Curating Architecture and the City (Critiques)

Curating Architecture and the City

The collection, representation and exhibition of architecture and the built environment is explored for the first time in a major work addressing current practices, historical precedents, theoretical issues and future possibilities. Today, curation has become a loosely defined creative activity – the contemporary curator is more like an artist, representing the world through a wide variety of media and locations. While analytical tools can only deal with certain aspects of the city and qualitative investigation is elusive, approaching the built environment as a collection to be curated opens up new possibilities for exploring the urban fabric. Curating Architecture and the City considers cultural heritage and public space, and critiques recent contemporary curatorial, urban and architectural practice: •

architectural exhibitions

•

public galleries

•

regeneration projects

•

city tours

•

heritage archives

•

urban art installations

Balanced between theoretical investigations and case studies from Europe, the near East, Japan and North America, the broad range of chapters examine different aspects of the meeting between a curatorial ‘subject’ and an architectural or urbanistic ‘object’. Sarah Chaplin is Deputy Director of the Urban Renaissance Institute and Professor of Architecture and Urbanism at the University of Greenwich, London, UK. Alexandra Stara is Director of Graduate History and Theory and Principal Lecturer at the School of Architecture and Landscape, University of Kingston, UK.

CRITIQUES: Critical Studies in Architectural Humanities A project of the Architectural Humanities Research Association

Series Editor: Jonathan Hale (University of Nottingham) Editorial Board: Sarah Chaplin (University of Greenwich) Mark Dorrian (University of Edinburgh) Murray Fraser (University of Westminster) Hilde Heynen (Catholic University of Leuven) Andrew Leach (University of Queensland) Thomas Mical (Carleton University) Jane Rendell (University College London) Adam Sharr (Cardiff University) Igea Troiani (Oxford Brookes University) This original series of edited books contains selected papers from the AHRA Annual International Conferences. Each year the event has its own thematic focus while sharing an interest in new and emerging critical research in the areas of architectural history, theory, culture, design and urbanism. Volume 1: Critical Architecture Edited by: Jane Rendell, Jonathan Hill, Murray Fraser and Mark Dorrian Volume 2: From Models to Drawings: Imagination and Representation in Architecture Edited by: Marco Frascari, Jonathan Hale and Bradley Starkey Volume 3: The Politics of Making Edited by: Mark Swenarton, Igea Troiani and Helena Webster Volume 4: Curating Architecture and the City Edited by: Sarah Chaplin and Alexandra Stara AHRA provides an inclusive and comprehensive support network for humanities researchers in architecture across the UK and beyond. It promotes, supports, develops and disseminates high-quality research in all areas of architectural humanities. www.ahra-architecture.org.uk

Curating Architecture and the City

Edited by Sarah Chaplin and Alexandra Stara

First published 2009 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, NY10016 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2009. To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk. © 2009 Selection and editorial matter, Sarah Chaplin and Alexandra Stara; individual chapters, the contributors All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised 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 Curating architecture and the city/edited by Sarah Chaplin and Alexandra Stara. p. cm. – (AHRA critiques: critical studies in architectural humanities) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Architecture–Exhibitions. 2. Cities and towns–Interpretive programs. I. Chaplin, Sarah. II. Stara, Alexandra, 1967– NA25.C87 2009 720.75–dc22 ISBN 0-203-87638-5 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN10: 0-415-48982-2 (hbk) ISBN10: 0-415-48983-0 (pbk) ISBN10: 0-203-87638-5 (ebk) ISBN13: 978-0-415-48982-9 (hbk) ISBN13: 978-0-415-48983-6 (pbk) ISBN13: 978-0-203-87638-1 (ebk)

2008044831

Contents

Illustration credits

vii

List of contributors

ix

Acknowledgements

xiv

Introduction Sarah Chaplin and Alexandra Stara

1

City tours and urban reveries

7

The city and the text: remembering Dublin in Ulysses: remembering Ulysses in Dublin Hugh Campbell

9

Choosing (what) to learn from – Las Vegas, Los Angeles, London, Rome, Lagos . . .? Suzanne Ewing

23

Curated desires: film, photography and the visual transformation of urban space in surrealism Michael Chapman and Michael Ostwald

39

Moving city: curating architecture on site Jonathan Hale and Holger Schnädelbach

51

Awaiting the voice-over: the Öresund Film Commission location database and the mediatization of architectural landscape Maria Hellström Reimer

62

Curating contemporary architecture: touring the Bilbao Guggenheim and Seattle Central Library Ari Seligmann

78

v

Contents

Rethinking curatorship, rethinking architecture

91

Cura Tim Gough

93

Caring for dead architecture Matthias Albrecht Amann

103

Exhibiting architecture: the installation as laboratory for emerging architecture Florian Kossak

117

From flash art to flash mob: how have new gallery spaces informed the nature of contemporary display? Corinna Dean

129

Reading into the mysteries of Artemis Ephesia Zeynep Aktüre

145

Reinterpreting public space and cultural heritage

165

Curating the social, curating the architectural Gerald Adler

167

Expanding the public realm through curated collaborative action: the Echigo Tsumari abandoned house project Carol Mancke

179

Curating the nation: Turkish pavilions in world expositions Sebnem Yücel Young

193

After branding: a lively downtown? Marie-Paule Macdonald

207

The necessity of distance: setting the position for critical spatial practice Catharina Gabrielsson

219

Urban fictions with the office for subversive architecture Alexandra Stara

233

Afterword: please do not touch Jeremy Till

246

Index

vi

249

Illustration credits

The editors and publishers gratefully acknowledge the following for permission to reproduce material in this book. Every effort has been made to contact copyright holders for their permission. The publishers would be grateful to hear from any copyright holder who is not acknowledged here and will undertake to rectify any errors or omissions in future editions of the book. Gerald Adler Matthias Albrecht Amann

175 (top), 176 105, 111, 112, 175 (bottom)

Atelier Big City

215

A.A. Bokhrushin Theatre Museum, Moscow

122

Erika Barahona-Ede, © FMGB Guggenheim Bilbao Museoa, 2008 Floris Besserer Hélène Binet

79 243 221, 224, 229

Brandenburgisches Landesamt für Denkmalpflege und Archäologisches Landesmuseum Emma Bush Hugh Campbell I. Can Siram Caruso St John Architects

170 35 11, 12 145, 151, 152, 155, 157 222, 225

Euan Cockburn

25

David Cowlard

234

dAb Collective

211

Phil Day

235

Corinna Dean Suzanne Ewing Andrea Fraser

141 27, 30, 34 80

Tom Gnägi

106

Tim Gough

97, 98, 99

Jonathan Hale

57, 58, 59

vii

Illustration credits

Hegarty & Stones

13, 14, 18, 19, 20

Maria Hellström Reimer

66, 67

Marie-Paule Macdonald

207, 216

Man Ray Trust, ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London, 2008 Carol Mancke Johannes Marburg osa Ross Perkin

45 181, 182, 184, 185, 187 241 239, 242 27

Jim Prevett with Jeremy Till

248

John Riddy and Matt’s Gallery, London

100

Helen Robertson and Matt’s Gallery, London Ari Seligmann

98 81, 83, 86

Stadtarchiv, Peine

174

State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow

123

Tabanlioglu Architects

199, 200, 201

Rachel Travers

28, 29

Mike Whitfield

24

Getrud Wolfschwenger, Vienna

viii

125

Contributors

Gerald Adler runs the Part I course in architecture at the University of Kent and is an Architects Registration Board examiner. His practice experience has been with Kammerer and Belz, Stuttgart; Georg Heinrichs, Berlin; Burkard Meyer Steiger, Baden/Switzerland; Hampshire County Architects, Winchester; Koichi Nagashima, Tokyo; and Ted Cullinan, London. He has recently completed a PhD on Heinrich Tessenow, and has given papers at various conferences. He is currently researching the place of the ruin in the modern architectural imagination and gave a paper on this subject at the 2007 Cardiff ‘Quality’ conference. Zeynep Aktüre teaches architectural history and design in Izmir Institute of Technology, Turkey. Her doctoral thesis, confirmed in 2005, elaborates on the ideology and methodology of classification in studies on ancient theatre architecture, on the basis of data from Greece and Spain. Her current research is on historiography and conservation history of Mediterranean archaeological sites and monuments. Her publications in Turkish and English include proceedings of international conferences of art, architecture and archaeology. She has experience in conservation projects and prizes in national architecture and ideas competitions in Turkey. Matthias Albrecht Amann is a researcher at Goerlitz Kompetenzzentrum Revitalisierender Staedtebau. He studied at Bauhaus University Weimar, ETH Zurich and Oxford Brookes University. Matthias has collaborated with Sergison Bates Architects and taught at Dresden University of Technology, Chair for Spatial Design (2003–5) and ETH Zurich, Chair for History of Urban Design (2005–7). He was an organiser of the Dresden International Symposium of Architecture 2004 and co-curator of the exhibition The Conquest of the Street at Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, 2006. In 2007 he was awarded the HeinrichTessenow Scholarship. Matthias publishes on architecture and urbanism and works in private practice.

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Contributors

Hugh Campbell is Professor of Architecture at UCD. His research interests cover a wide spectrum from Irish architecture and urbanism to the relationship of consciousness and space. His work has appeared in numerous journals and edited collections. Among recent publications are essays on Hans Scharoun’s Philharmonie in ARQ, and on the photography of Philip Lorca-diCorcia in DiPalma, Latouri and Periton (eds), The Intimate Metropolis (Routledge, 2008). With Nathalie Weadick, he commissioned and curated Ireland’s exhibition at the 2008 Venice Biennale entitled The Lives of Spaces as well as editing the accompanying book. Sarah Chaplin is Deputy Director of the Urban Renaissance Institute, and a Professor in the School of Architecture and Construction at the University of Greenwich. She was previously head of the School of Architecture and Landscape at Kingston University from 2003–8. She is a director of the Academy of Urbanism, and served on the Architecture and Built Environment panel for RAE2008. She was a founder member of AHRA, and is currently on its Steering Group. She has lectured, broadcast and published widely on architecture, urbanism, digital and visual culture. Her most recent book was Japanese Love Hotels: A Cultural History (Routledge, 2007). Michael Chapman lectures in architectural design and theory at the University of Newcastle, Australia, where he is completing a PhD concerned with the relationship between Surrealism and contemporary architectural discourse. His research and design have been published in journals and conferences nationally and internationally. Together with Michael Ostwald he is the author of Tracings: Architectural and Urban Memories (2003) and Residue: Architecture as a Condition of Loss (2007). His architectural designs have been exhibited and published internationally, including at the 2008 Venice Biennale. Corinna Dean is currently undertaking a PhD at the LSE’s Cities Programme, researching the regeneration effect of Tate Modern. She was programme director at the University of Kent Department of Architecture and taught on the critical and historical theory course at the RCA. She graduated with a degree in history of design (Manchester Polytechnic) and architecture (UCL) and has worked at the Architecture Foundation, London and on several architectural projects in Berlin and London. Corinna has written on design and cities under military threat for Bauwelt, The Architectural Review, Bauzeitung, and was a curator on Interchange (2000) and the Venice Biennale (2008). Suzanne Ewing is a Lecturer in Architecture at the University of Edinburgh where she is currently programme leader for the Master of Architecture degree. She studied at the University of Cambridge, subsequently worked in practice, has taught at a number of UK institutions, and in 2002 co-founded Edinburgh-based practice, zone architects. Since 1993 she has been involved in exhibition curation. Her research work currently centres on discourses of studio and field,

x

Contributors

future city building and interdisciplinary practices, most recently in the publication and exhibition SaltCity: Cádiz Field+Work (2008). Catharina Gabrielsson received her professional diploma in Architecture in 1992, and her PhD in 2007, both at the School of Architecture, Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden. As a cultural critic and senior lecturer, she has published and lectured extensively at sites of higher education and in different media since the mid-1990s. She was appointed by the Swedish National Public Art Council to initiate and lead numerous art-and-architecture collaborations between 1997 and 2005. She currently holds a fellowship as Visiting Researcher at the LSE Cities Programme in London. Tim Gough teaches design at Kingston University School of Architecture and Landscape and lectures in the theory of architecture. He is partner in Robertson Gough, an artist–architect collaborative based in London. His recent research interests include phenomenology, the work of Gilles Deleuze, and the Roman baroque. Published work includes ‘Under What Grace’, in Resistance Studies Magazine (2008); Let Us Take Architecture, publication and symposium at the Wordsworth Trust with artist Lucy Gunning (2007); ‘Non-origin of Species – Deleuze, Derrida, Darwin’, in Culture and Organisation (2006); and ‘Defiguration of Space’, in Figuration-Defiguration, edited by Onuki and Pekar (2006). Jonathan Hale is an architect and Associate Professor at the School of the Built Environment, University of Nottingham. He is course director for the Master of Architecture (Design) and the interdisciplinary MA in Architecture and Critical Theory. His research interests include: architectural theory and criticism; the philosophy of technology; the relationship between architecture and the body; and architectural exhibitions. He is the author of numerous articles and books and has recently co-edited with William W. Braham (University of Pennsylvania) Rethinking Technology: a Reader in Architectural Theory (Routledge, 2007). He is also coordinator and a founder member of the AHRA. Maria Hellström Reimer is a visual artist and senior researcher at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, Department of Landscape Architecture at Alnarp. With a PhD in applied and theoretical aesthetics, she has conducted interdisciplinary and arts-based research at the Swedish Interactive Institute, Space and Virtuality Studio as well as at Malmö University, School of Arts and Communication. In an ongoing research project funded by the Swedish Research Council, Hellström Reimer is focusing on the consequences and potentials of the filmic imaginary in urbanistic practice. Florian Kossak is a Lecturer at the School of Architecture, University of Sheffield. He has taught at the Academy of Fine Arts, Munich and the University of Strathclyde. He has been architectural consultant for Otto Steidle, Munich, and co-founder of the cooperatives GLAS and PAR Ltd. Florian has curated and designed more than 20 exhibitions in Germany, France, Italy and the UK and was

xi

Contributors

co-editor of the journal glaspaper (2001–7). He is author and editor of numerous articles, architectural monographs and exhibition catalogues, most recently SHIFTS (2007) and Glasgow Is Made by Us (2007). Marie-Paule Macdonald is a registered architect, member of the Order of Architects of Québec and the RAIC. She studied in Dalhousie University and the University of Paris VIII with Françoise Choay. Marie-Paule has coordinated graduate design and urbanism studios for the University of Waterloo in Montréal and presented work at the Informal Architecture Symposium, Banff, 2004. She worked within the Dab Collective on the Quartier des Spectacles workshop, Montreal, 2005. Her publications include Wild in the Streets, in collaboration with Dan Graham (1994), rockspaces (2000), and ‘Vides et Résidus’ in the exhibition catalogue La Demeure, Montréal (2008). Carol Mancke is Senior Lecturer in Architecture and Urban Design and course director for the Master of Architecture (Design) at Kingston University. Carol studied at MIT, Berkeley, Central St Martins and the University of Osaka prefecture, Japan. She is a qualified architect in the US, Japan and the UK and has over 25 years’ experience in teaching and professional practice. She has had her own art and architecture practice, Machina Loci, in London since 2004. She has published articles in World Architecture, Architecture Today (Japanese publication) and the Guardian Space Magazine. Her work has been featured in Shin Kenchiku, Kenchiku Bunka, Japan Times and Comfort Magazine. Michael Ostwald is Dean of Architecture and Professor of Architecture at the University of Newcastle, Australia. He is a visiting professor at RMIT University and a professorial fellow at Victoria University Wellington. He is co-editor of the journal Architectural Design Research, and of Museum, Gallery and Cultural Architecture in Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific Region (2007) and on the editorial boards of Architectural Theory Review and the Nexus Network Journal. He has authored more than 200 scholarly publications and his recent books include The Architecture of the New Baroque (2006), Residue: Architecture as a Condition of Loss (2007) and Homo Faber: Modelling Design (2008). Holger Schnädelbach currently holds a Leverhulme Fellowship at the Mixed Reality Lab at the University of Nottingham, UK. His research spans the disciplines of architecture and computer science, focusing on the extension of architectural spaces through communication media in support of social interaction across physical boundaries. His work has been published in the leading HCI conferences and journals such as CHI, CSCW, Presence and TOCHI. He is currently investigating the multidisciplinary perspectives contributing to the emerging field of Adaptive Architecture, concerned with buildings that adapt to their environment and to their inhabitants. Ari Seligmann is an architecture critic and designer with professional experience in the United States and Japan. He has taught studios and seminars at University of

xii

Contributors

California, Berkeley, Woodbury University in Burbank, California, Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles, and UCLA. He has spoken at numerous international conferences and published work in Crib Sheets, Reassessing East Asia in Light of Urban and Architectural History, Thought Matters II, and After the Crash: Architecture in Post-Bubble Japan. Currently, he is working on several projects involved with explicating urban configurations in Tokyo. Alexandra Stara is director of graduate history and theory and course director of the MA Thinking Building at Kingston University, School of Architecture and Landscape. She qualified as an architect in NTUA, Greece, obtained Masters degrees from UCL and Cambridge, and holds a doctorate in the history of art from Oxford. She has taught and examined architecture nationally and internationally, and has been lecturing and publishing on the hermeneutics of art, architecture and the modern museum for the past 15 years. She is currently developing a project on urban and landscape photography. Her latest publication is Framing Duration: Contemporary Art Photography & the City (Artwords, 2009). Jeremy Till is an architect and educator. He is Dean of Architecture and the Built Environment at the University of Westminster. His extensive written work includes Architecture and Participation, Flexible Housing (with Tatjana Schneider), which was winner of the 2007 RIBA President’s Medal for Research, and Architecture Depends (MIT Press). As an architect, he is a director in Sarah Wigglesworth Architects, best known for their pioneering building, 9 Stock Orchard Street, which has received extensive international acclaim and multiple awards. In 2006 he was appointed to represent Britain at the Venice Architecture Biennale. Sebnem Yücel Young received her PhD from Arizona State University in 2003. She is currently Assistant Professor at Izmir Institute of Technology in Izmir, Turkey, where she teaches courses in architectural design, theory and history. Her research concentrates on cultural identity in architecture, regionalism and orientalism. Recent publications include ‘Identity Calling: Turkish Architecture and the West’, in Architecture, Ethics and the Personhood of Place, edited by Gregory Caicco (2007) and ‘Hyper Traditions/Hip Villages: Urbanite Villages of Western Anatolia’, in Traditional Dwellings and Settlements Review (2007).

xiii

Acknowledgements

The editors would like to thank the Architectural Humanities Research Association for the opportunity to host its 4th annual conference in November 2007 on Architecture, Urbanism and Curatorship, and in particular Jonathan Hale for his support in relation to this event and in the preparation of the book. We are grateful to the staff and students of the Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture and the School of Architecture and Landscape at Kingston University, where the conference was held, especially our fantastic conference organiser, Dennise Yue, as well as Dorinda Carter-Rowe and our session convenors who put in hours of their valuable time. We thank our sponsors, the Concrete Centre, the AHRC and the Academy of Urbanism for their support of the event. There were many more excellent contributors to the conference than we have been able to include in this publication, but who played an essential role in shaping and developing its themes. We would also like to thank Alex Hollingsworth, Fran Ford and their team at Routledge for making this book happen.

Introduction Sarah Chaplin and Alexandra Stara

Curation implies, in the first instance, care and responsibility for something. A traditional curator of the past century would be someone looking after a collection of valuable artefacts in a museum, ensuring they are kept in the best possible conditions and maintained as appropriate, most likely also managing any new acquisitions to expand the collection, as well as overseeing their potential display – though the aspect of display would in no way be essential to define the curator’s role. Today, curation has shifted considerably towards a process of display and interpretation, and away from site- or collection-specificity. It has become a more loosely defined creative activity, increasingly employed in a wide range of cultural fields. No longer implying an exclusive link to a collection, the contemporary curator is more like an artist-at-large, representing the world through the widest variety of media, locations and intentions. At its most extreme, this reinvention of the idea of curation could be criticised as yet another fad of consumerist postmodernity, requiring everchanging ways of selling everything. Indeed, there is affinity between the arts of packaging, branding and curating, deployed in equal measures across the department store, the gallery and the museum. And although styling itself can no longer be dismissed as an inconsequential activity, it is the potential of contemporary curatorial practice beyond appearances that renders it most interesting and relevant. The over-abundance of information and stimuli composing our culture requires increasingly informed and critical navigation, if any sense – both as meaning and direction – is to be got from it. It seems that the work of interpreters has never been more topical. Architecture, particularly on the urban scale, is a uniquely sensitive realm in that respect, as it balances between different extremes of attitudes, uses, ideas and interests. It is, for example, simultaneously conservative – physically conserving traces of the past at their grandest scale, as well as embodying history and memory in the living fabric of the city – and progressive – through rapid developments in design and building technology, as well as an increasing fascination with aesthetic innovation in its own right. It is also both local or ‘of a place’ and universal, with all its defining parameters mentioned above becoming increasingly globalised, as well as the

1

Sarah Chaplin and Alexandra Stara

increased mobility of populations worldwide. The temporal expanse within which these dramas unfold, the ongoing writing and rewriting of the city, have rendered it akin to a palimpsest – a favourite term in urban studies of late, from André Corboz to Giuliana Bruno. What this amounts to is a reading of the city as a layered parchment, with countless fragments of possible stories emerging through constant overwriting, none of which can be read in isolation or completeness. In other words, the contemporary city is a hybrid structure in a constant state of becoming through multiple interventions, conflicting intentions and mere chance, highly resistant to totalising analyses and narratives. Revealing these partly erased, mutated, ambiguous and latent layers remains essential in order to understand the city’s potential and to have any measure of success in further interventions. This is a key challenge of contemporary urbanism, which calls for devising alternative ways of reading and intervening in the urban fabric. The analytical tools of mainstream urbanism, measurements, statistics, etc., and the equivalent methodologies in practice, can only deal with certain aspects of the city, while qualitative complexities and ambiguities remain elusive. Theorists like Richard Sennett, Marc Augé and Sebastien Marot have argued for a broadening of our intellectual stance and the range of media for engaging with the modern urban phenomenon. Approaching the city as a collection to be curated, whether through representations or in situ, opens up new possibilities for exploring and enriching the urban fabric and the urban condition as a whole. The architectural exhibition, the public gallery, the regeneration project, as well as the city tour, the heritage archive and the urban art installation, can reveal unexpected aspects of the city and ways of inhabiting it. Far from being self-fulfilling activities, such curatorial acts translate as poetic interpretations – that is, creative interventions through interpreting and, conversely, invitations to critical engagement through making. Architecture and urbanism are complex creative acts of bridging difference and revealing identity, ultimately fulfilled through inhabitation. In that sense, they offer an ideal context for curating to realise its potential as caring-for, constructing and consuming/consummating of the dialectic entity that is the city. The main aim of this book is to explore the current practices, historical precedents, theoretical issues and future possibilities arising from the meeting of a curatorial ‘subject’ and an architectural or urbanistic ‘object’, dissolving into a creative encounter. The chapters have been selected to provide a balance between theoretical investigations and case studies, covering a broad methodological as well as thematic range. The studies are truly international in their scope, investigating the premise of Curating Architecture and the City across subjects from Europe, the near East, Japan and North America. Although the aim of the book focuses on the potential of the city today, there are strategically selected chapters covering historical subjects, in order to situate the contemporary in a temporal continuity and offer a longer perspective on the issues at stake. The chapters are structured in three sections: ‘City tours and urban reveries’; ‘Rethinking curatorship, rethinking architecture’; and ‘Reinterpreting public space and cultural heritage’. In the first section, chapters develop a series of themes including selecting sites, recording memories, challenging perceptions and spatialising narra-

2

Introduction

tives. Each author extends the notion of curatorship from museological practice into new spatial and interpretive territories. Hugh Campbell takes up the ways in which Dublin has sought to celebrate and remember the cultural enrichment that James Joyce has brought to a sense of place through tours, markers, maps and installations, each of which allows different points of contact with Dublin’s fictional past, and differing degrees of personal intimacy with the urban experience. Suzanne Ewing is concerned with the ways in which cities are effectively curated in the eyes of an architecture student by the very act of their tutors choosing to take them somewhere on a field trip, characterising field work as curatorial. She relates this to the practice of the Grand Tour, and shows how through history our relationship to urban places has been shaped by touristic itineraries and predilections. Michael Chapman and Michael Ostwald’s contribution looks at how desire has been subjected to curatorial strategies, through the media of film and photography, to construct a relationship to urban place that decontextualises our relationship to urban space, whereby surrealist art practices frame, fragment, flatten, expose and eroticise aspects of our experience, linking and provoking both conscious and unconscious readings of the city. The chapter by Jonathan Hale and Holger Schnädelbach looks at the role of mobile interactive media as a curatorial overlay, and how movement and vision are interconnected in terms of cognitive understanding of place. Listening to podcasts via mobile devices is starting to replace the more traditional use of a guidebook to aid discovery of a museum or city, and the authors present case studies which such technological enhancements to urban, architectural and gallery experiences. Maria Hellström Reimer is interested in the mediatisation of the urban landscape, in particular through the act of curating a database of film locations in the Öresund area. Hellström Reimer argues this process of archiving place for future filmic use destabilises existing relationships to place and creates a form of ‘intermediality’ between cinema and city, and she shows how the Öresund Film Commission has constructed not so much a typology but a tropology. Lastly in the first section, Ari Seligmann works through two projects, the Seattle Central Library and the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, to examine the ways in which mediagenic architecture is being curated through audio tours for tourists. Through his study, Seligmann show how contemporary architecture is curated through language and tone of voice, arguing that too much hyperbole can marshal narrow readings, and hence needs careful calibration. In the second section of the book, the chapters are intended to provoke revisions in our thinking about implicit relationships between curatorship and architecture. Tim Gough takes a broad philosophical look at the curation of the city, paying particular attention to the roles of virtuality and materiality. Gough articulates ‘care’ as both a responsible act and a conceptual term, and shows recent examples of artists’ gallery installations where there was an interplay between space and idea. Ultimately, he links the curator, the artist and the visitor in a shared act of participation.

3

Sarah Chaplin and Alexandra Stara

Matthias Albrecht Amann draws out a different categorical schema: that of how architecture and cities may be defined as being either dead or alive. Focusing attention on the vacated buildings of the former East Germany, Amann invokes theoretical positions historical precedent to consider the options for their future care and use, and shows how recent government programmes regarding whether to demolish or mothball housing blocks carry with them implicit notions of how we ‘store’ evidence of the past, both physical and non-physical. The issue of experimentation and exhibition as laboratory are what fascinate Florian Kossak, who seeks to distinguish between ‘art’ and ‘architectural’ installations. Kossak looks at the ways in which the Russian Constructivists and the Situationists used installation work as a space of experimentation about the future direction of architecture, dealing with issues of immersivity, temporality and site specificity. He shows how a continuous laboratory is needed within critical praxis, in order to mitigate the tendency towards the commodification of production. Corinna Dean takes up some of these same issues in her chapter on the nature of contemporary display. Dean looks in particular at the process of commissioning of Tate Modern, and how the Turbine Hall was transformed into a new public space for exhibition, and hence served to regenerate the area around Bankside. She discusses issues of spectacle, scale and spectatorship in such a setting, and how as a space it became a target of the transgressive practice of flash-mobbing. Zeynep Aktüre’s chapter invites us to consider the manner in which Artemisian artefacts are displayed in the Efes Museum. She invokes Hetherington’s idea of a ‘museum without walls’, comparing the Ephesian example to Stonehenge, where there is a similar degree of curatorial doubt about the meaning of the archaeological remains. Aktüre examines the spatial strategies employed at Ephesus, taking into consideration themes of ritual and routine, as well as aesthetic and historical forms of framing, as important factors supporting different museological readings, and urges for more openness where interpretation is concerned. The third and final section of the book explores cultural heritage and public space as realms where a broadly defined curatorial sensibility can offer new insights and enrich both historical understanding and everyday experience. Gerard Adler draws on the work of Françoise Choay and Alois Riegl in order to examine two earlytwentieth-century buildings by German architect Heinrich Tessenow, which challenge established schools of conservation. Through an exploration of their troubled history, Adler engages with the apparent conflict between the buildings’ architectural and social significance and concludes by dissolving it, arguing that the cultural and social is necessarily inscribed in the architectural and vice versa. Sebnem Yücel Young addresses the curation of national identity and the conflict between its overt and implicit representations. Her specific focus is Turkey and she discusses aspects of the nation’s ongoing process to reconcile its oriental past with its modern aspirations, through the creation of different pavilions in major international expositions. Yücel Young ultimately suggests that the curation of national rep-

4

Introduction

resentations is a means of critical reassessment of heritage as well as of its presence in contemporary reality. Carol Mancke discusses an alternative approach to heritage conservation, through the example of the art triennial in the rural region of Echigo Tsumari in Japan. The abandoned house project, which she has participated in and presents in this chapter, fuses art practice with community regeneration. Collaborative practice between artists, residents and visitors makes a convincing proposition for an ongoing, multi-layered curatorial approach that challenges conventional preservation practices. Marie-Paule Macdonald takes up the theme of urban regeneration in an urban context, through a critique of neighbourhood branding in Montréal, Canada. Macdonald proposes branding as a market-exaggerated counterpoint to curatorship, and juxtaposes the two approaches through an investigation of two contrasting plans for the redevelopment of the Quartier des Spectacles in Montréal: the one finally executed (the ‘branding’ project), and the proposal by dAb collective, made in response to a public competition by the city. The pitfalls of urban design in the name of regeneration and the possibility of an alternative approach are also addressed in the chapter by Catharina Gabrielsson. Focusing on the redevelopment of the main square in Kalmar, Sweden, by architects Caruso St John and artist Eva Löfdahl, Gabrielsson draws from a range of theoretical sources and her own professional experience, and argues the necessity of distance in the making of public space, as a simultaneously critical and poetic device. Alexandra Stara closes the section with a journey through the work of international art/architectural collaborative office for subversive architecture. Stara borrows the concept of fiction from Marc Augé, in order to argue the relevance of imagination and metaphor for both making and experiencing public space in the city. The work of osa, read as an ongoing curatorial project of the urban palimpsest, argues for a readjustment of our attitudes to the complexities of the contemporary city. The last word is given to Jeremy Till, curator of the British Pavilion at the Venice Biennale of Architecture in 2006, who concludes the book with something of a challenge to curators of architecture. Focusing on the nature of architectural exhibits and the limitations of interactivity in exhibition design, Till argues that controlling tactility is just one indication of how remote and inaccessible some architects and curators regard the interface between their exhibits and their visitors – an attitude quite removed from the way as people we are asked to participate in the public realm of the city. There are occasions when curatorial control is about staging an event and controlling the terms of engagement. However, as the questions that face us about the future of the built environment become more pressing, the business of curating architecture and the city is, and should be, messy and contingent, full of endless questions, contradictions and, most importantly, opportunities to engage directly with spaces, places, people and their ideas.

5

City tours and urban reveries

The city and the text Remembering Dublin in Ulysses: remembering Ulysses in Dublin Hugh Campbell

In Ulysses, James Joyce remembers Dublin. It is such a simple point that it is easy to forget. Not only is Ulysses an extraordinarily detailed portrait of Dublin life, it is one created at a physical and temporal distance. The final words of the novel are actually ‘Trieste – Zurich – Paris’, reflecting the fact that Joyce had barely set foot in Dublin during the seven years the novel took to write. Not only that, but by the time Ulysses was published in 1922, the Irish capital had undergone radical political, social and physical change: it was now the capital of an independent nation, but a capital that had suffered large-scale destruction during the 1916 rising and the war of independence. Right from the outset, Ulysses was, among many other things, an act of commemoration. Joyce’s famous boast, that if Dublin were destroyed it could be rebuilt entirely by reference to the pages of his novel, was really about recognising that the version he had constructed might in fact prove to be more enduring than the real city on which it was based. Joyce consulted street directories and maps, asked friends to send him all the shop names on particular streets, went to great lengths to ensure that his rendering of Dublin, 16 June 1904 was as complete and accurate as possible. ‘In Ulysses’, he said, ‘I wanted to stick close to the facts’.1 But if Joyce spent his entire writing life remembering Dublin, how does his native city choose to remember him? Initially, it seemed far more inclined to forget him. Ulysses was banned in Ireland, as it was in America, and Joyce’s exile remained in force long after his death in 1939. The opening of the James Joyce Museum in the Martello Tower in Sandycove, in which the first chapter of Ulysses is set, was really the first attempt to bring Joyce home. The intermingling of Joyce’s life, his fiction and the real space of the city that the tower exemplifies, continues through more recent initiatives such as the James Joyce Centre on North Great George’s Street – close to the Eccles Street address of the Blooms – and the annual celebrations of Bloomsday, with its uneasy mixture of pantomime and scholarly discussion. While the recent statue of Joyce on North Earl Street, off O’Connell Street, serves to announce very directly his acceptance into the pantheon of Irish greats and his newfound centrality to Dublin’s cultural tourism, the two projects of commemoration on which this chapter

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will focus are about something at once more direct and more difficult – the reintroduction of the text into the city from which it derives and which it depicts. It is straightforward enough to establish a museum or a study centre in a writer’s name, or to erect a statue of them in their native city, but to try to commemorate a work of fiction in its real setting is a much more slippery enterprise. The first of these projects dates from 1988, the year when, somewhat spuriously, Dublin celebrated its millennium. The sculptor Robin Buick and the curator of the Joyce Museum, Robert Nicholson (also the author of a book on Joyce), inserted into the pavements of the city a series of 14 plaques tracing Leopold Bloom’s movements through the centre of Dublin in the eighth chapter of Ulysses, Lestrygonians. Nicholson explains the logic behind choosing this chapter: The action of Ulysses takes place all over the city and in Sandycove, Dalkey, Sandymount and Glasnevin, so I felt that it would be more cohesive to concentrate on a single episode in the way that the plaques would fall into sequence as a trail. Few of the episodes actually conform to the public perception of Bloom walking steadily through the streets of Dublin, but one of them is admirably suited to this purpose – ‘Laestrygonians’, the eighth episode, which describes Bloom’s lunchtime journey from O’Connell Street to the National Museum with a stop at Davy Byrne’s en route.2 Lestrygonians (each of the chapters in Ulysses was originally named after an episode in Homer’s Odyssey, although these names do not appear in the published novel) is also the chapter that gives us the fullest and most continuous access to Bloom’s consciousness. We are in Bloom’s head almost all the time as he moves through the heart of lunchtime Dublin. However, at regular intervals, Joyce slips back to a third-person narration and advances Bloom a little further along his route (it is a technique he calls ‘peristaltic prose’, equating his reports on Bloom’s progress with the regular swallowing motions of our digestion). It is these intermittent ‘stage directions’ that, almost exclusively, provide the material for the plaques. Here is Nicholson again: The sequence of landmarks along the way is so closely described that Bloom’s position can be pinpointed to within a few yards at any point of the chapter. An added bonus is that most of the landmarks mentioned are still there. Since the opening of the chapter catches Mr Bloom in mid-stride outside Graham Lemon’s, I felt that we could place the first plaque at the starting-point of his journey outside the Evening Telegraph office in Abbey Street at the end of the previous chapter. The sequence then evolved easily enough with plaques spaced out at fairly regular intervals. Preference was given to important points in Bloom’s journey or to the opportunity to use a colourful quotation, but we were also mindful not to bunch up plaques in some places and leave overlong gaps in others.3 The bronze plaques, each about A3 in size, feature, in shallow relief, a bowler-hatted Bloom and a brief framed quotation. They are small enough to be inconspicuous, and

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The city and the text

Robin Buick, Joyce Plaque on Westmoreland Street, ‘Mr. Bloom smiled O rocks at two windows of the ballast office.’

Robin Buick, Joyce Plaque on Grafton Street, ‘He passed, dallying, the windows of Brown Thomas, silk mercers.’

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Hugh Campbell

sometimes you have to make a real effort to find them. A leaflet giving their locations and a short commentary by Nicholson was originally available but is long since out of print. In fact, at least one of the plaques has now disappeared (given that Dublin’s pavements seem to be dug up, patched and resurfaced on the slightest pretext, it is actually surprising how many of the plaques have survived), but it is still possible to follow the trail. Following the sequence of plaques, it is striking that the final one, marking the moment where we leave Bloom to gaze at the nude statues in the National Museum, is the only one that really allows us to inhabit his mind (the quotation reads: ‘His hand looking for the where did I put found in his hip pocket soap lotion have to call tepid paper stuck. Ah soap there I yes. Gate. Safe!’).4 However, the second project I want to discuss chooses to dwell entirely in a character’s consciousness. This time, the character is Molly Bloom, Leopold’s wife. In the final chapter of Ulysses – Penelope – Molly lies in bed in the small hours, having been woken by Leopold’s slipping into bed (even though he tries not to disturb her by lying head to toe), thinking about lovers past and present. Her late-night reverie is presented as an unbroken stream of thought (the entire chapter is made up of only eight sentences), ending with a reaffirmation of her attachment to Leopold (the famous last words of the novel: ‘and Yes I said yes I will yes’). The chapter formed the basis of a public art project conceived and realised by Frances Hegarty and Andrew Stones in 1997. The artists placed nine fragments of Molly’s thoughts, rendered in cerise-pink neon, at a series of locations around the city. The fragmentary quotations focus on what they call Molly’s ‘humorous and ironic

Robin Buick, Joyce Plaque on Kildare Street, ‘His hand looking for the where did I put found in his hip pocket soap lotion have to call tepid paper stuck. Ah soap there I yes. Gate. Safe!’

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The city and the text

appraisal of the activities of men’.5 The locations are then chosen for their correspondences with the content of the quotations. Sometimes these correspondences are simple – ‘. . . O that awful deepdown torrent O . . . and the sea the sea crimson sometimes like fire . . .’ is strung along the quay wall close to the level of the Liffey river. Often they are humorous – ‘I hate an unlucky man’ is written above a bookmakers; ‘I wouldn’t give a snap of my two fingers for all their learning’ is found on the side of Trinity College. But they are never direct: that is, they do not highlight specific references to the city’s detailed geography in the way that the plaques do. The setting of Penelope is a bedroom in Eccles Street, but the artists have relocated this private

For Dublin, sitespecific installation with neon, © Hegarty & Stones, 1997, ‘. . . it’d be much better for the world to be governed by the women in it . . .’

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Hugh Campbell

For Dublin, sitespecific installation with neon, © Hegarty & Stones, 1997, ’. . . O that awful deepdown torrent O . . . and the sea the sea crimson sometimes like fire . . .’

reverie to the public space of the city. They use the text in a very different way to Nicholson and Buick, looking for thematic rather than geographic content. Their medium is also very different. Although neon signs are as much part of the urban furniture as the metal plates and covers embedded in the streets and footpaths, they are essentially nocturnal. For the duration of the project, the neon texts remained lit continuously. Although they retained a faint, constant presence in the daylight and noise of a busy city, it was only at night, as the streets faded into darkness, that they grew more intensely visible. Furthermore, and unlike the plaques, there is no intended sequence to these neon interventions (although there is a map showing their locations). You are supposed to stumble on them unexpectedly, to wonder at their provenance and meaning. Of course there are all sorts of comparisons that could be made between the two projects, but for the purposes of this chapter I want to focus on the ways in which they reflect on the nature of memory and consciousness and their relation to the fabric of the city. It is through the act of writing that Joyce remembers. Memory, for him, is something produced rather than received; it is active not passive, protean rather than unchanging. Henri Bergson, whose work Joyce knew, used the image of the search to explain memory, believing that, in the words of Edward Casey, ‘memory involves the creative transformation of experience rather than its internalised reduplication in images or traces construed as copies’.6 This is certainly true of Joyce, who completely revised his own attitude to his native city through the process of writing about it, but it is equally true of his chief protagonists of Ulysses – Stephen Daedalus, Leopold and Molly Bloom – who spend so much of the novel in dialogue with their memories. It is because memory plays such a major role in our consciousness that Joyce is able to

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The city and the text

sketch out the characters’ entire histories, despite the fact that we are in their company so briefly. He recognises that to know someone’s autobiography, you would only have to inhabit their thoughts for a single day of their life. In The Feeling of What Happens, the neurologist Antonio Damasio presents a model of the self in which overlaid on our core consciousness is a continuously evolving ‘autobiographical consciousness’.7 At any moment, it is this cumulative self which is present – a self made up more of remembered experience than of immediate sensation. This seems very close to Bergson’s concept of durée – usually translated as duration: Duration is the continuous progress of the past which gnaws into the future and which swells as it advances. And as the past grows without ceasing, so also there is no limit to its preservation. Memory, as we have tried to prove, is not a faculty of putting away recollections in a drawer, or of inscribing them in a register . . . In reality, the past is preserved by itself, automatically. In its entirety, probably, it follows us at every instant; all that we have felt, thought and willed from our earliest infancy is there, leaning over the present which is about to join it, pressing against the portals of consciousness that would fain leave it outside.8 So the past is a constant, and constantly evolving, presence, ‘pressing against the portals of consciousness’. It does not need to be consciously summoned up. Shiv Kumar makes a distinction here between Joyce’s understanding of the functioning of memory and Marcel Proust’s: Stephen and Bloom do not go, like Proust’s Marcel, in search of lost time: memory is co-extensive with their perceptions, manifesting itself in a thousand elusive forms. It may in fact be said that memoire involontaire is a permanent aspect of their mental processes, and it is rarely that they have to evoke past images by a deliberate effort of the will.9 And if the past is a constant presence in the novel, so too is the city. And, like memory, it does not need to be consciously attended to. There is almost no physical description of the urban surroundings in Ulysses. After all, as Frank Budgen puts it, for the citizens of Dublin the city is ‘as native to them as water is to a fish’.10 It is their natural habitat – Stephen and Bloom are in their element. But, again like their own pasts, the city prompts and directs their respective trains of thought. For John Rickard, Joyce’s Dublin is a memory theatre in which the most trivial details matter. Although the characters are often unaware of the effects and associations of the symbols they encounter, the Dublin of Ulysses (and, by embodying the city, the text itself) functions as a loaded landscape in which virtually every detail seems to be connected to the past and, through the past, to every other detail.11 In Lestrygonians, we get perhaps the clearest demonstration of how consciousness and the city overlap. As Robert Nicholson indicated, this is the chapter that

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most closely conforms to the notion that Ulysses is written as a continuous stream of consciousness. Early in the chapter, as Bloom crosses the river Liffey, he thinks to himself ‘its always flowing in a stream, never the same, which in the stream of life we trace’.12 So we jump into the meandering stream of Bloom’s thoughts. Although in a chapter whose theme – according to the complex tables of correspondences which Joyce produced for the novel – is architecture, the physical fabric of the city is never far away, pressings its attentions on Bloom’s senses, sending his thoughts in unexpected directions. As so often in Joyce, literary technique is used to get as close as possible to ordinary human experience; in this case the familiar feeling of walking through a city you know, your mind on other things except when jolted to attention by an unexpected sight or encounter. The city, in so far as it is apprehended by Bloom – and, by extension, by the reader – is revealed in momentary, fragmentary snapshots. Here is Richard Ellmann: Other novelists are . . . much more likely to present a city in reconstructable form. Joyce offers no architectural information, only places to bump elbows, or to lean them, to see out of the corner of an eye, to recognize by a familiar smell. The city rises in bits, not in masses.13 In fact, city and consciousness are equally fragmented and bitty. If Bloom’s thoughts form a stream then it is a very broad, meandering one, accommodating frequent shifts in depth and direction and pace. In Consciousness Explained, Daniel Dennett presents what he calls his ‘Multiple Drafts’ model of the conscious mind: There is no single, definitive ‘stream of consciousness’ because there is no central headquarters, no Cartesian theatre where ‘it all comes together’ for the perusal of a ‘Central Meaner’. Instead of such a single stream (however wide) there are multiple channels in which specialist circuits try, in parallel pandemoniums, to do their various things, creating Multiple Drafts as they go. Most of these fragmentary drafts of ‘narrative’ play short-lived roles in the modulation of current activity but some get promoted to further functional roles, in swift succession, by the activity of a virtual machine in the brain. The seriality of this machine is not a ‘hard-wired’ design feature, but rather the upshot of a succession of coalitions of these specialists.14 It will come as no great surprise to learn that Dennett refers frequently to this model as the ‘Joycean machine’ (although he does not pursue the analogy at any stage). The plaques, however, do not seem to be interested in ‘parallel pandemoniums’ or in the intertwining of consciousness and the city. They prefer unadorned reportage. With the possible exception of the final plaque, we remain outside Bloom’s consciousness, mere observers. It is striking how many of the quotations refer to him as Mr. Bloom, increasing this sense of distance. If we were to go simply by these extracts, we might come to the conclusion that Ulysses was a very dull book indeed, comprising no more than an endless catalogue of Bloom’s movements around Dublin. At the same time, it is easy to understand why this is so. This memorial tries scrupulously to map Bloom’s

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The city and the text

fictional movements onto the real geography of Dublin: it tries to render them as fact. They are intended to resemble those plaques marking the locations around the city where various eminent people were born, lived, worked or died. So, every specific place name – Graham Lemons, Harrisons, Brown Thomas, Davy Byrne’s – is seized upon as evidence that Bloom, definitively, passed this point (which of course, being a fictional character, definitively, he did not) and the plaques are laid accordingly. Furthermore, in their style and material, the plaques seem intended to look as if they have always been there – as if Bloom himself might have stumbled across one or two in 1904. They blend in, rather than stand out. In fact, they blend in so well that they are at times pretty difficult to find, even with a map. Walking along, head down, camera at the ready, eyes searching among the plethora of metal plates that, you have just become newly aware, litter our streets and pavements, you realise that you have been thrust into a new relationship with the city, that the relative invisibility of these plaques has forced you to look at the streets more attentively and at closer range. However, these feel like an unintended benefit of a project that seems more intent on memorialising rather than opening up imaginative possibilities. This is a passive rather than an active view of memory and one which, furthermore, wants to make a seamless fit between text and city. In For Dublin the fit is altogether looser. It is important to remember that this is a temporary, public art piece with no official obligations to commemoration. Indeed, much of the piece can be read precisely as a reaction against such official forms of remembrance. Certainly, the artists are interested in creating a counterpoint between what they see as the male, public city of Stephen and Leopold with the private, female world of Molly: ‘In contrast to the richly varied metropolitan world of her male counterparts, Molly Bloom occupies a domestic domain associated with the body; with vanity, insecurity, inner desires and sexual motivations’.15 Without dwelling too much on the issue of gender (although it is certainly worth exploring further), it is still worthwhile pursuing the differences in the presentation of consciousness in this chapter, and the consequent differences in the way it is projected onto the city. Molly Bloom’s soliloquy is in fact the only time in the book where you do not stray outside a single consciousness at all, where the protagonist is alone, unmoving (excepting one trip to the chamber pot) and in the dark. There are almost no external stimuli (other than the chiming of the bells) so that Molly’s thought process is entirely selfsustaining. And the process conforms much more closely to the traditional idea of the stream of consciousness. It is continuous and uninterrupted; it just keeps going. Joyce communicates this by composing the chapter as a seamless flow. There are only eight sentences, and no sudden shifts in mood or theme. Again, Joyce is representing something familiar. It’s late at night, you’ve been woken and you can’t get back to sleep. So, to pass the time, and to keep yourself entertained, you wallow in and revisit favourite memories, you indulge and explore your private fantasies. This is not the same as the ‘what you are thinking about when you’re not thinking about anything’ that Joyce explored through Leopold. It is more deliberate, more consciously shaped than that. It holds to a single course, dwells on a single theme. Whereas Leopold’s

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attention was constantly being snagged on event and incident in walking through the city, Molly is uninterrupted and undistracted. She remains single-minded. There is a pendulum rhythm to this kind of reverie, where you swing from the furthest extremes of fancy to the weighted centre of reality. But the theme is constant, and the theme is sex. Fresh from an afternoon’s exertions with Blazes Boylan, Molly contemplates erotic encounters, imagined and real, with the various men who have entered her life, from her early years in Gibraltar to her present existence in Dublin. In fact, there are far more specific references to Gibraltar than to Dublin, so for Hegarty and Stones a strategy of identifying urban locations in the text and translating them directly was never going to be possible. Instead, they try to set up a dialogue between text and city, with each retaining its own integrity. Molly’s night-time reverie drifts out over the city (recalling Gabriel Conroy’s imagined journey at the end of The Dead), alighting at various moments where some connection is sensed. At night, the fragments of text do indeed seem to hover – the free-floating signifiers beloved of postmodernism. But if For Dublin ostensibly acts us to reconsider Molly’s relation to the city, it also asks us to reconsider our own. Just as the bronze plaques redirect our attention to the hard, dirty fabric of the city, so these neon texts reveal the importance of the layers of ephemeral text which are overlaid on that fabric. Joyce understood

For Dublin, sitespecific installation with neon, © Hegarty & Stones, 1997, ‘. . . I hate an unlucky man . . .’

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The city and the text

this, giving Dublin’s street names, shop signs and sandwichboard-men far more prominence in his novel than its monuments and buildings. For him such fragments of text were the ultimate mnemonic device, simultaneously drawing attention to what they advertised and marking their particular location in the city. So these neon texts would catch your eye and force it upwards, downwards, sideways, reacquainting you with the richness of the urban environment.16 It is worth noting how profoundly different the relationships with the urban environment produced by these projects are from the more familiar kind of cognitive mapping of the city presented, for instance, by Kevin Lynch in The Image of the City. For Lynch, understanding and feeling at home in a city was all a matter of clarity and legibility, of what he termed ‘imageability’.17 But the way in which both the plaques and the signs impact on our consciousness suggests that Joyce’s model of a city experienced randomly, absorbed unthinkingly and remembered vividly is far closer to the truth. In the end, it is the very vividness of memory that both ‘commemorative’ projects seem unable, or unwilling, to deal with. They both keep their distance from their subjects, preferring to dwell, in one instance, on Molly’s deflatory pronouncements rather than her erotic ardour, and in the other, on Leopold’s movements rather

For Dublin, sitespecific installation with neon, © Hegarty & Stones, 1997, ‘. . .a stranger to Dublin what place was it and so on about the monuments and he tired me out with statues . . .’

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than his musings. So they miss out on the predominant tone of Ulysses, which is one of easy, extraordinary intimacy. What Joyce is really showing us is that all those anonymous faces in the crowded city have something worth listening to, memories worth attending to if only you could hear what they are thinking. So, as Leopold Bloom sits in Davy Byrne’s gazing at two flies crawling up a pane of glass, his mind wanders to a day 16 years ago on Howth Head: Touched his senses moistened remembered. Hidden under wild ferns on Howth. Below us bay sleeping sky. No sound. The sky. The bay purple by the Lion’s head. Green by Drumleck. Yellowgreen towards Sutton. Fields of undersea, the lines faint brown in grass, buried cities. Pillowed on my coat she had her hair, earwigs in heather scrub my hand under her nape, you’ll toss me all. O wonder! Coolsoft with ointments her hand touched me, caressed: her eyes upon me did not turn away. Ravished over her I lay, full lips full open, kissed her mouth. Yum. Softly she gave me in my mouth the seedcake warm and chewed. Mawkish pulp her mouth had mumbled sweet and sour with spittle. Joy: I ate it: joy. Young life, her lips that gave

For Dublin, sitespecific installation with neon, © Hegarty & Stones, 1997, ‘. . . I supposed he died of galloping drink ages ago the days like years . . .’

