared in 1828 on stage in black face as an exaggerated character named “Jim Crow”. He toured widely and spawned imitations with names like Zip Coon and Jim Dandy—black face white characters portraying blacks as shuffling, dancing half-wits. By the late 1830s the term “Jim Crow” was widely used as a racial epithet for blacks (Dr David Pilgrim, Ferris State University, 9/2000). 3 For an excellent history of the role of Montgomery in the Civil Rights Movement see Taylor Branch’s Pulitzer Prize winning book, Parting the Waters. While Dr Martin Luther King, Jr was the most prominent of the Montgomery Civil Rights activists and leaders, scores of other men and women were crucial to the initiation and sustenance of the movement in those early days. Among these is the irrepressible Reverend Vernon Johns who occupied the pulpit of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church before King and, unknown to them at the time, prepared the congregation to become activists under King’s later leadership. 4 Signs of this are everywhere in Montgomery, though often disguised as silence toward civil rights rather than as hostility. Often this appears in public venues as detailed presentations of the days of the Confederacy, the establishment by the Wright Brothers of the first flight school in the US, and other details of the white history of the city. The years given noticeably short shrift are Reconstruction (the decade at the end of the Civil War when the North enforced legal, political and social changes on the South, in large part to dismantle the institution of slavery and assure rights to the freed slaves) and Civil Rights. For example, the website for Robert E. Lee High School (the name of the school, founded ironically in 1955, is a bit of a giveaway), of the Montgomery Public Schools, has a section on the history of Montgomery. The history is divided into periods, with most periods receiving well over 300 words of colorful description. Reconstruction gets a scant forty-six words “Reconstruction found Montgomery with her build (sic) environment intact. Through those eleven years, alterations occurred as citizens accommodated themselves to dramatic changes in the social, economic and political systems. A freed black population established its own churches,

Notes

221

schools and organizations, separate from those of the white community.” In 1861, half the population of Montgomery was black, slave and free. Yet, the end of slavery four years later and the short bright spot of Reconstruction, when black Alabama law makers occupied seats in both the US Congress and the State legislature, bought land, established businesses and colleges, etc. is treated in this Montgomery Public School website “history” as a set of parenthetic events that happened to someone else. The Civil Rights movement is given a slightly more generous eighty-three words, with Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King mentioned by name. The section ends with this sentence: “New court (Supreme Court) rulings (November 13, 1956) outlawed segregation and subsequent laws gave power to King’s followers.” In 1956, blacks (the “King’s followers” of this website) made up close to fifty percent of Montgomery’s population. (www.lee.mps.K12.al.us/Montgomery%20History/) 5 The First Amendment to the US Constitution states “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.” This has been subsequently interpreted, through legal precedent, to mean that the federal government should not in any way support, show favor or advance the specific ideas of any particular religion or religious group. 6 The first incarnation of the Ku Klux Klan was during the period of Reconstruction after the Civil War. It began as a group of insurgents in Tennessee who harassed and sometimes murdered freed slaves, the Union troops stationed in the South and anyone who sympathized with either of these groups. The Klan spread quickly throughout the former Confederate States and beyond. During the Jim Crow era, the group became symbolic of the sanctioned white racism in the South. Their tactics of lynching and burning crosses on the lawns of intended victims were emblematic of their viciousness and of the fear that characterized this era for black Americans. The Klan is mostly driven underground by post-Civil Rights law enforcement, but it still exists. The SPLC is among the groups in the US that keep track of its movements as it occupies an increasingly marginalized position.

6 Architecture and Change 1 Frampton continues to tie this point to a serious critique of the direction of architectural practice in relationship to technical commodification: “This dimension resists the maximizing thrust of capitalism, determined now, as ever before, on the process of global commodification. In this context it is regrettable that the European Community should simultaneously both patronize architecture and engender its demise, as is evident from its ruthless pursuit of a unified market, irrespective of cultural cost. An unforeseen consequence of this economic impulse has been the recent attempts on the part of various member states to undermine the authority of the architect, and with it, one should note, the capacity of the profession to be effective in the design of civic form” (Frampton 1996:377). 2 One such building is the 2003 Chancellery building at Edith Cowan University’s Joondalup campus in Perth, Australia. This project employs curving non-structural vertical glue laminated jarrah wood beams with thin horizontal battens as screens and as vertical markers of the building. See Architecture Australia, January/February 2004, pp. 64–71. 3 From Le Corbusier Sketchbook, Vol. 4, 1957–1964, MIT Press, 1982.

Bibliography Alabama State Archives, Alabama History Timeline (1861–1900), Montgomery. Online. Available at www.archives.state.al.us/timeline/al1861.html. Australian Nature Conservation Agency (undated report) Tjunguringkula Waakaripai: Working together at Uluru Kata-Tjuta National Park, Sydney. Barton, Craig (2001) “Duality and Invisibility”, in C.Barton (ed.) Sites of Memory, New York: Princeton Architectural Press. Belcher, Nathanial (2001) “Miami’s Colored Over Segregation: Segregation, Interstate 95 and Miami’s African-American Legends”, in C.Barton (ed.) Sites of Memory, New York: Princeton Architectural Press. Bennett, David (ed.) (1998) Multicultural States: Rethinking Difference and Identity, London and New York: Routledge. Bensa, Alban (1996) “Piano: Noumea”, Architecture D’Aujourd’hui, December #308. ——and Eric Wittersheim (1998) “Nationalism and Interdependence: The Political Thought of Jean-Marie Tjibaou”, The Contemporary Pacific, Vol. 10, No. 2, pp. 369–390. Bergson, Henri (1998 [1908]) Matter and Memory, New York: Zone Books. Blaser, Werner (2001) Renzo Piano—Centre Kanak, Basel: Birkhauser. Blumberg, Rhoda (1991) Civil Rights in the 1960s: Freedom Struggle, New York: Simon & Schuster. Bonnell, Victoria E. and Lynn Hunt (eds) (1999) Beyond the Cultural Turn, Berkeley: University of California Press. Bourdieu, Pierre (1977) Outline of a Theory of Practice, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ——(1980) The Logic of Practice, Stanford: Stanford University Press. ——(1993) The Field of Cultural Production, New York: Columbia University Press. Branch, Taylor (1988) Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954–63, New York: Simon & Schuster. Brokensha, Peter (1987 [1975]) The Pitjantjatjara and Their Crafts, Sydney: The Aboriginal Arts Board, Australia Council. Brooks, Geraldine (2003) “The Painted Desert”, The New Yorker, pp. 61–67. Brown, David (2001) “Sonorous Urbanism: Spatial Implications of the AACM”, in C.Barton (ed.) Sites of Memory, New York: Princeton Architectural Press. Buchanan, Peter (1991) “Pacific Rim and Planetary Culture”, Architectural Review, August. ——(1992) “Pacific Piano”, Architectural Review, March. ——(1993, 1997) Renzo Piano Building Workshop, Vols 1 and 2, London: Phaidon. Burgess, Gregory (1990) “Uluru National Park Cultural Centre: Project Brief and Design Concept”, report booklet. ——(1997) “Towards an Ecology of Culture”, A+U, Number 320 (May 1997): 102–107. ——(2001, 2002) Personal interviews with author. Burgin, Victor (1996) In/Different Spaces: Place and Memory in Visual Culture, Berkeley: University of California Press. Cairns, Stephen (1998) “Postcolonial Architectonics”, Postcolonial Studies, Vol. 1, No. 2, pp. 211– 235. Calvino, Italo (1988) Six Memos for the Next Millennium, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Campbell, I.C. (1996) A History of the Pacific Islands, Berkeley: University of California Press.