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The city and the text

me pouting. Soft, warm, sticky gumjelly lips. Flowers her eyes were, take me, willing eyes . . .18 And hours later, in her Eccles Street bed, as the novel draws to a close, Molly’s memory alights on the same intimate shared moment: The sun shines for you he said the day we were lying among the rhododendrons on Howth head in the grey tweed suit and his straw hat the day I got him to propose to me yes first I gave him the bit of seedcake out of my mouth and it was leap year like now yes 16 years ago my God after that long kiss I near lost my breath yes he said I was a flower of the mountain yes so we are flowers all a woman’s body yes that was one true thing he said in his life and the sun shines for you today yes that was why I liked him because I saw he understood or felt what a woman is and I knew I could always get round him and I gave him all the pleasure I could leading him on till he asked me to say yes and I wouldn’t answer first only looked out over the sea and the sky I was thinking of so many things he didn’t know . . .19 Imagine casting that in bronze on Grafton Street. Imagine writing that in neon over City Hall.

Notes 1 2 3 4

5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16

Frank Budgen, James Joyce and the Making of Ulysses and Other Writings, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989, p. 22. Letter to the author, 12 December 2002. Ibid. In fact, these are the last words of the chapter. James Joyce, Ulysses, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986 (the corrected text) (first published Paris, 1922), p. 150. Henceforth abbreviated as U. Frances Hegarty and Andrew Stones, www.brighter.org. Edward Casey, Remembering: A Phenomenological Study, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2000, p. 15. Antonio Damasio, The Feeling of What Happens: Body, Emotion and the Making of Consciousness, London: Vintage, 2000, pp. 195–234. Keith Ansell-Pearson and John Mullarkey (eds), Henri Bergson: Key Writings, New York: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2002, p. 173. Shiv Kumar, Bergson and the Stream of Consciousness Novel, London: Blackie, 1962, p. 143. Frank Budgen, James Joyce and the Making of Ulysses and Other Writings, p. 67. John S. Rickard, Joyce’s Book of Memory: The Mnemotechnics of Ulysses, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1989, p. 143. U, p. 126. Richard Ellmann, Four Dubliners: Wilde, Yeats, Joyce and Beckett, London: Hamilton, 1987, p. 112. Daniel Dennett, Consciousness Explained, London: Penguin, 1993, pp. 253–4. Frances Hegarty and Andrew Stones, www.brighter.org. On their use of neon as a ‘floating’ element in the city, the artists comment:

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All the neon texts in For Dublin begin and end with the three dots denoting a statement drawn from a continuum. Whether or not the connection to Joyce/Molly was initially known, we wanted to show that ‘our’ texts were excerpted from a pre-existing textual ‘flow’, and to hint that these excerpts could not constitute a definitive rendering of anything, including Joyce or Molly Bloom or any ‘real’ woman Molly may supposedly represent. Additionally, we wanted to differentiate our signs from commercial neon signs, where a text is often a trading name or an unambiguous injunction – to enter, to view, to consume, etc. The neon texts of For Dublin are indeed ‘adrift’ in multiple ways: they problematize the purpose historically associated with their form; they give the fictitious Molly the kind of prominence sought after by her fictitious husband Leopold (an advertising agent) and attained later by the mythicized, promoted ‘Leopold Bloom’ of official culture and of Bloomsday; and they seek, finally, a place for the female which acknowledges contemporary critiques of the domesticated or otherwise hidden female consciousness. (E-mail correspondence with the author, September 2008) 17 18 19

Kevin Lynch, The Image of the City, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1965. U, p. 144. U, p. 643.

Bibliography Ansell-Pearson, Keith and Mullarkey, John (eds), Henri Bergson: Key Writings, New York: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2002. Budgen, Frank, James Joyce and the Making of Ulysses and Other Writings, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989. Casey, Edward, Remembering: A Phenomenological Study, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2000. Damasio, Antonio, The Feeling of What Happens: Body, Emotion and the Making of Consciousness, London: Vintage, 2000. Dennett, Daniel, Consciousness Explained, London: Penguin, 1993. Ellmann, Richard, Four Dubliners: Wilde, Yeats, Joyce and Beckett, London: Hamilton, 1987. Hegarty, Frances and Stones, Andrew, artists’ website: www.brighter.org. Joyce, James, Ulysses, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986 (the corrected text) (first published Paris, 1922). Kumar, Shiv, Bergson and the Stream of Consciousness Novel, London: Blackie, 1962. Lynch, Kevin, The Image of the City, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1965. Rickard, John S., Joyce’s Book of Memory: The Mnemotechnics of Ulysses, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1989.

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Choosing (what) to learn from – Las Vegas, Los Angeles, London, Rome, Lagos . . .? Suzanne Ewing

Choose, vt To select (a person, thing, course of action, etc.) from a number of alternatives.1 Choose, vt (with object) To select from a number of possibilities, pick by preference. To prefer or decide to do (something). To want; desire. To make a choice. To be inclined. To contend with (an opponent) to decide, as by odd or even, who will do something.2 In framing choosing as an act of curation, this chapter outlines how tutors and lecturers involved in architectural education have acted as curators of urban sites, urban concerns and urban design methodologies, the idea and tangibility of city consistent as a key site of architectural knowledge and production. A curator is a guardian, overseer, keeper, usually with a concern for tangible objects, cultural resources. An architectural educator seeks to communicate and contribute to understanding the knowledge and production of the discipline. How might unravelling overlaps between urban curation and architectural education shed light on both choosing what to learn from, and the way cities are understood within the discipline of architecture? Synonyms, to ‘select’, ‘pick’, ‘elect’, ‘prefer’, underline subjectivity, either in terms of individual superiority, or for fitness, and can have personal or official dimensions. If probed this reveals values, ambitions, motivations, expected and unexpected paradigms underlying decisions. Choosing to learn from cities is an ongoing active element of formal architectural education. Choices of which are worth studying, what aspects are worthy of attention, are now inextricable from how processes and methods of engagement inform and enhance the development of architectural knowledge and ideas. Informal individual choices within a public canon of architectural knowledge can be traced back through Grand Tour itineraries; more formally expressed practitioner/teacher/researcher-led choices emerge in the mid twentieth century as the content and site of architectural knowledge becomes dispersed and contested. Both models engage with knowledges and ideas embedded in or embodied by the city, engage with travel, and generate output intended to

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demonstrate the furtherance of individual or collective learning of Architecture as a discipline.

Choosing . . . to learn from One curatorial story outlined in this chapter is a history of the international site visit. The proposition is that ‘city’ has been curated in architectural education in a variety of ways, shifting from Eurocentric cultural sites and artefacts to a global field of competing and contested urban futures. A lens to explore this curatorial story is the international site visit, present in some guise at some stage in almost all architectural education contexts. Though rarely critically reflected on, it can be an agent in informally and formally influencing the way architects learn and how they learn to negotiate and to position the role of their work in practice. There is usually a declared destination, a set of either ongoing or radical concerns/objectives. The site visit/field trip may be a place used educationally and to some extent publicly to significantly shift architectural or urban concerns. The field trip needs to be differentiated from the site visit, although they are often loosely interchangeable terms as used in architectural education. A field trip is a

Edinburgh Student on a Master of Architecture field trip to Cádiz, November 2006.

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A City Model of Cádiz presented by Master of Architecture students, Edinburgh, January 2008.

trip by students to gain first-hand knowledge. It takes place outside the formal place of education – the classroom, studio, lecture hall. It also describes a trip by a scholar or researcher to gather data first-hand. A site visit entails examination of a site to determine its suitability for some enterprise, and is predicated on the visitor being implicated in some official capacity with the proposed enterprise. Travelling to learn is the core ethos of the field trip, situated within the frame of the classroom/academy, teaching-research activity, looking and finding first-hand, undertaking fieldwork. It always contains the possibility of a speculation, action or intervention – whether in the studio (educational context), gallery (public arena), architectural practice (professional domain) or web (virtual space). There is always an element, degree or inflection of touristic practice which needs to be self-consciously critiqued. Site visit implies a travelling to practice, situated within an external brief, professional activity, an ongoing working with a place, a set of parameters, a particular problem, undertaking site analysis prior to further action. Design studio, which, as argued by Donald Schön,3 has shifted from problem-solving to problem-setting, can enact nuances of both field trip and site visit, sometimes separate, sometimes interconnected. The gaining or furthering of knowledge at the same time as the practising of production, or the gaining of knowledge through production (productive knowledge?), is a characteristic of the endeavour of Architectural Design. The field trip/site visit can be seen as a potential place of learning praxis in a context, which, as framed by Alberto Pérez-Gómez, has been dominated by an instrumental mode since the nineteenth century.4

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Choosing (what) . . . Rome, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Rome, London, Lagos A second curatorial story draws on selected examples of urban education–curation. Rome is a recurring benchmark in the Grand Tour itineraries of the classical city and cultural artefacts. European capitals such as Paris and Berlin exemplified cities of public encounter in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. A confrontation with the reality of the urban condition of the United States in the mid twentieth century evolves in Reyner Banham’s seminal study of Los Angeles5 and Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Steve Izenour’s Yale studio study of Las Vegas.6 The city becomes a capitalist laboratory of sorts in work in the 1980s by Rem Koolhaas on New York. Influential published material is generated in or through formal educational settings. The city within a globalised field, particularly rapidly expanding Asian, African and South American metropoli, is territory ‘captured’ in the 2006 Tenth Venice Biennale exhibition, Cities, Architecture and Society, directed by Ricky Burdett. The rhetoric in the published output of this event places ambitions to inform alongside provocation, to attempt to draw together the physically urban with less visible social, cultural and economic dimensions.7 A characterisation of this twenty-first-century territory is presented by Koolhaas as the ‘chaotic urbanism’ of Lagos.8 Choosing what to learn is of course connected with how to learn. Practices of ‘anti-curation’, the accidental encounter, the distraction of psychogeographic approaches to the city (the looking for rather than the looking after), the ludic, the forensic, the performative, the enacted camp, the transgressive space of being between academy and home, as well as more traditionally rigorous observing, drawing, sketching, surveying, measuring, interpreting, representing, publishing, are examples of modes of operation at play in field trips/site visits in formal architectural education. If the term curator is used in relation to city or urban, there is a question raised about the implied limit or definition of the idea of city – as a collection of artefacts, or a network of cultural resources – and its relationship to architectural knowledge and production. Michael Hays sets out ideologies of autonomy and typology underpinning architectural thought of the 1970s: The city is responsible for the isolation and fragmentation of architecture into constitutive parts (hence the importance of Piranesi’s Campo Marzio for an architect like Aldo Rossi or a historian like Manfredo Tafuri), but the city also simultaneously extends its logic uniformly over every patch of the cultural fabric, so that in each isolated type the entire genetic code of the city, as it were, can be found.9 This simultaneous detached fragmentation and genetic coding of differentiated particularity fuels ambivalence about the design of the city as both a futile and a fertile activity. A curator of contemporary art selects work that already exists, identifies themes, makes connections and interpretations. It is perhaps this definition that allows

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us to examine the student and/or studio teacher and the constructed design studio of the latter part of the twentieth century as an informal urban (or city) curator. Selecting aspects of the existing city, identifying themes, making linkages through research, documentation, representation and design strategies. The etymology of ‘curate’, and its connection to a more general sense of cura (care) as ‘restoration of health’, ‘recovery from disease’, ‘something that corrects or relieves a harmful or disturbing situation’, presents the city, not unproblematically, as a place of implicit damage requiring action, remedy or repair. This attitude to the city has been a recurrent Modernist point of departure. For instance, Frank Lloyd Wright ‘diagnosed the present city as diseased

Cádiz Old Town overview, November 2006.

Ground view documentation of an urban block in Cádiz Old Town, November 2006.

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Individual architectural proposals placed in Cádiz City Model, Studio 4, Edinburgh, June 2008.

and cancerous and fled to the primeval (deserts and spirals). To design was to separate the chaotic, disordered now from a utopian future or a primal past’.10 If the term educator is used in relation to city or urban, there is an inference of some sort of instruction ultimately leading to how to be or to act in the city in some way. Alberto Pérez-Gómez, within a framework of Architecture and Ethics Beyond Globalisation presented the architectural teacher as an interpreter, translator, involved in making ‘histories of the future’. A curator can be an educator and vice versa to limited extent. A curator’s priority of care is to the artefact(s); an educator’s priority of care is to the individual(s) being educated.

Grand Tour to field-based studio The history of the international site visit as part of an architectural education conventionally begins with privileged travel and versions of the Grand Tour of Europe from the eighteenth century onwards. A tour lasting three to four years was seen as a completion of education, as well as giving opportunities to encounter a potential pool of clients (presumably others wealthy enough to be circulating on the Grand Tour). Expected were the making of original sketches, drawings, measurements and surveys (archaeological practice) and general immersion in touring examples of the classical tradition, ‘a more public knowledge’11 the motivation usually to complete a body of work that would demonstrate suitable skills and knowledge for gaining commissions as an architect back at home.

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Individual part of City model.

Cádiz City Model represented in curated exhibition, SaltCity: Cadiz Field+Work, Matthew Architecture Gallery, Edinburgh, August 2008.

The Grand Tour was specifically associated with the Classical Tradition of the Academy: those with aspirations in the nineteenth-century Gothic tradition were likely to receive knowledge through ad hoc practice, the secret lore of the guilds of craftsmen and lodges, and more localised study of buildings. The subsequent presentation of work produced served to publicise the abilities and availability of a young architect setting up in business back in his (rarely her) home country. Affordability was

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still a big issue, and as the architectural profession shifted to the Academy at the end of the nineteenth century, various rewards relating to the possibility of undertaking a Grand Tour were offered: a three-year Rome scholarship for winning the Royal Academy Gold Medal; the French Academy’s ‘Prix de Rome’ enabling students to ‘round off’ their training by studying in Italy for four to five years; a Paris prize initiated by the Beaux Arts Society in the United States in 1903. The British School at Rome was set up in 1912 with funds from the Royal Commission for the Exhibition of 1851.12 The Grand Tour remains a conceptual idea within the frame of the scholarly field trip, a way to travel and to undertake an informal individual education focused around related cultural artefacts. Twentieth-century architects have used this framework as a self-conscious positioning of their own trajectories/foundations. Le Corbusier undertook a ‘reversed’ grand tour that he constructed through writings, published as his Carnets, such as Voyage d’Orient. Michael Graves: Images of a Grand Tour includes a collection of drawings and photographs from his tour of Europe in 1960 focusing on ancient architecture. This includes studying and recording great European monuments in Italy, Greece, Turkey, Spain, England, Germany and France. His use of pencil sketches and ink washes alongside photography and seeking out seminal classi-

Cambridge Architecture students visit Rome, 1987.

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cal remains directly recalls the intent of the traditional Grand Tour.13 Spanish architects Abalos and Herreros have recently curated and published their work under the title Grand Tour. The continuation of the architectural tour as a version of pilgrimage has also been commented on by Robert Harbison, in a paper entitled ‘Pilgrim’s Progress: On the latter day Grand Tour – how architectural devotees travel to view the sacred sites of their profession’.14 Rome, Paris, Berlin and other European cities recur and continue as twentieth-century sites of study in architectural education in the United States and Europe, continuing an implicit nexus of value of the Western historical tradition. The comment below by Denise Scott Brown outlines some reasons for the relevance of travel to architects: For all architects a broadening of the terms of reference to include more than their own personal tastes can be a means of sharpening and refining their aesthetic sensibilities. Ranging beyond the confines of one’s own taste, culture and conditioning provide an aesthetic jolt, opening the eye to new possibilities of beauty and reviving the creative energies. At least, it can help architects to understand the context in which they build.15 Architect Daniel Libeskind suggests that Students of architecture [should] become aware of what is happening in the world by travelling and seeing different societies in Asia, Africa and South America and not only in Europe and North America. It is important for students to express some more fundamental questions about the existence of architecture in the 21st century and to get out of this sleep in which the world of architecture seems to have fallen somewhere in the 18th century. Students have a tremendous role to play. They are not only the responders but also the creators of awareness.16 The student has a significant role in ‘choosing (what) to learn from’, and in the context of this chapter should be seen as an essential contributor to the education-curation of a design studio. Often the experimentation and inventiveness of site or fieldwork practices are fed by student ability, skill and motivation to adapt and use new technologies (film, audio, data recordings, etc.) in unfamiliar contexts. An ongoing critique of the relationship between architecture and tourism is important to this history. Notions of rites of passage and travel as discovery embedded in the Grand Tour model remain as remnant objectives of many educational field trips. Typically students (and teachers) of architecture have an increasing experience of travel, as well as exposure to a greater range of outputs such as book manifestos, or films or texts that critique urban places. The much expanded travel industry of the latter part of the twentieth century and new experiences and models of mass travel have influenced design studios, both in shifting the idea of studying valued cultural artefacts to studying more ‘common’ sites of everyday life, and in preoccupations with new mobilities as generators as well as sites of architectural possibility.

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Reyner Banham established a new way of approaching and describing the 1960s reality of the US urban condition in Los Angeles: Architecture of Four Ecologies. He innovatively introduces the reader to four equally weighted ‘territories’ of Los Angeles, each narrative with a diagrammatic map of relations, an overview interwoven with essays on architectural aspects, and a series of ground views, punctuated by black and white photographic illustration and aerial photographs. Consequences of high culture’s collision with emerging everyday sites of mass production for architectural knowledge and practice were tested through a new model of teaching/learning: the issue or field-based design studio, of which Learning from Las Vegas: The Forgotten Symbolism of Architectural Form is pivotal. Denise Scott Brown reflects Later, planning the following year’s studio at Yale, we . . . wondered if our brand of sightseeing research – which is entertaining, enjoyable, and enormously instructive for our own work – could not, if carefully and rigorously organised, prove enjoyable and instructive for our students as well.17 Looking for urban difference from home, or conversely relevance or relationship to city/place of origin; affirming urban preoccupation or diagnosis – the model or paradigmatic city; seeking a projective space where ‘the action’ or building boom or ‘the future’ is perceived to be; exemplifying consumption (architectural tourism, Grand Tour); seeking original ground to research, are categories that need more detailed examination. The international site visit/field trip can perhaps be seen as defined by Schön in the 1980s as one of the ‘less easily nameable traditions that inform the ways in which groups of students learn from and with one another’.18 Donald Schön identifies a shift that has taken place within design education from problem solving to problem setting. Looking for and defining a problem or series of problems in the city with a responsive architectural manifestation now tends to foreground the problem of ‘solving’ the city through definitive architectural set-piece proposals. The Project on the City has been influential in shifting communication to non-architectural audiences. Rem Koolhaas’s outspoken rejection of the European city as a future model, mostly irrelevant to contemporary global markets/flows of capitalism and urban development, is driven by the essential international mobility of his practice, within which he has positioned his role as an educator and researcher. Superstar architect and Pritzker Prize winner Rem Koolhaas spends considerable time travelling through cities around the world; in fact, he estimates that he is on the road 300 days a year. . . . Koolhaas loves motion, both as a personal state and as a fundamental aspect he looks for in a city. On the drive to the airport, he talks about his vision of a hyper-mobile city of the future – a city in constant flux that is both spontaneously self-organizing and pretty much in chaos.19 The quantification of city data as a means of understanding urban experience has been another trope. The touristic urbanism of MVRDV’s Costa Iberica,20 for instance, attempts to quantify urban experience through graphically processed data. This is a model of the

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collective, led authorship of a design studio, both promoting a place and curating a studio’s work. The boundaries of purely educational or research fieldwork output are potentially blurred. Are these published examples curating for practice or for education?

Learning from Las Vegas A suburban architecture (not the binary disorder of an urban order; not the residual of archetypes . . .) is a geography of filaments, of structures in space, of the silent mirage of the drive-in movie . . . the symbiosis not of city and building but of book and building . . . An archaeology of the present . . .21 The aim of the seminal Venturi/Scott Brown/Izenour Yale architectural studio project of 1968–70 was to learn from contemporary urban sprawl through the documentation and analysis of the physical form of Las Vegas. The resulting work was carefully curated as a published, re-published and influential book four years later. It was a self-conscious project, shifting disciplinary focus to the suburban condition. Robert Segrest continues in his placing of their work, ‘Venturi’s perceived radicalism was, and is, in the shift in the locus of architecture – from city to suburb, from high culture to nouveau riche, from Fifth Avenue to Main Street. This was transgression. How do you design out there?’.22 And yet a valuing of the tangible was positioned in previous practices of architectural site visits. As Venturi et al. write in the Preface, We believe a careful documentation and analysis of its physical form is as important to architects and urbanists today as were the studies of medieval Europe and ancient Rome and Greece to earlier generations . . . We spent three weeks in the library, four days in Los Angeles, and ten days in Las Vegas. We returned to Yale and spent ten weeks analyzing and presenting our discoveries.23 Of relevance in this chapter is Part 1 of the first edition: ‘A significance for A&P Parking Lots, or Learning from Las Vegas’. The introduction subtitles this ‘Learning from the existing landscape is a way of being revolutionary for an architect’, and this is paralleled with the description of ‘A studio research problem’ as designed by Denise Scott Brown. In 1979 she reflected on the studio’s aims: What we hoped to gain from our research were: •

A new view of some scorned areas of the metropolis . . .

•

Techniques for analyzing and describing suburban form . . .

•

Architectural theories and principles more useful to face the problems of late 20th century American society than those we’ve inherited from the early Modern Movement.24

In the same article she notes an underlying pedagogical concern for the rejuvenation of the traditional architectural studio, and attention to relevant techniques and methods,

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which represent and communicate the urbanism of ‘urban sprawl’. There is a candid reflection on the achievements of this field trip/fieldwork: Our attempts to find statistical information about the life of the city, its linkages and activity patterns were quite unsuccessful . . . Our efforts to document how people used the Strip through tracking studies foundered on our inability to design studies we could perform. Following people by car, riding with them in buses, and attempting to hitchhike in their cars produced little information and several mishaps . . . The products of the two studios [Las Vegas, Levittown] were physical descriptions of the places under study, and analyses of the physical and symbolic requirements they fulfilled. . . . Our research produced written descriptions, movies, video tapes, slides, photos, tapes, maps, charts, matrices, drawings, two songs, a cake and a book.25 An influential legacy of the published Learning from Las Vegas was of course the graphic documentation and analysis, drawing from conventional surveying techniques, contemporary art practice and Scott Brown’s own interest in popular culture. ‘We tried to devise mapping techniques that suited the Strip. Some were based on conventional land-use mapping methods, while others used the map of Rome by Nolli.’26 Thus the Nolli plan of the inconsequential (asphalt) on the Strip, the Nolli plan of the transient (cars) are perhaps most effective in communicating this displaced enquiry: the choice of city, identification of themes (autopia, sprawl, suburbia), and linkages communicated

Master of Architecture design studio, Edinburgh, March 2007.

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via previously practised mappings. The urban sprawl-scape of Las Vegas is re-curated to be read as the public space of sixteenth-century Rome. In a more recent interview, Scott Brown expands on some of these influences – Ed Ruscha, her own work photographing retail strips in Philadelphia, her childhood in South Africa in the 1940s where there was ‘the idea that creativity depended on looking at what’s around you’.27 There is also reflection on the shift in the paradigmatic status of Las Vegas from desert miracle to urban sprawl to scenographic town. The Venturi/Scott Brown/Izenour pedagogical model of a curated hybrid pedagogic/practice output – the first edition included design work from their own practice – was innovative as a vehicle both to shift focus of content from ‘high’ architecture to the ‘ugly and ordinary’, and to offer a curation of the urban realm that would reach a wider audience than the traditional field of architectural education – perhaps a ‘symbiosis not of city and building but of book and building’,28 as Robert Segrest suggests. In this sense it is a pivotal piece in an exploration of the relationship between urban curation and architectural teaching and learning. Scott Brown writes ‘Studio as a research tool . . . should help the architect at the drawing board, even if this happens unconsciously. “What did you learn from Las Vegas?” is not a question we can necessarily answer very clearly’.29 Michael Hays suggests that what happened here was that

Field trip documentation– market sellers, Cádiz, November 2006.

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‘communication across space of the social values of groups had superseded a building’s more conventional programmatics . . . as the primary substance of architecture’, a new ‘communicative suburbanism’.30 The template of the title Learning from . . . has become paradigmatic as a means of drawing attention to seemingly unworthy and underexposed subject matter in titles such as Learning from Ladakh, Learning from Lagos. There is a very active continuum implied in this rhetoric – the learning is provisional, not necessarily complete, and content is situated ready to shift paradigms.

Conclusion: education-curation Concerns and motivations underpinning choosing cities or parts of cities, what to look for or extract from them and related practices of how to do this, are deeply embedded in notions of value and experience in architectural education. Inflections of current education-curation are predominantly method driven, whether ground views – mobile/practice/itinerant explorations, or generated by a defined overview such as the curated 2006 Venice Biennale Cities, Architecture and Society, a representation and celebration of detached abstract data. The communication of comparative global city sizes and meta-researches into density and population growth, presented visually, despite ambition to re-attach the physical with the social, are detached from precise further or ongoing action. A ground-view practice is exemplified by collective, Stalker, representing the tradition of flâneur, dérive, psychogeography, When interfaced on foot, the metropolis becomes a world with large uncharted regions, composed of chaotic territories, where speculative development stands side by side with archaeological sites, high-tension cables and highways intersect with Roman aqueducts, modern industrial ruins offer shelter for a flora and fauna that had never lived in the city before . . . Transurbance restores the name of traveller to the citizen and tourist, permitting him to explore unprecedented itineraries composed of glaring contradictions . . . the idea is to rediscover, in the metropolitan territory, a sense that springs from the experience of the present state of things.31 The contemporary emphasis is on first-hand experience of the present in contrast with the Grand Tour’s emphasis on first-hand experience of the past. This chapter has framed choosing, the selection of a city to visit, study, learn from, act in, as an implicit curatorial practice. A telling of the history of the international field trip/site visit in architectural education traverses the public learning of the Grand Tour, the private consumption of independent architectural tourism, the road/train/plane trip and more formally expressed field-based thematic studios. Published outputs, demonstrating an ambition to reach audiences beyond the Academy

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and to shift disciplinary locus and boundaries, such as Learning from Las Vegas, expose choices, concerns and methodologies as central to inventive architectural engagement with cities. The problem-setting focus of recent architectural education has placed the issue of Choosing (what) to learn from . . .? as a fundamental pedagogical question, a shift to provisionality, contingency, ongoing learning. Choice and framing of site(s) and concern(s) may be led by the formal educators. However, students contribute to the process of curation in methodologies and site practices. This component of architectural education is ‘a less easily nameable tradition’ which deserves more scrutiny as situated knowledge production in Architecture. The urban educator-curator selects made work (Las Vegas strip, traditional north India, places of extreme

or

contested

urbanisation),

identifies

themes

(car/pedestrian,

self-

sufficiency/adaptability, shopping, chaos), and makes sometimes provocative connections (symbol + sprawl, tradition + innovation, flux + order) which in some cases have significantly influenced the way cities are understood within and without the discipline of Architecture.

Notes 1 2 3 4

5 6

7 8 9

10 11

12 13 14

Concise Dictionary (Glasgow, HarperCollins, 4th edn, 1999), p. 260. Dictionary.com. Dictionary.com Unabridged (v. 1.1). Random House, Inc. http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/choose (accessed: 22 September 2008). Donald Schön, The Design Studio: An Exploration of its Traditions and Potentials (London, RIBA Publications Ltd for RIBA Building Industry Trust, 1985), pp. 5, 9–12. Alberto Pérez-Gómez, ‘Architecture and ethics beyond globalisation’, EAAE and ARCC Proceedings of the Conference on Architectural Research (Belgium, EAAE, 2002), pp. 13–22. Reyner Banham, Los Angeles: Architecture of Four Ecologies (London, The Penguin Press, 1971). Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Steve Izenour, Learning from Las Vegas: The Forgotten Symbolism of Architectural Form (Cambridge, MA and London, The MIT Press, 1972). Fondazione La Biennale di Venezia, 10th International Architecture Exhibition Cities. Architecture and Society (New York, Rizzoli International Publications Inc., 2006). Bregtje van der Haak, Lagos/Koolhaas (New York, Icarus Films, 2002). K. Michael Hays, ‘Prolegomenon for a study linking the advanced architecture of the present to that of the 1970s through ideologies of media, the experience of cities in transition and the ongoing effects of reification’, Perspecta, vol. 32, ‘Resurfacing Modernism’ (2001), p. 100. Robert Segrest, ‘The perimeter projects: notes for design’, Assemblage, no. 1 (October 1986), p. 30. Mark Crinson and Jules Lubbock, Architecture, Art or Profession? Three Hundred Years of Architectural Education in Britain (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1994), p. 40. Crinson and Lubbock (1994), p. 80. Brian Ambroziak, Michael Graves. Images of a Grand Tour (New York, Princeton Architectural Press, 2005). Robert Harbison ‘Pilgrim’s Progress: On the latter day Grand Tour – how architectural

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15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27

28 29 30 31

38

devotees travel to view the sacred sites of their profession’ (New York, vol. 89, no. 5 May 2000), pp. 91–4. Denise Scott Brown quoted in Martin Pearce and Maggie Toy, The Education of Architects (London, Academy Editions, 1995), p. 127. Daniel Libeskind, ‘Observation on education of architects’, in Pearce and Toy (1995), p. 89. Denise Scott Brown, ‘On formal analysis as design research’, JAE, vol. 32, no. 4 Search/Research (May 1979), p. 8. Schön, (1986), p. 6. Roland Berger, ‘Learning from Lagos’, think:act magazine, August 2006. Nathalie de Vries, Winy Maas and Jacob Van Rijs, Costa Iberica. Upbeat to the Leisure City (Barcelona, Actar, 2000). Robert Segrest, (1986), p. 34. Robert Segrest, (1986), p. 30. Venturi et al., Preface of Learning from Las Vegas (1972), p. ix. Denise Scott Brown, JAE (May 1979), p. 8. Denise Scott Brown, JAE (May 1979), pp. 10–11. Denise Scott Brown, JAE (May 1979), p. 11. ‘Re-learning from Las Vegas’, Rem Koolhaas and Hans Olbrist interview Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown in Geneva, August 2000. AMOMA, Content (Taschen, Germany, 2004), pp. 150–7. Robert Segrest, (1986), p. 34. Denise Scott Brown, JAE (May 1979), p. 10. K. Michael Hays, (2001), p. 102. Francesco Carceri; ‘actual territories’ are described at www.stalkerlab.it.

Curated desires Film, photography and the visual transformation of urban space in surrealism Michael Chapman and Michael Ostwald

Curated desires Our individual experience of the city is innately fragmented, episodic and partial. In order to navigate the city a path must be traced. This path may consist of a sequence of known streets or a series of views to distant landmarks, but it could equally be framed by the determination to find something less tangible; warmth, fresh air, adventure or solace. Along this path individual moments are later singled out as significant milestones or as distinct, and sometimes treasured, memories. In between these moments, the rest is blurred or lost. This is why an individual’s experience of the city is fragmentary. The mind makes sense of these moments by placing them in a historical sequence or by sorting them into a range of possible groupings and then by representing or reframing them, in dairies, conversations and reminiscences. In this way, we each curate our experience of the city. In this sense, curation has more in common with navigation or framing than it has with the science and practice of mapping. The traditional cartographic concept of mapping implies a holistic attempt to define the limits or characteristics of something. In contrast, navigation and framing suggest a process of selection and organisation within a larger set of possibilities. Both curation and cartography are necessarily representational, but the former infers the existence of a totality from the selective presentation of its elements, while the latter seeks to construct a whole and identify its constituent parts. The point of theoretical slippage between curation and cartography is the act of mapping; a process which serves both the creation and ordering of knowledge. Prior to the nineteenth century, cities were often understood through selective framings rather than cartographic representations.1 With a few exceptions, early urban maps were more concerned with conveying symbolic ownership of a space or territory than accurately depicting its boundaries, defining its populace or resources. Maps were selective in their representations; often displaying palaces or castles in detail and with exaggerated scale, against a backdrop of anonymous urban housing.2 In medieval maps, peasant farms and agrarian mills are picturesque landscape elements rather than distinct places and slums are almost never depicted. In the aftermath of

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the Industrial Revolution this began to change and a new fascination arose with the need to define the city, however immoral or unclean, in all of its elements. At street level, census takers and surveyors were at the vanguard of this movement and above the rooftops, designers and engineers used balloons to look down on the city, exposing its primal figure-ground relations and identifying and diagnosing solutions to its problems.3 By the beginning of the twentieth century the city had become ostensibly quantified and delineated for the first time. As a result of this, in the years that followed, the dominant discourse on urban space was shaped by the view that cities could be designed or governed to produce optimal conditions. Modernist designers were drawn to such cartographic representations and they formulated schemes to shape historic cities in such a way that they could solve, both spatially and socially, the ills of the city. The works of Le Corbusier and Ludwig Hilberseimer in the 1920s in Europe exemplify this overarching, god-like perspective, looking down on cities for the purpose of shaping the future. Yet, some isolated groups rebelled against this position and celebrated the sensual, emotional or philosophical potential of the city; those illusive qualities that cartography cannot capture. The tools they used to recreate their urban experiences were more immediate and idiosyncratic; they relied on literature, poetry, photography and film to map, edit and organise the terrain between space and emotion. Rather than working from the representations authorised by surveyors or scientists, they set out to curate their own version of the city. Among the most important of these groups were the Surrealists who, in the 1920s and 1930s, used these techniques to actively oppose Modernism. The primary literary texts of Surrealism, André Breton’s Nadja (1928) and L’Amour Fou (1937) and Louis Aragon’s Paris Peasant (1924), share a common urban setting: Paris in the 1920s. This is not a Paris defined by the population of arrondissements, the width of avenues or the capacity or waterways; this is a place of latent anxiety, fleeting romance and adventure. In each of these three works, the ‘male’ protagonist psychologically maps the city, recording the moods, anxieties, paranoias and desires that form a backdrop to the narrative and are buried in the archaeology of its built form. The collision between the fantasies of the Surrealist movement and the hygienic machinations of the Modern Movement could not have been more dramatic, operating on vastly different trajectories across the landscape of Paris in the 1920s and 1930s. At the heart of this tension was a fundamental rupture between the cartographic city – a quantified apparatus for optimised living – and the curated city, a living site of eroticism and desire. The focus of this chapter is on the Surrealist attempts to repossess the city through the creation of a climate, and a curatorial practice, wherein art and literature became the forum through which polemical attitudes towards the city could be presented and politicised. While the Surrealists were often depicted as ambivalent about architecture, the city of Paris was a critical backdrop not only for the fiction of Breton and Aragon, but Surrealist experience in general. Marked as a site of gratification and heterogeneity, for the Surrealists the dynamic Parisian landscape provided a bridge between the

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world of the living and the subconscious realm of dreams. While leading Surrealists like Breton were fanatical collectors of objects, assembling domestic collections of ancient statues and filling their houses with anthropological artefacts, it was the city that constituted the museum of Surrealist experience; a city constructed of fragments that were carefully chosen and arranged to celebrate the unpredictable and to orchestrate desire. The artistic mediums that best allowed the Surrealists to engage with the city were film, photography and collage. Through the application of these approaches, they were able to document the complex, temporal palimpsest of the city; recording not only the spaces but also the events that occurred in them and the time sequences that transformed them. In these works of photography, film and collage, the architecture of Paris is presented as the frozen backdrop for an intricate dream sequence, torn from any global narrative, separated from any spatial or social context and marked as the space of masculine erotic adventure and gratification. This selective curating of the city – cropped in the photos of Brassai, fragmented and temporally displaced in the surgically edited films of Man Ray, flattened and fossilised in the images of Ubac – provides a polemical and subjective alternative to the totalising utopias of Modernism. Echoing the literary aspirations of the movement, these fragmentary hallucinations provide the means through which architecture is integrated into Surrealism, not through spatial experience or architectural practice, but through a filmic transformation that flattened and decontextualised urban space. In Nadja, the archetypal novel of the movement, Breton’s text weaves the themes of Surrealism seamlessly into a fictional, autobiographical sojourn through Paris, where the city frames the poet’s pursuit of the mentally unstable Nadja. The novel documents, from an exclusively male perspective, the psychological transition from initial ‘curiosity’, ‘anxiety’ and ‘discomfort’ towards ‘lust’, ‘love’ and, ultimately, ‘boredom’ and ‘indifference’. Photographs accompany the work, commissioned from Jacques-André Boiffard, of the spaces where the primary activities in the novel take place.4 Documentary in nature, the images are ostensibly devoid of people, emotion and the kind of psychological paranoias that permeate Breton’s text. At the same time, Breton’s text furnishes a reading of the photos that, in the context of Surrealism, is transformative. This is a relationship that, to use a word drawn from postmodernism, is indexical;5 the image, the site, the event and the text are unable to escape the peculiar ‘binding’ that locates them. In Breton’s L’Amour Fou, Rosalind Krauss argues that the ‘Tour Saint Jacques’ becomes the ‘psychological fulcrum’ where the poet’s fear of an unknown woman turns to lust.6 The tower also functions to trigger memories of an earlier poem that Breton’s protagonist has forgotten; reignited by the site and his romantic pursuit across it. An iconic photograph by Brassai, which was published with the text, records this moment. The confluence of words and images in Nadja and L’Amour Fou is replicated throughout the Surrealist journals, beginning with L’Révolution Surrealiste then Minotaur and even VVV; the journal of the exiled Surrealists published from New York during the war. In each case the texts of the primary poets and artists were supplemented by the visual proof, sometimes explicit, at other times obscure. This visual

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curation of Surrealist ideas, and the sometimes-domineering revision of their aesthetic trajectories by Breton, created a climate where visual practice and theoretical ideas were literally bound together supplementing, but also destabilising, each other. However, the cold, documentary photographs of Paris taken by Boiffard and Brassai are only one dimension of the diverse and aggressively creative modes of surrealist photography. While in Nadja, the text functions as the backdrop to the documentary photos, a range of other indices were employed by the Surrealists, including correlations between architecture and forms from nature. Krauss argues that, for the Surrealists, photographic practice constituted a kind of ‘text’ which freed words from their supplementary descriptive role in the ‘caption’ and enabled the images themselves to posit a system of open communication. This is a language ideally suited to curatorial practice, where images are coordinated and arranged based on their relationship to a system of meaning. So what then is the role of the city as the context and subject of this system of contorted signs? An expanding body of literature has recently appeared that reappraises the role of photography in Surrealism, charting the obsession with external reality and internal desire. The seminal work in this field is Krauss and Livingston’s L’Amour Fou, which was completed in 1985 as part of an exhibition of Surrealist photography.7 This catalogue argues for a reading of the photography both in terms of the experimental ‘dark room’ and also its association with Georges Bataille; the renegade Surrealist who, through his publication of the journal Documents, formed around himself a powerful circle of those who were disillusioned by Breton’s ‘official’ group. For Krauss, Bataille’s notion of the ‘formless’ illuminates the cropped, distorted and dismembered forms of the more extreme experiments in Surrealist photography.8 Bataille posited the ‘formless’ as a creative strategy against the organising and domineering processes of ‘architecture’ which Bataille associated with order, repetition and authority.9 The shifting emphasis from Breton to Bataille has more recently been questioned for its unbalanced dependence on one aspect of Surrealist aesthetics.10 Ian Walker argues that the focus on the ‘dark-room’ works in the L’Amour Fou exhibition has been at the expense of the documentary work of important photographers like Brassai and Cartier Bresson whose work, while not as overtly Surrealist in its imagery, corresponds to an equally important mode of Surrealist practice.11 For the present chapter, such arguments about differing photographic techniques are less relevant than the relationship between architectural space and Surrealism, particularly as it is recorded and constructed in photography and ‘framed’ in journals in opposition to the totalising utopias of the Modern Movement. Architecture, which for Bataille represents an organising principle, is conspicuous in Surrealist photography where it functions as a rigid frame from which the trajectories of the informe are mapped. Photography, in this instance, functions as a polemical tool to align the social and subjective spaces of architecture against the tabula rasa. It enables, through curation, the vision of a sensual, living city that is in stark counterpoint to the cartography of Modernism. The mistrust between the competing avant-gardes of Surrealism and Modernism was obvious, even at the time. The Surrealists disliked modern architecture

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with the same zealotry that Le Corbusier reserved for his condemnation of the historical city.12 The proposed annihilation of Paris in his 1921 Plan Voisin would equally destroy the kind of chance encounters and social unpredictability that Breton and Aragon had, in the same decade, documented in the founding texts of the Surrealist movement. Where Le Corbusier yearned for a future inspired by automotive technology and aeronautical mastery, the Surrealists retreated into the newly built museums of African anthropology and tribal primitivism as the source of their inspiration and, in the process, developed an intellectual and aesthetic market for connoisseur products from the colonies and beyond.13 What the Surrealists shared with Modernism in general, and Le Corbusier in particular, was a faith in the photographic image as a supplement to the pervasive polemics of the written word. However, where machines and technology dominate the photographs of Le Corbusier,14 the feminine body – constructed and positioned through an organising gaze – is used by the Surrealists to reconstruct the city. While past scholarship on this topic has focused on the problematic representation of femininity in Surrealist photography, architecture is equally incriminated in this framing of the body, with the city and the female form blurring as alternate metaphors of male desire. In such images, architectural space forms an unexplored bridge that, through transgression of the medium of photography, functions to document the erotic desires that were lingering at the heart of the movement. Given their preoccupations with internal experience and external reality, the Surrealists display a notable lack of concern for architectural practice and the creation of architectural space. The contemporaneous connections between architectural practice and Surrealism are few. Duchamp’s two anarchic installations notwithstanding, it was rare for Surrealists to explore ideas that are spatial in nature, outside of the accepted media of painting and film.15 Frederick Kiesler was the only certified architect who was a member and he completed few works, preferring to focus on theatre and unbuilt projects. Dada maverick Tristan Tzara commissioned Adolf Loos to design a house for him and the Surrealist collector Beistegui commissioned a design from Le Corbusier, but neither of the completed works could be read as entirely Surrealist and are more representative of the themes of early Modernism. The second-wave Surrealist Roberto Matta trained as an architect and worked in the studio of Le Corbusier before turning to art, and incidental connections have been drawn between Le Corbusier (despite his stated indifference towards the movement) and Surrealism by way of the work of De Chirico.16 Man Ray had also studied architecture for a period, Dalí had written of the architecture of Gaudi17 and Matta later penned a short piece on a possible Surrealist architecture18 but, in general, the Surrealists were content to document and inhabit space, rather than to create it. In this sense, photography is the primary medium through which Surrealist attitudes towards architecture are revealed. Without doubt the most difficult and contested dimension of Surrealist photography has been the problematic manner in which it positions the female body as the site of male desire. The overwhelming focus of recent art criticism revisiting Surrealist photography has been, justifiably in many ways, on the role of the female body; the transformations it is forced to undertake, the decapitations and croppings it is

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subjected to and the eroticised gaze it is required to serve. ‘Headless and footless’, as Mary Ann Caws describes it, the body is rendered without a head, voice, vision or mobility, existing primarily as a torso.19 The two main poles of Surrealist depiction of women that emerge are the female body cropped and fragmented beyond recognition or, equally paradigmatic, the terrifying woman returning the male gaze aggressively in a ‘medusan’ stare (the obsessive depiction of the hair and the eyes are common themes in these portraits). These images, at least in the hands of their Freudian interpreters, speak equally of the male anxiety towards the phallus and castration, as the erotic desire that is central to the more familiar, and more explicit, reading of the imagery.20 It is now well-known that all of the official members of the Surrealist movement were men – at least for the period of the first two manifestoes – and while a number of important and creative women were involved in the Surrealist circle, especially Dora Maar, Meret Oppenheim and Lee Miller – all three posing in a number of iconic Man Ray photographs – the Surrealists never successfully managed the transition from ‘woman as creative muse’ to ‘woman as creative participant in Surrealist activity’. Aragon’s novel marks an interesting junction in Surrealism in that, unlike Breton, he was conscious of the male bias of the movement and equally the potential role of women within it. To introduce these themes into the context of architecture, Man Ray’s Tribute to the Marquis de Sade is an important starting point because it explicitly locates architecture as a frame for the female body. The photo, repeated as the cover for his own copy of Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom, creates a symbolic ‘frame’ around the human buttocks, delineating with a simple white line, the space of a cross. The line, which also has obvious religious connotations, can be read as a reference to the architectural plan and the confluence that exists between the living, bracketed body and the objective frame that positions it. The window – framing and distorting the female body and effectively curating it within a museum of masculine desire – is the symbolic bridge that connects the camera, the architectural space of the plan and the subject that is enclosed by it. The Surrealists saw both the female body and the city as gateway sites to the unconscious and, as a result, it is not surprising that their paths crossed in the creative output of the movement. A painting by Max Ernst suggestively titled The Garden of France shows the fluency with which the Surrealists saw the woman and the city, burying a naked female body in the fabric of a map of Paris; her contours directly mirroring the archaeology of Paris and the ‘geographies of desire’ that are accommodated within them. Equally, Ernst’s collages from the early 1930s invariably position women floating mysteriously outside windows. In this work, architecture becomes the frame, within a frame, through which the body is located and, in this case, excluded. The importance of windows, particularly in framing and enclosing the body, is central to Surrealist activity. In these images architecture becomes the threshold between the external reality and the internal desires of the artist, not only organising the composition, but positioning the body outside it. If the body in the imagery of Man Ray is cropped and tormented beyond recognition, in Ernst it is decontextualised, floating loosely beyond the outer frame of the space.

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Man Ray, Monument to Sade (1933), © Man Ray Trust ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London, 2008.

While architectural space and the window serve a key function in the creative work of Ernst, it is in photography that the ‘frame’ of architecture becomes explicit. Man Ray’s famous series of ‘untitled’ portraits of Lee Miller from the early 1930s serve as another example of the window, space and the body in a state of hierarchical composition. The ‘traces’ of architecture, articulated through shadow, are conspicuous across the image, locating the figure, articulating it and blurring the edges between, in Bataille’s sense, the organising imperative of architecture and the fluid compositional strategies of avant-garde photography. A similar melting of female bodies and architectural elements is inscribed in Maurice Tabard’s work where not only the shadows, but here the architectural elements themselves collide with the floating faces that disrupt the figure-ground. This seamless blending of architectural space and female form has not been widely considered in the key works on Surrealist photography, but it can be traced through a number of their most celebrated exponents. The lens of the camera frames the architectural enclosure, which then positions the body, and melts into it. This is the Surrealist technique through which the female body is isolated and framed by architecture. The Surrealist painters – particularly Dalí and Magritte – repeatedly experimented with the relative flatness of the picture plane. This gave rise to a productive cross-pollination between photography and painting with each trying to escape their own medium by embracing the other. Photography demonstrates a fascination with ‘flattening’ architectural space by collapsing the figure-ground, while painting, on the other hand, attempts to escape its flatness through visual illusions and the attempt to replicate the objectivity of photographic representation through an exaggeration of

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figure and ground. Ernst’s clever overpainting The Master’s Bedroom (1920) is one of many examples of this strategy of using skewed perspective to position bodies within architectural space.21 The flattened, fossilised and solarised images of the Belgian photographer Raoul Ubac are a clear example of this technique where bodies, instead of receding into space, are frozen at its surface. Krauss has been criticised for not acknowledging the chauvinistic overtones of this sea of contorted female bodies frozen against the picture plane.22 She reads the image as a manifestation of the automatic processes of Ubac; an attempt to subvert what Ubac claimed was the ‘rationalist arrogance’23 of photography. There is a rhyming between these images and the work of Tabard where the figure (the female form) and the ‘ground’ (the architectural frame) flow into each other and are frozen as one. Ubac’s solarised images have a disturbing architectural quality where the gyrating forms of figure and ground melt into each other, beginning to resemble labyrinthine plans. When read against fossilised images like Paris Opera, the tangled sea of bodies represents the same architectural framings that permeate Surrealist practice in general. The binary notion of the window as camera and as architecture is central to this reading. One final example of the curatorial framing of architecture, the city and the body in Surrealist practice is associated with a particular type of window. The Surrealists were obsessed with reconciling the unmapped internal unconscious with the external realities of the industrialised world and in the process merge the psychoanalysis of Freud with the social programme of Marx. For Benjamin, who shared the Surrealist fascination with wandering, the department store was the last outpost of the modern flâneur and successfully connects the commodity fetishism of Marxist capitalism with the sexual fetishism of Freudian psychoanalysis; a marriage that the Surrealists, at least throughout the 1920s and early 1930s, were happy to promote.24 Benjamin, referring to the use of photography in the Surrealist novel, writes that Photography intervenes in a very strange way. It makes the streets, gates, squares of the city into illustrations of a trashy novel, draws of the banal obviousness of the ancient architecture to inject it with the most pristine intensity toward the events described to which, as in old chamber-maids books, word-for-word quotations with page numbers refer. And all of the parts of Paris that appear here are places where what is between these people turns like a revolving door.25 The windows that line the streets of commercial districts in Paris function as gateways into the ‘surreal’ realms of repressed desire. Store-fronts, full of mannequins, gloves, corsets and shoes were a recurring device in Surrealist photography, functioning as a fetishistic exhibition to satiate male desire. They married the conspicuous lust for consumable goods with the fascination for objects, such as the spoons and masks that Breton describes in detail in L’Amour Fou. Here the romantic sojourns are replaced with meandering searches for consumable objects, in each case functioning as a symbol of sexuality and displacing lust onto the fetishistic commodity. Eugene Atget’s

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Eugene Atget, Boulevard de Strasbourg (1912).

iconic photograph Boulevard de Strasbourg, depicting a street window crammed with corsets, is one of the most explicitly architectural renderings of this framing of commodified desire. The female body is no longer just within the abstract window of the camera, it is now morselated and abstracted into identical, headless torsos, framed in glass and smeared with reflections of the city and passers-by. Like the documentary photos that permeate Breton’s novels, Atget’s window selectively isolates or curates its content, exhibiting it for conspicuous consumption while simultaneously functioning as a portal between desire and reality. It is not surprising that the Surrealists framed the female body through architecture; locating the fragmented locus of their passions within the department stores of the consumer city. The Surrealist practice, however chauvinist in its execution, is in stark contrast to the Modernist framing of the city. The former relies on curation, on the careful placement of fragments of words and images to evoke a world where flesh and stone are bound by emotion. Moreover, these fragments are framed and isolated in space, like ‘Canaletto’ box views in museums, but from the point of view of the flâneur or the lover. In contrast, the Modernist views the city from above,

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as if from an aeroplane or balloon. They map the future of the city in its totality; circumscribed, quantified and rendered in stark black-line work against a white background. But more importantly, the Modernist city is to be inhabited by humans who conform to an ideal, Le Corbusier’s Modulor; a ratio that enables the architect to mathematically define the relationship between a harmonically proportioned building and a perfect male body. What better foil for such a vision than the fragmented and eroticised female body; a figure that the modular was patently unable to accommodate. Ultimately, architecture is integrated into Surrealist practice, not through spatial experience or the design of buildings, but through a type of filmic documentation that flattens and decontextualises urban space. The relationship between text and photograph in Surrealism is part of the reconfiguring, rewriting and remapping of the city from the artist’s, poet’s or flâneur’s perspective. The fragmented female body is framed by architecture, which – like the camera itself – encloses the body and at the same time constrains it. The index is no longer just Breton’s text but equally the topographies of desire, of cameras not only pointing but framing and containing and imprisoning the building against the landscape of desire that is being implicated.

Notes 1 2

3

4 5

6 7 8

9

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S. Thernstrom and Richard Sennett (eds), Nineteenth-Century Cities: Essays in the New Urban History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1969). Denis Wood, The Power of Maps (London: Routledge, 1993); Norman J.W. Thrower, Maps and Man. An Examination of Cartography in Relation to Culture and Civilization (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1972). Michael J. Ostwald and R. John Moore, ‘The Science of Urban Pathology: Victorian Rituals of Architectural and Urban Dissection’, Australasian Victorian Studies Journal, 2 (1996): 65–80. Jacques-André Boiffard was Man Ray’s assistant throughout the 1920s. For the relationship between the index, photography and critical theory, see Craig Owens, ‘Photography En Abyme’, October, 5 (1978): 73–88; Rosalind Krauss, ‘Notes on the Index: Seventies Art in America’, October, 4 (1977): 58–67; Briony Fer, ‘The Space of Anxiety: Sculpture and Photography in the Work of Jeff Wall’, in Geraldine A. Johnson (ed.), Sculpture and Photography: Envisioning the Third Dimension (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998): 181–98. For its use in the reinterpretation of Surrealist photography, see Rosalind Krauss, ‘The Photographic Conditions of Surrealism’, October, 19 (1981): 3–34; Ian Walker, ‘Index and Construct’, in I. Walker, City Gorged with Dreams: Surrealism and Documentary Photography in Interwar Paris (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002): 8–29. See Rosalind Krauss, ‘Nightwalkers’, Art Journal, 41, 1 (1981): 33–4. Rosalind Krauss and Jane Livingston (eds), L’Amour Fou: Photography and Surrealism (New York: Abbeville Press, 1985). The relevance of Bataille’s notion of ‘informe’ to modern art is further explored in Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind Krauss, Formless: A User’s Guide (New York: Zone Books, 1999). See also Hal Foster, Compulsive Beauty (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995). The importance of ‘architecture’ in Bataille’s work has been introduced into critical theory through Denis Hollier’s influential work from 1974. See Denis Hollier, Against

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10 11 12 13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20 21

22

23

24

Architecture: The Writing of Georges Bataille, Betsy Wing trans., (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991) [Orig. 1974]. Hal Foster, Compulsive Beauty (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995). Ian Walker, City Gorged with Dreams: Surrealism and Documentary Photography in Interwar Paris (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002). Le Corbusier, The City of Tomorrow and Its Planning, F. Etchels trans., (London: Architectural Press Limited, 1971). Breton’s own house is a primary example, crowded and overloaded with artefacts and constituting a miniature museum devoid of the clean, open-planning principles of Modernism that were more typically associated with artistic intellectuals in the period. See Krzysztof Fijalkowski, ‘Un salon au fond d’un lac: The Domestic Spaces of Surrealism’, in Thomas Mical (ed.), Surrealism and Architecture (London: Routledge, 2005): 11–30. For a feminist reading of Corbusier’s use of photography, see Luis E. Carranza, ‘Le Corbusier and the Problems of Representation’, Journal of Architectural Education, 48, 2 (1994): 70–81. As the invited curator of the ‘Exposition Internationale de Surrealism’ in 1938, Duchamp famously installed 1,200 coal sacks from the roof of the space, removing the lights and forcing everyone to experience the space by candlelight. The 1947 ‘First Papers of Surrealism’ in New York, Duchamp, with the help of Friedrich Kiesler, used 16 miles of string to disrupt any possible progression through the space. The two shows – the first major exhibitions of Surrealism in Europe and America respectively – are the most concerted attempt to translate Surrealist themes of disjunction and anarchy into space. Demos argues for an ‘indifference’ on the part of Duchamp towards the mediums of painting exhibited in the two respective exhibitions. See T.J. Demos, ‘Duchamp’s Labyrinth: First Papers on Surrealism, 1942’, October, 97 (2001): 91–119. See Alexander Gorlin, ‘The Ghost in the Machine: Surrealism in the Work of Le Corbusier’, Perspecta, 18 (1982): 50–65; republished in Thomas Mical (ed.), Surrealism and Architecture (London: Routledge, 2005): 103–18. See Salvador Dalí, ‘Art Nouveau Architecture’s Terrifying and Edible Beauty’, in Dalibor Veseley (ed.), Architectural Design Profile: Surrealism and Architecture, 11, (1978): 139. Roberto Matta, ‘Sensitive Mathematics – Architecture of Time’, in Mary Ann Caws (ed.), Surrealist Painters and Poets: An Anthology (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001): 299–300. Mary Ann Caws, ‘Seeing the Surrealist Woman: We Are a Problem’, in Mary Ann Caws, Rudolf Kuenzli and Gwen Raaberg (eds), Surrealism and Women (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991): 11–16. See, for instance, Hal Foster, ‘Obscene, Abject, Traumatic’, October, 78 (1996): 106–24. This image has been widely discussed: see Hal Foster, Prosthetic Gods (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004): 211–20; Rosalind Krauss, ‘The Master’s Bedroom’, Representations, 28 (1989): 55–76. See Rudolf E. Kuenzli, ‘Surrealism and Misogyny’, in Mary Ann Caws, Rudolf Kuenzli and Gwen Raaberg (eds), Surrealism and Women (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991): 17–31. Raoul Ubac quoted in Rosalind Krauss, ‘Photography in the Service of Surrealism’, in Rosalind Krauss and Jane Livingston (eds), L’Amour Fou: Photography and Surrealism (New York: Abbeville Press, 1985): 24. This is despite being routinely ridiculed by both Freud and the French Communist Party, causing their eventual estrangement from both. See Gérard Durozoi, History of

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25

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the Surrealist Movement, Alison Anderson trans. (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1997.) Walter Benjamin, ‘Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia’, in Susan Sontag (ed.), One-Way Street and Other Writings, (London: Verso, 1985): 231 [orig. 1929].

Moving city Curating architecture on site Jonathan Hale and Holger Schnädelbach

This chapter investigates the potential for developing a more vivid, engaging and ultimately meaningful paradigm for architectural exhibitions, combining the experience of real architectural space with a curatorial overlay of interpretive information normally only available within a gallery setting – effectively bringing the viewer, the building and the interpretation together in a ‘third space’ created by the use of mobile and interactive media technologies. The final part of the chapter presents an ongoing series of case studies describing an interdisciplinary collaboration between the School of the Built Environment and the Mixed Reality Lab of the School of Computer Sciences at the University of Nottingham. In taking an architectural exhibition out onto the street in the form of a self-guided walk around the real spaces of the city, this approach to curating architecture in situ adopts the methods of ‘augmented reality’. Using a handheld computer (PDA) allows explanatory, interpretive and critical material to be presented simultaneously with the fully embodied experience of moving around in real three-dimensional space. As an approach to making exhibitions about buildings, the ‘book-on-the-wall’ has a long and dogged history. Typically consisting of photographs, drawings and panels of text displayed within a gallery (occasionally supplemented by architectural models), this has been the dominant paradigm for architectural curating throughout most of the last century – at least since Hitchcock and Johnson’s 1932 MOMA show The International Style. The experiential limits of a mainly two-dimensional presentation format are all too obvious but at least this method has the benefit of graphical abstraction, allowing a specific focus on thematic issues without the real-world ‘distractions’ of the building’s programme, contents and context. By contrast, the ‘salvage yard’ approach involves the use of actual full-size building fragments – material samples, components and constructional assemblies – in order to provide some degree of real-life spatial experience while also referring to the temporal process of construction. Alternatively, the paradigm of the ‘office/studio/workshop’ tries to sidestep the problem of capturing the experience of built space and instead focuses on the story of its creation. By presenting drawings, sketches, models and mock-ups pro-

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duced during the process of design, the gallery is transformed into a place of intellectual production, offering an insight into the often arcane world of the professional design studio. One of the best historical examples of an approach which combines some elements of all three of the above scenarios is the Sir John Soane Museum in London – created originally as the architect’s house, library, gallery and teaching space all rolled into one. In the broader context of exhibition design in the art world, Nicholas Serota’s essay Experience or Interpretation: The Dilemma of Museums of Modern Art1 suggests a dichotomy between exhibitions that try to recreate the experience of the artist’s studio and those that emphasise the interpretive role of the curator. The former may involve using the actual studio itself, thus taking the viewer to the work: providing an insight into the artist’s own creative experience by giving a sense of the context in which the work was produced. A good example of this approach can be seen at the Barbara Hepworth Museum in St Ives, Cornwall where the works are displayed within the spaces used by the artist herself between 1949 and 1975 as a home, studio, workshop and gallery. The second of Serota’s two curatorial approaches remains within the confines of the traditional museum or gallery setting. In this situation the work is brought to the viewer: organised and contextualised according to the wishes of the curator and displayed along with an explanatory narrative of captions, labels and texts. Serota’s alternatives highlight the main choices open to the architectural exhibition curator with the added dilemma that regardless of whether the studio or the gallery model is chosen, graphic representations, scale models or building fragments are likely to be the only items that can normally be physically accommodated within the exhibition space itself. Insight into the experience of the actual buildings themselves will still require an imaginative leap that many viewers – particularly those not professionally trained in three-dimensional visualisation – will find impossible to make. The main dilemma remains that of the absence of the work itself and thus the absence of the multi-sensory and dynamic experience of a real three-dimensional architectural space unfolding in time. Buildings provide a fully embodied and highly visceral experience arising out of the movement of the human body in space and this experience is dependent for its depth and richness upon the fundamental cognitive connections between perception and action. To understand the importance of the relationship between action and perception and how it might be useful in helping to expand the potential impact of architectural exhibitions, it is worth considering some recent advances in the fields of cognitive neuroscience and consciousness studies, as well as some key philosophical insights on the role of the body in the process of perception. Just prior to the emergence of what became known as phenomenology – beginning around 1900 with the mature work of Edmund Husserl – the French philosopher Henri Bergson, writing in the book Matter and Memory, published in 1890, suggested that: ‘The objects which surround my body reflect its possible action upon them.’2 His statement implies that our perception of the things around us is dependent on the body’s capacity to transform them. Taking the action of the body-in-the-world as

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the ultimate root of knowledge, he suggests that our physical engagement with the environment around us provides both the source and the limits of our understanding of it. Second, if the actions of the body form the basis of what (as well as how) we can know about the external world, then this same external world – having been acted on in a variety of ways – then becomes an equivalent source of knowledge about the capacities of the body. Thus, the body is both the source and medium of our knowledge about the world – and the world is the source of our knowledge about the body. The two realms are interlinked within a reciprocal process of ‘information exchange’. Bergson was also implying that our understanding of the environment around us is based on an intuitive grasp of the activities afforded by it – an implicit assessment of its opportunities and obstacles as defined in relation to our needs and goals. This idea is similar to what the American psychologist James J. Gibson later called the ‘affordances’ offered by the environment – a component of his novel ‘ecological’ theory of perception based on a study of the interdependence between an organism and its surroundings.3 Within the phenomenological tradition this idea was further elaborated in the late work of the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty, specifically in his concept of the ‘chiasm’ or intertwining of the body and its immediate environment in a new in-between realm he described as the ‘flesh of the world’. This term refers to a similar interdependence between the body and the outside world, and was described in an essay entitled ‘The Intertwining – The Chiasm’, published posthumously in the book The Visible and the Invisible in 1964. The essay explores the idea of an intertwining – or ‘crossing over’ – between the organism and its perceptual environment, through which the body becomes part of an intermediate realm situated somewhere between the mind and the world of physical objects, or things-inthemselves. The instability of this in-between status was also addressed by MerleauPonty in an earlier essay (‘Eye and Mind’, first published in French in 1961), where he described a similarly fundamental continuity between the body and the ‘outside’ world: Visible and mobile, my body is a thing among things; it is caught in the fabric of the world, and its cohesion is that of a thing. But because it moves itself and sees, it holds things in a circle around itself. Things are an annex or prolongation of itself; they are encrusted into its flesh, they are part of its full definition; the world is made of the same stuff as the body.4 Merleau-Ponty’s most famous illustration of this idea is the example of a blind person navigating with the aid of a stick, where the stick – like a hand-tool – becomes an extension of the arm that holds it. In other words, with skilful use the boundary of the body-image expands to incorporate the tool – the stick, in a sense, disappears or becomes ‘transparent’ and the world is experienced through it. This idea was further developed by Merleau-Ponty in reference to the role of the artist’s body in producing a visual image. The interaction between body and world that takes place through the medium of the paint provides the philosopher with a model for all perceptual activity: the mind’s access to the outside world must inevitably arise initially from the body’s movement in it, which also always to some extent involves a movement of it:

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The painter ‘takes his body with him,’ says Valéry. Indeed we cannot imagine how a mind could paint. It is by lending his body to the world that the artist changes the world into paintings. To understand these transubstantiations we must go back to the working, actual body – not the body as a chunk of space or a bundle of functions but that body which is an intertwining of vision and movement.5 The precise mechanisms by which movement and vision may be related are still not fully understood, although recent work in the cognitive neurosciences has begun to reveal some powerful supporting evidence. A key experimental benchmark is provided by the work of Richard Held and Alan Hein who in 1963 published a paper describing their observations of animals brought up in a specially adapted environment.6 Pairs of 8–12-week-old kittens were placed inside a cylindrical enclosure, both were restrained by a ‘gondola’ apparatus, but only one was able to control its own movements by relatively normal walking. The other was fully suspended within the mechanism that also linked the two together and thus its movements remained subject to the whims of the first. On release from the apparatus after as little as ten days confinement, the second kitten showed signs of ‘experiential blindness’ – a lack of awareness of obstacles or edges in its environment caused by an inability to relate its visual perceptions to its own bodily movements. The implication of the experiment is that a proper understanding of three-dimensional space is dependent upon a process of movement-produced sensory feedback. This most likely involves a cross-modal ‘intertwining’ of perceptual data from all the bodily senses – a form of synaesthesia – where sensory input is combined and situated within a spatial and temporal framework provided by the body’s movement through a particular environment. A further demonstration of the centrality of bodily movement to the processes of perception and cognition in general is provided by the recent discovery of the ‘mirror-neuron’ system by researchers in the neurosciences using new visualisation technologies such as Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI).7 Mirrorneurons appear to constitute a matching system within the brain whereby the visual observation of a particular bodily movement triggers a similar pattern of neuronal activity to that which occurs during the actual performance of the movement itself. These findings suggest that our understanding of the actions of others is based on an empathic process of self-projection – when observing goal-directed human or animal behaviour we perceive these movements by unconsciously ‘imagining’ ourselves carrying out the same tasks. Vittorio Gallese, among others, has written extensively on the application of this discovery to the understanding of phenomena as seemingly diverse as emotional and social empathy, gestural communication, imitative learning and tool-use.8 It may still require a cognitive leap to accept that we might also understand important aspects of the designed environment via a similar neural mechanism, but the possibility is certainly suggested by these experimental findings that we may be constantly and unconsciously – through the mirror-neuron system – ‘enacting’ the

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affordances offered by the objects, equipment and spaces that surround us. Philosophers are also beginning to draw significant inferences from these discoveries, for example in the attempt to redefine such long-contested phenomenological concepts as body-image and body-schema as deployed in debates on the perception of space. It seems clear that at the very least, as one philosopher has recently put it, these findings prove: ‘a direct and active link between the motor and sensory systems.’9 If this mechanism does in fact form a core component of our perceptual and cognitive systems, then it would make sense to exploit the multiple ‘channels’ of sensory awareness in the attempt to achieve more engaging forms of communication. To return to the question posed at the start of this chapter as to the most effective modes of architectural communication, it becomes clear that exhibitions should attempt to address the entire spectrum of the human sensorium and thereby engage more fully the body’s intertwined motor-cognitive apparatus.

Case study 1: ‘Andorak’ + ‘spectacular spaces’ These questions were first addressed on a practical level through a postgraduate teaching project at the University of Nottingham in the academic year 1999–2000.10 The initial brief was very open: simply to devise an exhibition about a chosen architect’s work and to challenge the conventional gallery format such as discussed here already. The most promising of the approaches to emerge from the studio was a project entitled ‘Andorak’, a self-guided walk around the centre of Nottingham that set out to present the architecture of Tadao Ando. While most of Ando’s buildings had been built in Japan, it was clear that the exhibition would have to rely heavily on photographs and drawings. To avoid the usual pitfalls, and as an alternative to presenting individual buildings, the project focused on some of the more generic themes at play in Ando’s work. By picking up on broad thematic issues such as materiality, light, nature and history, a series of spaces around the centre of Nottingham were identified that could illustrate Ando’s ideas in ‘real life’. The exhibition became a self-guided walk using a CD-sized information pack containing a fold-out map and a set of 24 cards, one for each stop on the tour. At each location a small photograph on the card would suggest a detail to look out for – sometimes a well-known landmark such as a church or a clock tower, often an incidental feature like a shadow on a wall or a piece of graffiti. A short quotation from Ando’s writings and a piece of haiku poetry suggested a connection between the highlighted feature and an aspect of Ando’s architecture. On the back of each card a longer text offered a more in-depth explanation. One of the most powerful moments on the tour was during a long walk up a cobbled hill, where a connection was made to the ramped approach to one of Ando’s museums in Japan. The visitor was invited to consider for a moment the physical exertion involved in carrying the weight of the body up a slope – the sudden awareness of gravity experienced directly through the muscles – and the effect this might have on the expectation of reward for the effort in a dramatic view at the end of a long ascent.

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The project was tested on a group of local A-level students and a good range of feedback was collected. The most common response was a comment on the way it invited a reassessment of familiar locations. Each visitor was invited to exchange their outdoor coat for an elaborately folded yellow cagoule – hence the title ‘An(d)orak’ – which lent a ritual element to the start of the tour as well as offering a temporary new identity through which to re-experience the city. Evidence gathered a few days after the event suggested that for some people it had had a longer-term effect – visitors reported paying more attention to the experience of their own bodies as they moved; continuing to examine their surroundings in forensic detail; and enjoying the more subtle and transient qualities of the city such as movement, light and ambient sounds. In 2002 a variant of the project was offered to a new group of students, this time the objective being to design installations for pieces of public art.11 With the support of a small grant from the Arts Council, this work was presented to the public during Architecture Week 2002, again as a self-guided walk but this time using a more traditional guidebook format. Most of the stops were empty spaces that had simply been taken as sites for the designs reproduced in the guidebook, so there were fewer ‘real’ places to experience and more reliance on the printed imagery. This seemed to produce a less satisfying experience than the original Andorak tour, where the interplay between the text, images and the physical locations created a more engaging dialogue between presence and absence.

Case study 2: ‘moving city’ In 2003 a new opportunity arose to extend the project through a collaboration with Nottingham Castle Museum and Art Gallery involving a link-up with an exhibition of kinetic sculpture called Making a Move.12 The scale of the project and the funding available allowed a new phase of experimentation with mobile digital technologies, hence the collaboration of the present co-authors on the writing of this chapter.13 The Mixed Reality Lab at the University of Nottingham already had a substantial track record of working with artists and performers on interactive public installations, including various arts festivals around Europe with companies such as Active Ingredient and Blast Theory. The original idea for the guided walk was to devise a route around sites in the city centre where the Castle Museum was proposing to install actual pieces of sculpture. As it turned out, all the artists in the exhibition chose locations inside the castle grounds. The student project therefore involved presenting imaginary installations for art works of their own devising – all site-specific pieces rather than ‘off-theshelf’ works by recognised artists. This gave an added dimension to the tour as there were more direct and meaningful connections between the projects and the particular locations being visited. Using a PDA instead of a printed guidebook allowed a mix of visual images, animations, text, sound-effects, voice-overs and video clips. Beginning

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with a clickable map of the city centre, visitors navigated their way along a prescribed route, following the instructions on the touch-screen display. The interface was constructed using Flash software similar to that used on many websites, so most visitors were able to use this without needing special assistance. The individual projects presented at each location employed their own distinctive graphical interface and some of these did prove difficult to access for some visitors due to the variety of different formats used. Returning to the overall map on the main menu allowed the visitor to vary the route of the walk – either by short-circuiting or repeating parts of it and thereby personalising the experience. Some visitors again remarked that there was too much textual information. They would have preferred more audio guidance – such as a continuous voice-over commentary – leaving them free to enjoy viewing the city without becoming too absorbed in the PDA itself. Positive feedback focused on the experience of seeing familiar places in a new and unexpected way, alongside the enjoyment of walking through the city ‘accompanied’ by the curatorial narrative.

Case study 3: ‘future garden’ + ‘anywhere-somewhereeverywhere’ The most recent phase of the project began in May 2006 and involved a further collaboration between the current authors and the Vienna-based artist and choreographer Cie Willi Dorner.14 A public event was presented as part of the NottDance06 festival of contemporary dance and included a self-guided walk around the Sneinton Market site

Moving City: PDA interface (clickable map).

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on the east side of Nottingham city centre which is scheduled for demolition. Willi Dorner set out the basic agenda for the project which was planned as a way of questioning the current regeneration plans and stimulating debate on the future of the market. He consulted with local artists and market users about their ideas for what should happen. A group of architecture students were then given four weeks to work up designs based on the findings of this vox-pop research (most of which proposed retaining and refurbishing the market) and present this material via a similar PDA interface as used on the previous Moving City project. This time the navigation was done using a ‘video follow’ approach, where video clips of the route between ‘stations’ around the site have to be followed at walking speed by the viewer. This creates a more restricted linear structure which is more difficult to short-circuit, although it does provide a stronger sense of an unfolding narrative which in this case was driven by the artist/curator. At most stations viewers were asked to identify a photograph of the market as shown on the screen and then line up the view to provide a kind of ‘augmented reality’ overlay. When activated, this view then gradually dissolved or morphed into the completed design proposal, with a CAD animation showing the gradual installation of the new architectural elements. Additional information was provided by a layering of voice-overs, sound effects and text captions. At some stations visitors were shown video interviews, historical archive photographs and a pre-recorded site-specific dance performance set within the market. At points along the tour there were also opportunities for live or interactive elements, including: a voice recorder inside a temporary homeless shelter; a fortune-teller in a nearby warehouse; and a live dance performance inside one of the market buildings.

Future Garden: PDA in use at numbered ‘station’.

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Future Garden: PDA interface (CAD montage/animation).

Feedback from visitors to the event was generally very positive. Over a three-day period, out of a total of 44 participants 28 completed a written questionnaire. Most enjoyed the video-follow navigation approach and found the more interactive elements more memorable. Physical marking of ground with the numbers of each station provided valuable confirmation that viewers had reached the correct locations. At each station there were also options as to how much of the content to engage with, so it was possible to speed up the experience if viewing time was limited. The sense of intimacy created by the one-to-one ‘dialogue’ between visitor and curator also helped to communicate the underlying political message of the Future Garden project. Aside from the sensory impact of the multimedia presentations of design proposals, viewers were also able to empathise very directly with the plight of established market users being forced out by the commercial pressures of the currently fashionable urbanregeneration agenda. In April 2008 a new project with the same artist funded by a major grant from the Arts Council was staged in Nottingham in partnership with the Broadway Media Centre.15 This event explored the more abstract theme of hidden spaces within the city and offered viewers a more interactive experience using an adapted mobilephone interface. Direct communication with the curators/performers allowed the information displayed to be dynamically updated via the mobile-phone network, responding to the viewer’s movements and preferences as described to an unseen guide or ‘shadow’. The intention was to engage the viewer in the personal reconfiguration of their own exhibition/event experience, thereby intensifying the sense of a direct and embodied engagement with both the spaces of the city and the curatorial voice.

Conclusion The case-study projects presented above have provided valuable opportunities to assess the impact and implications of mobile digital technologies within the ‘expanded field’ of outdoor real-life architectural exhibitions. Downloadable ‘podcast’ audio

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walking tours around major cities and museums are already becoming part of the mainstream tourist industry. As the software tools for visual interfaces such as PDA, MDA, mobile phone and iPod become more widely and easily accessible, it is likely that they will be used more and more frequently as personal interpretation devices both within the traditional confines of the museum and gallery setting as well as, hopefully, in what has been described here as the most vivid, engaging and ultimately most effective context for architectural communication – the experience of the buildings themselves.

Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6

7 8

9 10

11

12

13

14

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Nicholas Serota, Experience or Interpretation: The Dilemma of Museums of Modern Art (Walter Neurath Memorial Lectures), London: Thames and Hudson, 2000. Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, New York: Zone Books, 1988 [1892], p. 21. James J. Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception, Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1986 [1979], pp. 127–43. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, ‘Eye and Mind’, in M. Merleau-Ponty, The Primacy of Perception Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964, p. 163. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, ‘Eye and Mind’, in The Primacy of Perception Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964, p. 162. Richard Held and Alan Hein, ‘Movement Produced Stimulation in the Development of Visually Guided Behaviour’, Journal of Comparative and Physiological Psychology, 1963, 56 (5), pp. 872–6. V. Gallese, L. Fadiga, L. Fogassi and G. Rizzolatti, ‘Action Recognition in the Premotor Cortex’, Brain, April 1996, 119 (2), pp. 593–609. See, for example, Vittorio Gallese, ‘The “Shared Manifold” Hypothesis: From Mirror Neurons to Empathy’, Journal of Consciousness Studies, 2001, 8, pp. 33–50. Atsushi Iriki, ‘The Neural Origins and Implications of Imitation, Mirror Neurons and Tool Use’, Current Opinion in Neurobiology, 2006, 16, pp. 660–7. Shaun Gallagher, How the Body Shapes the Mind, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005, p. 9. The authors would like to acknowledge the input of the two students who developed the original version, Andrew Puncher and Peter Richardson. The project was further developed by the author with the support of a grant from the University of Nottingham’s New Lecturer’s Research Fund, 2000–1. The authors would like to acknowledge the efforts of all the students in the ‘Building Project’ group 2001–2, but special thanks are due to Ishaan Saccaram and Katherine Kemp for their generous editorial and production assistance. The authors would like to thank Kate Stoddart, formerly Exhibitions Officer at Nottingham Castle Museum and Art Gallery, for her kind invitation to participate in the Making a Move exhibition. The authors would like to acknowledge the financial support of Opun – the Architecture and Built Environment Centre for the East Midlands, and Neil Horsley of Nottingham Development Enterprise. All the students in the ‘Building Project’ (2003) group deserve thanks for their efforts but special credit goes to Jon Meggitt and Simon Hobbs for their additional work on the PDA interface. The ‘Future’ event was commissioned by Dance4 as part of the NottDance06 festival and involved the choreographer Willi Dorner; dancers Suzie Firth, Satu Herrala and Sonja Pregrad; film makers Adam Robertson and Jules Winter; project manager Jo

Moving city

15

Mardell; evaluation was carried out by Ben Bedwell of the Mixed Reality Lab; additional material was supplied by Tom Huggon, Steve and the Sneinton Market users. The ‘Building Project’ (2006) students again deserve a mention, with special thanks to James Alexander for extra help formatting the PDA interface. ‘Anywhere-Somewhere-Everywhere’ was a project by Cie Willi Dorner developed in collaboration with the Mixed Reality Lab and the School of the Built Environment at The University of Nottingham. The project is funded by Arts Council England and supported by Broadway Media Centre, Dance4 and the Austrian Cultural Forum.

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Awaiting the voice-over The Öresund Film Commission location database and the mediatization of the architectural landscape Maria Hellström Reimer

Introduction Today it is more difficult than ever to isolate the reproduction of the built environment from what has been called ‘the economy of images and signs’.1 Inevitably inscribed in ever more all-embracing circuits of communication, architecture and urban planning are practices in transformation, in search of both their societal function and their inner logic. Nevertheless, repeated attempts are being made from within the spatial professions to develop a tectonically or historically formulated immunity to this shift, or to dismiss it as superficial aestheticization. Yet, what characterizes the change is perhaps not so much the transformation of urban space into a matter of visual representation or more or less pleasant sceneries. Rather it is its mediatization that is conspicuous; the integration of architecture with new, distributed and extra-architectonical forms of spatial reproduction; a process of convergence which, as far as architecture is concerned, constitutes a destabilizing of grounds. One of these destabilizing forms of spatial reproduction is film. As pointed out already by Kuleshov in the 1920s, film is not only a moving representation of modern and fragmented urban space, but on a more fundamental level unfolds as its ‘creative geography’.2 As an emergent geographical arena, film production also gives rise to new bodies of agency. Today, the emerging film commissions play an active role, engaging not only in the promotional care-taking of an already existing architectural environment, but also in its continuous assessment and alteration. As such, these new agents play an important role in problematizing the distinction between representation and reproduction, or in other words, between curatorship and authorship in the spatial domain. What we have to ask, however, is what the premises are for this new spatial commissioning, and how it affects the further intermediation of architectural knowledge. Through a case study of the Öresund Film Commission and its web-based ‘location database’, this chapter aims to discuss these and related issues. A compilation of more than 500 still images of potential locations for film production, covering anything from ‘fairytale scenery and medieval villages tucked in lush fields’ to

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‘contemporary European settings’,3 the database provokingly actualizes the ambiguities of, on the one hand, architectural typologization and archival practices and, on the other hand, a proliferating branding culture. Together with a number of similar place collections, this cinematographically oriented location database actualizes the changing conditions of a mediatized architectural arena, as well as the expectations, both for adaptation and change, to which it gives rise. The argument developed is that rather than simply sustaining and caring for a pre-defined architectural narrative as a spatial commissioning practice, architectural curatorship has in itself a central say in the mediation and transformation of the architectural landscape.

A shift in resolution In the public consciousness, ‘architecture’ or ‘the built environment’ is undoubtedly already a composite notion, associated as much with master plans or legislations as with cinematic strolls or computerized car thefts. Although disputable, this new complexity has been described in terms of a spatial turn.4 What used to be regarded an object – the Building or the City – has expanded into a relational field or landscape, where aesthetic aspects – visual as well as other, more generally communicative – play an important role. In this respect, globalization is dependent upon ‘landscapization’ or ‘-scaping’, described by American cultural anthropologist Arjun Appadurai as an imaginary activity, creatively manipulating scales and distances.5 Rather than a placebound framing, -scaping is the expanded form of spatial and social reproduction, which in a globalized world is necessary in order to link the local and situated to a discursive level of negotiated meaning. A widened and urbanized world is thus not necessarily the same as a world devoid of locality. Instead, it is a world in which locality has been attributed a reach, an extended scope of potential occurrence. And, as urban sociologist Saskia Sassen has proposed, in relation to such an outreaching notion of locality, topographic or morphologic description is insufficient, as it does not embrace the transgressions, the discontinuous re-scalings and the virtual leaps, all of which are decisive modulations for the reproduction of an expanded cultural landscape. In this respect, global dissemination also has a condensing and intensifying effect, causing what Sassen denotes an ‘imbrication’ of global and non-global, imaginary and material.6 What seems to be a levelling dissolution of spatial differences, argues Sassen, at a closer look appears to produce a higher degree of resolution or detailing. And conversely, what are regarded as local, topographic or cultural idiosyncrasies often turn out to be the exponents of a global culture of intermediation. It is from this perspective of re-scaling and ‘resolutional’ leaps that we should consider the role of the cinematic. As a ‘media-scape’, film production is intimately associated with the urban landscape. However, it emerges out of a space that is no longer merely a result of a unified, authorial city-planning gesture. It is rather intimately linked to a more general idea of urbanity – that is of urban life in all its aspects

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and potentials. Cinema could in this sense be considered a substantiation of urbanism as an occupation not only with organizational or structural aspects of the city, but also with aesthetic issues, such as potentials of modulation and intermediation.7 ‘It would be hard’, Hong Kong-based cultural theorist Ackbar Abbas writes, ‘to imagine the existence of cinema without the experience of cities’.8 Referring to Walter Benjamin and his classical analyses of the modern media-scape, Abbas stresses the fact that film is an urban form of expression, embracing also the urban shock effect; the obtrusive leaps of changing temporality, defined by Benjamin as a new and intrinsically urban formal principle.9 At the same time, the popular movie is a conservative industry. In its commercial form, it is often unifying and harmonizing, and rarely the experimental, provocative or shocking medium that it could be. Cinematic practice here follows the pattern of urbanity, in that it has developed out of the tension between, on the one hand, the discontinuous spatiality of rapid glances and, on the other, the epic urge for meaning. The city as well as the cinema thus activate an ambiguous potentiality, on the one hand the agitating principles of montage and on the other, affirmative patterns of narration – in film terminology often described as the suspension of disbelief;10 a deferral of the scepticism towards the fictive, the un-real, the fragmented or alternative.11

Filmic urbanism The conclusion we may draw from this is that cinematic practice not only is a form of representing the city or a way of describing foreign or remote places. Rather, we should describe the relation cinema–city as a form of intermediality, a productive and spatial exchange between two different forms of human expression or languages. As stated above, this intermediality is not free of complication. Although often conservatively predictable on a macro-level, on a micro-level it is sometimes surprisingly inconsistent, giving rise to new forms of localities, new territorial conflicts and new political patterns. This is exemplified by the geographical buzz around the release of The Simpsons Movie. As most people know, this fictional American family inhabits a trivial municipality labelled Springfield. But which? Is it Springfield, Massachusetts or Springfield, Illinois? Or is it one of North Carolina’s four Springfields? In the United States, there are 71 Springfields in 36 different states, and with the premiere of The Simpsons Movie at hand, many of them also claimed the epithet Homer’s hometown. In order to settle the conflict, 20th Century Fox, the company behind the movie, intelligently enough invited all of them to a competition, where the assignment was the production of a short film presenting the city’s capability to signify its fictive original. The winner then gained not only the honour of hosting the very first screening, but the lucrative rights to figure as the most trivial and typical of American towns.12 On the sparsely populated west coast of Ireland a similar battle has taken place. Here, the fight concerned the right to represent Craggy Island, the island in Channel Four’s popular TV series Father Ted. Despite the fact that the island in the show is depicted

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as grey and inhospitable, populated by a number of more-or-less repulsive characters, and that it does not really hold any places of interest, it has given rise to a Father Tedtourism of considerable economic importance. This, in turn, has led to a territorial dispute between the two Aran islands, Inis Mor and Inis Oirr, both of which claim to be the geographical source of the story. The conflict was settled in a way that without difficulty could have been integrated in the storyboard of the show, namely in a local football game, where the winner was appointed ‘the real Craggy Island’ for a year.13 Another British example is Slough. Situated just outside London, this suburban town was already in 1937 depicted as the ugliest municipality in England. Through a poem by John Betjeman, Slough came to represent brutal and inhumane industrialization;14 a characterization further developed in the TV comedy The Office.15 Here, the image of Slough as the gloomiest and most depressing place in Great Britain was reinforced, consequently adding to the challenges of the city’s policy makers.16 In southern Sweden, in the coastal town of Ystad, a comparable, yet less discouraging, scenario has developed, originating from Henning Mankell’s popular detective stories about superintendent Kurt Wallander. Even before any of the 13 Wallander movies were filmed, readers had found their way to the peripheral seaport, in Mankell’s novels the representative of a disintegrating welfare society. However, despite a depressing plot, the production of the films consolidated the media-tourism trend, and furthermore motivated a considerable urban regeneration, where parts of the former military barracks were transformed into Ystad Studios and Cineteket; the Cinecittá of southern Sweden.17 Established in 2004, the studios have developed into a regional resource and production centre for film, bringing to the provincial town a new, yet also considerably more violent, appeal. What these examples actualize is the complex relation between locality and intermediality that characterizes the emerging media-scape. This is where the new film commissions – as new spatial entrepreneurs or curatorial agents – enter the architectural arena; an arena which before has been reserved for authorizing practitioners and spatial experts, such as architects, landscape architects and planners.

The Öresund Film Commission and its location database As ‘intermediary’ agents, the film entrepreneurs show a double engagement both with cinema and with the architectural landscape. As commissioners, they build upon a relation of trust, but also, legally speaking, on the ability to mediate or intervene in a borderline situation, like that of trade. Rotterdam Film Fund was the first of its kind. Founded in 1996,18 it constituted an important part of the Dutch embracing of a ‘permanent spatial revolution’.19 In Rotterdam this did not simply entail a foolhardy architectonic re-staging, but also included a conscious re-conceptualization of its ‘history-less’, modern and industrial past – an urban ‘shock therapy’ that might not have been possible without conscious cinematic re-staging.20 In a similar way, Film London has contributed to the transformation of the British capital’s murky image. The

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third most sought-after shooting location in the world, after Los Angeles and New York, London has on average 35 film shoots a day, to a great extent the result of commissioning efforts.21 Inspired by these initiatives, the Öresund region has also taken the consequences of the emerging urban-cinematographic logic. Through the establishing of a transnational film commission, The Öresund Film Commission (henceforth referred to as OFC), different regional agents have explicitly declared their willingness to develop the region into an active counterpart in the global sign-and-image economy.22 According to the OFC’s website home page, the assignment of the commission is ‘to promote the region as an international film location and to service international film and TV productions shooting in the region’.23 The international or transnational target group is clearly defined, even though all film projects actively using locations or facilities in the region will be supported.24 Deliberately launching the transnational Danish–Swedish Öresund region as a possible location for film production, OFC has developed into a new kind of ‘spatializing’ actor. A closer inquiry into the aesthetic sustaining this activity could therefore be of great interest, not least if we want to understand the premises of ‘locality production’ in a global economy. The commission’s aim to link the reproduction of the physical environment to the production of filmic narratives appears most clearly in its web-based location database, which consists of several hundreds of possible exterior and interior shooting locations.25 These locations are evaluated and classified according to different, potentially narrative frameworks, such as ‘watersides’, ‘landscapes’, ‘public buildings’, ‘city looks’, ‘historical architecture’, ‘modern architecture’, ‘army sites’, ‘infrastructure’, ‘landmarks’ and ‘industrial’. These in turn present sub-categories. ‘Public buildings’, for example, includes both ‘churches’ and ‘prisons’; and ‘industrial’ comprises both ‘exteriors’ and ‘interiors’, further specified as ‘rough exteriors’ and ‘rough interiors’. Browsing through the database, you are enabled to set up your own, tentative spatial framework or cinematic-scape, simply by dropping the chosen locations in the provided ‘shopping cart’.

Screenshot of the Öresund Film Commission location database.

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Screenshot of the Öresund Film Commission location database, category: ‘industrial exteriors’.

Screenshot of the Öresund Film Commission location database, category: ‘rough exteriors’.

Screenshot of the Öresund Film Commission location database, category: ‘public buildings – jails’.

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The places in the database are de-identified; there is no geographical specification or other information than that of the photograph. They are furthermore to a great extent de-populated.26 This de-contextualization is of course central and deliberate; the idea is to open up the places for a broader set of potential projections. At the same time this simplification results in a certain formalization, revealing an unarticulated association with certain spatial and aesthetic ideals. This simplification is most notable in the ‘landscape’ category, where fields in blossom, open moors and early summer forests are bluntly over-represented. This tacit stereotypization is further reinforced by the fact that the moving image in the database is equalized with the still image, which is thought to automatically evoke ‘a sense of place’. In this respect, the location database builds upon the conventional idea of landscape as a scenic and static background, entirely separate from the dynamics of the plot. A such, the commissioning of the database unfolds into a provisioning of spatial commodity samples, at the very best a generator of what in film language is referred to as film cartolina27 – easily digested and preconceived postcard movies, with no real capability of releasing the chosen places from their preconceived representational obligations. In this respect, the OFC location database is by no means unique. Many regional commissions employ similar geographical governing instruments. One example is Malta, whose location database gives a very seductive impression, explicitly combining the promotion of local tourism with that of film.28 The Rotterdam location database, however, has a more mundane appeal, and is linked to the global database Locamundo, a locational search engine, for which you need to buy a ‘search access’.29 The possibilities of free browsing are heavily restricted and the identities of the locations actively protected. In this way, Locamundo aims at reinforcing its own and the participating photographers’ intellectual rights to the places. Also, Film London has its online location database, complemented with a physical locations library, where more than 10,000 places are represented.30 Regularly, Film London also appoints the location of the month, thereby actualizing the places, which from an intermediary point of view have reached the most noticeable success.31 Despite a sometimes predictable content, the location databases also bring into consciousness the ambiguous conditions of spatial representation. Due to the clear focus on the commissioning or realizing of projects, they provide comprehensive mapping of representational agency. On the one hand, the databases seem to promote uncontroversial natural sceneries and typical historical settings. On the other hand, they make you aware of all the regulations surrounding the engagement of localities for mediating purposes. As of yet, the Öresund Region has a minimum of regulations for shooting outside. London and Rotterdam, however, are already regulated stages, where a strict representational regime at times regulates the filmic action down to the very camera position.32 At the same time, such ostensibly pre-scripted backdrops are compensated for by the presence of the ‘raw’, the ‘wild’ or the ‘rough’; environments and localities that in a narrative respect provide a dramatic pitch or a playing field for that which is

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not necessarily controlled or legitimate. In the OFC’s location database, great importance is attached not only to flourishing fields, castle meadows or lush interiors, but also to urban peripheries, prison yards, industrial areas, desolate roadscapes or mundane neighbourhood streets – locations often disregarded in a conventional architectural context. The objection here would of course be that even though this ‘rough’ locality to a certain extent transgresses spatial conventions, it does instead confirm cinematographic standards. At the same time, however, the raw or the rough also actualizes locality’s fundamental heterogeneity and materiality, its ‘heterotopian’ power, its power to, as Foucault expressed it, ‘draw . . . us out of ourselves’, ‘clawing and gnawing’, or even eroding the most rigid of representational intentions, presenting the presumptive filmmaker with an abundance of potential courses of action.33

Typologies and tropologies An interesting question unfolding here is of course how the above-described filmic categorization differs from or affects the ones developed within the spatial disciplines. Like the filmic location databases, descriptive models for landscape assessment, such as the British Landscape Character Assessment (LCA), which, as it is stated in the introductory text, ‘has emerged as an appropriate way to look at landscape because it provides a structured approach to identifying character and distinctiveness as well as value’. As such, it is not ‘designed to resist changes’, but ‘to help ensure that change and development does not undermine whatever is characteristic and valued with any particular landscape’.34 Yet, the primary objective of the LCA is the strict discrimination between characterization and evaluation, the former understood as the objective identifying of a ‘distinct and recognizable pattern of elements’, such as combinations of geology, land form, vegetation, land use and human settlements.35 Structured characterization through description, mapping and classification then results in the identification of generic landscape character types or landscape character areas. Even though different judgements are used, the process of characterization ‘should be objective in the main, while making judgements to inform decisions involves an element of subjectivity which can be clarified by using criteria agreed upon beforehand’.36 To a certain extent this distinction between characterization and evaluation is related to the ambition of the OFC location database to commission settings rather than propose plots. However, where the LCA protocol sets out to minimize the subjective input in the mapping process, in the OFC case it is instead implicitly reflected in the ‘popular’ structure of the typologizing scheme. Such a translation of the subjective into the popular can also be traced in more historically or culturally oriented classification protocols like the Danish SAVE, Survey of Architectural Values in the Environment. Focusing on evaluation, this code of assessment does not only deal with the definition of architectonic objects, but also takes into account their local and historical situatedness, including subjective preferences and narratives.37 Constructed around the anthropological notion of ‘cultural environment’, the SAVE system

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expresses an expanded curatorial awareness, which embraces not only the temporality and constructedness of every social and historical setting, but furthermore the temporality and relativity of the evaluating activity as such. ‘Changes in aesthetic preferences over time’, it is stated, ‘also mean changes in the evaluation of what is valuable, interesting or beautiful in the historical city’.38 In the SAVE protocol, it is thus possible to discern a shift in assessment policies, from an essentialist typologization concerned with relatively stable characters to a typologization with constructivist traits, where the act of intermediation is brought into the foreground. The representation and classification of spatial qualities is no longer understood as objective documentation, but as a creative gesture, interfering with an open-ended, local and material micro-environment. Both of the above-mentioned examples of architectural typologies articulate what could be called a discursive awareness, and even though the conclusions differ, it is not difficult to see a strong ‘projective’ or even ‘filmic’ influence. Not even the most specialized of architectural protocols have remained unaffected of the emergent image-and-sign economy. Instead, despite their explicit effort to express the opposite, they should be understood as direct answers to or even products of this economy. With the aim of deliberately protecting the architectural landscape from the levelling and exchangeability inflicted upon it through mass mediation, these protocols at the same time develop into safeguarding tools, which, paradoxically enough, open for the management and promotion not only of historical buildings as iconic landmarks, but of locations and entire landscapes as objects of (nostalgic) desire. In this respect, the spatial-assessment protocols unveil what could be described as the main curatorial dilemma. Even though the articulate aim of the protocols might be to ‘cure’ the architectural landscape from its lack of differentiation, they are most often used as normative tools, more or less consciously promoting ideologically motivated forms of spatial organization.39 As commissioners of a postcard aesthetics, the filmic location databases are no different, often in a similar way operating on the basis of unarticulated aesthetic conventions, mythologized stereotypes or taken-for-granted tastes. There are, however, also certain interesting differences. Even though conventional architectural assessment and filmic categorization alike to a great extent are products of a greater and more general process of aestheticization, they still point in different directions, actualizing distinct curatorial traits. While assessment protocols like LCA or SAVE build upon a structural approach to aesthetics as a set of rules, a tool for the essential recognition of a transcendental meaning or identity, the location database instead constitutes a temporal and limitless archive, a cross-referential stage, first and foremost providing an open-ended and action-oriented multiplicity. Against this it might be said that ‘identity’ by no means is absent from the OFC location database. On the contrary, it constitutes one of its main commissioning incentives, an important regional ‘branding’ potential. However, rather than a matter of inherent character, spatial identity here appears as a modality, as a relational tension and potential differentiation. Rather than a typology, the OFC location database there-

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fore proposes a tropology, a cartography of tentative tropes, of everything from excitable turns to everyday transfigurations. A such, the location database provides not only a pitch for the media industry, but also actualizes a qualitative leap in the conception of space and temporality, actualizing a paradigmatic shift from what Gilles Deleuze in his philosophy of cinema refers to as a logic of privileged instants or transcendental poses, to a logic of any-instant-whatever, a logic grounded not in the collection of ideals, but in the accumulation of banalities.40 What I suggest here then is that even though the OFC location database in many ways is ambiguous, it still draws attention to a new kind of spatial, archival and/or curatorial onset, which in a very interesting way reflects both an aesthetic, an ontological and a geopolitical shift. In the location database, the Öresund region’s curatorial striving for a coherent geographical identity collides with the ambition to commission abundant potentials for spatial re-configuration and change. On the one hand intending to impose an easily recognizable geographical brand or pose on the global market, the OFC and its location database simultaneously opens up for what could be described as a production of ‘any-locality-whatever’, a locality production that in unprecedented ways transgresses preconceived ideas of a fixed regional identity.

Convergence and divergence There is no doubt that the Öresund Film Commission and its corresponding agencies in different parts of the world represent a new kind of architectural entrepreneur. Irrevocably actualizing the intermediary and discursive aspects of locality production, they directly intervene in the representation, evaluation and reproduction of the architectural landscape. Not only representing space, but actively facilitating spatial change, these new agents also provokingly challenge the privilege of spatial interpretation and authorization formerly ascribed to architects and planners. In this way, these new spatial agents also bring into consciousness the general convergence of intermediary practices that is the result of globalization.41 Old forms of mediation, often hierarchically structured and deeply embedded in the hegemonic culture, congregate or even collide with new and often distributed forms, resulting in a redistribution of power. One example is the field of music, where old and new forms of mediation tend to converge. Also, formerly separate forms of expression to an increasing extent tend to overlap, as in the field of news. In the same way, architecture and urban planning is today not only a matter for spatial experts but to an increasing extent a concern also for economists, policy makers, social scientists or information agents – and not the least for the cultural agents that Walter Benjamin might have called ‘dream-makers’. What we experience through the appearance of the filmic location databases is thus not only the intermediary relation between cinema and urbanism, but a convergence of spatial practices, with no given priority between them. Not only are the filmic and the urban historically intertwined, as the projective form of the architectural landscape, film and/or animation has today almost replaced the plan as authorizing tool,

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thus adding to the spatiality of architecture an inescapable, temporal mode, a dimension of fiction, of narrative, of plot or event. The formerly so self-sufficient Vitruvian or Albertian voice-over has thus been erased, replaced by the multifarious clatter of expectant production crews. The critique of this converging tendency has first and foremost concerned the question of whether it really results in a progressive development, or whether it rather represents a new means of control. Is the mediatization of society really resulting in revitalizing encounters and situations, or is it merely what Debord called an ‘accumulation of spectacle’?42 Does it open for empowering transfiguration or is it simply part of a decompressing ‘festivalization of urban politics’?43 Does it result in an enabling materialization of spatial relations or is it no more than a ‘wholesale commodification of the environment’?44 And what does this new convergence, this multi-, hyper- and inter-mediality, imply? A new universalism of symbolic languages? Or new strategic alliances between spatial stakeholders and actors of the media industry? In his cinematographic enquiries of post-industrial space, Patrick Keiller also has posed similar questions, directing the camera lens towards an architectural landscape devoid of material production, emptied of local cultivation, its constructive agency long ago ‘sourced out’. If the lingering result of proliferating mediatization is the feeling of being left behind, on a remote shore with no real possibility to affect the production of locality, then we certainly should seek the first opportunity to press the switch.45 However, even though such a critique is more than adequate, my intention here has first and foremost been to investigate what in a Benjaminian vocabulary could be called the ‘de-auratization’ of architecture and the urban landscape, brought about by the new spatial commissioners. This disenchantment or bringing down of architecture from its monumental heights to a more mundane, tropological street level also liberates

architectural

practice

from

its

representative

responsibilities,

instead

transforming it into a matter of ‘representability’: a term that, following Fredric Jameson ‘raises in its turn the question of . . . representation in the first place’.46 What the cinematic location databases remind us of is in this respect the conflict inherent in the architectural landscape as a work of art in the age of digital reproduction: neither can it claim autonomy as the privileged myth about our situation in the world, nor is it totally released from its local and material ties. Instead, it emerges as inherently polemical – juxtaposing within itself the myths of meaning and identity on the one hand, and the vectors of freedom, of intersecting instants, on the other. The architectural landscape, as well as its curating, is in this sense highly dependent upon what German film theorist Thomas Elsaesser has called the ‘cinema effect’; the fact that ‘cinematic perception has become internalised as our mode of cognition and embodied experience’:47 we can no longer just ‘think’ since our thoughts have been ‘replaced by moving images’.48 My argumentation here follows that of Elsaesser, who is suggesting that rather than being hypnotized by this ubiquitous merging, we should consider the fact that there is also a new dynamics at work, ‘a dynamics of convergence and divergence, of synergy and self-differentiation’. At a closer look, the OFC location database and its peers also activate new parameters, pre-

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viously disregarded aspects and potential ‘meanings’ of place, of architecture and the city. While on the one hand merging with other administrative, governing tools and spatio-narrative conventions, the location databases also propose new spatial modes, new qualitative ‘methods’ for spatial ‘play’, for geographical interaction or even for ‘world-making’.49 Different from geo-morphological or cultural heritage-oriented landscape mapping, which is dependent upon a legend or an unambiguous voice, the cinematically oriented ‘archive’ is actualizing diverging possibilities, for every combination of sequences bringing into consciousness the need for enunciation, for discursive and relational directionality.