Bibliography

223

Carter, Paul (2000) “Coastal Forms”, (Review of house by Greg Burgess), Architecture Australia, January/February, pp. 50–55. Castells, Manuel (1997) The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture, Vols. I–III, Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. Chambers, Iain and Lidia Curti (eds) (1996) The Post-colonial Question, London: Routledge. Clifford, James (1982) Person and Myth, Berkeley: University of California Press. ——(1988) The Predicament of Culture, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ——(1997) Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ——(2000) Interview with author. Cosgrove, Denis (1998) Social Formation and Symbolic Landscape, Madison: University of Wisconsin. ——(ed.) (1999) Mappings, London: Reaktion. Davis, Howard (1999) The Culture of Building, New York: Oxford University Press. Davis, Mike (2001) Late Victorian Holocausts, London: Verso. de Blas, Alexandra (2000) Interview with Emmanuel Kasarherou, http://www.abc.gov.au/ra/carvingout/%20issues/tjibaou.htm Dees, Morris with Steve Fiffer (2001) A Lawyer’s Journey: The Morris Dees Story, Chicago: American Bar Association. ——(2003) Founder and Chief Trial Counsel, Southern Poverty Law Center, interview with author. Dexter Avenue King Memorial Baptist Church (2003) History Pamphlet, Montgomery, Alabama. Dovey, Kim (1996) “Architecture and Aborigines”, Architecture Australia, Vol. 85, July/August. ——(1999) Framing Places: Mediating Power in Built Form, London: Routledge. ——(2000) “Seeing Uluru”, Thresholds 21, MIT. Elliott, Cecil D. (1993) Technics and Architecture: The Development of Materials and Systems for Buildings, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Erdy, Scott and David McHenry (2003) Erdy McHenry Architects, interview, March. Frampton, Kenneth (1996) Studies in Tectonic Culture, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. ——(1997) “Renzo Piano: The Architect as Homo Faber”, GA Architect 14, vol. 14, pp. 8–25. Hayden, Dolores (1995) The Power of Place: Urban Landscapes as Public History, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Geertz, Clifford (1973) The Interpretation of Cultures, New York: Harper Collins/Basic Books. ——(1983) Local Knowledge, New York: Harper Collins/Basic Books. Gelder, Ken and Jane M.Jacob (1998) Uncanny Australia: Sacredness and Identity in a Postcolonial Nation, Melbourne: Melbourne University Press. Gering de Bruin (2002) City Architect, Mandela Municipality, interview. Ghandi, Leela (1998) Postcolonial Theory, New York: Columbia University Press. Goodman, David (1999) Fault Lines: Journeys into the New South Africa, Berkeley: University of California Press. ——and Elgin, Catherine Z. (1988) Reconceptions in Philosophy and Other Arts and Sciences, Indianapolis: Hackett. Gratton, Michelle (ed.) (2000) Reconciliation: Essays on Australian Reconciliation, Melbourne: Black, Inc. Gupta, Akhil and James Ferguson (eds) (1997) Culture, Power, Place: Explorations in Critical Anthropology, London: Duke University Press. Habel, Norman (1999) Reconciliation: Searching for Australia’s Soul, Sydney: HarperCollins. Hall, Stuart (1997) “The Local and the Global: Globalization and Ethnicity”, in A.King (ed.) Culture, Globalization and the World System, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Harley, J.B. (2001) The New Nature of Maps, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Hart, Gillian (2002) Disabling Globalization: Places of Power in Post-Apartheid South Africa, Berkeley: University of California Press.