Questioning the voice-over: be kind rewind Through a discussion of the Öresund Film Commission and its promotion of the regional landscape, I have tried to draw attention to the fact that architecture today is an intermediary and discursive practice, integrated in a media economy. Considering the current transformations of this economy, one has to ask, however, whether landscape conventions and location databases alike are already, at least to a certain extent, phenomena of the past. After all, the concern of both landscape-assessment protocols and location databases is the directing of locality production, providing it with a more or less authoritative voice-over. Out there, however, in the everyday intersection between architecture and film, locality production is a far more polyvocal affair. The recent movie by French film maker Michel Gondry, Be Kind Rewind, takes place in this very intersection. Set in a trivial video-store in a sprawling and wornout post-industrial landscape, the film tells the story of Mike and Jerry, who, after having accidentally de-magnetized the video-tapes of the store, set out to re-enact (or, as they say, ‘swede’) the films; that is, with a low budget and a crew from the neighbourhood, remake them.50 In their own improvised way, re-enacting the plot of movies like Ghost Busters or Rush Hour, they manage to re-appropriate not only the representational action and narrative initiative, but also the social infrastructure of a patchy and uneven architectural landscape. Instead of critically dismissing this landscape, Gondry’s characters throw themselves into it, in an unprejudiced way exploring its presuppositions. And what they unveil are new forms of representational agency, a distributed and collaborative locality production based upon do-it-yourself storytelling. And this activist message, disrespectful of copyrighted voice-overs, has already generated not one but a multitude of follow-ups – not to say a ‘sweding’ movement of considerable magnitude.51 That Gondry from within manages to pull off a film that so obviously turns the premises of the Hollywood system inside out is in itself an interesting sign. Deliberately set in a new geopolitical landscape, it shows in practice that the local does not necessarily have to submit to a prescribed or commercially viable narrative. It also shows that the cinema, as Elsaesser puts it, ‘is part of us, it seems, even when we are not at the movies’.52 There is no longer a representative outside to the everyday inside, no fictive vantage point from which to establish an overview. There is no given plot,

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but only relations, from which to interact and perform. This inevitably changes the implications of directing the architectural landscape, but also opens up a whole new significance for its curating, which, in a situation of continuous de-magnetization, potentially will unfold as a both creative, collaborative and empowering story.

Notes 1

2

3 4 5

6

7

8 9

Baudrillard, Jean (1981), For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, St Louis: Telos Press; Scott Lash and John Urry (1994), Economies of Signs & Space, London: Sage Publications. Russian avant-garde filmmaker Lev Kuleshov, the first to develop a theory of montage. For Kuleshov, editing was the essence of cinema, something he actively demonstrated in what has come to be known as the Kuleshov Experiments. See Lev Kuleshov (1974), Kuleshov on Film. Writings, selected, translated and edited by Ronals Levaco, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press; and François Penz (2008) ‘From Topographical Coherence to Creative Geography: Rohmer’s The Aviator’s Wife and Rivette’s Pont du Nord’, in Andrew Webber and Emma Wilson (eds) (2008), Cities in Transition: The Moving Image and the Modern Metropolis, London: Wallflower Press, pp. 123-40. www.oresundfilm.com. Crang and Thrift, 2000. In an attempt to formulate a ‘trans-national anthropology’, an anthropology for societies that are no longer defined by a fixed geographical belonging, Appadurai puts an emphasis on the suffix -scape as the imaginary spatiality of a globalized world. According to Appadurai, global socio-cultural existence can be described in terms of different spatially extended -scapes – ethnoscapes, ideoscapes, technoscapes, financescapes and mediascapes – the suffix emphasizing the fact that these spatialities are not objectively given, but ‘perspectival constructs, inflected by the historical, linguistic, and political situatedness’ (Arjun Appadurai (1996), Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minneapolis Press, p. 33); a deliberate expansion of a more restricted scenic or pictorial understanding of landscape. Saskia Sassen (2003), ‘Reading the City in a Global Digital Age: Between Topographic Representation and Spatialized Power Projects’, in Linda Krause and Patrice Petro (eds), Global Cities: Cinema, Architecture and Urbanism in a Digital Age, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, p. 20. In his book Gode intentioner og uregerlige byer (Good intentions and unruly cities), Danish architectural theorist Tom Nielsen discusses the difference between ‘urbanism’ and ‘city planning’. To a greater extent than the notion of city planning, urbanism embraces the intention of linking descriptive or critical investigations to deliberate interventions (Tom Nielsen (2008), Gode intentioner og uregerlige byer, Århus: Arkitektskolens forlag, footnote 3). Ackbar Abbas (2003), ‘Cinema, the City and the Cinematic’, in Linda Krause and Patrice Petro (eds), op. cit., p. 144. In a text published in 1939 and entitled Illuminations, Benjamin describes the city dweller as ‘a kaleidoscope attributed with a consciousness’, an instrument reacting upon very different stimuli. ‘Thus technology [in the city]’, Benjamin continues, has subjected the human sensorium to a complex kind of training. There came a day when a new and urgent need for stimuli was met by the film. In a film, perception in the form of shocks was established as a formal principle. That which determines the rhythm of production on a conveyor belt is the basis of the rhythm of reception in the film.

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10

11

12 13

14 15 16

17

18 19

20

21 22

23 24 25

Ackbar Abbas (2003), ‘Cinema, the City and the Cinematic’, in Linda Krause and Patrice Petro (eds), Global Cities: Cinema, Architecture and Urbanism in a Digital Age, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, p. 144. ‘The willing suspension of disbelief for the moment’; an expression coined by Samuel Taylor Coleridge in his Bibliographia Literaria (1817) and which aimed at a person’s promptitude to accept the premises of fiction. See the entry ‘aesthetics’ in Encyclopædia Britannica Online, 2008. http://search.eb.com/eb/article-9106009 (accessed 2 April 2008). For a discussion of how the cinematic medium affected the conception of space and architecture, see also Malin Zimm (2005), Losing The Plot: Architecture and Narrativity in Fin-de-Siècle Media Cultures, Stockholm: Axl Books. Associated Press, 9 March 2007 and The Simpsons Archive, www.snpp.com/guides/ sprinfield.list.html (accessed 13 March 2007). Jonathan Brown (2007), ‘Father Ted Fans Invade as Fight for Real Craggy Island is Settled’, the Independent, 24 February 2007. Online: http://new.independent.co.uk/ Europe/article2300383.ece (accessed 13 March 2007). ‘Come friendly bombs, and fall on Slough/It isn’t fit for humans now/There isn’t grass to graze a cow/Swarm over, death!’ John Betjeman, ‘Slough’, 1937. The Office (2001–3), BBC TV-series, created by comedian Ricky Gervais. See www.bbc.co.uk/comedy/theoffice/. Slough Local Development Framework 2006–2026, pp. 16 and 22. See also ‘Slough to celebrate its “beauty” ’; article at BBC News, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/ berkshire/6761065.stm (accessed 9 January 2008). It is also worth noting that Slough at the official web page of the TV series has its own entry, an entry which no longer is ‘clickable’. I Wallanders fotspår (In the Footsteps of Wallander), booklet produced by the municipality of Ystad. Online: www.ystad.se/ystadweb.nsf/wwwpages/ 2FAB0AEAFDC7DF 34C1256B6F004AD622/$File/wallander_pdf_svenska.pdf (accessed 18 October 2007). See also Ystad Studios’ homepage at www.ystadstudios.se/. In this quite superficial analysis of the Rotterdam Film Fund, I have exclusively used information available on its website, www.rff.rotterdam.nl/. See Wouter Vanstiphout (2006), ‘Dirty Minimalism – The Liberation of Unimportance in Recent Dutch Architecture’, Harvard Design Magazine, 24, spring/summer 2006, available online: http://www.gsd.harvard.edu/research/publications/hdm/back/ 24_Vanstiphout.html (accessed 20 March 2007). For a discussion about Rotterdam in the wake of these radical bids, see Wouter Vanstiphout (2006): ‘From being architecture’s main tabernacle, this city has become its butcher’s block.’ However, as architectural revitalization has become increasingly politically problematic, the moving image, as a more commonplace subcultural practice, has gained in importance. See www.filmlondon.org.uk/. A free online search, however, reveals severe flaws in the system; the same location shows up irrespective of input data. OFC is a non-profit organization established in 2003 on the initiative of regional stakeholders, such as the municipalities of Copenhagen and Fredriksberg (Denmark), the Region of Skåne (Scania, Sweden) and the municipality of Malmö (Sweden), cofunded also by the EU through funds for regional development. See www.oresundfilm.com. www.oresundfilm.com (accessed 3 March 2007). Interview via mail with the Danish representative for the commission, Ulrik Bolt Jørgensen 12 March 2007. According to OFC director Ulrik Bolt Jørgensen, the design of the location database is inspired by a number of similar Internet resources, combined with a thorough

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26

27

28 29 30 31

32

33

34

35 36 37

38 39

76

experience of what is demanded from film producers. Mail interview with Ulrik Bolt Jørgensen, 12 March 2007. Only a limited number (30 out of 268) of ‘city looks’ show people and most of the photographs, furthermore, present a very bright image of the region. In the same category (‘city looks’), 140 images clearly show bright sunlight, reinforced by blue skies. Only 24 images are cloudy. Some 22 are night shots and 41 are interiors. Film cartolina, Italian for postcard movie, sample movie, tourist movie. During the 1950s, Rome established itself as the European equivalent to Hollywood. Emphasizing the possibilities of filming ‘on location’ this bid was also intimately associated with the launching of Rome as a tourist destination. Characteristic topography and magnificent views, combined with an epic tradition, played an important role. Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita (1960), with Swedish actress Anita Ekberg’s famous performance in Fontana di Trevi, is one, albeit perhaps more ‘artistic’, example. OFC director Ulrik Bolt Jørgensen in a mail interview 12 March 2007. For the film commission of Malta, see www.mfc.com.mt. See www.locamundo.com. See www.filmlondon.org.uk/content.asp?CategoryID=764 (accessed 1 February 2008). In May 2008, the football stadium ‘The Den’ was appointed the location of the month. Situated in Bermondsey, south-east London, only 4.3 miles from central London, it is the stadium closest to the city. The pitch was used in March 2008 by Nike as the stage for their 2008 European Championship advertisement video. Previous months featured the former government building Shoreditch Town Hall, the disused Aldwych Station and rough Silwood Street, situated not far from ‘The Den’ in the working-class neighbourhood of Bermondsey. For the most popular locations, Film London provides detailed guidelines, as in the case of Big Ben, where 11 potential camera positions are marked out, with information of whom to contact in order to request permission. See www.filmlondon.org.uk/ uploads/documents/doc_248.pdf (accessed 29 May 2008). Michel Foucault’s seminal text ‘Of Other Spaces’ naturally plays an important role as to a ‘filmic’ locality production, which certainly, with Foucault’s words could be described as ‘[t]he space in which we live, which draws us out of ourselves, in which the erosion of our lives, our time and our history occurs, the space that claws and gnaws at us’ (Michel Foucault (1986/1997) ‘Of Other Spaces’, in Documenta X – The Book, Kassel: Cantz Verlag, pp. 262–72). Carys Swanwick (ed.) (2002) Landscape Character Assessment – Guidance for England and Scotland. The Countryside Agency and The Scottish Natural Heritage, p. 3. Available online: www.countryside.gov.uk/lar/landscape/cc/landscape/publication/ (accessed 31 May 2008). Swanwick, op. cit., p. 9. Swanwick, op. cit, p. 10. SAVE, Survey of Architectural Values in the Environment. See SAVE – orientering (SAVE – an orientation). Miljø- og Energiministeriet, Skov- og Naturstyrelsen, 1997. See also Kaspar Lægring Nielsen (2007), ‘SAVE som æstetisk og politisk praxis – med udgangspunkt i Christiania’ (‘SAVE as aesthetic and political praxis with the point of departure in Christiania’), in Anne Tjetjen, Svava Riesto and Pernille Skov (eds), Forankring I forandring. Christiania og bevaring som ressource i byomdannelse (Grounded in Change. Christiania and conservation as resource for urban regeneration), Århus: Arkitektskolens Forlag, pp. 153–75. Lægring-Nielsen, op. cit., p. 158. I here especially refer to the deliberate use of architectural assessment protocols in urban ‘normalization’ or gentrification processes, like the one initiated by the neoliberal Danish government in 2003 in order to finally come to grips with the self-

Awaiting the voice-over

40 41 42 43

44 45 46 47

48

49 50

51 52

governed Freetown of Christiania in Copenhagen. See Maria Hellström (2006) Steal This Place: The Aesthetics of Tactical Formlessness and ‘The Free Town of Christiania’, doctoral dissertation, Acta Universitatis Agriculturae Sueciae 2006: 27, SLU, Alnarp, and Tjetjen et al. (2007). Gilles Deleuze (1983/1992), Cinema I, London: The Athlone Press, pp. 5–6. Henry Jenkins (2006), Convergence Culture – Where Old and New Media Collide, New York: New York University Press. Guy Debord (1967/1987), The Society of the Spectacle, London: Rebel Press. H. Häussermann and C. Colomb (2003), ‘The New Berlin: Marketing the City of Dreams’, in L. M. Hoffman, S. S. Fainstein and D. R. Judd (eds), Cities and Visitors: Regulating People, Markets and City Space, London: Blackwell, pp. 200–18. Kenneth Frampton (2005), ‘The Work of Architecture in the Age of Commodification’, Harvard Design Magazine, 23, Fall 2005/Winter 2006, pp. 64–9. See Patrick Keiller’s film London (1994) and the follow-up Robinson in Space (1997). Fredric Jameson (1992), The Geo-Political Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Elsaesser, Thomas (2004) ‘The New Film History as Media Archeology’, in Cinémas, 14, pp. 2–3. Available online: www.erudit.org/revue/cine/2004/v14/n2–3/026005ar. html (accessed 15 September 2007). In his influential essay ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ (1935/1999), Walter Benjamin quoted the French writer George Duhamel, who claimed that ‘I can no longer think what I want to think. My thoughts have been replaced by moving images.’ See also Elsaesser, op. cit. Elsaesser, op. cit. The concept ‘sweding’ does not have any specific connotations to Sweden but was randomly chosen as a notion ‘that meant nothing but still sounded cool’. Gondry interviewed by Nicholas Wennö in the major Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter, 20 April 2008. There are today more than 2,000 ‘sweded’ movies to be found on YouTube. Elsaesser, op. cit.

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Curating contemporary architecture Touring the Bilbao Guggenheim and Seattle Central Library Ari Seligmann

The Bilbao Guggenheim Museum (1997) and the Seattle Central Library (2004) represent contemporary landmarks with high levels of public exposure. These projects are paragons of contemporary mediagenic architecture that continue to be curated through media portrayals, marketing materials and tourist promotions. Tourism is an established form of curating the built environment and individual building tours shape public perceptions of architecture. Analysing tours of the Bilbao Guggenheim and Seattle Library elucidates the narration of contemporary architecture and its implications. Frank Gehry’s Bilbao Guggenheim Museum generated a lot of publicity for architecture. Among a host of accolades, it has even been described as ‘the building that made architecture famous’.1 Yet, how is this famous building portrayed to its visitors? The Acoustiguide tour offered by the museum represents the primary depiction of its architecture. Within museum practices audio guides have become a standard tool to help patrons navigate and learn more about exhibited works. Such guides typically explain the artworks, but in Bilbao the first two programmes on the audio guide introduce the museum building, reinforcing the primacy of its architecture. At the outset, patrons who rent an Acoustiguide are offered a choice of viewing the exhibits or hearing about ‘this amazing building’.2 The first tour on the audio guide begins with the central atrium of the museum. With a pervasive tone of enthusiastic revelry the narrator inquires ‘Isn’t this a wonderful place? . . . you can feel your soul rise up with the building around you’.3 The guide proceeds to explain the centrepiece atrium as the heart of the museum and as an uplifting decompression chamber providing respite between demanding encounters with contemporary art. The atrium is also portrayed as a domesticating device. The guide describes This space, to which you can return after every gallery, to refresh the spirit before your next encounter with the demands of Contemporary Art. This building recognizes that modern art is demanding – complicated, bewilder-

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ing – and the Museum tries to make you feel at home, so that you can relax and absorb what you see more easily.4 While the vertiginous dynamism of the atrium is hardly a haven with visual calm, the guide rationalizes that curving surfaces are appealing, welcoming and soothing to everyone. The narrator suggests These curving surfaces have a direct appeal, that has nothing to do with age or class or education. They give the building its warmth, its welcoming feel, and in this way the atrium tries to make you feel at home, and prepares you for the purpose of the building – the art it contains.5 While there may be a need to domesticate the spatial exuberance of the dynamic atrium for diverse patrons, repeatedly describing the atrium in terms of domestic comfort is jarring. Especially since the monumental scale of the atrium strains any domestic associations. Moreover, art is often associated with notions of sacred and distinct from secular daily life. The notion of a relaxing domestic atmosphere preparing people for the reception of art is incongruent with the distinguishing and inspiring roles of the museum. While the Bilbao Guggenheim is no longer solely a solemn repository of art, it also lacks any sense of domestic familiarity – formally, spatially or materially.

Bilbao Guggenheim atrium.

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While art museums are typically places to look but not touch, at the Bilbao Guggenheim visitors are encouraged to engage with the building. The narrator suggests that the supple surfaces stimulate visitors to run their hands along the walls. In fact, the guide invites patrons to stroke the sensual limestone curves and admire the undulating glass panels. The guide explains ‘These curves are gentle, but in their huge scale powerfully sensual. You will see people going up to the walls and stroking them. You might feel the desire to do so yourself’. Later it suggests ‘Stroke these gleaming titanium scales, and think of the architect playing with the carp in the bathwater’.6 The sexual undertones in these descriptions even inspired a video performance piece by the artist Andrea Fraser. In Little Frank and His Carp (2001) the Bilbao Guggenheim audio guide serves as a soundtrack goading Fraser as she caresses and embraces the building, adding new meaning to public displays of affection.7 While the audio guide cultivates popular affection for the museum, it also highlights resonances between art and architecture. In the ongoing debate over the primacy of art or architecture in museums, the Guggenheim is often criticized for overwhelming its contents.8 However, the audio guide portrays the opposite, stressing how well-suited Richard Serra’s Snake (1997) is for the large ‘fish’ gallery. It also recounts that Jenny Holzer viewed the architecture of her ‘semi-weird’ room as a ‘gift that would strengthen her art’.9 Since the diversity of the galleries helps expand the possibilities of art installations, the narrator proudly concludes that the building enhances the art it contains. In between grandiloquent descriptions and anecdotes about Gehry’s fishy obsessions, the guide also manages to squeeze in some technical information about

Still from Little Frank and His Carp (2001). Courtesy of Andrea Fraser.

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the building. The narrator explains how computer technology enabled the design and production of the project, which he predicts will revolutionize architecture and expand the architectural imagination. The tour also points out how computer controls manage lighting, life safety and HVAC systems. The guide mostly marvels at the building, but surprisingly it also uses the large ‘fish’ gallery to illustrate the subtle incorporation of lighting and ventilation systems. The first audio guide programme focuses primarily on the interiors, but also outlines some of the urban strategies of the museum. It highlights the public spaces surrounding the building – including the large entry plaza and the riverside bridge extending the waterfront promenade. The tour suggests that the glazed curtain walls of the atrium blur interior and exterior spaces while creating presumed linkages between the city and the river. Transparency is supposed to facilitate connections ‘so that the building both welcomes the outside world, and reaches out to the city, to cast it spell on inhabitants and visitors alike’.10 However, while the glazing suggests openness, the tower and exterior articulation of the atrium are actually the primary beacons luring people to the museum. Tour programme one ends by inviting museum patrons who have been seduced by sinuous forms and opportunities to caress curved panels of limestone and titanium to ‘continue to explore this wonderful building’.11 In programme two, as the narrator leads patrons around the exterior he complements his claims with first-hand accounts from the architect. Yet, in contrast to the diverse coverage of the first programme, the second treats the building as an art object. Various portrayals position the architect as artist and the building as an urban sculpture. Gehry openly acknowledges that he thinks of the city in sculptural terms and states that translating the beauty of sculpture with movement and feeling is the basis for innovative architecture. As visitors circumambulate the building, Gehry recounts

Entry and efforts to beckon visitors.

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I’ve always thought of the city in sculptural terms. The city itself is a sculpture that can be composed, and in which relationships can be established. To say that a building has to have a certain architectural attitude to be a building is too limiting. If you can translate the beauty of sculpture into the building, whatever it does to give it movement and feeling, that’s where the innovation in architecture is.12 However, equating the building with sculpture leads to a series of formal analyses and the guide subsequently describes juxtapositions, dynamism and lighting effects. Repeated claims of ‘beautiful composition’ throughout the second tour programme culminate with the emphatic opinion that ‘it is difficult to imagine this building more beautiful than it is’.13 The narrator establishes a position of authority throughout the tour and uses it, with corroboration from the architect, to impress upon visitors the aesthetic virtues of the museum. Despite the incessant hyperbole, the building tour concludes noting that the museum has become a valuable engine for Bilbao’s urban regeneration. Rather than segue to the next programme by taking visitors back into the museum to see the art on display in the galleries, the guide ends reminding patrons ‘when you go back inside don’t forget to look at the exhibits’.14 This telling turn of phrase further suggests that the building is imagined as the main attraction of the museum’s collection. While the first tour programme furtively conveys a lot of information about the building in passing – from materiality and production to HVAC systems and urban strategies – the second programme primarily fetishizes formal achievements. The Guggenheim has a stake in promoting the building, but this does not warrant the generally inflated rhetoric of the audio guide. Furthermore, the building is portrayed as an artwork in the Guggenheim collection. Despite identifying urban relationships and technological features, architecture is treated as sculpture and Gehry upheld as an artistic genius. While it may be beneficial for the museum to represent architecture as art, this unproductively limits public perceptions of the discipline. Proffering incongruent domestic analogies, encouraging patrons to pet the building and reducing architecture to sculptural form colours the public image of architecture. Even though the Bilbao Guggenheim represents the expansion of architectural possibilities, the audio-guide tour narrows public perspectives of architecture by equating it with art. The media fervour generated by the Bilbao Guggenheim was echoed by the Seattle Central Library, leading some to suggest that ‘what Bilbao has become for museums, Seattle is becoming for libraries’.15 Though both projects shared the media spotlight, their tours represent dramatically different approaches to curating contemporary architecture. Variations in their depictions may be partially explained by institutional differences. Both are educational institutions, but the museum is primarily concerned with art appreciation and enriching culture while the library is a public information outlet. This has some influences on the ways they present architecture – emphasizing aesthetics or functions. Both projects introduced innovations, but the museum is best known for formal advances while the library is noted for

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novel organizational strategies. These perceptions are reinforced by the tours and shape which dimensions are highlighted on tours. The tour contents also vary with regard to audience. While the museum tours guide paying visitors, the library is open to multiple audiences including the general public using the facility and visitors. Both facilities follow tour precedents. The use of audio guides is an established part of contemporary museum experiences, but the Bilbao Guggenheim expands this practice by including a building tour at the outset. Similarly, most major North American libraries have a general tour highlighting the facilities and sometimes the architectural heritage of the institution, but none match the variety of tour options offered by the Seattle Central Library.16 The Seattle Library regularly conducts two guided tours – a general tour and an architectural tour.17 The library also provides two self-guided tours – one based on an explanatory pamphlet available at the entrances to the building and the other following a downloadable audio tour for MP3 players. There is also a virtual tour through an online video narrated by the City Librarian, which can also be downloaded and actually followed in situ. Initially, the library tours familiarized the public with its innovative facilities and celebrated its accomplishments as a new model for twenty-first-century libraries. As a result of international attention, the library quickly became a new tourist destination in Seattle, and building tours continue to accommodate tourists. Though the number of guided tours has progressively declined over the years, they continue to be a prominent visitor service.18 In order to add more flexibility for those who cannot

Seattle Central Library docent-led tour.

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coordinate visits with the established tour schedule, the library issued a self-guided tour pamphlet in 2006. The MP3 audio tour, which added additional options for visitors, became available in spring 2007. The virtual video tour also debuted in spring 2007 as a marketing mechanism to both introduce the facility and invite additional visitors. The audio and virtual tours complement and have not yet replaced the docent-led guided tours. Despite expectations of overlap and duplication the library tour options are actually quite different. While they each have varied emphases and routes, there are consistent themes and a relatively neutral tone throughout. Unlike the museum, which is invested in cultural promotion, the library is not necessarily a promoter of the built environment. However, a brief comparative content analysis of the library tours reveals the ways that architecture is depicted and demonstrates the balance of architectural, technical and operational information presented. According to Jeff Christensen, tour and event coordinator for the Seattle Central Library, many visitors assume that the general tour addresses how to use the facilities and when possible opt for the architecture tour because they think that it will explain more about the unique building. In fact, the general tour covers many architectural aspects. The tour actually begins with the building, outlining a brief history of the project and explaining the design concept. The tour highlights the facilities and artworks throughout the building. The guide describes innovative features such as the Mixing Chamber, which consolidated reference resources, and the Books Spiral, which organized the entire non-fiction collection in numerical order on a continuous minimumslope surface, as well as sustainable features, which earned the library a Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) silver rating. The tour concludes positioning architecture as a public art, explaining that even though exterior views of the library may give the impression of an architectural spectacle, in fact the library was generated through extensive civic conversations and continues to enrich Seattle’s social and urban landscapes. The general tour maintains that the library represents local civic values while evoking wonder and discovery, and summarizes the library as ‘highly rational, but quite poetic’. As expected, the general tour provides the broadest coverage for the widest audience. The architecture tour, initiated in conjunction with the Seattle Architectural Foundation, introduces the facility, but emphasizes more technical aspects of the building. While the general tour is fully scripted, the architecture tour is based on a fixed introductory section and then a loose outline for docents to elaborate upon based on their interests and the desires of the given tour group. Docents are encouraged to poll their audience and calibrate the tour accordingly. The architecture tour begins by recounting the competition process and architect selection. In sharp contrast to the Bilbao Guggenheim, the library is portrayed as an example of the classic modernist dictum ‘form follows function’, based on the form of the building being derived from consolidating the programme requirements into platforms that were modified to maximize contextual relationships and then fitted with a glass skin. Portrayals echo Rem Koolhaas’s public presentations of the project and also reflect input from the project

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manager, of the local partner architectural firm (LMN), who helped formulate the architectural tour. Like the general tour, the design concept is presented at the outset, but the architecture tour also explains strategies for structure, glazing, HVAC systems, fire protection and building materials. Compared to the general tour, the architectural tour traces a modified route through the building and concludes at a different physical and conceptual point. The architectural tour ends reminding visitors that architecture is a collaborative product. The guide notes that client, architect, engineers, consultants, contractors and the public all contributed to the resulting project, which continues to exceed expectations and attendance records. The collaborative architecture depicted in Seattle is radically different from the tale of genius masterpiece found in Bilbao. Shifting to the self-guided tours, since they also address broad audiences both were derived from the general tour. The pamphlet-based self-guided tour is an extremely abbreviated version of the general tour, outlining floor-by-floor highlights. The pamphlet also contains a brief section with frequently asked questions addressing pressing concerns such as ‘How do you wash the windows?’, ‘What are those white puffy things on the ceiling on level 10?’, ‘Why are the hallways on level 4 red?’ and ‘Why are the escalators and elevators fluorescent green-yellow?’. On its own the pamphlet provides an overview, but is a little difficult to use as a tour map. The self-guided tour pamphlet is supplemented by additional documents available at the library – the letter-size map of the Central Library and reprints of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer’s ‘Cool house, a guide to Seattle Central Library’. With these three documents in tow, a visitor has all they need to explore the building on their own. The recently added audio tour also provides flexibility and independence to visitors, while acquainting them with library features.19 The audio tour is loosely based on the general tour, but does not follow the same script, and takes a different route meandering from level 1 to 10. The audio tour focuses more on describing the facilities. It identifies the architects, but never explicates the concept for the library. The narrator elaborates on some of the sustainable material choices, but explains the artworks distributed throughout the library in more detail than the architecture. A distinguishing feature of the audio guide is the inclusion of librarians introducing various sections of the library such as: the children’s area, teen centre, the Mixing Chamber and the arts collection. While ending at a different physical location, the audio tour echoes the conclusion of the general tour. It reminds visitors that the library is not simply an architectural marvel, but an active civic venue fostering wonder and discovery. The virtual tour is the most recent addition to touring options. The City Librarian narrates this tour presenting a comprehensive view of the facility.20 The tour is front-loaded with factual information concerning the architects, size, cost, visitor volumes, etc. The narrator provides historical background, assesses reception of the project and highlights the revolutionary Books Spiral. The City Librarian also reiterates that rather than hire a ‘star architect’, the Library Board wanted an architectural team that could handle a diverse client and intensive public participation. The tour explains that Rem Koolhaas provided the design intelligence needed to address the challenges

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Seattle Central Library audio tour and building wayfinding.

facing contemporary libraries ‘with grace and beauty’. In Bilbao the audio guide beats visitors over the head with beauty, but in Seattle the virtual tour is one of the few places that the notion of beauty is invoked. The City Librarian proudly declares ‘While the building continues to wow and welcome tourists its beauty surpasses even what Rem and the rest of us had envisioned’. However, the virtual tour does not dwell on aesthetics; it quickly returns to functional aspects emphasizing the technological systems incorporated to facilitate efficient operation. This tour also stresses environmentally sensitive aspects – from waterless toilets to electric chargers in the parking area. After providing a general overview, the virtual tour embarks on a floor-by-floor recap of features. The tour concludes inviting virtual visitors to come and experience the library for themselves. Unlike the other tours, which end stressing either collaboration or civic expression, the virtual tour concludes soliciting ‘We hope you, your friends, and family will come and visit us many times’. In contrast to Bilbao, Seattle Library tours refrain from incessantly lauding aesthetics and instead proudly demonstrate how the building works. Throughout the different tours the library is recognized as being an innovative organization, technologically advanced, environmentally sensitive and a civic facility providing public access to information. The library tours portray architecture as a collectively generated inventive solution to identifiable problems, not simply as sculptural aesthetic production. This comparison of tours at the Bilbao Guggenheim and the Seattle Library reveals a range of strategies and techniques for curating contemporary architecture. The Bilbao Guggenheim audio guide imparts a narrow reading of architecture with a singular narrative drenched in hyperbole. The Guggenheim tour portrays architecture

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as art using recurring adjectives such as amazing, wonderful, sculptural and beautiful. The Seattle Library offers several tours calibrated to multiple audiences and provides multifaceted presentations of architecture delivered with enthusiastic precision. The library tours portray architecture as poetic problem solving and repeatedly use descriptors such as exciting, efficient, comfortable and ingenious. The tours curate architecture stressing formal aspects in Bilbao and functional aspects in Seattle. While the library tours provide a more balanced presentation of architecture, the emphases of the museum and library tours reinforce discursive construction of the projects for broader audiences.

Conclusion These tours raise several open questions applicable to multiple forms of curation. What is an appropriate mode of delivery? For example, should curation explicate, historicize, reframe, critique, promote or celebrate? How should presentations be calibrated for intended audiences (which also necessitates defining audiences such as novices, professionals, connoisseurs, tourists or the general public)? Additional concerns include how to incorporate diversity into depictions and how to convey information while fostering wonder and discovery. In addition to the messages (content), the media (evolving technologies) supporting tours in Bilbao and Seattle also help expand considerations of curation. Moving beyond rented audio guides, which have become commonplace in museums, MP3 tours (podcasts) and virtual tours open new avenues for creating guides to the built environment. Institutions are increasingly exploring the potentials of these media, such as Shape East (The Architecture and Built Environment Centre for Cambridge) with their MP3 audio walks of Cambridge, or commercial organizations such as Tourist Tracks.21 While the proliferation of MP3 technology allows easy distribution of narrated self-guided tours for any environment, broad access to technology also enables anyone to become a curator. Similarly, the virtual tour of the library extends its reach through portable computers and video iPods. Yet, while the library guides its presentation through the virtual tour, venues such as YouTube allow people to present their own takes on the built environment. The variety of tours offered at the Seattle Library is related to its populism as a public library, but YouTube represents the further popularization of narrating architecture and urbanism. As prominent examples of mediagenic architecture, the Bilbao Guggenheim and the Seattle Library both appear on YouTube. In contrast to the institutional tours previously examined, a brief survey of YouTube presentations reveals a plurality of approaches. The buildings serve as backdrops, are described in travelogues and are the subjects of mini-documentaries, some of which mimic the institutional tours.22 The projects and their tours become raw materials for further representations. Examination of the Bilbao Guggenheim and Seattle Library demonstrate that institutions are narrating their images and facilities through tours, while positioning

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architecture in the public realm. Expanding on museum audio guides, the evolving media of portable audio and video, employed at the library, present new possibilities for curating the built environment. New media open channels for new messages. The ease of creating content also challenges institutional authority and potentially broadens the field of curation. While the Seattle Library has an armature to accommodate multiplicity, portrayals of the Bilbao Guggenheim could benefit from alternative perspectives. However, the proliferation and plurality of multimedia representations will inevitably require further curation.

Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

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Joseph Giovannini, ‘Experience Music Project’, Architecture (2000, August), 80. Bilbao Guggenheim, ‘Building Tour – Script for Recording’, October 1998 draft, Inform program 0, no. 5. Bilbao Guggenheim, ‘Building Tour – Script for Recording’, Inform program 1, no. 6. Bilbao Guggenheim, ‘Building Tour – Script for Recording’, Inform program 1, no. 8. Bilbao Guggenheim, ‘Building Tour – Script for Recording’, Inform program 1, no. 9. Bilbao Guggenheim, ‘Building Tour – Script for Recording’, Inform program 1, no. 9, no. 23. Little Frank and His Carp is a six-minute video performance filmed with hidden cameras in the atrium of the Bilbao Guggenheim. It is an institutional critique of museological seduction and an absurdist amplification of the suggestive audio guide. See Andrea Fraser, ‘ “Isn’t This a Wonderful Place?” (A Tour of a Tour of the Guggenheim Bilbao)’, in Anna Maria Guasch and Joseba Zulaika (eds), Learning from the Bilbao Guggenheim (Reno, NV: Center for Basque Studies, 2005), pp. 37–58; Mildred Malone, Andrea Fraser – Little Frank and His Carp (June 2007 [cited 9 September 2007]), available online: www.kemperartmuseum.wustl.edu/spotlight6.07.pdf. For continuing debates on the competition between art and architecture in museums, see Ann Wilson Lloyd, ‘Architecture for Art’s Sake’, The Atlantic, June 2001, www.theatlantic.com/doc/200106/lloyd (accessed 4 August 2004); Allan Schwartzman, ‘Art vs. Architecture’, Architecture, 86, 12 (1997): 56–9; Evdoxia Baniotopoulou, ‘Art for Whose Sake? Modern Art Museums and Their Role in Transforming Societies: The Case of the Guggenheim Bilbao’, Journal of Conservation and Museum Studies, 7 (2001): 1–13. Bilbao Guggenheim, ‘Building Tour – Script for Recording’, Inform program 1, no. 28. Bilbao Guggenheim, ‘Building Tour – Script for Recording’, Inform program 1, no. 26. Bilbao Guggenheim, ‘Building Tour – Script for Recording’, Inform program 1, no. 31. Bilbao Guggenheim, ‘Building Tour – Script for Recording’, Inform program 2, no. 53. Bilbao Guggenheim, ‘Building Tour – Script for Recording’, Inform program 2, no. 47. Bilbao Guggenheim, ‘Building Tour – Script for Recording’, Inform program 2, no. 62. Brian Kenney, ‘After Seattle’, Library Journal (2005, 15 August): 54. For example, the Los Angeles Public Library has tours daily and a self-guided tour pamphlet, the New York Public Library has two tours daily and the San Francisco Public Library offers tours once a month. As of autumn 2007, the general and architectural tours were each offered about twice a week. There is an additional set of guided and self-guided tours for school children not addressed in this chapter. See www.spl.org/default.asp?pageID=audience_children_schooltours. Tracking tour statistics, between opening in June 2004 and December 2004 11,465

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19 20

21 22

people participated in tours, but for 2006 only 5,430. Building renovations in 2006 caused a two-month hiatus of tours. But even a comparison of the peak month for visitors, August, reveals a steady decline from 2,296 people in 2004 to 1,373 in 2005 to 672 in 2006 and 392 in 2007. Data provided by the Seattle Central Library. The audio tour is available online: www.spl.org/default.asp?pageID=branch_ central_visit_tours&branchID=1. The virtual tour is available online: www.spl.org/default.asp?pageID=branch_ central_visit_tours&branchID=1. The virtual tour has also been packaged as a souvenir sold in DVD form at the Friends of the Library gift shop. See www.stridedesign.net/shapewalks/audiowalkshome.aspx and www.touristtracks.com/index.html. These are some highlights from a survey of YouTube coverage of the Seattle Library and Bilbao Guggenheim. ‘Seattle Library’ by jocelf is a critique comparing the new Central Library to the historic University Branch Carnegie library. See www.youtube. com/watch?v=JK1OXO1lF-A. ‘Donnie Does Seattle’ by CarolNewYorker is primarily a travelogue, but the Seattle Library portion includes a back-of-house tour that is never available to regular visitors or guided-tour participants. However, the explanations of other areas of the library, especially in the children’s area, mimic the guided tour. See www.youtube.com/watch?v=WHCJJf7QXyU. ‘Seattle Public Library’ by Loggerguy77 is a peripatetic roving presentation of the library in constant motion. See www.youtube.com/watch?v=fzsY50XxULM. ‘Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao’ by ad5901 is a mini-travel documentary on the museum and one of the few videos daring, or furtive, enough to capture the atrium, since photography is banned on the interiors. See www.youtube.com/watch?v=xxVgz3np7AM. ‘The Incredible Museum Guggenheim!!!’ traces multiple stages of the museum from construction to inhabitation, but uses jump cuts between images like a music video. See www.youtube.com/watch?v=zkYjyUs_FgM. Reinforcing the range of representations ‘museo guggenheim Bilbao’ by manuelgiron is a slideshow of still images of the exterior of the museum. See www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z8Eey0Syqac. Since interior photography is not permitted, most YouTube videos of the Bilbao Guggenheim are generally exposés of the exterior.

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Rethinking curatorship, rethinking architecture

Cura Tim Gough

This chapter outlines an idea of the curation of the city, which, eschewing both the concepts of the virtual and the material, and the opposition between them, considers instead the interplay between inhabitation and the spatial realm. This resonance gives inhabitation its possibility. In (re)turn, those who inhabit give both their everyday and their curatorial attention to that spatial realm which, in this very movement, becomes something other. I will posit that Deleuze’s early idea of an ‘irreducible’ life, before and beyond conceptual oppositions, is the locus of a rich curatorship. This idea of curatorship can be ascertained in the strategy used at Matt’s Gallery, a publicly-funded arts venue in East London. This strategy sets up a series of situations: first, the artist/curator operates within and with the space of the gallery to create the show; second, potentially, this curatorial and creative event is projected into the time of the ‘viewer’/’inhabitant’, the time beyond the opening, the time of the show itself. The same strategy, I will argue, should be at work in the city, in the activity of architects and urban planners; and I will conclude with the claim that it is only by the projection of an essentially open, ‘liturgical’ future that the full import of this strategy can be experienced. If virtuality is, in truth and for us, today, the ephemeral interplay of webbased social spaces and images which never leave the realm of light (widely defined: the electromagnetic spectrum) and differential impulse, then the nature of material – the ‘stuff’ of which buildings and the city are made, of the ‘reality’ placed in contrast to this supposed virtuality – is far from certain. One paradox of this increasingly virtual situation is that the practical curatorial tendencies of the late twentieth century in respect of the city, architecture and other artefacts in the so-called built environment, influenced by an archaeological materialism, far from reducing the significance of the physical has tended to reify the material existence of such artefacts. It is as if the Cartesian res extensa, the extended material body, despite being called into question in the name of phenomenology, existentialism and their later progeny, has mounted a last stance within the laws, regulations and conservation charters providing the policed framework within which the

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curation of significant buildings occurs. However, it is far from clear that this is merely the remnants of an essentially outmoded ontology. This materialism – sanctioned legally and by the hegemony of technology and science – is as virtual as virtuality ‘itself’, and what establishes the status of the virtual is what establishes that of its partner, materialism. Indeed for quite obvious reasons, namely that there is an overall structure of thought within which they interplay and obtain their validity. The credence of the extended substance of material artefacts is at the same time the credence of the thinking substance of the res cogitans. Our virtual existence is the outworking of the concept of thinking substance, pushed to an extreme; likewise the immense validity placed on the physical existence of our cities and buildings is an outworking of the concept of material substance, again taken to the limit. There is the sense that if extreme, exemplary and irrecoverable loss is to be measured, then the inevitable criterion by which one would achieve this is that of the loss of a material artefact – the destruction of a building, for instance, or the removal of a section of historic fabric. No matter that this is a perversion of Descartes. If Peter Carl points out that architects have a habit of turning tools of analysis into means of production – when he makes reference to ‘the ease with which [they] can transform an instrument of criticism into one of composition’1 – then in doing so they stand in a common tradition. The transformation of Kant’s third critique of aesthetic judgement into the discipline of aesthetics raising the question of the judgement and analysis of works of art became the question of the production and validation of works of art. An epistemological question about the possibilities for judging certain isolated categories became a hegemonic ontology and validation system. In the case of the Cartesian duality of mind and body, res cogitans and res extensa, the perversion was succinctly put by Gilles Deleuze in his first published work from 1946 entitled Mathesis, Science and Philosophy,2 where he states: the knowing mind, as distinct as it might be in itself from the extension with which it appears to have strictly nothing in common, nonetheless deploys the order of things in thinking the order of its representations. At the very moment where unity is affirmed, this unity breaks apart and destroys itself. But in being broken apart, Descartes now remarks, unity finds its true sense in re-forming upon another plane, where it finds its true meaning. In so far as the theoretical disunion of thought and extension is affirmed, so too is the fact of their practical union, as a definition of life. Unity does not come about at the level of an abstract God transcending humanity, but in the very name of concrete life . . . the unity . . . is the unity of life itself, which delineates a third order, irreducible to the other two.3 (Emphasis added) Deleuze’s notion of perversion is thus the attempt to define life – his third order – in terms of res cogitans and res extensa. These are reductions of ‘life’; therefore, per-

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force, life is irreducible to them. Yet the post-Cartesian gains obtained by virtue of this Cartesian schema in the distinct and limited realms of science and technology has led precisely to this translation of critique and analysis into an ontology and a hegemonic means of validation. Once the means for defining and validating reality are tied to the dualism of thinking and material substances, the ground is set for the dance between these to become ever more intense, and thus it is that the current phenomena of virtuality is only the flip side of an ever more assured and extreme materialism. Material, it might be asserted, thus becomes more virtual than virtuality itself. Clearly, this makes sense only when spoken from a situation where Deleuze’s ‘life’ is maintained in its irreducibility. Such a situation occurs in Seneca’s last letter, where he makes reference to the root meaning of curation: ‘the good of the one, namely God, is fulfilled by his nature; but that of the other, man, is fulfilled by care [cura].’4 This aphorism is quoted by Heidegger in the section of Being and Time which outlines the manner in which the Being of Dasein – that being which each of us is – has the fundamental character of care – Sorge, in German. Care, for Heidegger, is a single ‘primordial structural totality’,5 but it is also structurally articulated.6 It gives the possibility that our way of being with the ‘ready-to-hand’ objects of everyday life can be taken as concern (Besorgen); and that our way of being with Others can be taken as solicitude (Fuersorge). Kisiel, in his analysis of the genesis of Being and Time, shows how the guiding notion of care derives in Heidegger’s early thought from his lectures on Augustine,7 where cura has the dual aspect of uti and frui, that is, using and enjoyment. Subsequently, Heidegger drops the theological reference in favour of the more secular Seneca and a Latin fable about a personified care, in accordance with his general strategy of removing the explicit theological references of his early work while maintaining, in Being and Time, implicit theological structures. In this particular case, he may also have wished to question the oppositional dualism of the utilitarian and the enjoyable. However, it is the curatorial question I wish to emphasise here – a question which Heidegger would perhaps avoid as being too redolent of an inauthentic curiosity, a curiosity driven by the ‘lust of the eyes’, to use Augustine’s phrase;8 an inauthentic curiosity having the character of ‘the zealous but superfluous concern of inquisitiveness’.9 I wish to argue that care, as a phenomenon of irreducible life, and as our ‘perfection’, to use Seneca’s term, is that which allows our curatorial aspect to occur and, at the same time, that Idea10 evinced through the history of concrete acts of curatorship. Curatorship, here, would be widely defined: I refer not only to the specific profession of the curator, but to a wider implication of this term, and the structure of ‘care’ must be read as having a strange, non-conceptual status. By conceptual I mean here the use of a pre-defined ground – the concept – in such a way that it is expressed and represented by those (material or virtual) phenomena in which it is realised. By contrast, care has an Ideational structure – a term which Deleuze carefully distinguishes from that of the concept.11 Care allows the experience of curation to occur, but not in the sense that it pre-exists curation itself as an identical and defined concept. This, in Deleuze’s terms, would be to subordinate difference to the identical.

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Rather, care occurs only through the thing which it allows; the Idea of care only ever exists in and through its so-called ‘concrete’ realisation, even though it is at the same time that which allows such realisation to occur. This experience of care being the curatorial strategy may be seen to operate at Matt’s Gallery in East London. The gallery, a low-value rented space, consists of two large, columnated warehouse-type rooms, each with windows along one wall facing out over a canal and, at the time the exhibitions took place, waste land. Each exhibition is curated primarily by the artists themselves, with some collaboration with the gallery owner or other curators. While an exhibition is proceeding in one of the spaces, the artist has three months to work in the adjacent space to bring the exhibition to the time of the opening. Exhibitions move rhythmically from one space to the other. Thus the artist has considerable time to develop their work within a specific, spatially determined milieu, one to which they can respond as the work moves towards the opening day. The curatorship of the works therefore occurs between the artist and owner/curator. There is an interplay between the curating and the creation of the work. The gallery, as artist’s studio, operates simultaneously as the space of creation and the space of curation. I wish to remark particularly on those artists – for instance, Helen Robertson, Mike Nelson, Lucy Gunning – who work with the space in such a way as to project the curatorship, by means of an extended notion of ‘installation’, into the time of the exhibition itself. They do this by calling on those who come to these spaces themselves to curate – to care – in participatory fashion. In Robertson’s installation from 1999, the gallery space is articulated by a series of apparently non-figurative photographs mounted in carefully selected locations in the space. The photographs are of fabric, or netting placed in front of coloured paper; the photographs were taken at a certain distance from the subject matter such that the visitor to the space perceived each image differently according to their distance from it. Thus, on first entering the gallery, the images – flat against the wall – had the appearance perhaps of grey holes punched in the white painted plaster; on reassessment, all the images at a distance appeared uniform, monochrome; closer to, they began to oscillate to the eye; right up close the eye became confused about the surface and focus point of the image, thus causing it to flicker. Slight ripples in the netting or the fabric were visible close up and further disturbed the viewing experience. (This experience may be compared to that of a strange occurrence on approaching a building by Herzog and de Meuron in Basel. By the interplay of printed partially translucent glass and the patterns beneath in a layered façade, the building surface takes on an extraordinary oscillating quality at a certain distance: the surface appears to jump towards you and then back due to a subtly deployed moiré effect. As with elements of many of this practice’s architecture, this effect could be created only by means of mocking up, trying out, experiencing the façade in its experiential reality as the design develops. In other words, the design is not conceptual but Ideational in its intent. A photograph cannot depict this experience – as, indeed, is the case with Robertson’s work. Herzog and de Meuron are on record as stating that they are

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entirely uninterested, during the creation of their work, in the question of how the work will appear when photographed.) Some of the images were, close up, subtly nonmonochrome. These images were not isolated works mounted in a gallery, but were conceived and installed as an installation in the space to affect the space and effect a particular spatial experience. For instance, the positioning and size of each image was related to the four central columns such that when one moved around the space the columns blocked an image in turn – thus responding to and reinforcing the circular movement of the viewer around the gallery space, around the columns. Each image was related to the planes of the wall; the images were placed at the edge of the peripheral field, in contrast to the usual positioning of art works centrally on a gallery wall; thus the planes of the wall were made to slip outwards. In one corner, the existing room curves off the rectilinear; this point is diagonally opposite the entry; here, images were installed closer together – a grouping of three images – such that this characteristic of the space was emphasised and the feeling of the space being sucked and expanded into the corner – a sort of slight whirlpool effect, a slight stretching or concentration – was evinced. The work was produced as a minimal intervention in the space in order to allow the space to occur as the space that it was. The images are very small compared to the large scale of the room. This was in contrast to the more common artist’s response to Matt’s Gallery, which typically (and successfully) results in larger-scale theatrical works. Examples of such are Mike Nelson’s interventions. These were explicitly spatial installations in the gallery, creating in his earlier two exhibitions (Coral Reef and Trading Station Alpha) room-like spaces full of stuff, at once slightly comical and sinister, overwrought but also laconic, as if something were missing, one was not quite sure what. It felt as though events had occurred or were about to occur, or perhaps the inhabitants were about to return, angry at one’s presence, angry at having their privacy invaded. His more recent exhibition – Amnesiac Shrine – was at once more abstract and more open. Lucy Gunning’s piece, ESC, from summer 2004, consisted of three video pieces presented around the gallery space on flat-screen monitor, TV and CRT monitor,

Plan of Matt’s Gallery showing Helen Robertson’s installation, 1999.

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Photograph of Helen Robertson’s installation.

Photograph of The Institute for Hospital Pharmaceuticals, Basel, by Herzog and de Meuron 1995–8.

all hung from the ceiling. One video piece was of drunken city boys in London’s Liverpool Street Station of a Friday night; this piece was displayed in a cardboard ‘room’ or box in the corner of the space, the walls of this room hung from the ceiling and clearing the floor such that one ducked into it. Another video was of tree-house dwellers at a protest site, their dwellings linked by vertical and horizontal ropes across which they traversed. The last showed a group of Qi Gong practitioners in a small domestic room,

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shaking in what appeared to be a sort of induced delirium. But this exhibition was not a series of video works, even though all the reviews spoke of it as such. A hint to this was the wall painting, taking up one side of the gallery – a sort of target with its centre well below the level of the floor, hinting in turn at a potential larger space. This painting had a dramatic effect as one entered the space through the door in the opposite corner – an effect of the wall moving suddenly towards one, a jerk, a breaking in the built fabric of the space as a result of the optical effect of the radiating red lines (an effect this viewer can only compare in its initiatory drama to that experienced on first entering Michelangelo’s Medici Chapel in Florence, where the shifting forwards of the mouldings and architraves to the niches, doors and their pediments – creating at first glance a series of vertical cracks through the space – combined with the false perspective of the upper-level windows making the walls appear to be falling outwards, allows the whole space to appear at first instance to be collapsing around one). It was not simply that there were a series of (non-literary) ‘themes’ traversing the pieces: the boxes of the TV monitors reflected the box of the loud speakers, the cardboard-box space, the space within which the Qi Gong practitioners and the person videoing them were present, the external view of the boxes of the tree houses; the way in which the panning in and out on the tree-house video, set in front of the red target, responded to, reflected and called out to the similar movement of that target. Nor was it only the care with which the space was handled: the decision to leave the lights off and allow the natural light from one side to affect the space during the course of the day; the way in which the strong horizontal line of the window sill acted as a clear horizon in the space against which the target could work, this time as a setting sun; the colour of the target reflecting a line of warning tape in the adjacent waste land, distant through the window and again projecting the gallery space outwards, this time horizontally.

Plan of Matt’s Gallery showing Lucy Gunning’s installation, ESC, 2004.