Bibliography

224

Hart, Sara (1998) “Double Indemnity”, (Technology Report on Tjibaou Cultural Center), Architecture, October. Harvey, David (1973) Social Justice and the City, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. ——(2000) Spaces of Hope, Berkeley: University of California Press. ——(2001) Spaces of Capital: Towards a Critical Geography, London: Routledge. Heinrich Wolff (2001) Architect, Red Location Apartheid Museum, interview, May. Holl, Steven (1991) Anchoring, New York: Princeton Architectural Press. Horowitz, Tony (2002) Blue Latitudes, New York: Henry Holt and Company. Hughes, Robert (1986) Fatal Shore, New York: Vintage Books. Huyssen, Andreas (1995) Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia, New York: Routledge. ——(2003) Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Jackson, Davina and Chris Johnson (2000) Australian Architecture Now, London: Thames and Hudson. Jacobs, Jane M. (1996) Edge of Empire: Postcolonialism and the City, London: Routledge. ——Kim Dovey and Mathilde Lochert (2000) “Authorizing Aboriginality in Architecture”, in L. Lokko (ed.) White Papers, Black Masks Architecture, Race, Culture, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. James, Wilmot and Linda Van de Vijver (eds) (2000) After the TRC: Reflections on Truth and Reconciliation in South Africa, Athens: Ohio University Press. Jameson, Fredric and Masao Miyoshi (eds) (1998) The Cultures of Globalization, Durham: Duke University Press. Jo Noero (2002) Architect, Red Location Apartheid Museum, interview, May. Johnson, Chris (2002) Geometries of Power: Imperial Cities of Delhi, Sydney: Faculty of Architecture, University of Sydney. Kasarherou, Emmanuel (1998) Cultural Director, Tjibaou Cultural Centre, interview, June. King, Anthony D. (ed.) (1998) Culture, Globalization and the World-System, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ——(2004) Spaces of Global Cultures: Architecture Urbanism Identity, London: Routledge. Krog, Antjie (1998) Country of My Skull, New York: Three Rivers Press. Kusno, Abidin (2000) Behind the Postcolonial: Architecture, Urban Space and Political Cultures in Indonesia, London: Routledge. Langweld, Neil (2002) Mandela Municipality Employee, former freedom fighter, interview, May. Layton, Robert (2001) Uluru: An Aboriginal History of Ayers Rock, Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press. Le Corbusier (1948) New World of Space, Boston: Institute of Contemporary Art. Lefaivre, Liane and Alexander Tzonis (2003) Critical Regionalism: Architecture and Identity in a Globalized World, New York: Prestel. Lefebvre, Henri (1991 [1971]) The Production of Space, Oxford: Blackwell. Levin, Joseph (2002, 2003) Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Southern Poverty Law Center, interviews with author. Lines, William J. (1991) Taming the Great South Land, Athens: University of Georgia Press. Lochert, Mathilde (1994) “Architecture and the Construction of Aboriginality,” Thesis, Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology. Lokko, Lesley Naa Norle (ed.) (2000) White Papers, Black Marks: Architecture, Race, Culture, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ——(2001) “Body, Memory, Map: a Narrative in 12 Segments”, in C.Barton (ed.) Sites of Memory, New York: Princeton Architectural Press. Low, Iain (2002) “Space and Transformation”, Digest of South African Architecture 2003, Cape Town. Malan, Rian (1990) My Traitor’s Heart, New York: Grove Press.

Bibliography

225

Mandela, Nelson (1994) Long Walk to Freedom, Boston: Little, Brown and Co. Markus, Thomas A. (1993) Buildings and Power: Freedom and Control in the Origin of Modern Building Types, London: Routledge. Mathabane, Mark (1986) Kaffir Boy, New York: Touchstone. Memmott, Paul (1996) “Aboriginal Signs and Architectural Meanings”, Architectural Theory Review, Vol. 1, No. 2, pp. 79–100. (1997) “Aboriginal Signs and Architectural Semiotics (Part 2)”, Architectural Theory Review, Vol. 2, no. 1, pp. 38–64. ——and Joseph Reser (1997) “Design Concepts and Processes for Public Aboriginal Architecture”, PaPER, 55–56. ——and Carol Go-Sam (2000) “Living Spaces”, The Oxford Companion to Aboriginal Art and Culture, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mitchell, W.J.T. (1994) “Imperial Landscape”, in W.J.T.Mitchell (ed.) Landscape and Power, London: University of Chicago Press. Miyake, Riichi (1998) “From the Vernacular to the Universal”, and “Interview with William Vassal”, A+U, August. Morojele, Mpethi (2003) “Space and Identity—From the Grassroots to the Global”, Digest of South African Architecture 2003, Cape Town. Mumford, Lewis (1961) The City in History, New York: Harcourt, Brae & World. Murphy, Bernice (2002) “Centre Culturel Tjibaou: A Museum and Arts Centre Redefining New Caledonia’s Cultural Heritage”, Australian National University, Humanities Research, Vol. XI, No. 1. Musikavahnu, Leslie (2002) Architect, Johannesburg, interview with author. Nalbantoglu, G.B. and C.T.Wong (eds) (1997) Postcolonial Space(s), New York: Princeton Architectural Press. Noero, Jo (1999) Competition Architect’s Statement, South African Architect, June. ——(2001, 2002, 2003) Interviews with author. Pacey, Andrew (1999) Meaning in Technology, Cambridge: MIT Press. Pakenham, Thomas (2002) The Scramble for Africa, London: Abacus. Pandele, Vuyisile and Celia Mtati, Tobeka Scolotela, Tozama Scolotela, Pumla Mngadi, Bongozina Fini and Bonginkosi Berick Sidliki (2002) New Brighton Community Liaisons on Apartheid Museum, interview with author. Parks Australia (2000) “Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park Visitor Infrastructure Master Plan”. Pearson, Richard (1998) “Former Alabama Gov. George C.Wallace Dies”, Washington, DC: Washington Post. Online. Available http://www.washingtonpost.com/wpsrv/politics/daily/sept98//%20wallace.htm Perera, Nihal (1998) Society and Space: Colonialism, Nationalism and Postcolonial Identity in Sri Lanka, Boulder: Westview Press. Piano, Renzo (1994) “Project Background”, (for Tjibaou Cultural Centre) Monument, #3. ——(1997) “Jean-Marie Tjibaou Cultural Centre, Construction: 1995–1998”, Renzo Piano Logbook, London: Thames and Hudson. ——(2001, 2002) Interviews with author, San Francisco. Pogrund, Benjamin (2000) War of Words: Memoir of a South African Journalist, New York: Seven Stories Press. Prakash, Vikram (1997) “Identity Production in Postcolonial Indian Architecture: Recovering What We Never Had”, in G.B.Nalbantoglu and C.T.Wong (eds) Postcolonial Space(s), New York: Princeton Architectural Press. Provinelli, Elizabeth (1999) “Settler Modernity and the Quest for Indigenous Tradition”, Public Culture, Vol. 11, No. 1:19–47. Reynolds, Henry (1992) The Law of the Land, 2nd edn, Sydney: Penguin Books. Ross, Robert (1999) A Concise History of South Africa, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Bibliography