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Photograph of Lucy Gunning’s installation Esc, 2004

More ramified still was the sense in which all of this, and particularly the video work, was there perhaps not at all for itself. These works, far from being works (as the reviewers would have had us believe) of figurative video art, were, one began to think, lures for the person become not at all a viewer, but an intense participant. Their ‘video-work’ status as art objects disappeared, became almost irrelevant. Or rather, their status as art objects was merely a result of an abstraction and reduction away from the irreducible life which the artist had here both created and fostered. In other words, there is a call upon those who enter the space; the call is the call of care, the call to those who will arrive in an undetermined but richly opened future to themselves curate in a complex interplay between their being and the being of the space and that which is in it and which replays/re-emphasises it. Gunning’s ESC achieved something remarkable, which was that this interplay occurred not simply between the viewer and the work – which is the essentially theatrical effect of the other two examples given – but rather, in acting as a multi-facetted lure for the groups of people in the gallery, also effected a series of social interplays among people and groups at the same time. In this sense I would characterise this installation not simply as theatrical (although it is that as well), but as architectural. In this way, architecture is concerned not only with the interplay between the viewer and the work, the inhabitant and the surrounding; it is concerned to make place for a more complex series of possibilities and interplays between groups of people, occurring at the same time as the theatrical moment of the work, and both enabled and enriched by it. This posits a ramified and open curatorial experience, which extends from the common work of the artist and curator within a space at once creative studio and predefined curatorial gallery, and is projected out into the space and characteristics of

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the installation itself in such a way that the participants, called to become something other than they were, in turn act as curators of their own involvement in participatory and architectural fashion. Has architecture, properly thought and experienced, ever been otherwise? Is the city, considered as a site of curation, a place of care, anything other than such an irreducible life? Is the responsibility of the city curator, the urban planner, the architect, anything other or less than the fostering of such care? Or can their concern simply be regarded instead as the derived realm of res extensa, its form, and the materiality in which these are represented? I want to stress that I am not positing a return to a Heideggerian authenticity. This is why I have emphasised the curatorial aspect of care, even the curiosity, theatricality and, I would also say, the museological imagination inherently involved in these resonances. For the Heideggarian critique would tend to deprecate the moment of curiosity, the moment of the viewer stopping to look, the moment of the mere tourist, in the name of a more original and less abstracted involvement. But, I would argue, the moment of abstraction within curation; the moment of the displacement from everyday involvement; the moment of distance, of consciousness and reflexivity at the same time as the involvement; this is always already there for us within these interplayings. Taking the clue of the curatorial strategy outlined above, the architectural and urban ‘work’ will thus be essentially liturgical – allowing a purging of theological, cultic or ritual implications from this word, and take it instead at root as ‘work of the people’ (Greek: leit – ergon). The care and curatorship of the creators of these realms – that this, the architects or urban planners, among others – occurs in the setting up of the possibility of the projected future of the city or the space. This projected future consists not in the positing in advance of a material or spatial ‘reality’. It is possible, after the event, to analyse and reduce this projected future to such ‘reality’. This is the very meaning of analysis, and is not to be deprecated: merely precisely located. Analysis is imperative, and such analysis is always already with us, from the start, as a constant possibility and thus reality of our everyday dealings in the world. Rather, just as the creative designer curates the city and at the same time creates their work in a toand-fro activity between what exists and what will exist, what they have an eye to in this resonating movement is its continuation by others within the space of the city or the room. The care of this resonance consists in granting it also to others in the projection not of a closed, complete, existent presence, but in the projection of the open future and open work of an ongoing curation. When the work is left open; when the task of the designer becomes not primarily the consideration of built form but the wider task of the consideration of the interplay of people and space, peoples and place, in this case the resulting people-work, the resulting ‘liturgy’, gives responsibility and thus the possibility of curation to the others who will come to inhabit and come to view. The perfection of woman is ‘fulfilled by care (cura)’; this means that there is a responsibility – a political one – to allow for care, to allow for curation. This notion of architecture and the city is an inherently non-conceptual one. It is non-conceptual because it does not operate by positing a pre-defined conceptual

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ground, which then comes to be represented in the work. This conceptual ground would act to close the work in subordinating it to the identical – that is, to the concept as something identified, identifiable and predefined. The work should instead remain open in its respect of a primary difference, a primary movement and a primary resonance. Such a work would be, using the terms as defined earlier, inherently Ideational. Again, I emphasise that the ‘concept’ can be derived from this Ideational movement, but only in a later act of analysis. Thus the Ideational work – in art as well as architecture – is inherently more conceptual than conceptual art or conceptual architecture strictly defined. It hyperbolises the concept, makes it larger, more grand, more open and more rich than the one which derives from a static, predefined or essentially analytic tradition. And not only does the movement of the Ideational work occur during the activity of the supposed creators and curators in the sense that the idea of it only ever comes to exist through the movement of its creation; but this Ideational movement extends into the curatorial and creative response of those who come after that moment of creation, who indeed have been given space by means of it. This experience is the gift of architecture.

Notes 1 2

3 4

5 6 7 8 9 10

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Peter Carl, Introduction, in Alvin Boyarski (ed.), Architecture and Continuity (London: AA Publications, 1982), p. 5. This text by Gilles Deleuze is an introduction to Jean Malfatti de Montereggio’s Etudes sur la Mathese ou anarchie et hierarchie de la science (Paris: Editions Du Griffon D’Or, 1946); it has recently been translated by Robin Mackay and David Reggio in Collapse, vol. III (Falmouth: Urbanomic, 2007), pp. 141–55. Deleuze, Introduction to Etudes sur la Mathese ou anarchie et hierarchie de la science, pp. 142–3. The original runs: unius bonum natura perficit, dei scilicet, alterius cura, hominis. Lucius Annaeus Seneca, Epistles 93–124, trans. R.M. Gummere (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, Loeb Edition, 1925), Epistle 124, p. 444. The translation given is taken from Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 243. The more conventional Loeb translation of the Latin runs: ‘Of one of these, then – to wit, God – it is Nature that perfects the Good; of the other – to wit man – pains and study do so’, p. 445. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1962), p. 237 (H193). Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 241 (H196). Theodore Kisiel, The Genesis of Heidegger’s Being and Time (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1993), p. 201. Quoted in Kisiel, p. 210. Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, trans. R.M. Wallace (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983), p. 531 note 16. Idea, not concept. See Gilles Deleuze, Difference & Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (London: The Athlone Press, 1994), pp. 61–3 on Plato’s Idea in the Phaedrus and how Plato is (regrettably) read through Aristotle, who is in thrall to the concept and thus tends to subordinate difference to identity (something Deleuze cannot stand). Although Deleuze argues that Plato/Platonism must be overturned, nonetheless he hears in Plato’s Ideas a ‘ground that measures and makes the difference’, p. 62. Deleuze, Difference & Repetition, p. 62.

Caring for dead architecture Matthias Albrecht Amann

To what extent is architecture allegorical? Painters, sculptors and writers across the ages have shown that architecture as a discipline, as well as architects and their works, can serve perfectly as a ‘donor’ for allegorical representations. The community of the faithful was depicted as a church, man as a house and God himself was characterized as the architect. There was hardly any doubt about the fact that the semantic fields of architecture and the city could be concealed within the sensus allegoricus of, for instance, the representation of a machine. There are innumerable examples of houses and cities that are depicted as living organisms, or even as people who speak and express feelings. If works of architecture are perceived as living, they must, sooner or later, also die. So it is not surprising that one can care about what could be called ‘dead architecture’. When we describe the atmospheres created by architecture or cities we tend to use a vocabulary borrowed from allegory. Let’s consider the term ‘dead’: speaking in German of a building as being totsaniert refers to a refurbishment operation intended to rehabilitate (sanieren) or revive a building but which, in the end, does it to death (tot). Such a refurbished building has been stripped of its personality, and no longer radiates what once animated it. This suggests that architecture in certain circumstances can be thought of as living, or at least as something that reflects living things, although in reality architecture consists of inanimate matter and can be categorized as being dead.1 One can also find many examples of the living reflected in the dead in literature. To mention only one: in his novel Bruges-la-morte, Georges Rodenbach writes: ‘Each town represents a condition of the soul.’2 Rodenbach relates the Flemish city of Bruges to the grief of his protagonist, the widower Hugo Viane, and he describes it as a ‘dead city’. Rodenbach’s narrative is apt and this analogy is not arbitrary. Hugo Viane goes for his regular evening walk and only then is the image of a dead city evoked: Yet upon this evening . . . he mechanically wended his way among paths which his imagination had peopled with sombre images . . . From the

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windows of the funereal dwellings that stretched in spectral fashion along the margins of the canals, with their gable-ends reflected like skeletons of crape in the waters, a mortuary impression was conveyed.3 The impression of houses, bridges and spires as dead only arises from the description of Hugo’s actions when he walks through the city. This awareness of architecture as dead or alive alters our sense of the historiography of place and architecture. The precondition of Michel Foucault’s historiographic methodology did not only lead to the relationship between cause and effect being reversed, but also caused the focus of at least historiography to turn from objects to practices: ‘Objects seem to determine our behaviour, but beforehand our practice determines its objects.’4 This methodological revolution shook the common system of terms, which suddenly contained things, which had fundamentally different practical causes bearing the same name. Since Vitruvius’s writings people have described the skills and qualifications necessary for an architect because they determine his practice and his practice again determines the objectifications that we generally call buildings. But even in the ‘democratic’ twentieth century the insight hardly gained acceptance, namely that practices leading to built objectifications are not exclusively conducted by architectural specialists and their influential clients, but by society itself. Yet, from the second half of the century there was no lack of methodical support to realize this. In 1951, Martin Heidegger, with his famous lecture ‘Bauen Wohnen Denken’, set out to derive the act of building from the state of human being, which he characterized as a course of being rather than as a set of conditions.5 Four years later, Swiss architect and writer Max Frisch, in his well-known essay ‘Who delivers the plans?’, questioned the planner’s position of power.6 In particular, Frisch examines architectural conceptions of participation and performance that became so influential from the 1960s to the 1980s. Although the manifold influences of human life are inscribed in architecture, this does not mean that architecture is something that is alive. Even though the artefacts are stamped by their creator this does not change anything. However, architecture becomes ‘enlivened’ when it is being used. Hence, if there is not a soul in the city centre at around 8 p.m. (which sometimes occurs), it is referred to as being ‘dead’. It is assumed that the measure of ‘liveliness’ alludes mainly to the perceivable traces of human life that can be found in architecture and cities. The ‘deadest’ city or the ‘deadest’ architecture one could imagine would therefore be places that are deserted, and in which nature outweighs the signs of human activity. In this sense, large parts of Eastern German cities are in effect dead. In 2000, there were about one million unoccupied flats in this part of Germany, many of them in city centres and inner suburbs, with many dating from the ‘Gründerzeit’ (the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries), which were often built in perimeter blocks and gave a rigid structure to their cities.7 These vacancies are the result of complex migration processes, which have been caused by the economic and social

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Unoccupied houses in Leipzig-Lindenau, Germany.

impacts of German reunification in 1990, and are also the result of the decline in birth rates since 2003. This phenomenon is generally referred to as ‘urban shrinkage’.8 In this chapter I will briefly outline how unoccupied houses are being dealt with in Eastern Germany. I will then describe a curatorial model for these buildings, based on the skills an architect might bring to bear on the matter, which is the skill of ordering matter. In particular, I will be discussing the status of these unoccupied housing units and will use the word ‘house’ quite often, although what I have to say could also apply to works of architecture in general. As a point of interest, the German word ‘house’ can also apply to a generic building. Obviously, one of the most frequently asked questions in this situation is how to deal with these vast amounts of unoccupied, ‘dead’ houses. Or, referring to curatorship, the topic of this volume, how such buildings should be cared for.9 It is not appropriate to compare architecture in this respect to medicine, where treatment is applied only when death has not occurred. Things are a little different with architecture, although not completely different, as we will see with certain examples of revitalization. Whereas the basis of conservation practice is historic value,10 which identifies a ‘dead’ object as a medium of collective memory – or oblivion, to cite Adrian Forty11 – and which is valid for only a minority of buildings, most unoccupied buildings perish in a murmur of anonymous recollections. In these cases, curatorship is applied only in exceptional circumstances.

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Demolition The German Federal Development Programme, ‘Stadtumbau Ost’ (Urban Reconstruction East), that was published in 2002, proposed two strategies to deal with unoccupied buildings (mainly housing): demolition and upgrading. Where physical and social structures were still intact, these were to be enhanced and strengthened. The lion’s share of the available money, however, was to be pumped into extensive demolitions.12 After the reunification of Germany, the large East German housing associations were made responsible for the former GDR’s housing debts. Since then, their liabilities have grown because of the high percentage of unoccupied flats in their holdings.13 The material substance of the buildings is not of interest: they are considered assets only in the financial sense. The public therefore regards the programme mainly as a means to rehabilitate the finances of the housing industry. The programme, which ends in 2009, has budgeted for the demolition of 350,000 flats.14 But it is evident that the problem of unoccupied houses cannot be solved by demolition, neither in terms of economics nor psychology. Sociological studies have shown that the effects of demolition on the inhabitants of the area where the policy has been implemented suffer from a kind of ‘psychological shrinkage’, because it means that the collective memory of an urban environment is lost through the demolition of that very environment.15 The Bundestransferstelle, the institution that was founded to evaluate the programme, came to a similarly negative conclusion: demolition is no solution.16

Unoccupied block of flats in HalleNeustadt, Germany.

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‘Mothballing’ The 2002 demolition policy has not met with wide support. Proposals put forward by the programme’s opponents for how to treat the malaise are manifold; the most significant of these are based on economic reasoning. One of the initiators of the Foundation for Architecture and Building Culture (Stiftung Architektur und Baukultur), Karl Ganser, suggests that unoccupied buildings should be left, because over the years it would become apparent ‘which of them are of cultural value and can profitably be further used’.17 He goes on to say that buildings that are left alone will be worked on by nature. He proposes depositing the subsidies allocated to convert the buildings into a fund. According to him, a double economic benefit would be obtained: on the one hand, the material value of the buildings themselves, and on the other, the interest earned from the fund, which could finance the maintenance of the sites. If this strategy is confronted with the implications of a cityscape of ruins, which would be expected as its consequence, one is doubtful that, as Ganser promises, the people left behind would enjoy the spectacle of nature busily working on the vacated parts of their town quarters. This would require a change of thinking because it implies that the opposition between culture and nature, which for centuries has been a basis of the concept called ‘city’, should be dissolved. Ganser’s proposal provides no tangible solution to the issue as understood by many others – the unoccupied houses would remain as they currently are and suffer natural decomposition. However, because the current ideological concept of urbanism assumes that progress is to do with urban growth, and the normal understanding of cities is that they are nothing more than built objects, the large extent of vacant property will be interpreted by many as a sign of crisis.18

Performance orientation Given that the connotations of the word ‘dead’ in the context of architecture and cities can be related to the retreat of human action from houses, if the material substance of houses is an objectification of the human performances that occur in them, when they are vacated the connection between people and buildings is broken. This disconnection does not result, however, in any material change to the houses, other than from the possible effects of nature. On the contrary, their configurations remain the same because their continuous adaptation to human life and its traces no longer occur. It is perhaps not surprising that instead of demolition or ‘mothballing’, many attempts have been made to reattach empty buildings to human action. Performance-oriented concepts, dating mainly from the 1960s, have been revived in order to promote the buildings’ positive potentials. German architecture magazines are full of proposals in the spirit of the Situationist movement, which aim to refill empty town quarters with life using the Situationist tactic of ‘détournement’.19 One manifestation of this example is ‘sportification’, a method intended to reanimate city centres by means of new sports,

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for instance frisbee being played between the rooftops of adjacent empty tower blocks.20 Such concepts presume that the radius of human action can be limitlessly enlarged provided that new demands are created. However, I would contend that architectural action can reconnect the vast holdings of unoccupied buildings with everyday life through another means. I will introduce a curatorial model, which is based on architects’ ability to order matter, and compare this with the idea of introducing new functions as proposed by Philipp Oswalt, the initiator of the ‘Shrinking Cities’ project. This curatorial model is, by its nature, ontological because it relates to the foundations of architecture. To explain this, it will be helpful to consider the essential principles of architecture using an analogy – the analogy of a storeroom.

The storeroom analogy A storeroom is a place where things are kept in an organized way. What distinguishes it from an archive21 or junk room or collection,22 as Baudrillard puts it in his book The System of Objects, is that once something is transferred to a storeroom, it is inserted into an order, which exclusively controls access to the things in storage. Finding and removing a specific object can only be done through the medium of the storeroom order. It is impossible to simply take hold of an item without challenging the fundamental principles of storage. Because the storeroom order protects the goods within it against unlimited access, one can regard the storeroom as a highly controlled shelter. This concept requires an appropriate ordering system to make it work. If it is not suitable for the goods being stored, it will be very difficult to remove them, and the store would become a trap for these things. The only solution in such a case would be to dismantle the storeroom – which is certainly not what whoever established the place would have had in mind. The parallels between this mechanism and the concept of a house are clear. Storeroom order can be compared to architectural order, which has been a subject of theoretical thought for centuries. Both storerooms and buildings deprive the individual objects they contain (or consist of) of autonomy. Someone who regards a house as a quarry, and acts towards it accordingly, can be accused of violence because he disrespects the order that embraces all the house’s material substance, and his actions jeopardize the order itself. Let’s focus on the things that are placed into a storeroom ordering system. They have been put into it to be located spatially and fixed such that only time is allowed to affect them. Space is the domain of storeroom order. Every alteration to the goods’ position in space is governed by the storeroom order. Time, on the other hand, acts independently, and has a powerful effect on the stored items, working on them and altering them. Sometimes this is welcome, for example, if Cheddar cheese is to mature. Sometimes time has undesirable effects. These happen to perishable goods, such as foods; but time can also make objects obsolete, for example, technical devices. The decision to fix a thing spatially and give it over to the realm of time is

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usually to do with a future intention. The thing is looked at with an anticipatory gaze that converts it into an object of potentiality.23 And this is its definition as it enters the storeroom order. The intentional gaze reinvents the object, but does not interfere with its material substance. As Gernot Boehme remarks in his important book, Aisthetik, this reinvention is a feature of perception.24 The object has a number of properties, but when it enters the storeroom ‘reality’ it loses some of these properties, and those that remain are determined by its envisaged future. Such losses need not be permanent. There is a chance that it will regain some of these lost properties once it encounters another reality beyond the storeroom. But the connections between the storeroom and the world beyond remain difficult to determine. The perceived qualities of an object before, during and after its inclusion in a storeroom order are pertinent to our problem. The properties of a building define it as a work of architecture until, as with the system of storeroom order, that which we call ‘house’ is dissolved. Hence a brick in the wall of a house is secondary to its use as a residence, and is secondary to its overall form and structure (see Vitruvius25). If being unoccupied causes the order called ‘house’ to collapse, then it is crucial to find a new order for what has become merely an accumulation of matter so that it can once again be identified as a ‘building’ (not, in this case, as a ‘house’). To achieve this, and now we come to the core of the matter, it is necessary to question some basic principles of ‘use’, and the relations between the parts and the whole. Although the Vitruvian category ‘firmitas’ is untouched, because the curatorial model is not to demolish the buildings, different methods can, of course, be used to maintain a building’s structural stability.

The problem of use As new kinds of functions are found for these vacated buildings, which is completely reasonable, it is clear that the concept of use summons the forces connecting man and house, and reactivates them. Following Kari Jormakka’s thinking, the conceptual framework within which the work of, for example, architecture occurs, ‘defines what kind of work it is’ and ‘what aspects of it constitute meaning’.26 Within the conceptual framework of architecture is the idea that its works are to be used, i.e. that they are to have a function. But use also has an impact on those aspects that individuate a work. The only way to find out whether the category ‘use’ is being suitably fulfilled in a building, in this case a housing unit, is when it is occupied, or lived in. We are likely to forget this, because, by convention, architectural drawings usually represent or stipulate ‘use’. Imagine you enter a vacant building. Just by examining the material substance of the building you could probably tell what function it was designed for. Given that the building’s function was ‘housing’, you could not predict what consequences a strange wall projection in the corridor, for example, would have for living in the house.

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The designer of the house based his or her design on the assumption that somebody would live in it because this is the only way for him or her to qualify what he/she has done. Hence ‘use’ is a relevant criterion of his or her work. If someone now focuses on something the designer (or author, in Jormakka’s terminology) has not regarded as relevant, this would, according to Jormakka, ‘not lead to a radical re-interpretation of the work, but would result in the material object being regarded as a non-authored work or as a work of different kind or as a work by another author’.27 When the intended use of a house is obsolete, is the house’s material substance obsolete as well, as the demolition programme suggests? What I have just said argues against this. The spatial structures of the houses under discussion, in so far as they are open enough to allow other uses, similarly suggest otherwise. Spatial flexibility is certainly true of houses from the ‘Gründerzeit’, and is even more so for modernist houses, in which unambiguous gestalt was sacrificed in favour of the universality of architectural space. ‘Use’, however, should be regarded as only one aspect of the order called ‘house’ through which the accumulated matter of a building becomes readable.

The parts and the whole Rather than asking the usual question: ‘What shall we do with the unoccupied buildings?’, it would be more helpful to ask what they are. This might help in finding a new order for these ‘unused’ houses – which of course are not useless – and develop a structural understanding based on the relationships between the parts and the whole, not only of the buildings, but also of the city quarter they occupy and constitute. We have learned from Gestalt psychology that our need to perceive a building as ‘intact’ organizes the relationship between the parts and the whole. When a building is gutted or altered, every action must, in the end, maintain the building’s gestalt as a whole. Indeed, the larger the temporary divergence from a building’s overall ordering principle – in our case called ‘house’ – during constructional work, the more astonishing it seems to be:28 how exciting are buildings with their façade removed in order to apply a new one, or houses which, while reconstruction work is in progress, have no roof? If the material substance of the unoccupied houses is to be considered the raw material of a new order, and to regard working with them as a compositional task, one would have to adjust the proportions between the parts and between the parts and the whole, and the meaning of the accumulated matter would also need to be adjusted. The result could be that the buildings are not ‘houses’ any more, but still parts of a city and, above all, elements of a reconstituted, i.e. a newly ordered accumulation of matter.

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A new architectural order Let me summarize: within the order called ‘house’ certain ingredients aim to establish it as being of use and intact as a ‘house’. In order to introduce its material substance into a new order, it is necessary to reduce the signs of these ingredients, or at least their significance. The outcome would still be a testimony of human activity, but in this case, the activity would be the reconfiguring of accumulated matter into a new order. The accumulated matter would not consist merely of randomly scattered empty shells, but parts of an ordered system. To achieve this, an architect’s ability and knowledge is required. Usually the architect has to determine a building’s use and give it the appearance of, in this case, a house. Now he/she would need his/her talent to decide where and to what degree to subtract the signs that make it a ‘house’. Admittedly, this all sounds very abstract, but I will end my chapter with two examples, both of which are in a way difficult, but can illustrate attempts to connect the material substance of existing buildings with a new order. They may also show how architectural actions can inform a curatorial practice that regards buildings as objectifications of accumulating and ordering material. One of the central projects of sixteenth-century architectural theory was to establish a canon of the five orders. Sebastiano Serlio, who with his treatise Regole

Vignola’s universal modulus allows every single one of the five orders to fit into a given aperture.

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generali di architettura (1537) triggered a flood of books on columns, measured the monuments of antiquity and augmented the incomplete descriptions of Vitruvius by complementing them copiously with his own carefully taken dimensions and deliberate inventions of his own.29 His most influential successor regarding books on columns was Giacomo Barozzi da Vignola, who published his opus Regola delli cinque ordini d’architettura in 1562. He made no secret of the fact that rather than being concerned with the individual particularities of the best buildings of antiquity, general principles could be extracted from them to create a singular formula that could coordinate all the proportions of the five orders.30 This example illustrates how, starting from specific buildings, a reflexive order could be created. Vignola’s work would prove to be enormously important for architecture up to the early twentieth century. The second example is by the architect and artist Gordon Matta-Clark, who applied ‘cuttings’ to the walls, ceilings, roofs and façades of unoccupied buildings. By doing so, he confronted the existing building with a new order. In an interview, his widow described his working method: He preferred to cut out parts of load bearing beams so that their weight would rest on other beams and a ceiling or something else would give way. One could see that the building was able to keep standing with a different

Beaubourg witnessing G. MattaClark violating a house.

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pressure distribution. I think that he meant to test the ability of a building to keep standing under peculiar circumstances.31 While he was altering the structure of the house with his new order, he was unveiling concealed aspects of that structure. The accumulated matter of the buildings held together and their overall structural configurations, although altered, remained strong. But the matter of the buildings ended up, in effect, referring to itself. Matta-Clark’s work Conical Intersect, which he realized in Paris in 1975, was received with some hostility. His response was that the criticism came from ‘people who think that what I’m doing is exploiting the sanctity of a certain kind of domestic space’.32 The curatorial model I have described puts a new order on dead houses. Matta-Clark’s work also puts a new order on dead houses. But if Matta-Clark were to have followed our model, he would have failed, because in our model the building would have ceased to be a ‘house’, whereas in his work the building was still understood as a house, but one that had been violated. Considering their professional skills there is no reason why architects should not address themselves to the task of caring for dead architecture.

Notes 1

2 3 4 5 6 7

8

In his phenomenological analysis the German philosopher Heinrich Rombach describes the difference between dead and living things: ‘Das tote Ding hat sein Sein in der Form des Stehens und Bleibens. Wenn das Ding “nicht mehr” sein soll, so muss ihm dies von außen zugefügt werden, durch Zerstörung, Zerfall, Auflösung.’ (‘The dead thing has its being in the form of standing and remaining. If such a thing is not to be “any longer”, one has to cause this from outside by means of destruction, decay, dissolution.’ Transl. MAA.) Heinrich Rombach, Phänomenologie des gegenwärtigen Bewusstseins (Freiburg/München: Alber, 1980), pp. 88ff. Georges Rodenbach, Bruges-la-morte, translated from French, with a critical Introduction, by Thomas Duncan (London: Swan Sonnenschein & Co., 1903), p. 89. Ibid., pp. 256ff. Paul Veyne, Foucault: Die Revolutionierung der Geschichte, (Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp, 1992), p. 24. Martin Heidegger, ‘Bauen Wohnen Denken’, in Martin Heidegger, Vorträge und Aufsätze (Pfullingen: Günther Neske, 1954), pp. 145–62. Max Frisch, ‘Wer liefert ihnen denn die Pläne?’, in Max Frisch, Gesammelte Werke in zeitlicher Folge, vol. III (Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 1991), pp. 346–54. Report of the commission ‘Wohnungswirtschaftlicher Strukturwandel in den neuen Bundesländern’ (‘Structural Change of the Housing Industry in the “new” German countries’), commissioned by the Federal Ministry of Transport, Building and Urban Affairs, November 2000, pp. 17–19. See Hans-Joachim Bürkner, Thomas Kuder, Manfred Kühn, Regenerierung Schrumpfender Städte. Theoretische Zugänge und Forschungsperspektiven (Erkner: Leibniz-Institut für Regionalentwicklung und Strukturplanung, 2005), available online: www.irs-net.de/download/wp_regenerierung.pdf. See also ‘11. koordinierte Bevölkerungsvorausberechnung’, edited by Statistisches Bundesamt (Wiesbaden: Statistisches Bundesamt, 2006), p. 33. On the German debate about urban shrinkage,

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9

10

11 12 13

14 15

see Benno Brandstetter, Thilo Lang, Anne Pfeifer, ‘Umgang mit der schrumpfenden Stadt – ein Debattenüberblick’, Berliner Debatte Initial, 16, 6, 2005, pp. 55–68. The Grimm brothers’ Deutsches Wörterbuch does not index ‘Kurator’ (curator); there are entries for ‘Cur/Kur’ (cure) and ‘curieren/kurieren’ (to cure of), both in a strict medical sense, derived from Latin ‘curare’ (to care). Wilhelm and Jacob Grimm, Deutsches Wörterbuch, vol. 11 (Leipzig: S. Hirzel, 1860), col. 2781–2808. In the German-speaking area the expression ‘Kurator’ (curator) emerges as a term in the legal system and in the body politic in close relation to the Latin meaning, which describes someone who acts on behalf of an institution. Meyers Konversationslexikon defines a curator as follows: Kurator (lat., Pfleger), der ständige rechtliche Vertreter einer Person, insbesondere der Zustandsvormund eines ganz oder teilweise Handlungsunfähigen (curator: ‘permanent legal representative of a person, esp. the guardian of someone fully or partly incapable of acting’, transl. by the author), Meyers Konversationslexikon, vol. 10, (Leipzig; Wien: Verlag des Bibliographischen Instituts, 1888), p. 338. See Alois Riegl, Der moderne Denkmalkultus. Sein Wesen und seine Entstehung (Wien; Leipzig: Braumüller, 1903). See also Françoise Choay, Das architektonische Erbe, eine Allegorie. Geschichte und Theorie der Baudenkmale (BauweltFundamente, 109) (Wiesbaden: Viehweg, 1997). Adrian Forty, ‘Introduction’, in Adrian Forty and Susanne Küchler (eds), The Art of Forgetting (Oxford: Berg, 2001), pp. 1–18. Bundestransferstelle Stadtumbau Ost, Erster Statusbericht der Bundestransferstelle Stadtumbau Ost – Stand und Perspektiven (Berlin: IRS, 2006), pp. 29ff. See Rochus Wiedemer, ‘Wieso wird denn abgerissen?’, contribution to the exhibition Shrinking Cities. International Exhibition (Berlin, 2004), available online: www.shrinkingcities.com/fileadmin/shrink/downloads/pdfs/Wolfen_Screen_Deutsch.pdf. Bundestransferstelle Stadtumbau Ost, Erster Statusbericht der Bundestransferstelle Stadtumbau Ost – Stand und Perspektiven (Berlin: IRS, 2006), p. 38. Jürgen Dürrschmidt, ‘Schrumpfung in den Köpfen’, in Philipp Oswalt (ed.), Schrumpfende Städte. Internationale Untersuchung 1 (Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje-Cantz, 2004), p. 274.

16 Angesichts der Dimension des Wohnungsleerstandes in Ostdeutschland und der nur schwer zu erfassenden Dynamik der in manchen Städten ablaufenden Schrumpfungsprozesse, muss darüber nachgedacht werden, wie strategisch mit dauerhaft nicht mehr benötigten Wohnungen umgegangen werden kann, für die möglicherweise keine Rückbaumittel zur Verfügung gestellt werden können. Hier sind dauerhafte Stilllegung und Sicherung ganzer Quartiere ebenso in den Blick zu nehmen wie Möglichkeiten der Umnutzung. [Considering the huge number of unoccupied houses in Eastern Germany and the incalculable dynamics of shrinkage processes in some cities one needs a strategy to deal with long-term unoccupied housing units for the demolition of which there is potentially no financial support available. Possible solutions for these cases include the closure and protection of entire city quarters and their re-use. (Transl. MAA.)]

17 18

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Bundestransferstelle Stadtumbau Ost, Erster Statusbericht der Bundestransferstelle Stadtumbau Ost – Stand und Perspektiven (Berlin: IRS, 2006), p. 81. Karl Ganser, ‘Hände weg, liegenlassen!’, in Der Architekt, 4, 2001, pp. 27–30. Anne Brandl, ‘Schrumpfung – Niedergang oder Neuschöpfung des Städtischen? Plädoyer für eine Erweiterung des Stadtbegriffs’, in Karsten Borgmann, Matthias Bruhn, Sven Kuhrau, Marc Schalenberg (eds), Das Ende der Urbanisierung? Wandelnde Perspektiven auf die Stadt, ihre Geschichte und Erforschung (Historisches Forum, vol. 8) (2006), pp. 33–47.

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19

20

21

22 23

Considering the current exhibitions and publications one feels inclined to speak of a revival of Situationist urbanism. For ‘détournement’ see Heinz Stahlhut, Juri Steiner, Siebe Tettero, Stefan Zweifel, ‘Preface’, in Stefan Zweifel, Juri Steiner, Heinz Stahlhut (eds), In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni – Die Situationistische Internationale (1957–1972) (Zürich: Ringier, 2006), p. 12. See also ‘Situativer Urbanismus. Zu einer beiläufigen Form des Sozialen’, Archplus – Zeitschrift für Architektur und Städtebau, 183, 2007. Online: www.sportification.net. For a selection of strategies for ‘temporary use’ see Philipp Oswalt, ‘von Gemüseanbau, Tierhaltung, Freizeit und Sport über soziale Initiativen und Dienstleistungen, Alternativ-, Jugend- und Popkultur, Kunst- und Musikszene, Nightlife bis hin zu Migrantenökonomie, Handel und Gewerbe, Erfindern und Start-up-Unternehmern’. Urban Catalyst (Philipp Misselwitz, Philipp Oswalt, Klaus Overmeyer, Nina Brodowski), ‘Open-Source Urbanismus. Vom Inselurbanismus zur Urbanität der Zwischenräume’, Archplus – Zeitschrift für Architektur und Städtebau, 183, 2007, pp. 84–91. See also Philipp Misselwitz, Philipp Oswalt, Klaus Overmeyer (eds), Urban Catalyst. Strategies for Temporary Use (Barcelona: ACTAR, 2007). Similarly Karl Ganser toys with the idea of ‘ “inszenatorische Architektur”, die als Vorläufer und Wegbereiter für eine neue Funktionalität zu verstehen ist’. (‘scenographic architecture, which is the precursor and pioneer of a new functionality’; transl. MAA). Karl Ganser, ‘Hände weg, liegenlassen!’, Der Architekt, 4, 2001, p. 30. See Mark Wigley, ‘Unleashing the Archive’, Future Anterior. Journal of Historic Preservation History, Theory and Criticism, II, 2 (Winter 2005), pp. 11–15. ‘An archive is only an archive when it is entered, or, more precisely, when things come out’ (p. 13). See Jean Baudrillard, Le système des objets (Paris: Gallimard, 1968). Objects of potentiality are by definition materials. See Monika Wagner, Das Material der Kunst. Eine andere Geschichte der Moderne (München: Beck, 2001). See also Monika Wagner, ‘Materialvernichtung als künstlerische Schöpfung’, in Andreas Haus, Franck Hofmann, Änne Söll (eds), Material im Prozess. Strategien ästhetischer Produktivität (Berlin: Reimer, 2000), pp. 109–21.

24 Ein Ding ist immer auch Potenz, d.h. es ist nicht in allem, was es ist und was zu ihm gehört, jeweils manifest. Das, was das Ding ausmacht, das, was es materiell konstituiert . . . fällt nicht in die Sinne, sondern wir bloß gedacht. [A thing is generally also a potentiality, i.e. it is not manifest in anything which it is and what belongs to it at a time. What constitutes the thing materially, is not sensible but is only to be thought. (Transl. MAA)]

25 26 27 28

29 30 31

Gernot Böhme, Aisthetik. Vorlesungen über Ästhetik als allgemeine Wahrnehmungslehre (München: Fink, 2001), p. 163. See the three categories of Vitruvius: firmitas, utilitas, venustas. Vitruvius, De architectura libri decem, first book, third chapter. Kari Jormakka, Geschichte der Architekturtheorie (Wien: Selene, 2003), p. 23. Ibid., p. 25. To hollow out historic buildings, e.g. Baroque city houses, and adapt them for contemporary (commercial) uses is a frequently applied method. The historical façade is kept in the whole process of building. See James S. Ackerman, Origins, Imitation, Conventions. Representation in the Visual Arts (Cambridge, MA; London: MIT Press, 2002), pp. 180ff. Ibid., p. 239. See also the study by Christof Thoenes, ‘Vignolas, Regola delli cinque ordini’, Römisches Jahrbuch der Bibliotheca Hertziana, 20, 1983, pp. 345–76. Jane Crawford Matta-Clark on Gordon Matta-Clark, interview with Jürgen Harten, 27 March 1979, in Gordon Matta-Clark, One for All – All for One (exhibition catalogue), Städtische Kunsthalle Düsseldorf (Düsseldorf, 1979), n.p.

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32

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Pamela M. Lee, Object to Be Destroyed. The Work of Gordon Matta-Clark (Cambridge, MA; London: MIT press, 2000), p. 187 note 42. Conical Intersect was realized with a house directly situated next to the Centre Pompidou, which at that time was under construction. Apparently, ‘Conical Intersect’ was interpreted as a symbol for the demolition of large parts of the quarter Les Halles and this is why the reactions to Matta-Clark’s work was so hostile. See ibid., pp. 185ff.

Exhibiting architecture: the installation as laboratory for emerging architecture Florian Kossak

An architectural exhibition is often regarded as a medium in which finished products or artefacts are displayed as if outside or beyond the actual production process. Contrary to this notion, in this chapter I will portray the architectural exhibition as an integral part of the production of architecture. When architects deliberately use exhibitions to engage in ‘theoretical, spatial and material speculations’,1 when they test ‘the real before the real’,2 as Peter Smithson has phrased it, then one can speak of the architectural exhibition as a form of laboratory. The laboratory exhibition is here defined as a continuation and integral part of the architectural praxis. It is predominantly driven and generated by architects. It is process oriented and projects into the future praxis of architecture. Most importantly, the laboratory exhibition provides a testing ground in which architectural research is conducted. It is concerned with the investigation, development and experimentation of hitherto un-imagined, un-tested, un-established architectural propositions. While the laboratory exhibition can have very different forms and use different locales, this chapter concentrates on one specific form of experimentation within the wider scope of architectural laboratory exhibitions – namely the architectural installation. I will first attempt to explore the notion of the architectural installation in differentiation to the art installation, maintaining that we are dealing here with two related but discrete categories. I will then explore moments in the historical lineage of such architectural installations as laboratories, looking at theatrical installations of the late Renaissance as well as manifestation of the early-twentieth-century Russian avantgarde. Of particular relevance here is the cross-disciplinary praxis of architecture and other cultural disciplines to produce and exhibit experimental installations in the form of masques, stage designs, interiors, agitprop or happenings and how these mostly temporal events and interventions ultimately led to the transformation of the urban realm and its architecture. Finally, I will make the argument for a contemporary

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experimental exhibition praxis that continues to use the installation in order to project into the future of architecture. Although there is evidence for installations being used as part of architectural experimentation for the last 500 years, it is hard to find any theoretical exploration or conceptual definition of the architectural installation per se. In contrast, most definitions that exist of the term and concept of ‘installation’ relate to the art installation. Indeed, installation art has become one, if not the foremost contemporary art form over the last 20 years. However, what we call installation art today encompasses a wide variety of practices – from the most inconspicuous interventions in the public realm of a back street to media-hyped institutional spectacles such as those of Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall. Paraphrasing Rosalind Krauss, one could state that the term installation has been ‘forced to cover such a heterogeneity that it is . . . in danger of collapsing’3 as a category. Or, as the Guardian columnist Stuart Jeffries proclaimed somewhat apologetically: ‘Installations . . . are a big, confusing family.’4 While the art installation may be characterised through its heterogeneity, there are nevertheless several common principles that define it and apply to almost all installation art, including the architectural installation. The architectural installation represents a discrete category and, although definitely related, is quite distinct from the art installation. To establish this distinction and in order to provide a provisional definition of the architectural installation, it is first necessary to summarise the defining characteristics of the art installation, namely site specificity, spatiality, engagement of the viewer, and temporality.5

Site specificity: Installation art is conceived and installed within a space or site that provides its specific, often pre-existing, framework. This space or site is usually an interior within a gallery or museum environment and the installation responds – affirmatively or transformatively – to the given institutional, cultural, social or spatial context. In many cases the installation transforms the spatial qualities of its site and the relation between space and installation might become so close that both merge into one another and their distinction is dissolved.

Spatiality: Installation can only function in space and in relation to space. This spatial development, which may have started when Tatlin’s 1914 Corner Counter-Relief ‘left’ the wall to venture into the space, led to art installations that create new spatial relations in existing spaces or in fact construct their own space altogether. One example is Kurt Schwitters’ Merz-Bau that he started in his Hanover flat in 1920. While the painting is a two-dimensional tableau in front of us, and the sculpture a three-dimensional object around which we can walk and look onto, the installation is a work within which we are and through which we can (potentially) move.

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Engagement of the viewer: Closely linked with the previous characteristic is the integration of the viewer into the installation. Installations invite the viewer to become active and experience the installation. In many cases they immerse the viewer, requiring him/her to step out of the role of spectator and to become an actor or participant within it – an artistic strategy that Michael Fried calls (disapprovingly) the ‘theatricality of art’.6 By allowing or providing for the ‘participatory’ inclusion of the viewer within the work, installations deliberately incorporate the element of subjective perception, even transformation, into the art practice.

Temporality: While a painting or a sculpture remains categorically, no matter whether they are in the artist’s studio, in an exhibition or in a museum store room, the installation ceases to exist as an installation once it is taken out of its site and spatial context. It is only an installation as long as it is installed, as long as it is in position. In the beginning of this art form, installations were mostly conceived as very temporary events, but are now, after being absorbed by museum collections, often more or less permanently on exhibition. This relative permanence does not alter the fact that they have an inherent temporality that defines them.

One could also include as a fifth defining characteristic the rejection of marketable object, in the sense that this was an underlying aspect of most of the early installation art in the 1960s and 1970s. The development of environments, happenings, performances and art installations during that period was, at least partly, driven by an ideological opposition to the commodification of the art object. Today, however, artists, art institutions and the art market have developed techniques and procedures that allow installation art to be incorporated into the prevailing commodification process and this characteristic seems therefore to have lost its relevance. These four or five defining characteristics, while being generally useful, cannot fully describe the complex notion of installation art.7 What they show, however, is the close relation that exists to how architecture is also defined, in that it is site specific, spatial and necessitates the active role of the viewer (or, as we might called it: user).8 Architectural installations betray the same basic characteristics that constitute the art installation.9 The indebtedness of installation art to architecture and the appropriation of architectural precepts is described by Peter Osborne as the ‘architecturalisation of art’.10 This close relation is also expressed in Rosalind Krauss’ construct of the ‘expanded field of sculpture’, in which she describes installations of the abovedescribed nature as ‘axiomatic structures’.11 What distinguishes the architectural installation from art installations, and justifies establishing architectural installation as a discrete category, is that it embodies the practice of experimentation. While we can encounter art works and installation art that, in one way or another, set up an artistic experiment, even create the notion of a laboratory,12 this chapter would argue that the experimentation of architecture or by architects follows an altogether different intentionality than that of art installations and artists.

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To explore this difference we can take the Russian Constructivists as an example. The Constructivists themselves used the term ‘laboratory work’ to describe their experiments from 1921 onwards that happened as much in the studio as well as in places of display, namely the gallery exhibition and the theatre. The crucial point of this ‘laboratory work’ was that it was, as Christina Lodder writes, ‘not undertaken . . . as an end in itself, nor for any immediate utilitarian purpose . . . but with the idea that such experimentation would eventually contribute to the solution of some utilitarian task’.13 Maria Gough speaks here of the difference between the ‘pure experiment’ and the ‘experiment which has a basis in reality’.14 If one accepts the risk that runs with every generalisation, we could ascribe the ‘pure experiment’ to art or, in our case, installation art, and the ‘experiment with basis in reality’ to architecture. This is a notion that also recalls Peter Smithson’s ‘real before the real’ that he used in relation to the courtly Baroque masques. These masques, just as the exhibitions of the Modern avant-garde, acted as confined experimental installations to present and test new architectural expressions, constructions or spatial figurations.15 Similarly to the Constructivists’ ‘laboratory work’ that was directed towards a forthcoming, still unpredictable, utilitarian task, the ‘real before the real’ of the experimental installation points already beyond the realm of experimentation and towards another, future architecture that would supersede its experimental precursor. The architectural installation is not therefore confined to the gallery or museum space, nor does it have to be part of or be an exhibition in the most common sense. The only premise is that the installation is installed within an existing space, and furthermore is conceived in reaction to this existing space and transforms it through its existence. This space can be an interior or enclosed space just as easily as it can be an exterior or open, yet defined, space. Vladimir Mayakovskii expressed this in 1918 when he postulated that ‘the streets are our brushes, the squares our palettes’.16 The architectural significance in this statement lies in the fact that Mayakovskii does not speak of the streets and squares as the mere canvases for the new art and architecture, but as the very means that create new spaces for a new society. Public exhibition spaces such as museums, galleries, salons, etc. did not exist until the late seventeenth century, and it took architecture another good 100 years to find its way into these emerging places of display. Architects therefore had to find other spaces and occasions where they could mediate and test their architectural ideas beyond the studio and before the built building. The dramaturgical plays, masques, festivals and later theatre scena offered such possibilities. Their scale as well as spatial requirements predisposed them for large or 1:1 architectural installations. These theatrical events and spaces may be regarded as the precursors of experimental laboratories for architecture and have served to maintain the relationship and exchanges between architecture and stage since the sixteenth century, which in itself has produced a sustained space for experimentation in the development of architecture. As one of the earliest, still existing, examples of an interior theatre installation, one could take the Teatro Olimpico in Vicenza, designed by Palladio and completed

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by Scamozzi in 1585. The principal layout of the theatre with a semi-circular arrangement for the audience and the perspectival scena of the stage had already been developed theoretically by architects like Peruzzi or Serlio.17 Similarly, stage sets creating more or less realistic street scenes through staggered replicas of buildings existed since at least the late fifteenth century. What makes the scenic installation of the Teatro Olimpico so remarkable is the use of perspective to a dramatic effect in order to achieve a full-scale enactment of an ‘ideal city space’. The theatre installation is here used to experiment with an idea of ‘ordering’ the city by means of a perspectival axis, something only achieved in full-scale architectural terms several years later with the conception and consequent construction of the Piazza del Popolo and its Tridente in Rome under Pope Sixtus V.18 On a smaller architectural scale, the appropriation of the perspectival effect in Palladio and Scamozzi’s street scenes, with the raising of the floor plane, shortening of the interregnum and the downsizing of the flanking façades, can also be found in Borromini’s colonnade in the Palazzo Spada, or in Bernini’s Scala Regia in the Vatican.19 It is here ‘no accident’, as Lewis Mumford stated, that architects and city planners like Servandoni, Inigo Jones or Bernini were also scenic designers. In the twentieth century, Constructivist examples such as Lyubov Popova’s ‘acting apparatus’ for The Magnanimous Cuckold, produced by Vsevolod Meierkhol’d in Moscow in 1922, used the theatre as a means to develop from surface to space. Although they were ultimately in favour of the dissolution of the traditional theatre in order to take art and culture out into the streets, the Constructivists nevertheless used the theatre as a laboratory in such a way as to accelerate its demise.20 In 1921, just one year prior to the performance of The Magnanimous Cuckold, the Russian Constructivists had presented their ‘laboratory work’ in the third OBMOKU21 exhibition in Moscow. Apart from wall-based paintings, the Constructivists filled this exhibition with three-dimensional constructions, including works by Tatlin, Stenberg, Rodchenko, Ioganson and Medunetskii. While these ‘non-utilitarian’

The Teatro Olimpico in Vicenza, designed by Palladio and completed by Scamozzi in 1585.

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Lyubov Popova’s ‘acting apparatus’ for The Magnanimous Cuckold, produced by Vsevolod Meierkhol’d in Moscow in 1922.

constructions already pointed towards Constructivist ideas of large-scale, utilitarian buildings, they nevertheless remained closer in scale to the Constructivist paintings on the gallery wall.22 The transition to a larger scale was effectively explored through Popova’s (and others’) installations or apparatuses on the theatre stage. Popova’s timber stud apparatus for The Magnanimous Cuckold can be seen, on the one hand, as an expansion towards architecture of Rodchenko’s or Stenberg’s constructions as presented in the OBMOKU exhibition. On the other hand, this complex assemblage of elementary architectural elements – the timber-frame façade, the two stairs, openings, platforms, as well as symbolised machinery, such as the windmill and the two wheels, or the use of large-scale typography – anticipates and tests a new architectural expression of a new society. This new architectural expression almost immediately found its application in buildings such as the temporary Izvestiya pavilion by Niva, Gladkov and Kester at the 1923 All Union Agricultural Exhibition in Moscow.23 Popova’s apparatus is also significant regarding the installation’s principle of being ‘installed in space’. The whole stage and backstage area was left completely bare, stripped of all the usual requisites like curtain, backdrops or portals. Nothing was used that would provide the illusion of being something other than it was – a brick wall was a brick wall, an electrical cable was an electrical cable. It was thus not only Popova’s stage apparatus that manifested the three principles of Constructivism as theorised by Aleksei Gan, namely ‘Tectonic’, ‘Faktura’ and ‘Construction’,24 but also the whole stage and backstage area. This set up can also be read as an attempt to create a

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Popova’s and Aleksander Vesnin’s ‘Project for a theatricised military parade for the Congress of the Third International’, entitled The End of Capital, from 1921.

clean slate, doing away with the old falsehoods, and literally providing a new ‘stage’ for a new world. This form of traditional theatre space, where the audience or the viewer is separated from Palladio and Scamozzi’s scena or Popova’s constructions, contradicts the ‘immersion of the viewer’ in the installation,25 in that it does not allow for the viewer to be physically immersed in the installation itself. However, the theatre installation, in conjunction with the narrative of the play, the manipulation of light, music, sound and special effects, still operates fully within the realm of sensory perception. It is, as Kamph writes, ‘ “installing” the viewer into an artificial system with an appeal to his subjective perception as its ultimate goal’.26 Immersivity is experienced vicariously, whereby it is the actor who performs the spatial penetration of the installation. These two examples of theatre-based architectural installations, Palladio’s and Scamozzi’s Teatro Olimpico and Popova’s stage apparatus for The Magnanimous Cuckold, stand as exemplars in a long tradition of exchanges between architecture and theatre.27 It is a tradition that still continues with architects like Zaha Hadid or Co-op Himmelblau, who use stage design to experiment with architectural ideas and develop their architecture language before the realisation of larger-scale building. Examples of this are Zaha Hadid’s stage for the Pet Shop Boys’ World Tour, 1999/2000; her theatre stage designs for Desire, at Steierischer Herbst Graz, 2003; Metapolis II in New York, 2007; and Co-op Himmelblau’s stage set for Der Weltbaumeister in Graz in 1993. Besides these interior architectural installations for the theatre, installations for outdoor spectacles are of similar significance in relation to experimentation with

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architecture. Jacob Burckhardt has noted how these public-realm installations offered architects since the early sixteenth century opportunities for ‘trying out large-scale effects [and make] experiments for large monumental art’.28 Architects, and other artists, have since used both strands of theatrical display, interior and exterior, to present, promote and test new architecture. It is probably not surprising that it is precisely in times of social and political revolutions, France 1789–95, Russia 1917–24, that architects have favoured the street and the public square as both the topic and the loci for their architectural interventions. The public realm offered the scope to mediate and test ideas on and with larger masses of people and put new concepts into an immediate social and spatial context. An installation in a public square further allows for the instantaneous and direct ‘immersion of the audience’ into the work itself, a fact that was used – and misused – in large-scale political spectacles. One such example would be Popova’s and Aleksander Vesnin’s ‘Project for a theatricised military parade for the Congress of the Third International’, entitled The End of Capital, from 1921. Popova describes this unrealised installation as [A] cast of thousands, soldiers, planes, trains, tanks, gymnasts and military bands, never assembled to move from the enclosed and forbidding city ‘Fortress of Capital’ on the left of the square to the open, skeletal structure of the ‘City of the Future’ on the right.29 The City of the Future is of course a Constructivist city and resembles both Popova’s and Vesnin’s theatre designs. A resemblance exists in particular with Vesnin’s design for Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday at the Kamernyi Theatre in Moscow, 1923, which can be understood as a test and precursor for his 1924 Leningrad Pravda Building. Although lacking an officially sanctioned political agenda, but nevertheless politically progressive in their ambitions, there was a new generation of architectural installation in public space which took place in the 1960s and early 1970s. Architects, as well as artists, were intrigued by the notions of perception, performance and experience, realising (falsely or not) that architecture in the age of high technology and space travel had no longer to be concerned with providing the more or less refined shelter for our physical survival. The focus had shifted to the social activity within this ‘hardware’ and one of such social activities was the notion of ‘play’. The interest in a new understanding of play and games goes back to the Situationists and had been theorised by Jacques Fillon and Guy Debord as early as 1954. For the Situationists30 the notion of play was fundamentally linked with the experimentation of alternative ways in which a city and architecture would be perceived. It is precisely both these aspects – perception and play – that are taken up by architects some ten years later and experimented with through installations in the public realm. This generation of architectural installations aimed to actively engage the audience and transform the viewer into a participant and, ultimately, into a producer of the work.

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This approach is exemplified by those involved in the architectural scene in Vienna in the 1960s and early 1970s, where architects like Günther Feuerstein and Hans Hollein, and in particular groups such as Zünd-Up, Haus-Rucker-Co and Co-op Himmelblau, created an ‘Austrian Phenomenon’, as Peter Cook called it in 1970.31 Vienna, besides Graz, provided the exceptionally experimental field or environment in which these architects tested and expanded the boundaries of architecture through installations, happenings and performance pieces that combined both play and perception. Haus-Rucker-Co, for instance, created Gehschule or school-of-walking in 1971, which transformed a stretch of pavement and invited passers-by to playfully experience ‘walking’. In 1970 Co-op Himmelblau created a Soft Space with 12,000 m3 of foam in a Viennese street. We can see today a resumption of the approaches to installations and forms of spectacles produced by both the Russian Constructivists and the Viennese architects of the late 1960s. What distinguishes today’s practitioners of architectural installation work from their predecessors is their desire to find alternative forms of architectural production and reappropriate architecture as a critical means or medium, in order to challenge the dominance of commercialisation and commodification of the urban realm. Today’s installations are often produced in a cross-disciplinary cooperation with artists, performers, natural or social scientists, exhibiting a new level of interdisciplinary collaboration. However, many of the forms and techniques used by their predecessors have been absorbed into the mainstream by the forces of commercialisation and commodification. Co-op Himmelblau’s foam, for example, has now been

Co-op Himmelblau, Soft Space, 12,000 cubic metres of foam in a Viennese street, 1970.

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repeated endlessly at rave parties of the 1990s and is now, at least in Germany, a regular feature of the rural clubbing scene. While these installations include the viewer as active participant, the participation merely masks their role as passive consumers. In order to avoid this trap and the submergence into a hegemonic culture of commodification, the challenge for any progressive and critical praxis engaged in architectural installation working in today’s context is therefore to develop the installation as a continuous laboratory in which to experiment with new forms of architecture and the way it is produced.

Notes 1 2

3 4 5

6

7

8

9

10 11 12 13

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Hani Rashid, ‘Installing Space’, in Kristin Feireiss (ed.) The Art of Architecture Exhibitions (Rotterdam: NAi Publishers, 2001), p. 34. Peter Smithson, ‘The Masque and the Exhibition: Stages Toward the Real’, in Giancarlo Di Carlo (ed.), Language of Architecture: Lectures, Seminars, and Projects. International Laboratory of Architecture and Urban Design, Urbino, 1981 (Florence: Sansoni, 1982), p. 62. Rosalind Kraus, ‘Sculpture in the Expanded Field’, October, vol. 8 (Spring, 1979), p. 33. Stuart Jeffries, ‘When Is a Room Not a Room?’, the Guardian, 24 November 2001. This categorisation excludes the ‘rejection of marketable object’ which was a main principle behind most of the early installation art in the 1960s and 1970s. The development of environments, happenings, performances and art installations in that period was, at least partly, driven by an ideological opposition to the commodification of the art object. However, today, artists, art institutions and the art market have developed techniques and procedures to easily include installation art into the prevailing commodification process. See Michael Fried, Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1997). Fried’s essay ‘Art and Objecthood’ was first published in Artforum 5 (June 1967), pp. 12–23. A contrary position that endorses the viewer as active agent within the art work can be found in Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics (Dijon: Presses du Réel, 2002). On installation art see, for instance, Nicolas De Olivera, Nicola Oxley, Michael Petry and Michael Archer, Installation Art (London: Thames & Hudson, 1996); Andrew Benjamin (ed.), Installation Art (Art & Design Profile, no. 30) (London: Academy Group, 1993). The indebtedness of installation art to architecture and appropriation of architectural principles into art is an aspect that has so far been neglected in most histories of art installations. Peter Osborne speaks here of the ‘architecturalisation of art’. But whether this leads indeed to a ‘reduction of architecture to art’ remains questionable. This close relation is also expressed in Rosalind Krauss’s construct of the ‘expanded field of sculpture’ in which she coins installations of the above and describes nature as ‘axiomatic structures’. Rosalind Kraus, op. cit., pp. 38–9. Peter Osborne, ‘Non-places and the Spaces of Art’, The Journal of Architecture, vol. 6, no. 2 (2001), p. 186. Rosalind Krauss, op. cit., p. 41. An example would be the 1999 exhibition Laboratorium in Antwerp, curated by Barbara Vanderlinden and Hans Ulrich Obrist. Christina Lodder, Russian Constructivism (New Haven, CT; London: Yale University

Exhibiting architecture

14 15

16 17 18 19

Press, 1993), p. 7. Maria Gough, ‘In the Laboratory of Constructivism: Karl Ioganson’s Cold Structures’, October, vol. 84 (Spring, 1998), p. 117. Smithson, op. cit., p. 62. The notion of the ‘real before the real’ implies that the experimentation, – the masque, exhibition or installation – is just as much architecture as the built building that the temporary structure might anticipate and ‘test’ – a position and view on architecture that is shared here. Vladimir Mayakovskii, ‘Prikaz po armi iskusstva’, Iskusstvo kommuny, no. 1 (1918), quoted in Lodder (1983), p. 48. See, for instance, Sebastiano Serlio’s Tutte l’opere d’architettura et prospetiva, published in 1545. Construction on the Piazza del Popolo and the Tridente started in 1589. Lewis Mumford notes here that The new baroque spatial perspective first manifested itself, not in the actual city, but in a painted street scene in the theatre (Serlio); and it was not an accident that the new city planners, like Servandoni, Inigo Jones, and Bernini were likewise scenic designers. Lewis Mumford, The City in History – its Origins, its Transformations, and its Prospects (London: Secker & Warburg, 1961), p. 378.

20 21 22

23

24 25

26

27

28

29

See Alma H. Law, ‘A Conversation with Vladimir Stenberg’, Art Journal, vol. 41, no. 3, The Russian Avant-Garde (Autumn, 1981), p. 233. Society of Young Artists. El Lissitzky pointed out the significance of the exhibition installation that let the viewer become intermediary between the constructions that were positioned throughout the whole gallery. He writes: ‘We looked not only at the works of art hanging on the walls, but particularly at those that filled the space of the hall’. Quoted in Gough, op. cit., p. 92. The change in political and consequently political climate in Russia after 1924/5 prevented the further development and implementation of the Constructivist ideal on a larger scale. For further reading on Russian Constructivism, see Lodder (1983) and Christina Lodder, Constructive Strands in Russian Art 1914–1937 (London: Pindar Press, 2005). See Lodder (1983), p. 99 or Gough, op. cit., pp. 96–7. This opposition of stage and audience is partly dissolved in stage and theatre designs that follow those of the Constructivists. One has to mention here Frederick Kiesler’s ‘Space Stage’, presented in 1924 at the International Exhibition of New Theatre Equipment in Vienna, which placed the stage with a concentric ramp in the middle of the auditorium. Yet this stage installation also did not manage to actually incorporate the audience. Stefan Kamph, ‘Installation’, in Theories of Media – Keywords Glossary (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago, 2004), available online: http://csmt.uchicago.edu/ glossary2004/installation.htm. In parallel to this relation between theatre stage and architecture one can also witness the influence of theatre installations on the art world. Olafur Eliasson’s 2003 Weather Project, the orange glowing sun in the Tate Modern Turbine Hall is here just one example of application of stage designs by innovative theatre directors such as Robert Wilson into ‘theatrical’ installation art. Jacob Burckhardt, Die Baukunst der Renaissance in Italien – Gesammelte Werke – Band II (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1962); English translation (London: Secker & Warburg, 1985), p. 267. Lodder (1983), p. 51.

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30

31

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Debord and Fillon wrote this manifesto prior to the Internationale Situationist. However, the same interest in play is expressed later in the text ‘Contribution to a Situationist Definition of Play’ (uncredited), Internationale Situationiste, no. 1 (June 1958). Peter Cook, Experimental Architecture (New York: Universe Books, 1970). See also Peter Cook, ‘The Austrian Phenomenon – Konzeptionen Experimente Wien Graz 1958–1973’, Hintergrund, no. 23 (Vienna: Architekturzentrum Wien, March 2004).

From flash art to flash mob How have new gallery spaces informed the nature of contemporary display? Corinna Dean

The debate surrounding cultural projects as the new urban regenerators is widespread. How these projects inform or construct the image of the cultural city on the global and local platform has been debated around issues of branding1 and politics,2 informing cultural, political and economic policy, form and urbanism. In this chapter, I aim to demonstrate how space, in this case Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall, has created a new paradigm of public space, creating a specific site for the social, cultural and political to merge with the spectacle. I will refer to the background against which Tate emerged and to the status of the museum in relation to cultural projects as urban global signifiers. The word spectacle has been used frequently in connection with the display of contemporary art, and in particular to describe the Unilever Series installations in Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall. The Swiss practice Herzog & de Meuron, who won the competition to convert the Bankside Power Station designed by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott into London’s Tate Modern, have demonstrated a keen interest in designing and participating in contemporary architectural exhibitions. In an essay by Philip Ursprung entitled ‘Exhibition Architecture’,3 their work is traced in relation to a representation of spectacle, in particular addressing the relationship between object, commodity and desire. Referring to the literary historian Thomas Richards’ publication, The Commodity Culture of Victorian England: Advertising and Spectacle 1851–1914, Ursprung cites the Great Exhibition held in Crystal Palace as a representation of a specific capitalist system which presents a spectacle of consumer goods paraded on show; objects were imbued with meaning acting as signifiers of taste, culture and class. Crystal Palace became a forerunner to Benjamin’s Arcades Project and then the shopping mall linking the act of consumption to illusion. The practice of Herzog & de Meuron is viewed as creating ‘tangible alternatives, they operate rather as though the buildings themselves were exhibits in a larger, as yet unfinished exhibition, creating a city in the making as it is called in their urban study of Basel’.4 The architects test the relationship between viewers and objects through material, scale and representation. By being in a constant process of experimentation rather than a resolved resolute

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form, their work creates a search for new aesthetic representation, theirs ‘is a form of representation that can cope with the complexity and dynamism of the current situation and is thus orientated towards the future’.5

Spectacle and the museum as global signifier Guy Debord’s 1967 critique in The Society of the Spectacle defined his usage of the term in relation to alienation and commodity fetishisation of late capitalist society.6 Since Debord’s critique of spectacle the term has oscillated between being used as a derogatory term describing the increasing use of scaled-up objects to make a visual impact and a new experience in relation to the viewer and the object. Jessica Morgan, curator of Carsten Höller’s Test Site installation in the Turbine Hall (2007), refers to a ‘spectacularisation of culture’ as having a positive effect on the ‘conversion of architecture and experience’.7 I will also refer to the concept of heterotopic space, defined by Foucault, within the context of the spectacle. As a counterpoint to the Marxist view of Debord where spectacle is viewed as leading to a fragmentation of society, Foucault proposes that heterotopias can play a positive role in creating new models of space. I will illustrate how the Turbine Hall could be aligned with the notion of a contemporary space of illusion. Debord’s subsequent publication, The Comments on the Society of the Spectacle (1987) revisits his analysis of 20 years earlier to demonstrate how aspects of reality from terrorism to the environment are caught up in the logic of spectacular society. Debord comments on the supremacy of commodity fetishism and the collusions between state and economy in an unrelenting way. On turning to art he points directly to the relationship between the dealers (economy) and the inability of the systems of art to acknowledge their historical past, ‘as the meanings of history and taste are lost, networks of falsifications are organised’.8 I will refer to the spectacle’s ability to undermine or alter what can be argued as tenets of art (or discourse) through dissolution of history and the media’s ability to commandeer and influence meaning in art. Referring to Flash Art, a leading art magazine for debate and analysis of the art market, for an overview of how art is positioned against what some would say is an over-hyped market, the art critic Jerry Saltz summarises the values of the art market; in his column ‘The Good the Bad and the Very Bad, Theory of the Market’, ‘although everyone says the market is about quality, the market merely assigns values, fetishises desire, charts hits, and creates ambience’.9

Tate Modern and cultural regeneration The establishment of Tate Modern has proved a dynamic and self-governing process that has led to the regeneration of Bankside as a successful visitor attraction.10 Other cultural regeneration projects have been executed, for example, in Paris with its

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Grands Projèts and Vienna’s Museumsquartier. The programme of cultural projects in Paris was executed under President Mitterrand, the Louvre was the first of Mitterrand’s Grand Projèts followed by the Opera-Bastille, La Defense and the Bibliothèque Nationale. The works culminated in the most extensive building programme in Paris since Haussmann’s new city layout of the 1870s. Paris’s projects were specific in that they were generated by the state and were viewed by some as direct forms of cultural hegemony. Other examples of cultural regeneration projects include those in Berlin – the city’s repositioning itself as the capital of Germany resulted in regeneration projects in Postzdamerplatz and Leipzigerplatz – and, of course, Bilbao’s Guggenheim. Whereas Gehry’s building was less concerned with its immediate context, the design for Tate Modern incorporated a strategy for the urban context in Bankside. In 1995 the Guggenheim Museum, Venice held an exhibition titled Frank Gehry in Bilbao: The Museum in the Expanded Field, which highlighted the language of the building as a sculptural object; irrespective of context, the architecture provides a distinctive symbol and form of branded culture. The title of the exhibition alludes to Rosalind Krauss’s essay ‘Sculpture in the Expanded Field’,11 which describes the nature of sculpture and its display methodology emerging in the 1960s in relation to architecture and landscape. With the rise of the global city, the peripheral cities in contrast are often struggling to compete with flagship projects, as the global financial hotspots are still relatively concentrated, forming a trajectory between New York, London, Tokyo, Paris. Although this is set to change with the rise of India, China, Dubai and Qatar, to name just a few, the role of architecture is clearly instrumental in the promotion of cities, but without strong programming and curatorial leadership the success of the institution can be undermined. Focusing on the Turbine Hall, I will demonstrate how the architecture and its urban programme in the form of ‘bigness’12 has played a role in informing new methodologies in curatorial practice and the position of museum architecture as a cultural and global signifier.

Setting the scene A lot of attention has been focused on the role of signature architecture but equally the role of the institutional framework of the museum should be examined. The position of art in society, its promotion and positioning has undergone a dramatic shift in the last 30 years. The first reactions against the white cube and Adorno’s association of the museum as a mausoleum began to emerge during the last stretch of modernity, specifically at the end of the 1960s. Although historically there have always been collectors that shape notions of taste, art has been propelled by the media as if its position in society were some type of contemporary deity. Unusually for such an international cultural project, Nicholas Serota and the trustees drove Tate Modern. I will not elaborate on the full history of the establishment of Tate Modern but it is adequate to say that Southwark Council were very keen that

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the then-named Tate Gallery of Modern Art would be established within Southwark, starting with the full support from Southwark Council’s Chief Executive Anna Whyatt and a donation of £750,000, and the then newly formed Department of Regeneration, headed by Fred Manson. Southwark’s image was largely that of a borough housing a higher than average number of council-tenured flats, and the council were looking for a strategy for the former power station that had ceased to operate from 1984. Local surveys by private stakeholders and residents such as Bankside Residents Forum identified the negative impact that the vacant building had on the area and the lack of life at street level in the borough. Stephen Hepworth, Director of the Jerwood Space based near Tate Modern, made an astute prognosis on the impact of Tate, arguing that the arrival of Tate Modern ‘will first and foremost alter the art geography of London. Then over a five year period, it will impact nationally and internationally and cause other institutions to redefine their roles’.13 Hepworth’s statement has proved largely accurate and other institutions along with the government have taken a great deal of notice, such that the Tate is now viewed not only as a principle player in the global contemporary art world but also as a model for education and community work, attracting further funding from central government to support its educational schemes.

Signature architecture Against the background of the debate surrounding signature architecture, Tate emerged. Guasch and Zulaika go so far as to describe the role of flagship projects as adopting the ‘Benetton strategy of intertwining the politics of artistic representations with post modern consumerist techniques’.14 Nicholas Serota saw his approach as counter to the promotion of signature architecture. Gauging public feeling, which reflected British scepticism towards contemporary architecture, the site of Bankside Power Station was selected. The power station appeared an ideal building due to its proximity to the city and the possible regeneration effects comparable to the impact of the Tate in Liverpool, the Burrell Collection in Glasgow or the National Museum of Film, Photography and TV in Bradford. In addition, the power station was offered at the nominal price of £10 million as the property market experienced a downturn, therefore Tate would benefit from the gap between cost and potential market value. The building would provide a certain continuum with the past. Serota describes the relevance of this continuity of time: ‘the museum of modern art is an arena in which we examine our relationship with the immediate past, our attitude to the present and our hopes concerning the future.’15 In seeking to define the architecture for the new gallery, Tate’s research found out that two of the three key models for the museum of modern art in the twentieth century have been urban: MOMA, New York, established in 1929 in a series of quasi-domestic artificially lit rooms; and the Centre Pompidou, Paris, opened in 1977 but conceived in the late 1960s as open floors of space. The third model, epitomised

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by the Louisiana, Mumlebaek and the Rijksmuseum Kröller-Mueller, Otterlo, is by contrast ‘humanist, rural and naturally lit’.16 Management consultants McKinsey & Co., hired to help define the economic benefits and vision, led a survey together with Tate, and their findings identified that most artists favoured neither of the two celebrated urban models. Instead it was revealed that artists preferred day-lit conversions of existing buildings where architectural intervention was minimal, such as Hällen fur Neue Kunst, Schäffhausen and the Saatchi Collection, London or the late-nineteenth-century beaux-arts-style museum such as the Künsthall, Bern or the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. These findings validated the decision to place the modern gallery inside an ex-industrial building. The Tate team set themselves the challenge ‘to create a new urban model distinct from the Pompidou or MOMA’.17 Douglas Crimp writes about the importance of the architecture of the gallery and the ‘aura’ of the building in defining the artwork, ‘the governing idea is that an artwork’s meaning is formed in relation to its institutional framing conditions’.18 Art works that are displayed within the gallery institution are given a legitimate status within the art system. A recounting of MOMA’s mission statement about its principle mandate is that collection-connoisseurship is central to its role. MOMA extended its exhibition space after holding an international competition for a modern extension to the building in June 1997. The winning scheme, executed by the Japanese architect Yoshio Taniguchi, has been greeted with mixed appraisal. The New York Times wrote that the public consensus reveals that MOMA is becoming too corporate, partly due to the foyer in the new extension being used to host corporate events rather than its original intention to act as a large sculpture gallery, compounded by a $20 entry fee and an opening exhibition of the UBS collection.19 Interestingly, in the exhibition displaying the six short-listed entries (which included Herzog & de Meuron) for the MOMA extension, Rem Koolhaas unashamedly embraced the direction of the museum in the twenty-first century. In his charette submission, entitled Moma Inc, his premise was that the museum has many functions other than aesthetic contemplation: ‘it sells watches, courts the media, makes deals, these functions should be architecturally expressed’. Herbert Muschamp, the New York Times architecture critic, stated that Koolhaas is unique in being so attuned to post-industrial culture and it is Koolhaas’s blatant vocabulary that rejects any trace of Modernist tenets, whilst taking on board the schizophrenia of present society with all its contradictions that is a worthy response to the undefined territory of the modern art gallery.20 Richard Sennett comments on the potential of the city as a democratic space: ‘when the city operates as an open system; incorporating principles of porosity of territory, narrative indeterminacy and incomplete form it becomes democratic not in a legal sense, but as a physical experience’.21 Swiss practice Herzog & de Meuron’s winning scheme for Tate Modern demonstrated no specific function aligned to the Turbine Hall. Instead the architects introduced a suggestion of programme through

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imagery, but left the use of the space largely undetermined. Key to Herzog & de Meuron’s submission was a perspective drawing that illustrated the Turbine Hall from the west side, demonstrating the full scale of the space, in the foreground of which was an image of Rachel Whiteread’s House (1993) that for the composition of the image had been scaled up and the upper floors of the two-storey house removed so that it was comparable in scale to Whiteread’s previous concrete casting entitled Ghost (1990), a cast of one room. To have an impact in the Turbine Hall the scale of any artist’s work would have to be vast to compete with the monumentality of the space. Davidts discusses the increasing size of art installations in his article ‘The Vast and the Void’,22 in response to an institution’s desire to make an impact on the global art scene, he states that the placing of the scaled-up House within the key drawing of the Turbine Hall was a prophetic move that set the scene for the future art installations in the Turbine Hall. Accompanying the perspective drawing in the competition submission, the text narrates a second-person perspective of being in the building, ‘entering through the south entrance’s light gate, you come across the Switch House and find yourself inside one of London’s most powerful new public spaces, the Turbine Hall’.23 The hierarchy of the space was established, but devoid of a programmatic strategy, except for the introduction of House as well as Dan Graham’s Pavilions. Returning to Ursprung’s view that the building becomes an exhibit in an undefined territory, Lefebvre discusses the condition of pre-existing space as underpinning not only spatial arrangements but also representational spaces and their attendant imagery and mythic narratives.24

Turbine Hall In order to analyse the ‘condition’ of the Turbine Hall and its ability to influence the contemporary nature of display, I will now examine Tate’s position in relation to the display of contemporary art. As the Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson points out, there is no unmediated neutral state of perception in a gallery, as by definition any aesthetic proposition demands sensory perception.25 Nicholas Serota outlines his ambitions of the dual quality of experiences for contemporary museum space, ‘the best museums of the future will seek to promote different modes and levels of “interpretation” by subtle juxtapositions of experience’.26 Serota acknowledges the shift in audience expectations and the desire to encompass broader audiences that exert a sense of democratisation of art. Detractors of the spectacle deride the image-saturated society where contemplation is replaced by desire for immediacy. In a discussion about the gallery spaces and the Turbine Hall, the architecture of the building sets an immediate framework. Herzog & de Meuron’s winning entry appeared to modestly work within the structural framework of the building, extracting the apparatus of its industrial past, creating an enormous void, which the architects compared to Milan’s Galleria Vittorio Emanuele (1877) and introducing into the void the concept of a covered street. The project was, from the beginning, viewed

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as an urban enclave, albeit a very significant one in the larger urban field. ‘The choice of Bankside was almost a choice of urbanism’, comments Jacques Herzog. This building will aim to act as a filter which people can walk through in all directions, we want to attract people who aren’t necessarily going to the museum, to turn this once hermetically sealed Power Station into an urban, totally contemporary landscape where both art and people are embodied within the architecture.27 The intention of the building was to create an urban mesh to link other enclaves of the city. It lay in a dormant area of tightly knit communities and a warren of street patterns hemmed in by railway ducts. Surveys arrived at the conclusion that those working in the area had a negative image of the borough, citing poor transport infrastructure, little life at street level and poor facilities. The building was to be considered a fluid structure opening up the area and extending its reach north to the city across the Millennium Bridge and southwards towards Elephant and Castle. It is clear that the ambitions of Tate Modern stretch beyond that of creating a signature building; in order for the gallery to have a sustainable and influential role it positioned itself in the steering seat on a local and global level. Tate Modern is now acknowledged as playing a key role in establishing the Cultural Quarter at Bankside and is part of a newly formed group of 20 cultural organisations located in Bankside and the South Bank that are committed to working together, in partnership with local government, the business sector and the creative industries.28

Spaces within In view of Serota’s claim to create spaces that provide mixed experiences, criticism has been levelled at the gallery spaces: for the flat light levels and the unevenness of quality of space and the large ventilation grilles that take up valuable floor area. Regarding the results of the surveys carried out with McKinsey & Co., in which artists favoured displaying work in industrial buildings, the Tate galleries appeared remarkably minimalist in their execution. Herzog & de Meuron had not created a public building on this level, although they had worked with a number of artists and it was clear that what informed their practice was an understanding of the practice and theory of contemporary art. In fact, it was a commission they had carried out for the artist Rèmy Zaug that informed the gallery spaces on the three levels adjacent to the Turbine Hall. The artist, and occasional collaborator with Herzog & de Meuron, Rèmy Zaug commissioned the architects to design his studio in a rundown suburb of Mulhouse, France, which was then used as a test site for the gallery spaces of the Tate. The freestanding 5 m rectangular pavilion could be described as having distinct parallels with Zaug’s work, which is concerned with perception and the transmissibility of meaning, as well as an understanding of the site’s borders, edges and margins. The galleries embody the statement by Herzog & de Meuron about the apparent simplicity of minimalist spaces focusing

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attention without distraction on the straightforward reality of the object. Space and light are paramount and the galleries are conceived as distinct, solid-walled rooms rather than enclosures formed by partitions. Both Serota and Herzog wanted to recreate realism artificially through the rendition of natural light using artificial means.29 This perhaps points to their positioning of the aesthetic for the building. By recreating the natural conditions artificially, there is an ambition of simulation of space. Arguably the building does not contain the ‘rawness’ of its past. The Turbine Hall, measuring 155 m by 35 m, is clearly deemed one of the most successful elements of the scheme. In a CABE (Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment) response to a submitted planning document for Phase 2 of Tate Modern, it states that the primacy of the Turbine Hall ‘should be enforced’.30 In the document Tate Modern: The First Five Years, published five years after the opening of the Tate Modern in 2000, the critic Martin Gayford states that ‘the most startling and novel feature [of Tate] was the huge cavern of the Turbine Hall’.31

The universal gaze In order to assess the Turbine Hall’s ability to provide an altered state, alluding to Foucault’s theories of heterotopic spaces, I would like to refer to how we define our relationship with the space as consumers, visitors or spectators. Michel de Certeau, in his famous description of viewing New York from the World Trade Center, talks about how one’s body is no longer clasped by the streets that turn and return it according to an anonymous law . . . he leaves behind the mass that carries off and mixes up in itself any identity of authors or spectators, transforming the work into a text.32 Richard Sennett and de Certeau both describe the diversity of urban experience, but in Sennett’s account the citizen is one that has shifted from discourse to gaze. The Turbine Hall through its open programmatic variety appears to allow an arena of experiences, observations and narratives to take place. Highlighting art’s preoccupation with scale, Davidts argues that the artists of the Unilever Series have addressed the issue of scale while sacrificing a critical analysis of the institution; basically the art works have been scaled up or inflated. With reference to Herzog & de Meuron’s competition entry, the scaling-up of the art piece for the Turbine Hall was a prophetic move that foreshadowed the events to come. Another art piece commissioned by Tate Modern that the art critic, Martin Gayford, draws our attention to is Blockhead and Daddies Bighead, two 40-feet-high inflatable figures by the American artist Paul McCarthy, ‘perhaps the most striking thing about them was that they competed and registered in a sweeping urban skyline that also included Norman Foster’s St Mary’s Axe (Swiss Re Building) and St Paul’s’.33 Here, the

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artworks are required to compete with the edifices that represent the power and civic pride of the city by literally pumping up the scale of execution. In recent architectural theory, immensity or, to borrow from Koolhaas, ‘bigness’ has become a discredited intellectual category.34 Arguing that monumentality can instigate a structure of complexity, in the case of the Turbine Hall the condition of emptiness and the void translates as that which creates a dialectic between indeterminacy (behaviour) and specificity (the building’s shell). So on the one hand we have the argument that current museum architecture is of ‘spectacular spectatorship, of touristic awe’35 and a critique of the proliferation of oversized installations. On the other hand the architectural critique supports monumentality within the urban realm as it permits a freeing up of programmatic activity and density, which allows the city to respond in a unpredictable, even chaotic, way. Over-scaled buildings have a heritage in the pre-spectacle era; to cite a few, EtienneLouis Boullée, whose work began to interpret a new dimension where scale, rather than that of the human, became an interpretation of cosmic scale, influenced by his readings of Isaac Newton and executed in his Cenotaph for Sir Isaac Newton and St Paul’s built during the age of rationalism.36 In the case of the Turbine Hall, the treatment of the space, the axial root taking people down into the hall from the west access, demonstrates the urban enactment of using the space as a filter, a sectional reading that cuts through the underbelly of the site, while providing an axis on the north–south trajectory. In his writings, Koolhaas provocatively describes the chance of cultural complexity, which can be acted out within a place of monumentality. The conventional scale of street patterns is rejected for a different urban platform, one that links buildings (St Paul’s) and the potential for addressing the poorer site of south London (OMA competition submission for Tate Modern) addressed in Phase 2, summed up by Herzog & de Meuron as an urban passage, the city in flux.

Unilever installations I overheard an interesting comment about the loss of a sense of spectacle made by a visitor on viewing Olafur Eliasson’s Ventilator, 1997 in the Marron atrium at MOMA, April 2008: ‘Look, all we get is this revolving fan whereas in London, at the Tate Modern they got this gigantic sun’. An analysis of the Unilever Series installations and events will seek to broaden the debate about counter-spectacle. After negotiations with the Anglo-Dutch Company Unilever in 1999, the proposal for a young artists’ sculpture project was replaced with the Unilever Series and committed funding for a ten-year period. In addition to the Unilever Series, the Turbine Hall space has been used for a number of events or happenings. Tate organised Clap in Time by the artists Nina Jan Beier and Marie Jan Lund, where throughout the galleries various groups including Tate staff were encouraged to clap for a short duration. The action, Clap in Time, which has its

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origins in Invisible Theatre from the 1970s, and drew in non-performers or ‘spectactors’, was intended to create a sculptural soundscape to produce a parallel or alternative structure within the museum’s monumental architecture. Another event, which took place in the Turbine Hall on 12 October 2007, organised by mobile clubbing, was a ‘flash mob’ event.37 Text messaging was used to mobilise ‘flash mobbers’ to occupy the Turbine Hall on the designated date and time. Flash mobbers arrived, at 19.01 p.m. they danced, occupied the space until 19.21 p.m. and then moved on. ‘Flash mob’, a form of mobilisation through technology or hedonistic ‘derive’ can be seen as a demonstration that counters legislation regarding the coming together of groups of people in a public space. The action is an example of the way that the Turbine Hall has gained currency in being read as a significant public space. The police intervened at previous flash-mobbing events such as in Victoria Station, London, as the event was considered to be causing a nuisance and was viewed this way by many commuters. The Unilever Series can be described as being constructed around the notion of event time. Foucault introduced the concept of temporary event time, which could be applied to a site that would be temporarily altered through an event, be it a park or parking lot transformed by a pavilion, fairground or market; the event would take place over a fixed period of time and the predominant emphasis would be on leisure and amusement. This type of heterotopia of illusion allows actors to manipulate and alter images and values within an urban system by manipulating symbolic icons within communication systems. In an interview, Achim Bochardt-Hume, curator at Tate Modern, commented on the fact that prior to the execution of The Weather Project (2003) by the Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson, the Hall was considered foreboding and alien in scale. The installation shifted public perception and how people reacted to the space. On first encountering the space one cannot help feeling overwhelmed and a sense of excitement in anticipation of what lies beyond, the faint hypnotic hum of the generators that supply south London are a reminder of the less salubrious area to the south. BochardtHume describes the challenges of the space to the artist; the space has multiple thresholds, access routes and a strong axis running east to west.38 The first installation by Louise Bourgeois, in which she placed her oversized spider Maman (2000) with three 30-feet-high steel towers, and Juan Muñoz’s Double Bind (2001), an illusory space with darkened pools of light, perhaps added to its contemporary ‘cathedral’-like state. The stairs leading up to Louise Bourgeois’s towers were like extended pulpits and Muñoz’s figures watched over the spectators with a sense of menace. The Weather Project sought to exploit fully the scale of the Turbine Hall and recreate a simulation of the weather. To enrich the arguably simplistic concept of the work, a semi-circle of mono-frequency lights that were reflected in the mirrored ceiling were wired so that the mechanism was visible, allowing spectators to look behind the sun and understand its construction. The execution appeared to indicate a reconstruction of reality rather than an illusion of reality. According to a news article, ‘The Secret Diary of a Museum Attendant’ published in the Guardian,39 it appeared that some vis-

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itors interpreted the piece literally; a visitor arrived with a blow-up canoe; a delegation of 50 people dressed as Santa Claus; a couple launched into a somewhat uncompromising personal activity; while others used it as a place of public protest, their actions reflected in the mirrored ceiling. Parallels were drawn with Turner’s paintings of the Thames, suggesting Eliasson had created ‘a twenty-first century successor to the riverscapes of Turner and Monet’,40 but ultimately it could be perceived as a platform where visitors acted mainly in groups, dancing and creating body formations; it was about a spectacle rather than a sublime experience of a setting sun. This softening of the space made a marked difference in the way that the public related to the space, it became less ‘cathedral-like’ and more of a public arena, where people picnicked and lounged on the stairs. The success of the piece in terms of visitor numbers was impressive. In one statement, it was boasted that The Weather Project had more visitors than the shopping attraction, Bluewater, in Kent. A direct comparison with a commercial venture equates the spectators with consumers, referring to the triumph of the power of spectacle over retail. With reference to Carsten Höller’s installation Test Site (2006), the spectacularistion of culture is described by the curator Morgan as a collision between art and architecture. The work became an event, although not entirely compliant with the gallery its sub-text created a means of alternative circulation in the Tate. The installation consisted of steel slides linking the gallery floors to the floor of the Turbine Hall; the interaction with the installation occurs over an almost fixed duration of time. If, arguably, part of the artist’s role and responsibility is to attempt to oppose the transformation of art into a space of entertainment, dominated by commerce and questionable institutional interests, Carsten Höller’s installation Test Site appeared to operate on many levels: at once engaging the audience playfully with their environment but also offering an alternative urban transportation proposal. The accompanying catalogue proposes that the slides are taken as a realistic proposal for negotiating oneself through the city as a form of public transportation in a fun and time-saving way, opposing the increasingly corporate realm and risk-averse culture.41 Together with the engineers Adams Kara Taylor, a feasibility study for slides in the public realm was proposed, exploring notions of pleasure and play in public life. Again, as in Anish Kapoor’s Marsyus (2002), the work appears to create a dialogue with the spatial volume as opposed to the questioning and critiquing role of art, and this is where the enormity of the space begins to take over from the artist’s work. Into this equation comes the mechanics of the commission; in response to how the commissions perform in relation to an accusation of an interpretation of spectacle, Bochardt-Hume replies that art takes place within the mechanisms of the discourse. Perhaps it would be naive to think otherwise. Tate Modern’s position in terms of influencing the art world is strong and it has been successful in securing impressive funding budgets such as funds for the UBS re-hang42 and the Unilever art series. Although this is a fragile balance between autonomy and patronage (see the article ‘Tate Modern Has Sold Its Soul – and Us – Down the River’, for an account of Tate and

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UBS sponsorship43), into the spectrum comes the influence of the media and its nowfamiliar position in influencing public opinion. This is where the seventh Unilever artist Doris Salcedo’s Shibboleth (2007) has perhaps been misread. Rachel Cooke, an art critic, praised Salcedo for ‘refusing to submit to the showmanship this immense space often brings out in artists’ but concluded that ‘its message is embarrassingly banal’.44 A harsh interpretation of the work, it has been largely commented on by the press in relation to the lineage of the previous commissions instead of reading the work in relation to a body of previous art movements that tackle issues of ‘non-architecture’ explored by artists such as Gordon Matta-Clark. Here the art critic is falling prey to the tyranny of the media. An acknowledgement of history and how art questions processes should inform the critique, as Debord states, ‘history was knowledge that should endure and aid in understanding at least in part. In this way history was the measure of genuine novelty’.45

Conclusion Through these shifting interpretations of the Turbine Hall I would argue that it has witnessed a transgression of space. The shifting narrative, which has ebbed and flowed in response to culture, art theory and social structures, has demonstrated the unpredictability of how the urban morphology has manifested itself. The mechanisms of the art world, what Foucault might label the tools or apparatus, that is, the mechanisms of the discourse are apparent in the coupling of financial institutions and art institutions. Foucault describes in his essay ‘Des Espace Autres’ (1967) his theory on heterotopias.46 Among the many categories he describes a heterotopia of illusion, a space that exposes that of real space, or to create a space that is other, another real space as perfect as meticulous, or a space of compensation. The Turbine Hall operates as a public space, perhaps an illusion of an idealised version of a public space; devoid of violence, it appears unpoliced, throws up possibilities of unusual social behaviour, but appears relatively safe, free from Starbucks or the plethora of cultural tourist services which provide an uncomfortable reminder of the homogeneity of tourist sites. To create a contemporary heterotopia, the actors become contingent place makers of meaning and it is perhaps this that Jessica Morgan, curator of Test Site, is referring to in an attempt to define the phenomenological experience of scale of the Turbine Hall and the evaluation of the space which is indisputably linked to spectacularisation and expansionism. The Turbine Hall experiences massive crowds that have necessitated the type of crowd control more akin to stadium concerts; art is consumed and a different relationship to the art has been established.47 Morgan suggests that we may lose one experience of art but proposes that there must be a potential for others. In the Turbine Hall the audience becomes willing actors in a constantly performed space or staged field. Herzog & de Meuron reveal that the reality of architecture is not built architecture: rather, architecture creates its own reality outside the state of the built or

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Turbine Hall.

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unbuilt and is comparable to the autonomous reality of a painting, sculpture48 or perhaps even a novel. Just as Paul Auster’s central character Quinn in New York Trilogy appears to exist outside of reality, leading the reader to question Quinn’s identity in the dense urban setting of Manhattan, so too the Turbine Hall allows a sense of being outside the space when we observe activities. As contemporary flâneurs, we are able to dissect the site with a detective-like role, taking on certain vantage points, surveying, participating, on a stage set of emptiness, where we are forced to observe and be observed. The emptiness is a placebo for the cacophony of modern life. Arguably the space is at its strongest when empty.

Notes 1 2

3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23

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G. Evans, ‘Hard Branding the Cultural City, from Prado to Prada’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 27, 2, June 2003, pp. 417–40. G. Baeten, ‘From Community Planning to Partnership Planning. Urban Regeneration and Shifting Power Geometries on the South Bank, London’, Geo Journal, 51, 2000, pp. 293–300. P. Ursprung, Herzog & de Meuron Natural History (Baden: Lars Müller, 2002). Ibid., p. 28. Ibid., p. 25. G. Debord, The Society of the Spectacle (New York: Zone Books, 2006). Jessica Morgan, Carsten Höller Test Site (London: Tate Publishing, 2006), p. 15. G. Debord, Comments on the Society of the Spectacle (New York: Verso, 1988), p. 50. J. Saltz, ‘The Good the Bad and the Very Bad’, Flash Art, October 2007, p. 25. Tate Modern is the third most visited attraction in the United Kingdom after the National Gallery and British Museum, boasting 4.9 million visitors in its first year and in subsequent years 4–4.5 million. M. Gayford, Tate Modern: The First Five Years (London: Tate, 2005). R. Krauss, ‘Sculpture in the Expanded Field’, in R. Krauss, Originality of the AvantGarde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986), pp. 276–90. Archive notes from correspondence between Rem Koolhaas and Jennifer Sigler for S,M,L,XL manuscript. M. Coomer, Time Out Guide to Bankside & Tate Modern, in association with the Cross River Partnership and Bankside Attractions Group (London: Time Out, 2000). A.M. Guasch and J. Zulaika, Learning from the Bilbao Guggenheim (Centre for Basque Studies, University of Nevada, Reno, 2005), p. 17. Tate Gallery Archive TG 12/1/3/7 Tate Modern Project (1986–2000). Tate Gallery Archive TG12/1/3/8 Tate Modern Project (1986–2000). Tate Gallery Archive TG12/1/3/8 Tate Modern Project (1986–2000). D. Crimp, On the Museums’ Ruins (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), p. 272. ‘Make the Modern Modern? How Very Rash!’, New York Times, 15 June 1997, Arts & Leisure, p. 31. Ibid. R. Sennett, The Open City (Urban Age, Berlin, 2006). W. Davidts, ‘The Vast and the Void, on Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall and Unilever Series’, Footprint Transdisciplinary, Autumn 2007, pp. 77–92. Tate Gallery Archive TG 12/4/7/7/2 Tate Modern Project (1986–2000).

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24 25 26 27

28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35

36

37

38 39

L. Lefebvre, The Production of Space (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991). Artreview, September 2007, feature Olafur Eliasson, p. 72. N. Serota, Experience of Interpretation; The Dilemma of Museums of Modern Art (London: Thames and Hudson, 1996), p. 10. R. Moore and R. Ryan (eds), Building Tate Modern: Herzog & de Meuron Transforming Giles Gilbert Scott, London (London: Tate Gallery Publishing, 2000), interview with Jacques Herzog. Planning Application submitted by the Board of Trustees of the Tate Gallery: Supporting Statement, 2006. R. Moore and R. Ryan, op. cit., interview with Jacques Herzog. CABE on assessing the pre-application scheme for Tate Phase 2, 2007. M. Gayford, op. cit., p. 7. M. de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1988), p. 92. M. Gayford, op. cit., p. 8. Archive notes from correspondence between Rem Koolhaas and Jennifer Sigler for S,M,L,XL, manuscript. H. Foster, Design and Crime: and Other Diatribes (New York: Verso, 2000), Hal refers to Gehry’s architecture as ‘rather than evoking civic engagement, his cultural centres appear as sites of spectacular spectatorship, of touristic awe’. See Adolf Max Vogt’s discussions of Etienne-Louie Boullée in comparison to the building of the Power Station in Herzog & de Meuron, Natural History, (Baden: Lars Müller, 2002). Flash mobs have certain similarities to political demonstrations, although flash mobs were originally intended to be specifically apolitical. Flash mobs can be seen as a specialised form of smart mob, which is a term and concept put forward by Howard Rheingold in his 2003 book Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution (New York: Basic Books). From an interview with Achim Borchardt-Hume, curator of modern and contemporary art, Tate Modern, 18 October 2007. The Guardian, ‘Secret Diary of a Museum Attendant’, 18 March 2004, an edited account of Adrian Hardwick’s diary of observations. The commission has attracted a massive amount of media interest, and, as a result, thousands of people are flocking to Tate Modern. The most extraordinary things are happening, things I’m sure no one, least of all the artist, ever envisaged. Visitors are making their way to the end of the Turbine Hall and lying on the floor, using their bodies to make shapes and form words – some predictably obscene, which they can then see in the mirror above them. They are even spelling out website addresses. It has resulted in the most extraordinary social interaction taking place between complete strangers.

40 41 42

M. Gayford, ‘A New Space for a New Art’, op. cit., p. 8. Carsten Höller, Test Site, Slides in the Public Realm (London: Tate Publishing, 2006), pp. 55–85. Press release May 2006, Tate and UBS Partnership: A shared vision to open up art to wider audiences is behind a significant new three year partnership between UBS and Tate. As a result, UBS is enabling a dynamic and wide-reaching programme of activities, events and displays focused on the Tate Modern Collection called ‘UBS Openings’.

43

Laura Cumming, ‘Tate Modern Has Sold Its Soul – and Us – Down the River’, the Observer, Review, 13 May 2007. The article highlights the fact that Serota

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44 45 46

47 48

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announced that Tate Modern would not showcase private collections and yet has done a u-turn by displaying drawings from the UBS collection. Rachel Cooke, ‘Is This Really All It Is Cracked up to Be?’, the Observer, Review, 14 October 2007. G. Debord, Comments on the Society of the Spectacle, p. 15. This text, entitled ‘Des Espace Autres’, and published by the French journal Architecture, Mouvement, Continuite in October 1984, was the basis of a lecture given by Michel Foucault in March 1967. Carsten Höller, Test Site (London: Tate Publishing, 2006), p. 14. ‘Exhibiting Herzog & de Meuron’, in P. Ursprung, Natural History (Montreal: Lars Müller & CCA, 2002).

Reading into the mysteries of Artemis Ephesia Zeynep Aktüre

On 18 September 1956, Franz Miltner, head of the Austrian team of archaeologists working at the ancient site of Ephesos, near modern Selçuk in the Izmir province of Turkey, was informed by an enthusiastic Turkish excavation worker about the unearthing of a golden statue in the Prytaneion (see triptych1).2 On closer examination, the statue turned out to be not gold but, most probably, coated in gold on the upper half. The perfectly worked marble statue was named ‘Artemis the Beautiful’ by Miltner on the basis of its high-quality workmanship, distinguishing it from the later-discovered ‘Artemis the Colossal’, again from the Prytaneion, thus named because of its size. A third, smaller-than-life-size statue again from the Prytaneion would soon join the two.3

The three Artemis Ephesia sculptures now on display at Efes Museum in Selçuk, the ‘Beautiful’ on the left and the ‘Colossal’ in the centre.

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Thought to be Roman period copies of cult statues in the Artemision,4 the three statues are currently on display in the Artemis Hall of Efes Museum in Selçuk, which was specially designed for the purpose. In this chapter, I will try to examine the possibilities encouraged by the architecture and contents of this hall for an interpretation of the enigmatic Artemis Ephesia.

The curiosity named Artemis Ephesia The peculiarities distinguishing the goddess of the Ephesians from those of other cities had been noticed by the Turkish workers who unearthed ‘Artemis the Beautiful’. Sabahattin Türkogˇlu, a former director of Efes Museum, reported that the statue appeared rather strange to the workers who, glancing secretly at the lumps on the goddess’s chest, asked ‘could a woman possibly have more than two breasts?’.5 Efes Museum’s researcher, Öcal Özeren, explained how those breastlike swells on her chest were first thought to be breasts, then bodies of bees (the emblem of Ephesus is a bee), but then the thesis that these were the testicles of the bulls sacrificed to the goddess gained weight.6 The latter two theories challenge Edward Falkaner’s mid-nineteenth-century argument that the swellings were animal breasts, concluding that this ‘confirms the opinion of some learned men, that the Egyptian Isis and the Greek Diana were the same divinity with Rhœa, whose name they suppose to be derived from the Hebrew word, Rehah, to feed’.7 What these interpretations share is the belief that there should be a way of being sure about what the Ephesian Artemis figure signifies. Discussing the potentials of semiotics for the history of art, Vernon Hyde Minor explains our search for hidden or unknown meanings in visual art works as part of a general human desire for a natural, commonsensical, immediate way of knowing, of ‘being sure about the world’.8 Semiotics attempts to fulfil this desire by offering the reader and viewer counter-intuitive ciphers and cryptographic systems for decoding and uncovering hidden meanings, with meaning arising ‘in the collaboration between signs (visual or verbal) and interpreters’,9 giving the work of art its discursive character. This is evident in Falkaner’s encounter with the Ephesian Artemis figure: The circle around her head denotes the nimbus of her glory; the griffins inside of which express its brilliancy. In her breasts are the twelve signs of the zodiac; of which those seen in front are the Ram, Bull, Twins, Crab, and Lion: they are divided by the hours. Her necklace is composed of acorns, the primeval food of man. Lions are on her arms, to denote her power, and her hands are stretched out to show that she is ready to receive all who come to her. Her body is covered with various beasts and monsters, as sirens, sphinxes, and griffins, to show that she is the source of nature, the mother of all things.10

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The ‘reading’ goes on. This conceptualisation of works of plastic art as decipherable texts would seem to be rooted in a Renaissance conception of the world as a language.11 In the field of curatorship, this conception has produced the cabinet of curiosity, one of the commonly accepted predecessors of the modern museum.12 The difference lay in the fact that the scientific museums succeeded the ‘literary’ museums formed by the cabinets of curiosities by prioritising ‘seeing’ over ‘reading’.13 Every collector of curiosities would seem to have lived under the illusion that the microcosmos he constructed with his collection is, in a way, an installation of the macrocosmos that is the whole universe, an assembly of all extant knowledge in the same physical space, and a world-view in personal scale.14 While each cabinet is a mystery for other people, it is a very meaningful semiotic treasure for its own designer, a theatrum mundi that reveals the intrinsic order in apparently chaotic things through mysterious correspondences it establishes between the curiosities that are arranged regardless of their spatial and temporal attributes.15 Like every literary construct, it invites its visitors to contemplate a reading of those correspondences, to form their own personal image of the world. It is perhaps possible to conceive of the Ephesian Artemis figure as a theatrum mundi in itself, i.e. as a construction under the same illusion, in that it was an installation of the whole universe, a microcosmos revealing the intrinsic order in the apparently chaotic macrocosmos through a reading into the mysterious correspondences between its components. Perhaps this was what the mysteries of the Ephesian Artemis were about: ‘a cult of wonder’ not necessarily for the beauty but for the excessive, the surprising, the literally outlandish, the prodigious.16 After the transition from ‘the old science’ of the Middle Ages and early Renaissance into ‘the new philosophy’ emerging in the early seventeenth century,17 order is no longer revealed in the cross-references and enigmatic correspondences between things, but is imposed on them by the rational grids invented by such philosophers as Bacon, Descartes and Leibniz. In order to highlight the spatial and visual character of this paradigm shift, it may be useful to recall Camillo’s fascinating ‘memory theatre’, which attempted an encyclopaedic ordering of contemporary knowledge in the first half of the sixteenth century through a spatial disposition of objects of knowledge to be viewed from the stage. The memory theatre derived from Cicero’s proposal to assist memory by assigning each rhetorical object a specific spatial location within a room, a building, a city.18 In this formulation, things represent reality only when ordered in reference to their place in the catalogues, that are themselves based on the visible and definable similarities and differences in their physical attributes. The establishment and safeguarding of that reality in the Enlightenment museum thus became the duty of the curator.19 In this way, Michel Foucault’s ‘words’ and ‘things’ are disconnected, and the latter are redefined within the syntax of a new universal language which is no longer learned from the world itself. Instead, the world itself is now learned from the books and encyclopaedias written in that language.20 Later, in the nineteenth century, a deep historicity came to infuse the heart of ‘things’, isolating and defining them in their own coherence, imposing upon them

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forms of order implied by the continuity of time.21 As to the curiosities, in the universe of the classified, the defined, the measured, and the ordered, which is ideal for a semiotic exercise, they have apparently lost their charm, as they represented the condition of aporia by escaping classification, definition, measurement and ordering.22 Minor argues that, in this way, they shift our attention to the problems of decoding itself, reminding us of the impossibility of ‘being sure about the world’, and of the fact that ‘we can find pleasure in contemplating things that escape our understanding’.23 This would mean a continuation of the attempt to read into the mysteries of the Ephesian Artemis, even after accepting the impossibility of being sure about the validity of any of the possible interpretations including those quoted above. The curiosity named Artemis Ephesia may, in this respect, be comparable to Stonehenge, one of the world’s most familiar sites, analysed by Kevin Hetherington24 as ‘a museum without walls’ in allusion to Malraux’s famous essay of the same title.25 Malraux describes the museum principally as a spatial relation that has had a trajectory towards openness in its involvement with the process of ordering that takes place in or around certain sites or buildings. As such, the concept would seem to find its parallel in the concept of opera aperta, or the open work, first proposed by Umberto Eco in his eponymous book in 1962 and later elaborated on in his work on semiology.26 Owing partly to its ruined state, the openness of Stonehenge to interpretation is attested in the vast literature that offers the widest possible range of answers or guesses as to its age, purpose and makers,27 as if ‘specifically designed to accommodate every notion that could possibly be projected onto it’,28 just like the Kubrickdesigned monolith buried beneath the moon’s surface in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). According to Hetherington, Stonehenge functions as a ‘museum without walls’ by accommodating a multiplicity of attempts to show its meaning and use, ranging from the archaeological and museological practices of English Heritage to those of an earth-mysteries tradition. Whether or not they are part of a ‘museum without walls’ would likewise determine the degree to which the Artemis Ephesia sculptures, as exhibited in the Efes Museum in Selçuk, would accomplish their intrinsic potential as curiosities.