226

RPBW (1998) Press Kit, Centre Culturel Tjibaou, Noumea, New Caledonia, Renzo Piano Building Workshop. Sachs, Albie (2002) Justice of the South African Constitutional Court, interview, May. Said, Edward (1979) Orientalism, New York: Vintage Books. ——(1993) Culture and Imperialism, New York: Alfred A.Knopf. Sallis, John (2002) On Translation, Bloomington: University of Indiana Press. Sennett, Richard (1980) Authority, New York: W.W.Norton. ——(1994) Flesh and Stone: The Body and The City in Western Civilization, New York: W.W. Norton. Silverstein, Ken (2000) “The Church of Morris Dees”, Harper’s Magazine, November. Tawa, Michael (1996) “Liru and Kuniya”, Architecture Australia, vol. 85, Nov/Dec. Tjibaou, Jean-Marie (undated) quotes from exhibition on Tjibaou at the Cultural Centre, June 1998. Tutu, Desmond (1999) No Future Without Forgiveness, New York: Doubleday. Underwood, Dan (1996) “Snake Charmer”, Architectural Review, November. Vale, Lawrence (1992) Architecture, Power and National Identity, New Haven: Yale University Press. Vassal, William (1998) A+U, interview, August. ——(1998a) Tjibaou Cultural Centre Site Architect, interviews with author. Vrdoljak, Michele (2002) “Cast in Stone: Spatial narratives in the Face of Democracy”, 8th Annual Qualitative Methods Conference. Walsh, Frank (1999) South Africa, A Narrative History, New York: Kodansha. Washington, James E. (ed.) (1991) A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., San Francisco: Harper San Francisco. Werbner, Richard (ed.) (1998) Memory and the Postcolony: African Anthropology and the Critique of Power, London: Zed Books. West, Cornel (1993) “A Note on Race and Architecture”, Keeping Faith, London: Routledge. Wilmot, James and Linda Van de Vijiver (2000) After the TRC, Cape Town: David Philips Publisher. Wilson, Mabel (2001) “Between Rooms 307: Spaces of Memory at the National Civil Rights Museum”, in C.Barton (ed.) Sites of Memory, New York: Princeton Architectural Press. Wittersheim, Eric (1998) “Melanesian Élites and Modern Politics in New Caledonia and Vanuatu”, Discussion Paper, Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, The Australian National University. Wolff, Heinrich (2002) Interview with author. Zumthor, Peter (1998) Thinking Architecture, Baden: Lars Müller Publisher.

Index Note: italic entries indicate pages with illustrations.

Aborigines: 27, 40, 83–7, 88, 90, 91, 119, 202–3; painting, 90–1, 101–3; representational systems of, 101–2 agency: 2–3, 4, 26, 28, 29, 30, 31, 40, 94, 145, 148, 170, 194, 208; of architecture, 30–1, 34–5, 42, 55, 192, 193, 199, 207, 210, 229, 230; cultural, 28, 30, 33, 38, 39, 40, 41, 195, 209; spatial, 5, 8, 131 Alabama, state of: 161, 165, 167, 174, 175; capitol, 162, 165, 201; Montgomery, 15 Anangu: 40, 81, 83, 87–9, 91–6, 97–100, 101, 102, 104–6, 108, 109, 110, 111–16, 118–21, 196, 199, 200, 203, 206, 208 apartheid: 9, 27, 28, 41, 122–6, 127, 139, 163, 167; history of, 16, 123, 127–8, 131–3, 136, 151, 204; spatial legacy of, 16, 30, 133–6, 134, 135; spatial strategies of, 12, 17, 131–3, 144–5; struggle against, 136–7, 142–3, 144–5, 167, 197, 201, 204 architecture: 6, 7–8, 22, 123, 178, 192, 193–4, 198, 199, 206–10; agency of, 30–1, 34–5, 42, 55, 192, 193, 199, 207, 210, 229, 230; and meaning, 30–1, 65–6, 96–7, 101, 106, 109, 112, 119, 120, 124–5, 126, 135, 142, 144–5, 150, 159–60, 187, 189, 191, 194, 198, 199, 206–10; and power, 2–4, 22, 32, 50, 125, 135, 159–60, 191, 193, 202; and social change, 32–42, 120, 136, 138, 192–3, 195, 202, 206–10 Australia: 12, 20, 22, 24, 27, 40, 44, 79, 81, 82, 82, 84–6, 90–1 Ayers Rock: 60, 99, 101, 114; aka Uluru Babel, tower of: 1–2, 12, 46 Barton, Craig: 15–16 Bentham, Jeremy: 3, 9 Bensa, Alban: 70, 71, 74, 85, 86, 88, 98 Burgess, Gregory: 40, 79, 96–103, 104–7, 110, 112, 120, 196, 200, 203, 205, 206 bus boycott, Montgomery: 167, 171 cartography: 8, 18 Civil Rights Movement: 161, 162, 163, 166, 172–3, 176, 181, 216n3 Civil War: New Caledonia, 48, 49; United States, 161, 165, 174