The Artemis Hall: a cabinet of curiosity or a modern museum gallery? When viewed from the framework of the transition from the Renaissance cabinet of curiosity to the Enlightenment museum and then to nineteenth-century historicism, a spatial analysis of the Artemis Hall in the Efes Museum reveals something of all the three notions at work, intentionally or not creating an appeal for different kind of visitors. The analysis of the architectural plan organisation in the Natural History Museum in London by John Peponis and Jenny Hendin as a space enmeshed in the organisation of knowledge provides an illuminating tool in this regard.29 Peponis and Hendin show how the initial edifice, designed to house the Victorian natural history collections by

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Waterhouse and opened in 1881, had a comb-like ground-floor plan with a hall at the centre of its major axis which acted as a fulcrum from which all parts branched off. Situated in the western front of the museum, the birds gallery similarly has a series of display cases arranged at right angles to a central aisle, creating a series of convex spaces on either side of the aisle that are reachable from one another in two steps – one into the central aisle and one into the destination space – which enables a return to the starting point without having to retrace one’s steps.30 This reveals the dominant controlling function of the central aisle, which renders the whole layout easily comprehensible to the visitors, as if from the stage of Camillo’s theatrum mundi. Peponis and Hendin conclude: The Bird Gallery seems to correspond to a scheme where knowledge is inherently spatial – it is about the table of classification on which immutable beings find their correct position. . . . Order, over and above that which is built physically, is carried by the objects themselves. Visitors can observe in the characteristics of species the principles of classification that located them in their appropriate display cases.31 A quick glimpse at the plan layout of the Efes Museum reveals the difference of its organisation from that of the Natural History Museum and its birds gallery. The Efes Museum in fact represents the organisation of the later-renovated human biology hall of the Natural History Museum, which Peponis and Hendin compare and contrast to the birds gallery to highlight a contemporary change in relation to the enunciation, transmitting and social organisation of knowledge. Lacking a dominant controlling central hall with branching halls and cases, the Efes Museum offers, instead, a series of exhibition spaces that loosely wrap around a small courtyard which also has a direct connection with the entrance as a café space. From the entrance hall, the visitors are directed into a hall of exhibits from the so-called Slope Houses, alongside the longer edge of which a straight path from the entrance directs them to the next hall of sculptural remains from three fountains in the ancient city, and then into a third dimly lit hall of recent and small finds where it terminates in a window that provides visual access to a courtyard at the back that functions as a sculpture garden. After circling around the exhibits in these three halls, the visitors need to make an effort to find the doorway opening onto the sculpture garden from under a colonnade, on the opposite side of which is located another doorway leading into another dimly hall reserved for cemetery finds. At this doorway wraps the path leading to the entrance hall across the Artemis and Imperial Cult halls that wrap around the small inner courtyard.32 As the idea of wrapping would suggest, unlike the two steps required to reach another exhibition space in the birds gallery, the visitors have to cross several of these halls and back many steps to return to their starting point, occasionally making a number of loops, which show the depth of the exhibition space in Peponis and Hendin’s terms, while rendering it difficult for the visitors to find their way and comprehend the overall structure of the museum, as was found to be the case with the human biology hall of the Natural History Museum. Although the

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visitors are offered a single route for exploring the small museum at Selçuk, the presence of looping routes inside individual exhibition halls and the lack of a sequential arrangement of displays in and through them would suggest the potential of the whole installation to become a ‘museum without walls’, functioning as a spatial event in its own right, rather than conveying an explicit curatorial message about the order of things. Peponis and Hendin’s observations of the human biology hall of the Natural History Museum apply equally well to the Efes Museum: Firstly, the increase in depth not just within the exhibitions but also between the entrance hall and the exhibitions, may mark a categorical emphasis bearing on the visitors themselves. They have to be driven deep into the building before knowledge opens up for them, as if to be initiated in the ritual of transmission. Knowledge is not immediately accessible. Secondly, visitors are broken down into small groups, and transmission is individualized. The fragmentation of axiality, and the increase in subdivision, keeps the numbers of people who are in spatial contact with each other small . . . Thirdly, in so far as rings are used, they allow scope for differences between visitors. In theory at least, personal routes through the exhibits within the same gallery are possible.33 In the case of Efes Museum, the adoption of display strategies similar to those used in the human biology hall of the Natural History Museum would appear appropriate for a collection that has its origins in a storeroom. This storeroom was originally set up in 1929 in the village of Selçuk, enlarged in 1964, and finally took its current form after the construction of annexed spaces in 1976, built to house the sculptural artefacts unearthed during the excavations of the so-called Curetes Street at Ephesos. This street was lined with such important monuments as the Trajan Fountain, Pollio Fountain and the Memmius Monument, as explained by Türkogˇlu.34 There is, then, a degree of impossibility in cataloguing such a collection on the basis of the visible and definable similarities and differences in their physical attributes, in such a way as to reveal a unifying order intrinsic in them. Instead, the high aesthetic value attributed to these objects on display by one of the former directors of the museum, and the limited use of accompanying textual and complementary visual information in their exhibition – except in the renovated Slope Houses Hall – would seem to hint at the relevance of Carol Duncan’s analysis of the modern museum as a ‘ritual space’.35 Duncan uses the term ‘ritual’ in the sense of ‘habitual or routinized behaviour that lacks meaningful subjective context’.36 According to Duncan, museums force their visitors into a routinised kind of behaviour by changing the meanings of the displayed objects by removing them from their original settings and redefining them as works of art, claiming them ‘for a new kind of ritual attention [which] could entail the negation or obscuring the other, older meanings’.37 By inventing aesthetics to transfer spiritual values to the secular realm of the Enlightenment, museums thus serve to isolate objects for the concentrating gaze

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of the aesthetic adept and suppress as irrelevant other meanings the objects might have by presenting ‘works of art as just that, as objects of aesthetic contemplation and not as illustrative of historical or archaeological information’.38 Svetlana Alpers describes the same transformation of all objects into works of art as the ‘museum effect’.39 Kevin Walsh argues, in The Representation of the Past (1992), that [t]he auratic display, where the ‘beauty’ or aesthetic quality of the object is intentionally the predominant characteristic of the display, is oppressive in its impressiveness; the medium consumes the message and the auratic display is itself a form of spectacle, suppressing the ability to interpret.40 More than the other exhibits in Efes Museum, this discursive framework is particularly useful for an analysis of the current display of the three Artemis Ephesia statues whose rediscovery has inspired many interpretative attempts, including the present one. The Artemis Hall where the three sculptures are located is a rectangular room whose length is more than double its width. ‘Artemis the Beautiful’ and ‘Artemis the Colossal’ face each other from the two shorter sides of the Hall. The Hall occupies a central position in the Efes Museum, between the so-called ‘Hall of Cemetery Finds’41 and that of the ‘Imperial Cult’.42 The approach along the earlier described route is from the former hall, bringing the visitor directly to the area where ‘Artemis the Colossal’ is displayed in a recess that frames it in a kind of ‘aesthetic chapel’, facilitating its contemplation as a work of art just like ‘Artemis the Beautiful’, located in a smaller niche. Painted blue and naturally lit from the top, the semi-circular niche of ‘Artemis the Beautiful’ would indeed seem to conform to Miltner’s naming of the statue on the basis of aesthetic criteria. For those visitors who are attracted to

‘Artemis the Beautiful’ as displayed before the 1999 renovation of the Artemis Hall.

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museums with the hope of leaving with the satisfaction of an aesthetic experience, this part of Efes Museum should have been the favourite spot, at least before the 1999 renovation of the Hall. On the other hand, visitors interested in these acts of framing might notice that, rather than the historically neutral niche housing ‘Artemis the Beautiful’, the two pieces of wall that create an alcove for the display of ‘Artemis the Colossal’ were decorated with a pair of column paintings that hint at an attempt to recreate the authentic atmosphere within which the Artemis of Ephesos had presumably been worshipped by her ancient believers. For those visitors who are attracted to ancient sites and museums with the hope of going through a re-enactment of an authentic experience, this is the spot to look for it, allowing them to perceive what they saw, not as a work of art for aesthetic contemplation, but as Artemis Ephesia herself, one of the most curious-looking goddesses of Antiquity. Their gaze, in turn, would have transformed ‘Artemis the Colossal’ into a theatrum mundi that revealed the intrinsic order in apparent chaos through the mysterious correspondences between its various parts, a ‘reading’ of which would have helped the visitors either to form their own personal image of the world or to accept the impossibility of being sure about the world, and allow them to enjoy it from the stage of the theatrum mundi. Prior to the 1999 renovation of this part of the Efes Museum, visitors given to accepting this invitation to contemplate Artemis the Colossal as theatrum mundi may have even suspected that the whole Artemis Hall was, in fact, a cabinet of accidentally revealed curiosities. This included the third Artemis Ephesia statue, dated to AD

150–200 and displayed on one side of ‘Artemis the Beautiful’, which had, on its

other side, a marble block depicting a peace treaty between Ephesus and Alexandria, dated to

AD

238–44, with reliefs of the goddesses of the two cities, Artemis Ephesia

‘Artemis the Colossal’ as displayed before the 1999 renovation of the Artemis Hall.

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and Serapis. On closer inspection of the labelling of these curiosities (as labels are part of the process of classifying ‘things’ by naming them in ‘words’), there are along the longitudinal wall on the side of the smallest Artemis Ephesia other items labelled ‘lead pipe with stone sleeve sockets from the altar of Artemision’, ‘fragments of a horse possibly from a quadriga – Altar of Diana’s temple – early Hellenistic’ and ‘ideal male head, 350/300 B.V’. Along the facing wall is a window displaying ‘finds from the Altar of Artemision’, according to a label at one end, and the ‘Head of an Amazon from the Altars frieze’, according to another label at its other end, with none other in between them. Other contents of the Artemis Hall were, and still are, not labelled, apparently to the advantage of the curiosity-lovers. For, those visitors who prefer reading ‘words’ instead of the ‘things’ on display43 are bound to fail in locating, among the votive offerings from the Artemision Altar in this window, what any informed curiosity-lover would immediately identify as ‘things’ originating from Eastern Mediterranean sites such as Egypt, Phoenicia and Cyprus. A detailed list of these items, with expert opinion on their age, purpose and makers, would be accessible only to those visitors who have the motivation to learn the world from the books and encyclopaedias written in the universal language of the Enlightenment and, so, never go on a site trip without an expert guidebook, such as the one prepared by the Austrian team of excavators for Ephesos under the coordination of Peter Scherrer. Perhaps this latter type of visitors hope that the more knowledge they acquire on the time- and place-specific attributes of the items on display, the more defined those items would become for them within the syntax of a historicist language that would then impose upon ‘things’ forms of order implied by the continuity of time, as a possibility of ‘being sure about the world’. Only these adequately prepared visitors would be able to access the order imposed upon the chaotic display of ‘finds from the Altar of Artemision’ by Ulrike Muss, from the Austrian Institute of Archaeology, through her description of the items in the order of ‘Geometric Period finds’,44 ‘7th–6th century 46

‘gold’,

47

‘ivory’,

48

‘marble’,

49

‘schist’

50

and ‘limestone’

BC

finds’;45 and then of

finds, apparently proceeding

from the most to the least valuable materials.51 The importance of these finds is due to the fact, emphasised by Christiane Sourvinou-Inwood on early Greek sanctuaries of the eighth century

BC,

‘that the sanctuary with altar – with or without a temple – is the

regular, taken-for-granted focus of religious activity’,52 with votive offerings representing a more permanently attested form of worship.53 In the case of the Artemision of Ephesos, the earliest-dated votive offerings are thought to be contemporary with an eighth-century

BC

peripteral temple, which is described, on the website of the Austrian

Institute of Archaeology, as having served as a prototype for numerous peripteral temples, up to the Parthenon of the Athenian Acropolis. . . . Since all the older installations were abandoned and thereby sealed up already in the 6th century BC the small finds may be understood as stored up information concerning the cult and its representation.54

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Therefore, their presence in the Artemis Hall actually has the potential to provoke a perception of the displayed Artemis Ephesia statues not as works of art for aesthetic contemplation, but as illustrative of historical or archaeological information that would reveal those ‘other, older meanings’ which are argued above after Duncan to be commonly negated or obscured in modern museum practices. More specifically, Catherine Morgan explains the exotic luxuries such as the Phoenician, Egyptian and Cypriot dedications at the early lonian sanctuaries at Ephesos and the facing island of Samos by the commercial transactions for which the region was famous in the so-called Orientalising period of Eastern Mediterranean influence over Greek art:55 ‘Although there is little unusual in the range of objects offered, their styles often reflect a fusion of Greek and foreign traits’,56 revealing ‘the greater mobility and interaction within the Greek world and outside it’.57 Morgan’s comments are especially important in the light of the observation by Helmut Kyrieleis on the Heraion at Samos, that ‘in general, the equation of Greek and Near Eastern divinities is a welldocumented phenomenon in the history of Greek religion’.58 The relevance of these arguments for this chapter is due to a reference to Artemis in the Iliad (21.470) and elsewhere as Potnia Theron or ‘Mistress of Animals’, which is commonly represented by a female figure standing between a pair of lions or other wild or fantastic animals such as the bird, deer or griffon, which we have already seen as constructing the curiosity that is Artemis Ephesia.59 In her research on the cult of Anatolian Cybele, Lynn E. Roller finds the origins of this representational model in the second millennium Near East, and its later spread in Minoan and Mycenaean art, with Near Eastern centres such as Assyria and Cyprus providing the source material in the Early Iron Age, which corresponds to the period of the eighth-century BC peripteral temple in the Artemision. These would support Falkaner’s attribution of the mystery of the Ephesian Artemis to a fusion of Eastern Mediterranean and Aegean traits, by referring to the Egyptian Isis, Roman Diana and Greek Rhœa as derived from the Hebrew ‘Rehah’. However, this line of argument would seem to counter the one imposed by a group of installations in Efes Museum that would seem to centre, instead, on the presumption of an interrelation between pre-Greek and Greek populations at the site of Ephesos.60 The same suggestion surfaces in Morgan’s explanation that a rich collection of ivories dedicated at the Artemision at Ephesos between c. 650 BC and 550 BC (and possibly the work of Lydian craftsmen) shows non-Greek influences in style and workmanship, and their subjects include Hittite-style ‘Hawk Priestess’ as well as non-Greek figures from daily life.61 The difference between these two arguments, when analysed using the concept of the ‘museum without walls’ that would accommodate a multiplicity of attempts to interpret the meaning and use of its contents, highlights the importance of the part played by the display strategy in Efes Museum for the possible interpretations of the enigmatic Artemis Ephesia figure within its walls.

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Reading into the mysteries of Artemis Ephesia in the Artemis Hall of the Efes Museum Duncan and Wallace describe the modern museum as a complex architectural phenomenon that structures the visitor experience through the organisation of a selection of artworks in an architectural order.62 Although individuals respond to this structuring differently, depending on their educational, cultural and social background, the architectural setting of the museum nevertheless imposes the same structure to everyone by making all visitors follow the same architectural scenario during their activity in the museum, which they describe with the term ‘ritual’, on the basis of its striking similarity with sacred rituals, both in terms of form and in terms of content.63 The experience resembles traditional religious practices, in that the positioning of individual works, plans of individual rooms and the ordering of individual collections, encourage the visitors to practise the rites and internalise the beliefs that are inscribed in the architectural scenario,64 serving, in this way, to articulate hidden broader political and ideological objectives.65 The architectural layout of Efes Museum would gain in importance when viewed from this conceptual framework, as the scenario here directs the visitors into the Artemis Hall from the Hall of Cemetery Finds wherein are also displayed offerings for Cybele.66 Before entering the Artemis Hall, the visitors make their last stop in front of a series of drawings and objects that ‘reveal’ the order implied by continuity of time. This is structured as a sequence proceeding from a sixth-millennium

BC

Mother

Goddess figurine from the Neolithic site of Çatalhöyük in central Anatolia, to a sixthcentury

BC

one from the Hittite capital Hattusha further to the north, then to an eighth-

century

BC

Hittite one and a ninth-century

BC

Hittite Kubaba, both from Kargamish in

The sequence of images at the entrance of the Artemis Hall from the Hall of Cemetary Finds.

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south-eastern Anatolia, to conclude with a sixth-century 67

current capital city of Ankara.

BC

Phrygian Kybele from the

Passing to the Artemis Hall, visitors find themselves

facing the next step in the evolution that is authoritatively outlined for them as such, which is none other than ‘Artemis the Colossal’, i.e. the most ‘auratic’ object in an undifferentiated path of progress towards the modern in Walsh’s terms.68 In this way, Walsh shows that ‘its meaning is conferred by the “writer”, that is, the curator, the archaeologist, the historian, or the visitor who possesses the “cultural competence” to recognize the conferred meaning given by the “expert” ’.69 The selection of these items and their structuring in the architectural scenario uniquely in this part of the museum, which otherwise lacks a sequential arrangement of displays, would seem to support a particular interpretation of the Ephesian Artemis, namely one suggesting an evolution from Cybele at the very site of Ephesos, which is equated with the city of Apasas in Hittite texts.70 In this portion of the museum alone the visitors follow a programmed narrative that is a version of ancient history.71 The significance of this clear choice from among various possible alternative explanatory models for cultural interaction and change in Mediterranean prehistory deserves to be addressed in a separate study on the bond between politics and archaeology in Anatolian historiography. Yet, it should be noted here that this is the strongest curatorial suggestion that may be encountered within the walls of Efes Museum and without, as the same suggestion has found its way into, or perhaps rather it originated from, Ekrem Akurgal’s Ancient Civilizations and Ruins of Turkey, which is the best-known expert guidebook on the topic in the English language: On reaching this spot [i.e. the site of Ephesos], the Greeks found that the mother goddess, Kybele, held sway as chief deity, as in almost every part of Anatolia. In order to placate the indigenous peoples, they adopted a policy of syncretism and introduced the worship of Artemis and Kybele in the same deity.72 According to the Efes Museum’s researcher Öcal Özeren’s guidebook to the site and its museum, ‘[t]he big reliefs of lions on her arms are strong evidence that the goddess [Artemis] was in the stage of transition from Cybele. In all statues of Cybele there were lions at her side’.73 The power of this interpretative structure would seem to have increased, intentionally or not, through a series of modifications in the Artemis Hall during a renovation in 1999. These include the removal of the suspended ceiling that used to create a focus of natural light on ‘Artemis the Beautiful’ in a dimly lit hall that would have invited visitors for an aesthetic contemplation. The result is a brightly and more homogeneously lit hall within which the ‘aesthetic chapels’ of the former scenario no longer play any significant part. Also, on the other side of the hall, the pair of columns painted on the front walls of the niche housing ‘Artemis the Colossal’ has been painted over in grey. Instead of the two statues facing each other from their chapels at two ends of a dark central space, the leading part would now seem to be taken by that very space, thanks to the installation there of a model showing the Temple of Artemis at Ephesos

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The Artemis Hall of Efes Museum after the 1999 renovation.

in its Hellenistic phase, considered to have been one of the seven wonders of the ancient world. So, we end up with an anachronistic ensemble, consisting of a window of votive offerings from the pre-sixth-century BC deposit below the Hellenistic altar, which is believed by the Austrian excavators of the site to have served as a predecessor and prototype for later monumental altars such as the one at Pergamon;74 a highly speculative reconstruction of the Hellenistic period temple fronted by the altar; three Romanperiod Artemis Ephesia statues that do not come from Artemision but may easily be believed by visitors to have done so in the absence of information on their labels about their provenance; in addition to the other pieces described above. Located at the centre of the hall, the model representing one among the several temples at the Artemision would, thus, seem to be ordering the apparent chaos created by the various items displayed in the room by relating all to the Artemision and Artemision alone, and not to each other as in the cabinet of curiosities, discouraging the establishment of a direct connection with the ‘lumps on the goddess’ chest’ and geometric period finds originating from Egypt and Phoenicia in ‘her’ altar. In the physical space of the Artemis Hall, one now has to step into the Artemision to reach one from the other.

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Therefore, what we now find (amid a sequence of spaces that resemble the human biology hall of the Natural History Museum in its depth, fragmentation and openness to a variety of personal visitor choices) is a major hall that is perhaps the most popular part of the whole exhibition, which resembles the birds gallery of the Natural History Museum which is characterised by the dominant controlling function of its central aisle. The installation of a model of the Artemision at this very centre would seem to encourage the visitors further to internalise the idea, already introduced in the former Hall of Cemetery Finds, of a local evolution at Ephesos from Cybele to Artemis Ephesia. It would seem that Efes Museum tends to build walls around this exhibition space to convey a curatorial message about the order of things through the unity of its architectural space that imposes one interpretation as the correct one. In this architectural scenario, there seems to exist no part for the Egyptian Isis or the Hebrewsounding Rhea, not to mention the unlabelled votive offerings from Eastern Mediterranean sites such as Phoenicia, which would have suggested, instead, crosscultural interaction in space and time leading to a fusion of Eastern Mediterranean and Aegean traits as an explanation for the curiosity named Artemis Ephesia.

Conclusion This chapter has been motivated by an observation of lost interpretative possibilities in the 1999 renovation of the Artemis Hall of Efes Museum as a potential starting point for a discussion on the ideological aspect of archaeological museum architecture and curatorship, and its impact on the reconstructions of the past. My initial intention was to interpret the architectural scenario in which Artemis Ephesia was displayed before 1999 as a ritual object for aesthetic contemplation in isolation from its context, to contrast it with its subsequent re-contextualisation in such a way as to encourage one among several possible versions of East Mediterranean prehistory. However, while trying to do this, my own ‘correct’ version tended to surface between the above lines of mine. Another interpreter with a different background and agenda may have easily adopted the very same interpretative framework to evaluate the introduction of a model of the Artemision positively, as an attempt to overcome the former ‘museum effect’ through contextualisation. This does not, however, necessarily conform to Alan Radley’s description of the configuration of the modern museum using the ‘department store’ model which he contrasts with the old ‘cathedrals’ for ‘ritual’ in Duncan’s sense.75 The departmentstore model is ‘based upon the idea of a freely moving visitor who scans the array of artefacts, choosing to stop here or to wander there’,76 sampling this and leaving out that, which would imply in the case of an archaeology museum ‘that the past is capable of being reconstructed’,77 albeit in many different ways, as exemplified at Stonehenge. In recent literature especially in public archaeology and museum studies, there has been a strong contingent that wishes to promote this model as a transformation of the museum into ‘a truly democratic institution of civil society, where the

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equation of power and knowledge is redesigned to accommodate postmodern resistance to exclusively expert interpretations of collective and peripheral knowledges’.78 Seen in this way, the Efes Museum enables an acceptance of the value of expert interpretations of archaeological material, taking the view that an expert in any field is an individual who has been given the opportunity to profess that field for the community as a whole. Those individuals may, nevertheless, have hidden ideological agendas, who construct, as Roland Barthes theorised, sets of shared communal values, such as ‘The Great Family of Man’,79 which in the context of the present discussion might specifically encompass The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization.80 Ultimately, the best protection against hidden ideological agendas might be found in curiosities such as Artemis Ephesia, in that it defies the imposition of any rational grid that would fail to overlap the mysterious correspondences between its components. The viewer/visitor/reader should not be assumed as passive and uncritical, and subject to manipulation by any hidden social and ideological agenda in a museum.81 Nor should the museum-going ritual, or hunger for the so-called ‘museum effect’, be evaluated as a fruitless quest for meaning. So long as we accept the invitation, the informative power of curiosities would keep us in the middle of our neverending search for a way of being sure about the world. This is not to advocate any form of ‘over-interpretation’, rather the kind of openness which Umberto Eco’s concept of the open work implies, whereby all works of art possess an openness to a multiplicity of interpretations, the limits of which are imposed by the works themselves.82 In any museological strategy, the object still remains right there, with all its indices always open onto alternative interpretative paths for those who may wish to take them.83

Notes 1

2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

10

All the photographic images included in this chapter were taken by I. Can Siram, ' during two site trips in April 1999 and October 2007. I thank him wholeheartedly for his support throughout the lengthy period that finally resulted in this chapter. For a full account of the discovery, see Sabahattin Türkogˇlu (1991), Efes’in Öyküsü, Istanbul: Arkeoloji ve Sanat Yayınları, p. 152. Peter Scherrer (2000), Efes Rehberi, Istanbul: Ege Yayınları ve Avusturya Arkeoloji Enstitüsü, p. 210. Scherrer, Efes Rehberi, p. 210. Türkogˇlu, Efes’in Öyküsü, p. 152. Öcal Özeren (1991), Ephesus, Istanbul: Keskin Color Kartpostalcılık Ltd. S¸ti., p. 124. Edward Falkaner (1862), Ephesus, and the Temple of Diana, London: Day and Son, p. 290. Vernon Hyde Minor (1994), Art History’s History, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, p. 172. Norman Bryson (1990), Looking at the Overlooked: Four Essays on Still Life Painting, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, p. 10, cited in Minor, Art History’s History, p. 174. Falkaner, Ephesus, and the Temple of Diana, pp. 290–1.

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11

12 13 14 15 16

17 18

19 20

21 22 23 24

25 26

27

Paul Hirst (1993), ‘Foucault and Architecture’, AA Files: Annals of the Architectural Association 26: 52–60, p. 54, quoted in Ali Artun (2006), Tarih Sahneleri – Sanat Müzeleri I. Müze ve Modernlik, Istanbul: I˙letis¸im, p. 41. Kevin Walsh (1992), The Representation of the Past. Museums and Heritage in the Post-Modern World, London; New York: Routledge, pp. 18–22. Artun, Tarih Sahneleri – Sanat Müzeleri I, p. 41. Artun, Tarih Sahneleri – Sanat Müzeleri I, p. 41. Artun, Tarih Sahneleri – Sanat Müzeleri I, p. 41. Stephen Greenblatt (1991), ‘Resonance and Wonder’, in Ivan Karp and Steven D. Lavine (eds), Exhibiting Cultures. The Poetics of Museum Display, Washington, DC; London: Smithsonian Institution Press, pp. 42–56, at p. 50. Gwynne Evans Blakemore (1987), Elizabethan-Jacobean Drama: A New Hermaid Background Book, London: A&C Black, pp. 313–23. Martin Prösler (1996), ‘Museums and Globalization’, in Sharon Macdonald and Gordon Fyfe (eds), Theorizing Museums. Representing Identity and Diversity in a Changing World, Oxford: Blackwell Publishers/The Sociological Review, pp. 21–44, at p. 28. Artun, Tarih Sahneleri – Sanat Müzeleri I, p. 96. Michel Foucault (1994), The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, New York: Random House; cited also in Artun, Tarih Sahneleri – Sanat Müzeleri I, pp. 139–40. Foucault, The Order of Things, p. xxiii. As discussed in Umberto Eco (2000), Kant and the Platypus – Essays on Language and Cognition, New York; London: Harcourt, Inc. Minor, Art History’s History, p. 181. Kevin Hetherington (1996), ‘The Utopics of Social Ordering – Stonehenge as a Museum without Walls’, in Sharon Macdonald and Gordon Fyfe (eds), Theorizing Museums, pp. 153–76, at p. 28. André Malraux (1967), Museum without Walls, transl. Stuart Gilbert and Francis Price, London: Secker and Warburg. Umberto Eco (1989 [1962]), The Open Work, transl. A. Cancogni with an Introduction by D. Robey, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; Umberto Eco (1984 [1979]), The Role of the Reader – Explorations in the Semiotics of Texts, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press; Umberto Eco (1994 [1990]), The Limits of Interpretation, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Various authors have attributed Stonehenge to various makers including Phoenicians, Romans, Danes, Saxons, Celtic Druids, British aborigines, Brahmins, Egyptians, Chaldeans, and even . . . the Red Indians. Giants, dwarfs and supernatural forces were suggested by several of the pre-scientific writers. The post-scientific ones have added Atlanteans and extra terrestrials. It has been called a temple, an observatory, a memorial, a parliament, a necropolis, an orrery, a stone-age computer, and much besides. J. Michell (1982), Megalithomania, London: Thames and Hudson, p. 22, quoted in Hetherington, p. 163.

28 29 30 31 32

160

Michell, in Hetherington, ‘The Utopics of Social Ordering’, p. 163. John Peponis and Jenny Hedin (1982), ‘The Layout of Theories in the Natural History Museum’, 9H, 3: 21–5. Peponis and Hedin, ‘The Layout of Theories in the Natural History Museum’, p. 21. Peponis and Hedin, ‘The Layout of Theories in the Natural History Museum’, pp. 23, 24. The hall housing a thematic exhibition of gladiatorial fights for some years has a separate entrance opposite the small courtyard, and is disconnected, in a way, from the series of wrapping halls that are entered from the other side of the entrance hall.

Reading into the mysteries of Artemis Ephesia

33 34 35

36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44

45

46

47

48 49 50 51 52

53 54

Peponis and Hedin, ‘The Layout of Theories in the Natural History Museum’, p. 25. Scherrer, Efes Rehberi, p. 197; Türkogˇlu, Efes’in Öyküsü, p. 153. E.g. Carol Duncan (1991), ‘Art Museums and the Ritual of Citizenship’, in Ivan Karp and Steven D. Lavine (eds), Exhibiting Cultures. The Poetics of Museum Display, Washington, DC; London: Smithsonian Institution Press, pp. 88–103, at p. 90; Carol Duncan (1998), ‘The Art Museum as Ritual’, in Donald Preziosi (ed.), The Art of Art History: A Critical Anthology, Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 473–85; Carol Duncan and Alan Wallach (2004), ‘The Universal Survey Museum’, in Bettina Messias Carbonell (ed.), Museum Studies – An Anthology of Contexts, Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, pp. 51–70. Duncan, ‘Art Museums and the Ritual of Citizenship’, p. 478. Duncan, ‘Art Museums and the Ritual of Citizenship’, pp. 481–2. Duncan, ‘Art Museums and the Ritual of Citizenship’, p. 482. Svetlana Alpers (1991), ‘The Museum as a Way of Seeing’, in Ivan Karp and Steven D. Lavine (eds), Exhibiting Cultures, pp. 25–32, at p. 26. Walsh, The Representation of the Past, p. 35. Scherrer, Efes Rehberi, pp. 208–9. Scherrer, Efes Rehberi, pp. 214–16. In reference to Michel Foucault (1966), Les Mots et les Choses. Une archéologie des sciences humaines, Paris: Gallimard. These consist of a small bronze peacock, a small bell in the form of a pair of ducks, a big bronze peacock, a water buffalo (or ram?) and deer (maybe in Hittite style); two amber necklaces and a glazed terracotta one, all from the Geometric period peripteros (Scherrer, Efes Rehberi, p. 212). These consist of two bronze griffon bases, a pierced ivory pendant in the form of a lion’s head, a bronze omphalos cup, multi-coloured protoms; terracotta bases in the form of female and bull’s heads; four aryballoi in Corinthian order; a small Phoenician ivory plate pertaining to a small box with images of Egyptian gods Bastet and Hathor; ivory pomegranates; four hyperboloid transparent pieces of quartz that may have been used as lenses (Scherrer, Efes Rehberi, p. 212). Among these, a pendant featuring a bull–lion head composition that was recovered in 1986 near the cult base in the north, a golden fibula, a golden pin, and a pierced golden plate have been denoted as found worthy of mentioning, in addition to a golden sphyrelaton (i.e. applied over a timber core) statue of a goddess that was recovered from the west part of the temple, a copy of which is now on display (Scherrer, Efes Rehberi, p. 212). These consist of an ivory goddess figurine in Oriental cloths, carrying votive bowls over her head, from the northwest corner of the temple; a Caryatid type of ivory female figurine, from the west part of the temple; a large lid pertaining to a pyxis with carved lotus palmette decorations, an ivory ram, a small askos for sacrifices (Scherrer, Efes Rehberi, p. 212). That is, a larger white marble oil lamp (Scherrer, Efes Rehberi, p. 212). That is, a smaller green schist oil lamp (Scherrer, Efes Rehberi, p. 212). That is, an Archaic Neo-Cypric head that was unearthed in the altar excavations of 1970 (Scherrer, Efes Rehberi, p. 212). Scherrer, Efes Rehberi, p. 212. Christiane Sourvinou-Inwood (1995), ‘Early Sanctuaries, the Eighth Century and Ritual Space. Fragments of a Discourse’, in Nanno Marinatos and Robin Hägg (eds), Greek Sanctuaries – New Approaches, London & New York: Routledge, pp. 1–17. Sourvinou-Inwood, ‘Early Sanctuaries, the Eighth Century and Ritual Space’, p. 11. Available online: www.oeai.at/eng/ausland/artemision.html, accessed on 13 November 2007.

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55 56 57

58 59

60

61 62

63 64 65

66 67

68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75

76 77 78 79 80

162

Catherine Morgan (1995), ‘The Origins of Pan-Hellenism’, in Nanno Marinatos and Robin Hägg (eds), Greek Sanctuaries, pp. 18–44. Morgan, ‘The Origins of Pan-Hellenism’, p. 34. Sourvinou-Inwood, ‘Early Sanctuaries, the Eighth Century and Ritual Space’, p. 11; also emphasised in Helmut Kyrieleis (1995), ‘The Heraion at Samos’, in Nanno Marinatos and Robin Hägg (eds), Greek Sanctuaries, pp. 125–53, at p. 138. Kyrieleis, ‘The Heraion at Samos’, p. 146. Lynn E. Roller (2004), Ana Tanrıça’nın I˙zinde. Anadolu Kybele Kültürü [In Search of God the Mother. The Cult of Anatolian Cybele, translated into Turkish by Betül Avunç], Istanbul: Homer Kitabevi, pp. 141–2. In reference to Walter Burkert (1995), ‘Concordia Discors: The Literary and Archaeological Evidence on the Sanctuary of Samothrace’, in Nanno Marinatos and Robin Hägg (eds), Greek Sanctuaries, pp. 178–91, at p. 185. Morgan, ‘The Origins of Pan-Hellenism’, p. 34. Duncan and Wallach, ‘The Universal Survey Museum’, translated into Turkish by Renan Akman as Carol Duncan and Alan Wallach (2006), ‘Evrensel müze’, in Ali Artun (ed.), Tarih Sahneleri – Sanat Müzeleri II. Müze ve Eles¸tirel Düs¸ünce, I˙stanbul: I˙letis¸im, pp. 49–86, at p. 52. Duncan and Wallach, ‘Evrensel müze’, pp. 52–3. Duncan and Wallach, ‘Evrensel müze’, p. 54. Duncan, ‘Art Museums and the Ritual of Citizenship’, translated into Turkish by Elcin Gen as Carol Duncan (2006), ‘Sanat müzeleri ve yurttas¸lık ritüeli’, in Ali Artun (ed.), Tarih Sahneleri – Sanat Müzeleri II, pp. 203–24, at p. 206. Scherrer, Efes Rehberi, p. 208. Below these hand drawings are displayed various Meter representations and reliefs including one Meter-Cybele from Ephesos, dated to 470s BC, and a seated (Late Hellenistic?) goddess on her throne with lions on her sides (Scherrer, Efes Rehberi, p. 209). Walsh, The Representation of the Past, p. 36. Walsh, The Representation of the Past, p. 37. J.G. Macqueen (1968), ‘Geography and History in Western Asia Minor in the Second Millennium B.C.’, Anatolian Studies XVIII: 169–85, p. 169. In allusion to Duncan, ‘Art Museums and the Ritual of Citizenship’, p. 92. Ekrem Akurgal (1978), Ancient Civilizations and Ruins of Turkey. From Prehistoric Times until the End of the Roman Empire, Istanbul: Haset Kitabevi, p. 142. ' Özeren, Ephesus, p. 124 Available online: www.oeai.at/eng/ausland/artemision.html, accessed on 13 November 2007. Alan Radley (1991), ‘Boredom, Fascination and Mortality: Reflections upon the Experience of Museum Visiting’, in Gaynor Kavanagh (ed.) Museum Languages: Objects and Texts, Leicester; London; New York: Leicester University Press, pp. 65–82. Radley, ‘Boredom, Fascination and Mortality’, p. 71. Radley, ‘Boredom, Fascination and Mortality’, p. 72. Carmel Borg, Bernard Cauchi and Peter Mayo (2003), ‘Museum Education and Cultural Contestation’, Journal of Mediterranean Studies 13, 1: 89–108, p. 102. Roland Barthes (1973), ‘The Great Family of Man’, in R. Barthes, Mythologies, London: Paladin, pp. 100–2. The allusion here is obviously to Martin Bernal’s highly controversial (1987) Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization, Vol. I, The Fabrication of Ancient Greece 1785–1985, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, and (1991) Vol. II, The Archaeological and Documentary Evidence, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

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81 82

83

Eilean Hooper-Greenhill (1991), ‘A New Communication Model for Museums’, in Gaynor Kavanagh (ed.), Museum Languages, pp. 49–61. Cf. Stefan Collini (ed.) (1992), Interpretation and Overinterpretation, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; Umberto Eco (1994 [1990]), The Limits of Interpretation, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Hooper-Greenhill, ‘A New Communication Model for Museums’, pp. 54–5.

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Reinterpreting public space and cultural heritage

Curating the social, curating the architectural Gerald Adler

In our rootless society, ‘historic heritage’ has become one of the master words of the media tribe. It refers at once to an institution and to a mentality.1 Built works of architecture form vital aspects of our cultural heritage. However, the precise nature of what constitutes this heritage is called into question when it comes to considering buildings in their different physical, social and cultural manifestations. Do we value, above all, a particular building’s ‘pure’ architectural pedigree, or are its social and communal values paramount? We have such a dichotomy in the way the visual arts are curated. In Trafalgar Square, London, the National Gallery admits into its canon ‘approved’ works of artistic merit, as well as minor works, whose pedigree can be securely traced to renowned artists. Around the corner, the National Portrait Gallery aims to possess an image – painted, photographed or sculpted – of anyone and everyone figuring in British public life. The quality of the portrait, in terms of any inherent artistic merit, is not the main criterion for its inclusion in the collection. In terms of the built environment, the reasons for preservation or conservation are more complex. When ascribing value to an easel painting, we rarely consider the possibilities of reusing its canvas, but buildings also possess real-estate value, in addition to their architectural and social histories. A building, of course, has an inherent monetary value, in addition to its embedded energy. If, however, this is less than the redevelopment value of its site, then a dearth of any inherent social, historical or architectural qualities will render it ripe for demolition.

Curating buildings: defining the social, the historical and the architectural But first, back to basics. What do we mean by ‘curating’ buildings? Clearly this has something to do with building conservation, unless we are referring to that rarity, the

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collection of model buildings commissioned and built as an exemplar of a particular style or building type, such as the Weissenhofsiedlung (1927) in Stuttgart, or its conservative rival, the Kochenhofsiedlung (1933). Its other main meaning is the selfconscious publication of an architect’s oeuvre, or of individual buildings, ranging from the academic, such as Le Corbusier: oeuvres complètes or Tadao Ando: Complete Works, to the populist, such as ‘Great Modern Buildings’ published as full-colour posters in the Guardian newspaper in October 2007. I shall concentrate on the first meaning of curating, and shall examine the different, and sometimes conflicting, attitudes that prevail when deciding which buildings are worth conserving. If we restrict our attention to the curating of existing buildings we are faced with different kinds of values similar to those of the National Gallery and National Portrait Gallery mentioned above. At the start of the modern era, over 100 years ago, it was the Viennese art historian Alois Riegl (1858–1905) who grappled with the problem in a systematic way. The French architectural historian Françoise Choay (b. 1925) makes explicit reference to the debt she owes him in her groundbreaking book The Invention of the Historic Monument. She begins her painstaking exploration of the history of building conservation with this definition of heritage: Patrimoine: ‘inherited property passed down in accordance with the law, from fathers and mothers to children’; in English: patrimony, inheritance, or, most closely, heritage. This elegant and very ancient word was originally tied to the familial, economic and juridical structures of a stable society, rooted in space and time. Modified by a variety of adjectives (genetic, natural, historic) that have rendered it a ‘nomadic’ concept, it is now embarked on a new and much mediatised career.2 Choay traces the parallel endeavours of French and British architects and writers to cherish the past, to appreciate heritage and to deal practically with it. Such notables include Prosper Merimée, Victor Hugo, Eugène Viollet-le-Duc, John Ruskin and William Morris. She regards as monuments structures designed to be regarded as such (the Albert Memorial in London is a good example), whereas historic monuments have their status imposed on them subsequently: the monument is a deliberate (gewolte) [sic] creation whose purpose is established a priori and at the outset, while the historic monument is not initially desired (ungewolte) [sic] and created as such; it is constituted a posteriori by the converging gazes of the historian and the amateur, who choose it from the mass of existing edifices, of which monuments constitute only a small part. Any object can be converted into an historic witness without having had, originally, a memorial purpose. Conversely, any human artifact can be deliberately invested with memorial function.3 The buildings of the German architect Heinrich Tessenow (1876–1950), with which I conclude, fall into Choay’s (and Riegl’s) category of ‘historic monument’ and require ‘unconditional preservation’.4

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For our purposes, Choay’s account of how the conservation of historic monuments came to be institutionalised, in ways that are similar to the contemporary practice of ‘listing’ buildings, is of greatest interest. This so-called ‘consecration phase’ at the turn of the nineteenth century is the historical location of so much that was to become pivotal in the development of modernist attitudes and poses. Its dichotomies, many of which remain unresolved to the present day, underlie the design of Tessenow’s projects, which I give as examples at the end of this chapter. His projects for a Jewish philanthropic client have attained historic monument status for two reasons, the first aesthetic, by dint of being rare extant works of this architect, and the second social, since they are built examples of a unique instance of German-Jewish cultural life during Choay’s ‘consecration’ period, around the turn of the nineteenth century. Riegl offered a new, ‘scientific’ perspective regarding the thorny problem of deciding which buildings are worth conserving. He had become president of the Austrian Commission on Historic Monuments in 1902. The following year his book Der moderne Denkmalkultus (The Modern Cult of Monuments) was published.5 Riegl distinguished ‘commemorative’ (Erinnerungs-) from ‘of the presentday’ (Gegenwarts-) values. Commemorative values comprise ‘age value’ (Alterswert), ‘historic value’ (historischer Wert) and ‘deliberate commemorative value’ (gewollter Erinnerungswert).6 Riegl’s ‘present-day values’ comprise materialist ‘use values’ (Gebrauchswerte) and ‘art value’ (Kunstwert). This final, transcendent quality is further subdivided by Riegl to comprise, intriguingly, ‘newness value’ (Neuheitswert) and ‘relative art value’ (relativer Kunstwert). We are reminded of that feature of nineteenthcentury aesthetic theory which sought dualities, such as Karl Bötticher’s (1806–89) distinction between elements of buildings as being either Werkform (work-form) or Kunstform (art-form). These distinctions, of course, underlie the American architect Louis Sullivan’s most celebrated dictum ‘form follows function’. Riegl’s distinctions enable us to come to conclusions about the value of buildings whose cultural meaning has changed. Do we, in curating such a building, privilege its ‘architecture’ possibly at the expense of its ‘history’, or vice versa? In this context, one of Tessenow’s last realised projects from the Weimar Republic, his remodelling of Karl Friedrich Schinkel’s Guard House (1816–18) in Berlin, is interesting in two respects. First, it antagonised right-wing architects and critics associated with the Block – Paul Bonatz (1877–1956), Paul Schmitthenner (1884–1972) et al. – while nonplussing those associated with the Neues Bauen, thus placing Tessenow in an invidious middle ground within an increasingly politicised environment. Second, the project marks the second in a series, numbering four to date, of the re-curating of the monument. Its third reincarnation came as the East German state’s monument to the victims of fascism, while the latest remodelling casts it as a vaguely anti-war symbol, complete with its scaled-up Käthe Kollwitz statue of a nurturing mother. The point is that each successive German regime has sought to re-curate the monument in order to make sense of it within its altered political context.

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Heinrich Tessenow, Remodelling of Schinkel’s Neue Wache, Berlin-Mitte (1930s). Interior view (1930).

Current problems: Tessenow’s ‘Jewish’ projects and their status within both architectural and social history Currently, two minor buildings designed by Tessenow for a Jewish philanthropic foundation from the years immediately prior to the outbreak of the First World War are challenging conservationists and historians with similar questions as to the primacy of architectural form over more general cultural content. What should our response be towards buildings designed for a Jewish-German nationalist organisation, as they fall into disrepair or face a conversion so radical that nothing may be left of their original nature? How do we distinguish a cultural and political heritage as distinct from a strictly architectural one? Perhaps, after close examination of the evidence, we can find that there is, in fact, no dilemma and that the cultural and social is necessarily ‘inscribed’ in the architectural, and vice versa. Wilhelmine Germany, united under Prussia in 1871, granted full emancipation to the Jews, as Napoleon had done in France some 70 years earlier. However, the liberties granted to Jews gave rise to ever more vociferous anti-Jewish sentiments being aired. German anti-Semites voiced their concerns at the increasing presence of Jews, both in public life, as Jews assumed ever more prominent roles in academia and commerce, and from the influx of Ostjuden from the Austro-Hungarian and Russian empires on Germany’s eastern borders.

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In October 1879, Wilhelm Marr (1818–1904) founded the Antisemiten Liga (League of Anti-Semites). His book Der Sieg des Judentums über das Germanentum (The Victory of Judaism over Germany) appeared in March 1879, and the subsequent Antisemitische Hefte, which he began publishing the following year, fanned the public outpourings of anti-Semitism within Germany.7 There were two prominent public figures leading Wilhelmine anti-Semitism: the pastor Adolf Stöcker (1835–1909) and the historian Heinrich von Treitschke (1834–96). Their agitation helped fuel the infamous Berlin Movement anti-Semitic petition of April 1881, which mustered 250,000 signatures, including those of 4,000 students.8 This was just four months after the formation of the openly anti-Semitic Verein deutscher Studenten (Union of German Students), founded 16 December 1880, whose statutes declared that ‘[t]he Association will form clubs that will accept full-time Christian students who attend higher institutions of learning in Germany’.9 Paragraph five added that ‘[i]t is forbidden to demand or accept satisfaction with a weapon from members of the Jewish race’.10 The response of Jewish students to these anti-Semitic Burschenschaften (student associations) was to found their own German-Jewish associations, while among German Jewry at large two groupings arose to combat anti-Semitism. They were mutually antagonistic: the Centralverein deutscher Staatsbürger jüdischen Glaubens (Central Association of German Citizens of Jewish Faith; henceforth the CV), founded 26 March 1893, and the Zionistische Vereinigung für Deutschland (Zionist Union for Germany; the ZVfD), founded in 1897. The CV’s response to the challenge of Zionism was ‘for the Jews to assimilate as a national entity into the nations in whose midst they reside’.11 The Zionists, on the other hand, rejected assimilation and argued for the resettlement of Jews in Palestine. One might suppose that progressive circles in Wilhelmine Germany were immune to the virus of anti-Semitism. The Reform movement (Reformbewegung) is a catch-all term covering all aspects of social, cultural and artistic reform in central Europe, ranging from vegetarianism and informal dress to garden cities and eurhythmics.12 However, anti-Semitism became associated with certain aspects of the Reform movement in Germany, as it did elsewhere in the Western world, and the editors of mass-circulation journals which were either sympathetic to its ideals or which actively promoted its aims were renowned for their anti-Semitic attitudes. Otto Glagau (1834–92) was the publisher of the magazine Die Gartenlaube between 1874 and 1875. This magazine (in English: the arbour, or bower) was the leading journal of the rising middle class in Germany. Glagau wrote a series of articles labelling the Jews ‘swindlers and financial racketeers’.13 His book Der Börsen und Gründungsschwindel in Deutschland (The Stockmarket and Foundation Swindle in Germany; 1877) contributed both to the growing tide of anti-Semitism, as well as to the beginnings of the garden-city movement. The two were not such strange bedfellows as might first be imagined. The garden-city movement was essentially anti-cosmopolitan, and sought to vacate the city and all its evils for the unsullied purity of the countryside. If Die Gartenlaube represented the liberal middle class, then Der Kunstwart was perhaps the most prestigious art journal published in Germany around the turn of the century. Its anti-Semitic editor Ferdinand Avenarius published an essay by the

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(Zionist) Moritz Goldstein in March 1912 entitled ‘Deutsch Jüdischer Parnass’ (GermanJewish Parnassus). In this essay, Goldstein attacked those self-deluding Jews who believed they could assimilate into German society.14 The article reinforced the idea among circles of ‘progressive’ artists and intellectuals that the Jews were unable to integrate into society at large and should instead follow the path of Zionism in seeking a separate national existence in Palestine. However, the great majority of German Jews remained loyal to the assimilationist Centralverein, and groups openly hostile to the aims of Zionism emerged. The dispute between the pro- and anti-Zionist Jewish camps came to a head in 1914 when over 500 Jewish notables signed a full-page advertisement in all the major German newspapers. According to the historian Jehuda Reinharz, this expressed their twofold fear: that Zionism had become powerful enough to attract German Jews and that Christians would identify the entire German Jewish community with the Zionists, thereby adding fuel to the anti-semitic arguments that Jews were a foreign body within the German nation.15 It could therefore be said that the Centralverein represented the class aspirations and realities of the great majority of German Jews, and as such had no truck with ‘getting back to the land’, regardless of whether this was located in Palestine or in Germany. There was, however, a minority of German Jews who were neither Zionist nor bourgeois. These were those disparate groups, broadly attuned to the aims of the Reformbewegung, whose aim it was to reintegrate German Jews into the German nation, into its Boden (soil), if not its Blut (blood). The particular aspect of the Reform movement that they stressed was its anti-cosmopolitan, ‘back-to-the-land’ philosophy. There had been attempts in the last decades of the nineteenth century to promote the assimilation of German Jews, not in the political sense but rather by returning Jews to trades and occupations which they had hitherto neglected, or from which they had been excluded. The Verein zur Verbreitung der Handwerke unter den Juden (Association for the Spread of Trades amongst the Jews) was founded in Düsseldorf in 1880. It established apprentices’ homes there and in Cologne. Similar institutions were also founded in Berlin, but the most important foundation for accomplishing occupational reform was that created by Moritz Simon (1837–1905). Simon was a prosperous Hanover banker. During a visit to America he had been moved by the poverty of the newly arrived Jewish immigrants and had resolved to take steps on behalf of occupational reform in Germany when he returned home. After an attempt to introduce vocational training into the curriculum of the Jewish teachers’ seminary in Hanover had failed, he and a few colleagues started the Israelitische Erziehungsanstalt (Israelite Educational Institute) for training Jewish youth in horticulture and manual skills at Ahlem, near Hanover, in 1893.16 He addressed the Centralverein in Berlin 1904. Its chairman, Maximilian Horwitz, ‘emphasized the close relationship between his organization and the Verein zur Förderung der Bodenkultur unter den Juden Deutschlands’17 (Association for the Promotion of Agriculture amongst the Jews of Germany).