Index

228

Clifford, James: 52, 64, 204–5 colonization: 17, 28, 46, 50, 56, 62–3; spatial impacts of, 17–24, 89–90 Confederacy: 161, 165, 166, 168, 170, 174, 216n4, 217n6 cultural production: 28–30, 49, 86, 119, 159, 209 Dees, Morris: 183, 195, 196, 197, 198, 207, 226, 236n1 Dexter Avenue Baptist Church: 161, 164, 168, 168, 170, 171, 172, 181, 182, 201, 216n3 Erdy McHenry Architecture: 178, 179, 182, 187, 204, 206 Erdy, Scott: 178, 179, 181–4 geography: 6, 8, 35 globalization: 4, 9, 17, 24, 24–6, 27, 30, 32, 64, 202, 214n2/2 Gold Reef Apartheid Museum: 123–5, 124, 144, 151 Harley, J.B.: 8, 19 Harvey, David: 6, 7, 8, 25, 30, 33–5 hierarchy: and culture, 198; and power, 29; narrative, 145–6; of space, 8, 9–11, 15, 21, 126, 150, 220 Huyssen, Andreas: 144, 148 imagination: 2, 89, 149; and architecture, 32–3, 34–5, 36–7, 38, 193, 209; geographical: 19; as tool of change, 17, 28, 36, 145, 209 invisibility: 9, 12, 83, 85, 88, 185, 193; and power, 4, 14–16, 26, 33, 38, 153, 171 Kanak: 27, 40, 43, 44–52, 53, 54–5, 56, 60–1, 64–7, 68, 69, 70, 73, 76–8, 197, 199–200, 204–5, 206, 208; path: 57, 60 Kasarherou, Emmanuel: 51, 54, 56, 60–1 Kata Tjuta: 82, 83, 83, 93, 94, 121 King, Dr Martin Luther, Jr: 50, 161, 167, 168, 170–2, 173, 176 landscape: 66, 73, 79, 81, 88, 97, 107, 110, 113, 119, 124, 176, 199, 181, 194; Aboriginal understanding of, 83, 85–6, 88–90, 92, 97, 98, 121, 196; colonial modification of, 19–22, 24, 25, 28, 46, 47, 48, 107, 133, 136; Kanak understanding of, 52–6, 60–1, 76; and power, 4, 5, 6, 8, 9, 10, 15–16, 29, 30, 32, 125, 133, 136, 159, 161, 163, 181, 191, 198–202 Le Corbusier: 5, 32, 36, 37, 209 Leenhardt, Maurice: 52, 64 Lefebvre, Henri: 6, 7, 8, 30, 31 Levin, Joseph: 163, 177, 178, 179, 186, 189, 191, 206 Low, Iain: 36, 136, 209

Index

229

Mandela Municipality: 127, 128, 138, 150–4, 197 maps: 8, 18–19, 115, 176 Matignon-Oudinot Accord: 49, 214n1 marginalization: 27, 28, 42, 47, 48, 50, 171, 202, 204; spatial strategies of, 4, 9, 11–13, 17, 18, 30, 31, 39, 49, 132, 156–7, 191 Mbeki, Govan: 137–8 McHenry, David: 178, 183, 184, 187, 189 memory: 41, 46, 70, 76, 122, 126; spatial orchestration for, 51, 53, 142–9, 151, 204, 208 Mitterrand, François: 3, 20, 44, 50, 78 Montgomery, city of: 13, 15, 40, 161, 163, 165, 166, 167–70, 171–5, 176, 177, 178, 179, 184, 185, 187–9, 191, 201, 204, 208–9 Museum of Struggle: 40, 41–2, 122, 125, 126, 136, 139, 140, 144–8, 146, 147, 148, 149, 150–7, 151, 152, 153, 155, 156, 157, 158, 159–60, 159, 160, 197–8, 201, 204, 208 New Brighton: 126–7, 136–8, 151, 153, 156, 157, 158, 197, 201 New Caledonia: 12, 27, 40, 43, 44, 53, 54, 60, 61, 64, 65, 66, 70, 71; history, 44–9, 50, 52, 76, 78, 110, 197, 199, 205–6, 207 Noero Wolff Architects: 40, 125, 126, 138, 141, 142, 143, 156, 197–8, 201, 204, 208 Noero, Jo: 138–9, 141–2, 143, 144, 145, 147, 148, 197 panopticon: 3, 8, 9 Piano, Renzo: 43, 44, 50–1, 52–3, 55, 56, 61, 62, 65, 66, 67, 70, 71, 72, 76, 106, 110, 147, 197, 199, 203, 205–6 politics: 8, 13, 25, 33, 37, 39, 42, 65, 91, 129, 152–3, 167, 171, 187 Port Elizabeth: 40, 127, 137–8, 150 power: 1–42, 192–3, 198–9, 201, 202, 204, 209–10; and architecture, 2–4, 22, 32, 50, 125, 135, 159–60, 191, 193, 202, 209–10; and landscape, 4, 5, 6, 8, 9, 10, 15–16, 29, 30, 32, 125, 133, 136, 159, 161, 163, 181, 191, 198– 202; and space; see spatial power; and technology, 202–4 Reconciliation: 39, 91 Red Location: 136–8, 136, 141, 151–3, 153, 154, 156, 156, 158, 159, 201 Renzo Piano Building Workshop (RPBW): 40, 43, 51, 54, 55, 56, 62, 65–8, 70, 76, 197, 198, 199– 200, 203, 204–6 Said, Edward: 17, 19, 24, 28, 36, 47 segregation: 4, 9, 14–17, 26, 28, 30, 32, 47, 127, 130–1, 132, 135, 136, 142, 146, 163, 165, 166–7, 171–2, 173, 174; desegregation, 17, 163, 167, 173, 175, 189 social change: 205; and architecture, 32–3, 35–8, 40, 42, 192–3, 202, 209–10 South Africa: history of, 128–33 Southern Poverty Law Center: 13, 27, 40, 42, 163–5, 164, 167, 168, 174–83, 183–5, 187, 187, 188, 189, 189, 190, 191, 194, 198, 199, 201–2, 204, 206, 208

Index

230

spatial power: 3–8, 11, 14, 24, 32, 40, 193, 198–9, 201 technology: 7, 27, 38, 41, 47, 61, 64, 66, 70, 107, 207; meaning of, 40, 41, 43–4, 61, 62, 66, 70, 109–10, 193, 194, 202–4 Tjibaou Cultural Centre: 40, 41, 43, 44, 50, 51, 57–9, 60, 62, 63, 64, 69, 70–5, 73–8, 77, 109, 110, 113, 148, 197, 199–200, 203–4, 205–6, 207 Tjibaou, Jean-Marie: 43, 48, 49, 49, 50, 51, 53, 64, 65 translation: 96, 88, 114, 118, 120, 150, 195, 205; into physical space, 9, 39, 41, 68, 94, 192, 194–5, 198, 204, 207 tourists: 9, 41, 61, 79–83, 80, 84, 87–8, 89, 91, 92–3, 94–5, 98, 100–1, 102, 111–21, 138, 161, 176, 200, 208 Uluru: 80, 81–3, 84, 87–8, 91–5, 98, 99, 100, 101, 102, 103, 107, 109–11, 115–16, 118, 119, 120, 121, 196, 199, 200, 203; see also Ayers Rock Uluru-Kata Tjuta Cultural Centre: 41, 79, 81, 81, 94–6, 98–101, 102, 103, 104, 105, 107, 110, 112, 112, 113, 115–21 115–18, 196, 200, 203, 206, 207–8 Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park: 81, 82, 83, 93–4, 95, 99, 115, 119, 120, 200 Vassal, William: 68–9, 92–3 Wolff, Heinrich: 138 Zumthor, Peter: 35, 192