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Simon argued that a large part of those persons who now sympathize with the anti-Semites but are not themselves professional or racial anti-Semites will be healed of their prejudices as soon as they see how a number of Jews also participate in physically taxing labours.18 The story now becomes quite fascinating. Moritz Simon’s Foundation, established after his death, was instrumental in setting up two institutions that furthered the Jewish-German Nationalist cause (as represented by the Centralverein). However, these institutions resembled, to all intents and purposes, Zionist training camps. Simon wanted a return to the land, but for him the land was located in Germany, and not Palestine. The architectural and planning models his architect, Tessenow, chose were those of the Reform movement, a movement which had its own inherent anti-Semitic bias as I have indicated above. Simon wanted German Jews to relinquish their atavistic ghetto mentalities by returning to manual labour skills; the Zionists also wanted them to do so, but in Palestine. The bourgeois position of the Centralverein, on the other hand, sought primarily social advancement through the professions. In hindsight, of course, the aims of the Simon Foundation strike one as anomalous, brave, but ultimately doomed.19 The Teachers’ Training College at Peine (1911; also called the Simon Department for Horticulture and Manual Dexterity), and the Apprentices’ Home for the Teaching Estate for Young Israelite Farmers in nearby Steinhorst, were two projects executed by Tessenow between 1910 and 1913 at the instigation of the Simon Foundation to attract young Jewish men from their traditional sources of employment and ‘return’ them to the land.20 The Simon Foundation sought to integrate German Jews with their Christian neighbours, and was not Zionist in intent but reformist and (German) nationalist, in the liberal, non-xenophobic sense of the word. The Simon family was acquainted with the Dohrns, who had been instrumental in commissioning Tessenow to design the Dalcroze Institute in Dresden-Hellerau. Having seen Tessenow’s work at Hellerau and been recommended him by Wolf Dohrn (Tessenow’s great patron who was effective in driving forward the building of the Institute), it decided to entrust the commission to him. Tessenow’s scheme at Peine saw the realisation of an ideal agricultural community with striking formal similarities to the layout of the dance community at Hellerau.21 Tessenow’s position between the engaged left-wing architects of the Neues Bauen and the conservative Block group may be viewed as a reflection of the Simon Foundation’s ‘utopian’ aims of returning Jews to Germany’s (as opposed to Palestine’s) organic basis. Tessenow was sandwiched between the Block and the Bauhaus, and it was this apolitical stance which in the end fell foul of both polarities of German architectural practice in the late Weimar period. The strictly architectural qualities of Tessenow’s work for the Simon Foundation are ascetic and refined, and the buildings manage to rise above purely local considerations of style, without recourse to the bombast typical of much late Wilhelmine work. The Peine and Steinhorst buildings qualify as historic monuments in Choay’s sense simply because they stand as

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Heinrich Tessenow, Teachers’ Training College, Peine (1911–12). Ground plan, east and west elevations. Note the provision of the separate Milchküche (milk kitchen) to accord with Jewish dietary laws.

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Heinrich Tessenow, Apprentices’ Home for the Teaching Estate for Young Israelite Farmers, Steinhorst near Celle (1910). Oblique view of entrance front (2008).

Heinrich Tessenow, The Institute for Rhythmic Education, Hellerau near Dresden (1910–12). South façade viewed from entrance courtyard (under restoration, 2008).

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remnants of German-Jewish life, having survived the Nazi interregnum. Their conservation is particularly relevant as they represent a poignant double memory of Reformist values in two respects: design and social change.

Conclusion The questions raised here concern our attitude towards heritage. The historian Tristram Hunt, in his article ‘A jewel of democracy’, argues for our valuing the built heritage of radical history, in this case St Mary’s church, Putney, which was the home of the famous Putney debates (1647) of the English Civil War.22 There are finer late medieval parish churches in England, but few have the resonance of radical history in the same measure as Putney. To conclude with Françoise Choay, I was particularly inspired to write this chapter after having read her essay on the Parisian suburb of Drancy, in which she debates the pros and cons of conserving its housing estate that served as France’s main rounding-up point of prisoners, mainly French Jews, before despatching them to the east, to Auschwitz and the other camps.23 Should Drancy be conserved as a memorial? Choay sets out three criteria of assessment for such a site: its economic and use value, its historic value and its memorial value. Her conclusion is that it cannot both be a memorial, in the full sense of that word, and a place of daily life. ‘Memory can only be invoked there by excluding any utilitarian or daily function. You don’t live on the battlefields of Verdun. You don’t live in

Heinrich Tessenow, Apprentices’ Home for the Teaching Estate for Young Israelite Farmers, Steinhorst near Celle (1910). Detail of edge tiling in bathroom (2008).

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Auschwitz.’24 The buildings designed by Tessenow at Peine and Steinhorst are different from Drancy since they bear the memory of a remarkably optimistic interlude in German history. What Germany has in the case of these buildings by Tessenow are rare examples of surviving buildings designed according to Reformist principles. What makes them virtually unique in terms of heritage is that their status as ‘historic monuments’, unlike the vast majority of Jewish sites in Germany and those parts of Europe which came under German occupation during the Second World War (including Drancy), bears witness to an extremely hopeful and positive episode in GermanJewish social and cultural life. Their conservation, which must involve the provision of meaningful contemporary uses for their locations and communities, is an absolute necessity.

Notes 1

2 3 4 5

6

7 8 9 10 11 12

13 14 15 16 17

Françoise Choay, The Invention of the Historic Monument (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), transl. Lauren M. O’Connell, p. x [French: Allégorie du patrimoine, Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1992]. Choay, The Invention of the Historic Monument, p. x. Choay, The Invention of the Historic Monument, pp. 12–13. Choay, The Invention of the Historic Monument, p. 14. See Ernst Bacher (ed.), Kunstwerk oder Denkmal?: Alois Riegls Schriften zur Denkmalpflege (Vienna; Cologne; Weimar: Böhlau, 1995), and ‘Riegl, Alois: The Modern Cult of Monuments, its Charter and its Origin’, transl. K.W. Forster and D. Ghirardo, Oppositions, 25, 1982: 21–51. It is interesting to note that Riegl’s ‘age value’ was for him a material fact about the building and not a transcendent value, as it was for Ruskin (Choay, The Invention of the Historic Monument, p. 112). According to Choay, Riegl’s age-value ‘has some connection with Ruskin’s piety value’ (ibid., p. 112). ‘Gewollter Errinerungswert’, for Riegl, represents the ‘eternal present’ (ewige Gegenwart) (Bacher, Kunstwerk oder Denkmal?, p. 80.) Jehuda Reinharz, Fatherland or Promised Land: The Dilemma of the German Jew, 1893–1914 (Ann Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan Press, 1975), p. 15. The year 1881 is infamous for the start of the three-year pogrom against the Jews in Russia, and led to mass Jewish emigration to Western Europe and North America. Reinharz, Fatherland or Promised Land, p. 29. Reinharz, Fatherland or Promised Land, p. 29. Reinharz, Fatherland or Promised Land, p. 183. Eurhythmics was an important aspect of the burgeoning body-culture of the Reform movement. One of its main practitioners and proponents was the Swiss music pedagogue Emile Jaques-Dalcroze for whom Tessenow designed his Institute in the newly founded Hellerau Garden City just outside Dresden. Reinharz, Fatherland or Promised Land, p. 14. Reinharz, Fatherland or Promised Land, pp. 195–6. Reinharz, Fatherland or Promised Land, p. 220. Sanford Ragins, Jewish Responses to Anti-Semitism in Germany (Cincinnati, OH: Hebrew Union College Press, 1980), p. 68. Ragins has the incorrect year of 1883. Ragins, Jewish Responses, p. 69. The deputy chairman of the Association was Gustav Tuch. His son Ernst spelt out the solution to German anti-Semitism:

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In Tuch’s view the Jews should recognize that their membership in a declining class would lead to disaster, and hence, as an expression of their own selfinterest and out of dedication to their self-preservation, they must leave that class en masse and turn to agriculture and primary production. ‘The slogan for the economic redemption of German Jewry,’ Tuch said, ‘thus must read: Get out of the merchant class [Los vom Kaufmannstande]!’. (Ragins, Jewish Responses, p. 70) 18 19

Ragins, Jewish Responses, p. 69, citing the Allgemeine Zeitung des Judenthums, 8 March 1895, pp. 113–14. See also Ragins, Jewish Responses, p. 66: Zionists like Leo Pinsker and Theodor Herzl argued that the anti-semitic movement was an ugly but logical response to the fundamental abnormality of Jewish life, namely the lack of a Jewish national homeland. . . . The German Jewish liberals, of course, rejected the concept of Jewish nationhood, and they also gave considerable emphasis to the irrational component in antiSemitism. But, like the Zionists, they too admitted that there were aspects of Jewish life which were contributing causes of the hostility they experienced. And, again like the Zionists, they acknowledged, for the most part, that these were located in the circumstances of Jewish life and behaviour, not in Jewish teaching and religious doctrine. Not Judaism, but Jewry was in need of reform.

20 21

22

23

24

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The other buildings were the Israelite Children’s Day-Home, Hanover (1913; destroyed) and the Apprentices’ Home, Steinhorst (1912; extant). I am indebted to Theodor Böll, archivist at the Kunstbibliothek Berlin, for kindly supplying me with the background information on Tessenow’s connections with the Simon’sche Stiftung. I would also like to thank Reiner Schaffrath from Steinhorst for sending me the exhibition catalogue, Anja Schrader and Rainer Schaffrath, Thora Tore Tessenow: Ein Haus und (s)eine Geschichte gestern, heute – morgen? (Ausstellung vom 9. September bis 15. Oktober 2000 im ‘Haus der Gemeinde’ in Steinhorst (Steinhorst: Gemeinde Steinhorst, 2000). Tristram Hunt, ‘A Jewel of Democracy’, the Guardian (G2 supplement), 26 October 2007, pp. 4–7. The irony is that hardly anything remains of the medieval fabric at Putney: it is nearly all nineteenth century. Françoise Choay, ‘Cité de la Muette, Drancy: le culte patrimoniale’, François Choay, Pour une Anthropologie de l’Espace (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 2006). She goes on to say ‘what’s to be done with la Muette? It cannot be both a memorial at the same time as retaining its significance as a place of local life’ (‘que faire de la cité de la Muette? En aucun cas à la fois un mémorial et un lieu de vie locale’) (Choay, Anthropologie, p. 340). Choay, Anthropologie, p. 340. French: Le travail de la mémoire n’y est possible qu’à condition d’en exclure toute fonctionne utilitaire et quotidienne. On n’habite pas les champs de bataille de Verdun. On n’habite pas Auschwitz.

Expanding the public realm through curated collaborative action The Echigo Tsumari abandoned house project Carol Mancke

If you or I just tried to move into a house in a rural area like this, we would have a lot of trouble becoming part of the place. But, when art or an artist goes into a community, even if they run into difficulties, a lot of people get involved and connections are made. For art as well, this engagement with place brings huge meaning. . . . Art was an urban thing in the twentieth century, and when cities have problems, art expresses them. Bringing attention to urban problems is not a bad thing, but that kind of art is painful to look at all the time and it’s not all that art can be. . . . Also, when an artist expresses urban ills he/she becomes a spectator. An artist can’t possibly remain a spectator in Tsumari, and so they start to feel like doing something [about things].1 The Echigo Tsumari Art Triennial has taken place in Echigo Tsumari, a 760 km2 area in Niigata Prefecture north-west of Tokyo, every three years since 2000. Most of the land is steep forestland, yet the highest quality rice in Japan is produced there. Cut off by terrain and climate, the region has had a reputation for being closed and politically isolated. Snow accumulation of up to five metres has contributed to depopulation since the middle of the twentieth century and many of the 65,000 people remaining are elderly, living in villages of 5–30 houses. All things considered, it seems an unlikely place for an international arts festival.

Co-mingling of urban and rural culture One of the goals of the Triennial has been to expand the understanding of the public realm within the community and open a space for communication, discourse and cross-fertilisation with mainstream urban culture. Fram Kitagawa, who directs the event with his team of curators at Art Front Gallery, calls this a ‘co-mingling’ of urban and rural culture.2 The Triennial aims to create places and situations where this

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co-mingling can occur. A large gap separates urban and rural culture in Japan today. To bridge this gap effectively, the triennial has had to deal with two conditions that may be particular to Japan: first, the perceived status of rural culture and, second, the understanding of what constitutes ‘public’. Built and maintained with great skill and care over hundreds of years, Japan’s rural landscape is clearly the product of a traditional culture making best use of difficult terrain and limited resources. Still, it is unlikely that producers of that landscape see their work as ‘cultural’ activity.3 The Triennial’s goal of ‘co-mingling’ urban and rural culture requires the rural setting to be recognised as a valuable product and producer of culture. The perceived status of agriculture within the minds of farmers needs to be raised before it can begin to interact on an equal footing with urban culture.4 Japan’s single-minded pursuit of economic development over the last 60 years has had both positive and negative effects on rural culture. It has brought improvements to infrastructure including better roads and the rationalisation of agricultural lands. Unfortunately, these improvements have often been carried out without due consideration to their effect on local landscape and communities. Alex Kerr has written extensively of the ways that Japan’s brand of economic prosperity has contributed to the devaluation of rural culture and the gradual degradation of rural environments.5 Television, the Internet and ease of travel have spread mainstream culture and, with it, an unexamined acceptance of its values. While these changes have reduced the gap between the way of life in urban and rural settings, they have further undermined traditional rural culture. Unable to see their own cultural productions reflected back through mainstream media, residents in rural communities are at risk of gradually losing a sense of the value of their own creations. In the same way that they see their children leaving to work in the cities as natural, they may also view the chipping away at their culture and communities as an inevitable consequence of progress. The lack of an open public realm in rural communities accelerates this phenomenon. Public space in rural communities of the past was generally limited to the grounds of local shrines and temples. Public gatherings held to discuss issues of concern to the entire community took place in the house of the hereditary village headman. The sociologist Yasunaga Toshinobu writes that Japanese words for public and private reflect a dialectic between the ruler and the ruled – the state and the subject of the state. This is fundamentally different from the notion of public as something that is shared, in the sense of belonging to all, versus something that is private, or belonging to the individual.6 The Triennial needs to present an alternative kind of ‘publicness’ – something shared by everyone – in order to succeed. Local residents did not initially appreciate these goals, and the first event went ahead in 2000 despite significant resistance at the village level. As a result, most of the works were ‘sculptures’ on public land.7 A possible measure of the event’s success is that a large proportion of the 330 artworks on display in 2006 were located in ‘private’ spaces within villages. Many of these were part of the ‘Abandoned House Project’, which made use of empty farmhouses.

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Use/conservation Professor Yosuke Mamiya has speculated on the way the verb ‘to use’, when considered in the context of the conservation of buildings, contains a contradiction. He writes in an article about the Triennial: When we think of the verb ‘to use’, we think of the thing we use as being reduced through the using of it. Therefore, to use = to consume, and to spend = to use up. When we conserve something, whether it is nature or a building, we refrain from ‘using’ it . . . and try to keep people away from it. Buildings, however, decline to ruins when they are not used. Of course, if we use them in the sense of consuming them [reuse the materials of which they are made] then their ruin is hastened, but if they are used and maintained, then use = conservation.8 According to the 2003 census, there are an estimated seven million abandoned houses in Japan. The reasons for their abandonment are various but generally relate to the decrease in and ageing of the overall population. The fact that mainstream culture favours new styles of living, which are seen as incompatible with older houses, may also be to blame. At the same time that they are romanticised as environments where a purer Japanese way of life may be possible, old houses are seen as dark, dirty, too hot or too cold, and terribly inconvenient. In the context of a village of 25 households, an abandoned house radically affects the real and perceived potential of the place. As long as these buildings are not used, the productive space of the community is

Echigo Tsumari abandoned house.

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reduced, which in turn decreases the social and cultural potential of the community in a very tangible way. A small number of houses are protected by the Japanese government through Important Cultural Property designations. Today there are 326 vernacular houses (‘minka’ or ‘folk houses’) designated as Important Cultural Properties.9 Many of these have been restored to an ‘original’ form and opened to the public to present information about a past way of life. They are maintained and therefore conserved, but their power to shape or participate in contemporary culture is limited by the manner of presentation. A few more abandoned houses have found their way into outdoor farmhouse museums where vernacular buildings from different parts of the country are brought to one location and arranged in a sort of village. These become tourist attractions and often offer visitors the chance to experience aspects of what it would have been like to live in such a house in an earlier time. A number of architects and builders have found a niche in refurbishing old houses, either for their original owners or for clients in other parts of the country or even abroad. Houses are often taken apart and moved. There is even a society for rescuing buildings that would otherwise collapse or be demolished, finding owners for them and helping the new owners to rebuild them in other settings for other uses.10 The Echigo Tsumari abandoned house project offers a radically different approach to the problem of abandoned houses.

Restored minka.

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The abandoned house project The project grew out of a desire to stem a downward spiral caused by depopulation, and was based on the concept that houses deserted by families that cannot maintain them scar fragile communities, encouraging further depopulation. The project team obtained permission to use abandoned houses as venues for site-specific works, to be developed with community collaboration. The idea was that breathing new life into the abandoned houses, by means of collaborative action between artist(s) and community, would help to regenerate the communities. The project brought together three objectives: (1) the renewed houses would become a resource that would draw new residents to the region; (2) aspects of traditional regional culture embedded in the fabric of the buildings would be highlighted through exploration of the opportunities and constraints they offer to the production of meaning through art, and this knowledge could then be brought forward into contemporary culture; and (3) working on the projects with the participation of local builders and craftspeople would contribute directly to the regeneration of local industry.11 Artist/architect teams transformed 40 abandoned houses and schools in 2006. Their actions ranged from practical refurbishment to allow the display of artworks, to transformation of the buildings themselves into works of art. The project is ongoing and its ambition goes beyond the event. These houses – whether works of or venues for art – are for sale. The hope is that people from outside the region will sponsor projects and come to live in the region. Kitagawa has created a new initiative, the Community Museum Owner Project, to push this plan forward. The abandoned house project works presented in 2006 might be seen to fall into different categories: (1) those that focus critical attention to the rural way of life; (2) those that draw attention to formal or poetic relationships; (3) those that create opportunities for social exchange; (4) those that present traditional crafts; and (5) those that elevate the status of everyday artefacts. The abandoned house project might also be examined as a testing ground for forms of cultural production addressing different aspects of contemporary art discourse – site specificity, translation, local/global dichotomy, the aesthetic experience, the sublime, relational or dialogic art practice, interactivity, social sculpture, etc. It is beyond the scope of this chapter to address these or detail all the projects. I will, however, introduce four projects and discuss their implications against the goals of the Triennial.

Ayse Erkmen, What Happened! The house barely survived heavy snows and the Great Earthquake of 2004. The walls are cracked, glass fragments are scattered on the floor. By walking inside the house, visitors will realize its age. The ivy planted around it will slowly cover it, enclosing the time inside.12

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What happened!

There is something about this village that is less organised, somewhat poorer than others – the house more isolated. A long blank wall of weathered boards faces the road. Vines will soon cover the house completely. Inside, the entry area is dilapidated and gloomy, the surfaces dirty. A messy arrangement of certificates hangs over an inner door. A small shopping cart, the kind that old ladies use as walkers, waits, but there is no one here. I step out of my shoes and onto a smooth timber surface, a path running through the house. I smell and feel the soft freshness of new wood underfoot, its luminous warmth an enticement in this cheerless place. As I move further in, my perception shifts – I am not simply entering a house, I am on a trail expecting scenic overlooks, vista points and adventure. The house is in serious disarray. The walls are cracked – great chunks of plaster strewn about. The familiar apparatus and objects of everyday life are shaken from their settled places and thrown into uncanny relationships around me. The neat wooden plank leads into the depths of the house, past lists in extra-large script stuck haphazardly to the wall above the telephone and a television askew on the floor. The path pauses, jutting into the kitchen, offering a view of the entire collection of kitchen utensils and vessels lying smashed on the floor. Around to the bath, upstairs to children’s bedrooms, messy as if the children have just left for school, the wooden path takes me further into the mystery. What has happened here? I know that many people

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were forced to leave their homes after a violent earthquake in 2004. With the local building industry stretched to the limit, reconstruction was impossible before the winter snows, and in some cases it was too dangerous to stay. Surely there was time to pack, but nevertheless, some families took only what they could grab and left. They had had enough. Erkmen’s work draws me into the intimate circumstances of the people who lived here, even as it holds me at a distance. The path turns me into a tourist. I am allowed right into the thick of things. No display or special effects disrupt me and there is nothing between me and the action. I can move about freely – even off the path if I chose. The path separates me from the scene and works against the empathy I feel for the people who have left. I am forced to look critically at the pleasure I get from standing safely on the path imagining their panic and fear – at the way I enjoy the aesthetic arrangement of their shattered world.13 The work spotlights a decisive moment, fixing it into a recurring loop – forever separated from the possibility of growth and change. What Happened! opens a public space, but only as a window into deprivation and loss and perhaps communicating the artist’s desire that something be done. But, what can we do? It is difficult to see how this work can create the kind of after-effects the Triennial hopes to achieve.

Projection of Life/From here and there.

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Shunichi Ohtani (with architect S. Nakamura), Projection of Life/From here and there Ohtani visited all 120 families in the Murono community, listening to their stories as he looked through their photo albums. He scanned the photos, transferred them to film, and posted them onto the windows of the houses. Light passes through them, merging the current outside scenes with the community feelings captured in the photos.14 The village of Murono is in a valley along a main road. It has the feeling of a shukuba – an inn town that offers lodging to travellers. The house is not large, but it is made of grand stuff. The structural timbers are heavier and more evenly milled than is typical. I learn from the artist working there that the structure had originally been part of a grander house and was moved to the present location about 100 years ago. In contrast to What Happened, all evidence of the lives of former occupants is gone. The ground floor of the house has been deconstructed, its floorboards removed to reveal the substructure. Like the Erkmen work, however, there is a path at what would be the floor level. Light pours in through many multi-paned glass doors and windows. I notice that the light is coloured, so I take the path to the nearest window and see that it is covered with what looks like a family photo album. The light is filtered through hundreds of photographs of families, events and outings. I know nothing about the individuals who lived in this house, but the people who live in the village populate its light. Photographs overlay the view of the surrounding houses. My focus shifts between the photos in the foreground and the houses beyond. I can only look at one or the other, but the shadow of the other remains present. I feel privileged to be able to look at the photographs at my leisure, noticing the things I have in common with the locals and the things I do not. I follow the path to each window and then up the stairs. Each room offers more of the same, yet each is different. The images colour the light pleasantly. Still, I start to feel slightly claustrophobic. Light, air and sustenance . . . everything only finds its way into the house through the participation of the village as a whole. In the city we see work as something we do in order to support life; it is the space where we are ‘exploited’ and it is opposed to ‘life’. Only with effort can I remember that, taken together, ‘work’ is the communal activity of supporting human life. The photographs printed on the glass are a potent reminder of the communality of life. Two aspects of the work offer the pleasure of being able to see what is usually hidden inside albums or under floorboards. I enjoy being able to look at the photographs in my own time and enjoy their cumulative effect. Unlike paging through an album under the eye of the owner, I am not constrained to appreciate or respond in any particular way. I can jump from one group of pictures to another. I am freed of any responsibility towards them. At the same time, the secrets of the house are laid bare. The construction is in plain view and I can admire the simplicity of method and the craft in the execution. There are no poetic nooks to delight Bachelard. The space is abstract and depersonalised. The house has become an object-as-product-of-technology offered

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for sanitised consumption. Stripped of its history of specific inhabitation, the house presents itself as available for inhabitation. This work exposes a tension inherent in the abandoned house project. The houses are retrieved from collapse and given a short-term life during the Triennial. But in order to survive long term, each house must find a sponsor and so it must communicate liveability. While presenting information about itself through selective deconstruction and about the village through the photographs, the partial refurbishment also gives a generalised sense of the ‘charming’ lifestyle possible there. It seems to say, I may be old, but I can be contemporary.

Nihon University College of Art sculpture course (with architect C.J. Mancke), Shedding House15 Junichi Kurakake together with his former and current students have been hand carving the surface of walls and pillars inside and abandoned house. Simultaneously the house has undergone some renovation. Once carved, the space revives.16 This village of detached houses arranged on a steep south-facing slope seems coherent and prosperous. Shedding House is halfway up the hillside. I approach it from the side, a wall of weathered boards, a thatched roof covered with metal. As I come around to the front, I see that the rest of the house has new siding. A gabled volume projects from the south-east corner, making an L-shaped footprint. The entrance is under the projecting gable and into a rough concrete-floored space, with darkened timber walls and ceiling. Every timber surface is scored by individual strokes of a small carving tool, revealing the lighter meat of the wood. I pass through a wide opening and the space opens up above my head revealing an astonishingly striking frame of natural timbers supporting a lashed roof thatch visible from below. Here again, every piece of structure (beams, posts, rafters) is scored, as are the floors, window frames and plaster and timber walls. I have walked into a woodblock print of a

Shedding House.

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fairytale house. Light streams in. Surfaces shimmer and dematerialise. The space is abuzz with energy, the air alive. I remove my shoes and step onto the grooved surface that massages my feet as I walk. I lie on the floor and revel in the visual vibration. There is no furniture and no visible kitchen or bath. A stair leads to a room over the entrance with stunning views across the valley – richly green. This room is also entirely scored – the floor carving spinning out from the centre. I feel dizzy and strangely exhilarated. Downstairs again, I look behind two ancient blackened doors to find tatamifloored rooms with closets for bedding and clothing – bedrooms. A stair hidden in the closet leads up to a loft overlooking the main space. A mysteriously mute volume clad in flamed vertical boards sits on the other side of the main space. Inside are two brightly lit white spaces – a ‘system kitchen’ and a ‘unit bath’ and toilet. These prefabricated components, so common and utterly grounded in the contemporary everyday life of Japan, contrast radically with the timeless quality of the rest of the house. A Butoh17 dancer performs to an audience packed into the narrow spaces around the main room. Extra lights flood the space – warm light reflecting off plaster walls – the scored surfaces seem to flicker. A single scroll depicting an emperor in full regalia hangs on the narrow piece of wall between the dark doors. The dancer emerges and a frightening machine-like sound fills the space. His performance is intense and painful to watch. I wonder how the children in the audience are coping. Later we speculate on the dancer’s intent. Someone remarks that perhaps he was distressed at the way the house has been stripped of its history, emerging scraped of responsibility and shame – as fresh and young as the students who marked it. Did the dancer want to bring the spirit of that past back into the house,18 to remind us that the consequences of actions remain? Shedding House was one of the most popular works in 2006 and still receives visitors on weekends. It is regularly used for workshops and performances. Bringing attention to the hitherto concealed structure has brought the skill of anonymous builders to light and raised the status of all the houses in the village. The students’ actions, gentle and violent, performed on all the surfaces over time – cleaning, marking and finally bathing in gentle light – give the space a living energy that is much more than visual shimmer. The accumulation of their repetitive action has transformed the house into a powerful and nuanced public space. As Lefebvre might have said, the energy deployed within it has made the physical space real.19 The juxtaposition of the unremarkable conveniences of contemporary everyday life further reveals unacknowledged relationships between the present and imagined pasts and futures.

Grizedale Arts (Marcus Coates, Juneau/Projects/, Barnaby Hosking, Tim Olden, Adam Sutherland, Nina Pope, Karen Guthrie, Lali Chetwynd, Seven Samurai Seven artists from the group will live here and do something useful for the community – anything from farm labour to artwork.20

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The performance takes place in the protected undercroft of the new Snow-land Agrarian Culture Centre. One of the group, a man, is speaking in English against a background of pseudo-religious sound imagery. It is a manifesto, I think, but it is difficult to follow. The text is projected in Japanese behind the performers, and also read out by one of the curating staff in equally difficult Japanese. Later, as the men of the group play and sing, the two women, their faces masked by white makeup, mime what seems to be a history of dance. Another man, wearing a contemporary woman’s dress and a blonde wig crowned with an animal’s head, dances shaman-like, reined in by a rope attached to his waist. The atmospheric machismo of the manifesto reading and the image of women as either silent mimes or a bound shaman (who is actually a man) communicate something that unnerves me. Is it intentional? I look around to see what other people are thinking. It is very dark and I cannot read faces. Am I the only person to think this? Towards the end of the performance, people from the village join on stage to perform local folk songs and dances. I read real warmth in these people’s expressions. Whatever they thought of the performance, I can see that they like the young artists and are enjoying their interactions. The Grizedale Arts project is perhaps the most conceptually distant from conventional notions of art and architecture among the abandoned house projects. Seven British artists took up residence in an abandoned house in the same village as Shedding House. Part of the house had been refurbished to present the work of two Japanese artists. The Grizedale group used the rest as their home base. Styling themselves after the seven mercenaries in the film who were hired by a village to protect it from bandits, the artists offered themselves to the community to develop something together through a collaborative process. I found the Seven Samurai conceit very troubling at first. Casting themselves into an evangelistic role relative to the village, the artists appeared to suggest a superior, or more privileged, knowledge than the locals.21 It seemed an irredeemably arrogant starting point and the performance seemed to confirm this view. I became intrigued, however, as I learned more about the group’s encounters with the village. Each artist/artist team pursued different activities, which together involved nearly every person in the village. The projects involved music, dance, food, stories and even ideas for how the village might develop products or services. The group put together a website and web-based shop, where village products can be purchased.22 And, nine months after their residency, the artists welcomed a group of ten from the village to the Grizedale headquarters in Cumbria, to run workshops in farming and cooking. Although at times perplexed about what was expected of them during their trip, the participants I spoke to expressed satisfaction with the trip and an expectation of further exchanges in the future.23 The artists seem to have successfully established a relationship with the village, which is still ongoing at the time of this writing.24 Several curators and writers have written on Derrida’s ideas about hospitality in relation to biennales.25 Hosts gain creativity by allowing the ‘unlimited agency of the guest’, and jointly they build a ‘conflicted yet convivial relationship [which] could

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create a space of intersection of the “local” and the “international” in a temporary “dissociative” community formed by the . . . exhibition’.26 This creative agency of hospitality is clearly at work in Seven Samurai.

Conclusion/after-effects I have been able to stay at Shedding House twice since 2006. In June 2007, two of the locals took me to the paddies to see fireflies. They explained that in their youth, clouds of fireflies filled the heavy air above the young rice plants in early summer. The fireflies completely disappeared after the terraces were rebuilt some years ago. It turns out that fireflies depend on a kind of crustacean that lived in the ancient stone-lined ditches, but does not thrive in the smooth concrete channels that replaced them. A few years ago, the village lined some of the channels with stone. And so, that night we were surrounded by the magical flashing blue light I remember from my own childhood summers in Pennsylvania. We shared a perfect moment – ephemeral yet stretching through time, unquestionably particular and local, yet also connected through me to a faraway place. When I was there again in December 2007, I noticed a newsletter (first edition dated October 2007) for a new community-based organisation dedicated to enhancing the region and its way of life. The ‘Scarecrow Brigade’ was formed by a group of local residents who had participated in the Triennial. It is a forum to which anyone can bring ideas for discussion, development and eventual implementation. The goals include: supporting local events and festivals; supporting the Triennial; exchanging with artists and others; developing regional identity and culture by making full use of art works, local culture, history and preservation; and participating in and cooperating with local government. It is difficult to unpick the many ways the Echigo Tsumari Triennial has affected its setting. Would these things have happened without the kick-start it provided? It is impossible to know for sure, but I doubt it. International art events like Echigo Tsumari have the potential to speak and be heard beyond the art world and can and do engage with the needs of the communities in which they are set. They offer the possibility for and in some cases actually achieve genuinely regenerative aftereffects. Echigo Tsumari succeeds because it has operated in the understanding that the true value of global exchange is to be found in direct personal interaction. Local residents, visitors and other participants make personal connections, exchange ideas and impressions and learn to see their practice/environment/world differently. By redefining the abandoned buildings as artefacts participating in contemporary art discourse, Kitagawa’s strategy changes them from structures too archaic to support contemporary life into liveable and desirable ‘works of art’. This method can be seen as a radical response to the ways that historic buildings and landscapes are fetishised through preservation practices. The buildings are physically transformed through

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action, which changes both how they are perceived and how they might be interpreted. The fact that the action is collaborative further transforms their status from purely private dwellings into dwellings that are also part of the public realm.

Notes 1

2 3

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F. Kitagawa, ‘Abandoned houses, art and community – Towards a place for the comingling of the urban and the rural. Special Edition Case Study City: The whereabouts of 7,000,000 abandoned buildings’, Shin Kenchiku Jyutaku Tokushu, 246, October 2006, p. 82. F. Kitagawa, ‘Abandoned Houses, Art and Community’, p. 82. In English, the conceptual link between ‘agriculture’ and ‘culture’ is unavoidable, but there is no equivalent semantic link between these words in Japanese where ‘agriculture’, (no¯gyo¯), is made up of two characters that mean ‘farming’ or ‘farmer’ and ‘work’; and ‘culture’ ( bunka) is made up of the character for ‘written character’ or ‘literature’ and a character that generally means ‘change’. It is no accident that one of the three buildings built in conjunction with the Triennial is nicknamed the ‘No¯butai’, which means ‘Agriculture Stage’ but is a homonym for a stage for Noh Theatre, a form of theatre which is very high culture indeed. See A. Kerr, Dogs and Demons: Tales from the Dark Side of Modern Japan, New York: Hill and Wang, 2001, and Lost Japan, Victoria, Australia: Lonely Planet Publications, 1996. ‘Kan’ ( ) refers to the ‘official’, or the business of the state, while ‘Min’ ( ) connotes the business of individuals. M. Mae, Gibt es in Japan eine Civil Society? Zum schwierigen Verhältnis von Öffentlichkeit und Privatheit, available online: www.uniduesseldorf.de/home/Jahrbuch/2003/Mae, accessed 10 October 2007. F. Kitagawa, unpublished interview, 2006. Y. Mamiya, ‘Creating new space for living that continues and renews the regional. Special Edition Case Study City: The whereabouts of 7,000,000 abandoned buildings’, Shin Kenchiku Jyutaku Tokushu, 246, October 2006, p. 80. Government of Japan, National Treasures (Buildings), available online www.mext.go. jp/b_menu/shingi/bunka/toushin/04112401.htm, accessed 10 October 2007. JMRA: Nihon Minka Saisei Recycle Kyoukai (Japan Minka Recycle Association). Y. Mamiya, ‘Creating new space for living that continues and renews the regional’, p. 81. Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennial, Executive Committee, English Guidebook, Tokyo: Art Front Gallery, 2006, p. 14. I am reminded of an artwork I saw in London recently. In Collecting Time: The Living and the Dead (2005/6), the artist Fran Cottell installed a raised path through her house and allowed visitors to wander through as she and her family went about life as usual. The difference is, of course, that What Happened! is a ‘still life’ – a memorial to an event – whereas Cottell’s work is truly ‘live’. Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennial, Executive Committee, English Guidebook, p. 48. I was part of the collaborative team that produced Shedding House. As the architect, I worked closely with the owners and the artist team to integrate the sometimesconflicting goals of each. Although I am an interested party to the project, I have tried to write about the experience as if visiting for the first time. Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennial, Executive Committee, English Guidebook, p. 48. The word ‘butoh’ means ‘dance’. When capitalised it generally refers to a form of contemporary dance more accurately known as Ankoku-Butoh, or the ‘dance of utter

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19 20 21

22 23 24

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darkness’. See S. Klein, Ankoku Buto: The Premodern and Postmodern Influences on the Dance of Utter Darkness, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University East Asia Papers, no. 49. Particularly the era of the Showa Emperor (1925–88) when Japan emerged as an imperialist power, suffered massive destruction and humiliation in defeat and clawed its way to becoming a world economic power. H. Lefebvre, The Production of Space, transl. D Nicholson-Smith, Cambridge, MA; Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 1991, p. 13. Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennial, Executive Committee, English Guidebook, p. 48. See G. Kestor, Conversation Pieces Community and Communication in Modern Art, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2004, for a cogent discussion of the way that community-based art practices sometimes fall into evangelistic patterns which may be in opposition to their stated goals. See www.sevensamurai.jp/. Junko Maruyama, an artist who accompanied the group to Britain, in conversation with the author. The project as it has evolved might be compared to the Art Barns: After Kurt Schwitters projects in Lancashire directed by the artist/curator group Littoral. Especially relevant is Toro Adeniran-Kane’s work, which led to a mutually beneficial commercial arrangement where women from the artists’ community in Manchester contracted to buy produce directly from the farms (G. Kestor, Conversation Pieces Community and Communication in Modern Art). And also to Jeremy Deller’s piece at the Muster Skulptur project in summer 2007 (Speak to the earth and it will tell you). See J. Verwoert, ‘Forget the national: Perform the international in the key of the local (and vice versa)!’, and other articles in Research Papers Biennials and City-Wide Events, 2007. S. Dutton and J. Griffin, ‘Something like nothing, happens anywhere’, Research Papers Biennials and City-Wide Events, 2007: 6.

Curating the nation Turkish pavilions in world expositions Sebnem Yücel Young

Dis-orient-ing the nation World expositions predate the Republic of Turkey. They came into existence 72 years before the foundation of the Republic, in 1851, with London’s Great Exhibition. As Timothy Mitchell has stated, these were events to which ‘the “whole world” was to be invited in to see a fantastic and yet systematic profusion of material goods, all the new necessities and desires that modern capitalism could order up and display’.1 The nineteenth-century world expositions gave the opportunity to learn more about other cultures – those of the colonies and of potential new markets. During the nineteenth century, what accompanied the encounter with others was a curiosity to learn the place of one’s own nation in the world and an expectation to be convinced of its superiority over others. After all, world expositions were ‘great new rituals of selfcongratulation’.2 Consequently, while physically bringing different nations together, expo grounds were conceptually setting them apart. From the placement of the display grounds to the representations of other cultures, the world was hierarchically categorized into a modern, progressive West and its others. It is possible to argue that world expositions today have moved away from the ‘self-congratulatory’ fairs of the nineteenth century. First of all, there is now a governing body, which did not exist then. The Bureau International des Expositions (BIE) was founded in 1928, as a result of a growing need to control the number and quality of expositions – that is, to categorize them, to decide on the objectives of each category and to set up the procedures for the selection of the host country. This, in return, would enable making expositions ‘truly’ international events – moving them away from being vehicles of national propaganda for the host countries. There are two categories defined by the BIE for world expositions. The first refers to ‘international registered exhibitions’ or world expositions. These take place every five years for the duration of six months, and usually have broadly idealistic themes expected to represent universal hopes and aspirations, such as ‘evaluation of the world for a more human world’ (Brussels, Belgium, 1958) and ‘humankind, nature, technology’ (Hanover, Germany, 2000). The second category is smaller in size and

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refers to ‘international recognized exhibitions’. These take place between two international registered exhibitions and have a maximum duration of three months. The themes of registered exhibitions are more prosaic and specialized, like ‘oceans, a heritage for the future’ (Lisbon, Portugal, 1998), and ‘leisure in the age of technology’ (Brisbane, Australia, 1988). The BIE announces its duty as the identification and refining of the role of these exhibitions ‘as a means of promoting international good will and exploring the limits of human experience and knowledge’.3 Countries that are interested in hosting any of these events apply for the candidacy and the selection is made by the BIE based on the candidates’ proposals. The second major change, affecting the nature of world expositions, is the change in world order – from empires and colonies of the nineteenth century into nation states – affecting the representational strategies of the participants and the hosts alike. In nineteenth-century expositions the host country was in full control of the event in general and, to a large extent, of the exhibits as well. Sections devoted to different nations were not always executed by the members of the corresponding nations but by architects related to the host countries. For example, Gottfried Semper designed the Ottoman stands for the 1851 exhibition in the Crystal Palace. Léon Parvillée designed the Ottoman section for the 1867 Universal Exposition in Paris.4 Representations of countries varied from buildings designed according to principles these architects deduced from their knowledge of those countries’ architecture, to exact replicas of certain monuments.5 Zeynep Celik, in her book Displaying the Orient, examined such representations of Islamic cultures in the world expositions of the nineteenth century. According to her: The architectural styles of these pavilions embodied the colonizers’ concept of Islamic culture as well as the struggle of certain Muslim nations to define a contemporary image, integrating historical heritage with modernization. How Westerners received these pavilions and how Western architects reinterpreted Islamic stylistic traditions, together with the impact such experiments made in urban centres like Istanbul and Cairo, shed light on the dominant attitudes in cross-cultural exchanges.6 The oriental other – a concept not actually created but certainly reinforced and made tangible through these expositions – was placed in opposition to an occidental self. Like most orientalist representations, the impact of this constructed identity went beyond the grounds of the expo, changing both architectural discourse and practice in the represented countries.7 Today, every country designs its own exhibitions and pavilions. For nation states born out of empires, or for those that broke away from a colonial past, the challenge of coining and manifesting a convincingly independent identity is considerable. Inevitably, such states inherit stereotypes, desires and prejudices associated with the old empires, affecting not only how they represent themselves, but also how others interpret these representations. The problematic inheritance for the Republic of Turkey was the image of an exotic, traditional, stagnant and, by default, uncivilized, oriental

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other, which was an important part of nineteenth-century European artistic representations of the Ottoman Empire. In defining the new nation state, its history, art and cultural identity, standing against orientalist stereotypes and being recognized as modern (read: Western) was crucial.8 Following a war of independence against Western countries, however, such a formulation was problematic – how to be Western despite the West? This conflict was resolved with the formulation of a Turkish culture as essentially modern (Western), bridging the gap between the East and the West, and the adoption of Western civilization on these grounds.9 Despite the popularity of this formulation, (Turkish) culture’s relation to (Western) civilization continues to be questioned with regard to the representations of the nation, especially on the grounds of authenticity and belonging. In this chapter I will discuss such issues of cultural identity and its problems in relation to the Turkish pavilions from the 1992 Seville Expo – the last international registered exhibition of the twentieth century – and the 2000 Hanover Expo – the first of the twenty-first century. I will argue that the binaries that oriental identity is built upon continue to affect the representations of Turkey in world exposition, and that east–west, traditional–modern, progressive–stagnant continue to be the keywords for or against which new representations are constructed.

Turkish national pavilions The first exposition the Republic of Turkey participated in was the 1939 New York World’s Fair.10 Through the seven world expositions that the country was part of between the years 1939 and 2000, the approach to Turkish pavilions and exhibits went through only slight changes. One major change pertained to the authority organizing the Turkish participation to the expos, which shifted from the Ministry of Trade to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and, finally, to the Ministry of Tourism. What this signifies is a shift in the perception of the function of pavilions from trade to tourism. However, starting with the 1939 World’s Fair, there was one unchanging theme: Turkey unifies East and West not only geographically, but also culturally. Exhibitions based on this theme were choreographed into sections that manifested ‘a past to be proud of, a liveable present, and a hopeful future’.11 Within this particular framework, the discourse on national pavilions constructed multiple forms of national and cultural identities, oscillating between essentialist constructions and hybrid formations. The discussions surrounding Turkish pavilions in Seville and Hanover, built nearly a decade apart from each other, reflect such varieties within themselves and in comparison to each other.

Seville, 1992 In March 1989, the Ministry of State organized a national architectural competition to select the Turkish pavilion to be built on the site procured by the Turkish government.

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Some 119 projects were submitted to the competition. The winner was a project designed by Oner Tokcan, Hulusi Gonul and Ilder Tokcan, with the support of five of the seven members of the jury. Their design, which did not have a conventional pavilion building, was composed of three parts: open terraces, which included covered exhibition areas on either side; an underground hall, including an entrance hall, multipurpose hall and a restaurant; and a 20-metre-high digital publicity board. Professor Nurhan Atasoy of Istanbul University’s College of Languages and Literature selected the works exhibited in the pavilion. Among the exhibits was a model of the Ottoman navy troop ship commanded by Admiral Piri Reis. His 1513 map of the world was among the most accurate in existence at the time. Also exhibited were works of contemporary Turkish artists, such as painter Cemil Eren’s work Don Quixote and photographer Ara Guler’s collection Mimar Sinan. The architects of the project stated that one of their primary objectives was to respond to the Mediterranean climate by creating a series of closed, semi-closed and open areas. This would enable visitors to enjoy the fine weather in spring and autumn, as well as to take refuge from the heat of summer days in the cool underground hall housing the majority of the exhibits. The architects believed that the absence of a clearly defined pavilion structure would actually make the Turkish site more striking; and that the pleasant climatic experience accompanying the underground exhibits would make the experience enjoyable and therefore memorable. This hidden pavilion was not aimed at making a statement on the diminishing importance of a nation state in a global world economy, nor was it an attempt to question the idea of the nation altogether. Small exhibition areas surrounding the open terrace, their Seljukid ornaments and the exhibits housed inside, were all falling back on the glorification of the past. During the same expo, however, two exhibits demonstrated a more critical approach. Penelope Harvey, in her article ‘Nations on Display: Technology and Culture in Expo ’92’, tells us that the Czech exhibit was based on the interaction of the visitors with an abstract glass sculpture, devoid of all national, cultural and historical associations. According to Harvey, since the expo took place soon after the overthrow of the communist government, ‘they [the Czechs] wanted to find a way to leave the culture and history of their recent past behind them’.12 A Czech commissioner Harvey spoke to stated his preference for an even more radical exhibit without a pavilion, just ‘a patch of grass, a flagpole and the Czech flag’.13 The other critical example Harvey gives was from the Swiss exhibit, which welcomed the visitors with an artwork by Ben Vautier. This piece, which was the centrepiece of the exhibit, declared that ‘Switzerland does not exist’. ‘The threat to national identity posed by the lack of a common linguistic and cultural denominator was explicitly addressed in the exhibit and the solution found in communicative multiplicity, summed up in the slogan “Je pense donc je Suisse” ’.14 Unlike the Czech and Swiss exhibits, the absence of a clearly defined Turkish pavilion structure was not intended as a critical commentary on nationhood or its relationship to the past. The jury report stated that the project exemplified a thoughtful and conscious approach to the relations formed between past, present and future through a balanced composition of temporal, spatial and natural elements. The report read:

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In sum, we value this project for its humanist content that reflects the ideals of the modern world and the foundations of the Republic of Turkey, and for its progressive message that suits both the general purpose of this exposition and our times.15 ‘Humanist’, ‘ideal’, ‘modern’ and ‘progressive’ are problematic terms, heavily loaded both culturally and politically, meaning very different things in different contexts. Especially as a result of their close association with the colonial language defining and justifying the ‘civilizing mission’ of developed countries, they were used extensively not only during the colonization of others, but also during independence movements and the following founding of nation states by these others. In this architectural report, the use of such terms was a source of confusion. To begin with, the so-called humanist content of the project was neither self-evident nor properly explained. It seemed to have a rhetorical, rather than architectural purpose, as can be seen in the placement of the ‘ideals of the modern world’ side by side with the founding ideals of the Republic of Turkey, and in the union of the two under these elusive ‘humanist ideals’. Architecturally speaking, however, what we can deduce was the possible interpretation of the humanist content as the primary importance given to the climatic comfort of the visitors and as the lack of a dominant pavilion structure. The ‘progressive message’ of the project was also unclear for most. The technological and structural innovations that are generally used to convey such a message within an architectural context were absent in the formulation of the pavilion. Other than the digital publicity board, the building was supporting no technological innovation, not even for climatic reasons. Besides, this giant publicity board could easily be understood to be in conflict with a ‘humanist’ content of any project. Although Harvey tells us that technology and especially hyper-reality was at the centre of display in Seville, we need to recognize that the Turkish representations were still utilizing a more literal mode in their exhibits. Unlike the laser shows, 3-D cinemascopic presentations and simulations put on show by ‘more powerful participants’, which ‘commodified nations and the concept of culture itself’, the giant digital publicity board of the Turkish pavilion was still stuck on the ‘commodification of goods’.16 One of the jury members, Sevki Vanli, made his opposition to the selection of the project public with a report.17 There he stated that the architecture of the pavilion should have measured up to ‘the important place Turkey has occupied in world history, civilization, and culture’; and the country should have been represented with a project that is ‘worthy of the Turkish and Turkic architectural accomplishments’ present from the Balkans to India. He believed that the selected ‘garden structure’ was far from making any such statement.18 According to Vanli: Among the potpourri of the hundreds of national pavilions, which all compete to claim ‘I have a place in this world!’ this project is like a shy, scared little orphan girl walking on the side of the road with wild flowers in her hands in search of peace and humanism. Under the lights of the great events that came to life as a result of the great advancements of the last

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500 years, to face the millions with a project like this is synonymous with not having anything to state.19 The architecture journal of the Chamber of Architects of Turkey, Mimarlik, covered the competition awards ceremony and the colloquium which took place on 21 July 1989. The colloquium opened with remarks from the president of the jury, Maruf Onal. Onal, who stated that he respectfully disagreed with Sevki Vanli’s report, declared: ‘The jury did not find it suitable to represent the Republic of Turkey with a project that makes use of a technology that is neither created nor produced in the country’.20 According to Onal, ‘this selected project of simple means’, i.e. without imported technology, contained the cultural messages that they wanted to convey in representing the Republic of Turkey.21 Referring to building construction techniques – not to the technologydominated shows that were becoming popular in expos – Onal’s statement triggered a discussion of available technology in the country. The competition participants argued that the statement made by the chairman of the jury was not grounded in reality but instead on anti-developmental prejudice, since none of the 119 proposals required technology that was not already available in the country. Sevki Vanli, who made his opposition very clear with his report, extended the discussion on technology to the international award programmes in general and to the Aga Khan Awards for Architecture in particular. He stated that he stood against the valorization of primitive technology in developing countries and the distribution of Aga Khan Awards to mud-brick structures: ‘I want to curse the absurd mind set that suggests “you go and play with mud in your villages, we will build your buildings.” Let us have confidence in ourselves. Let us not be scared!’22 For its designers and the majority of the jury members, the Seville pavilion attempted to represent what they believed to be the ‘real Turkey’ – that is, a Turkey neither scientifically nor technologically advanced. On the other hand, Sevki Vanli and the other architects who participated in the competition reacted to the essentializing of Turkey as a country of primitive means and a spectator of the modern world. They believed that within the context of the expo and in relation to the countries of the centre, such a Turkish pavilion represented a pit stop, a pause. This reaction is, of course, a reflection of a progressivist way of thinking, in which the history of the world is understood to progress on a straight line from tradition into modernity. After the opening of the expo, despite their coverage of other pavilions, Turkish architecture magazines made no reference to the Turkish pavilion. For example, the 11-page coverage of the expo by architect Ali Osman Ozturk in Yapi magazine did not mention the Turkish pavilion once. Cuneyt Kizilelma’s article in Arredamento Dekorasyon mentioned the Turkish pavilion only in passing, with respect to the opening ceremony with mehter takimi (the military band of the Ottoman Empire): We would like to remind you that our country joined this expo – where more than 120 countries participated, developed nations showed off their strengths, and humble nations confined themselves to propaganda – with a

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small pavilion and, as usual, with mehter takimi, as if asking Europeans: ‘Do you remember us from the gates of Vienna?’23 The article neither described nor included any photographs of the pavilion. After a design competition, the lack of interest in the actualized pavilion was a sign of its dismissal as a building of minor representational importance.

Hanover, 2000 For the 2000 Hanover Exposition, the construction of the pavilion started only three months prior to the opening, following the Ministry of Tourism’s commissioning of Tabanlioglu Architects with the design. The Turkish pavilion was a rectangular steelframed box 21 m wide, 60 m long and 13 m high. It was framed by narrow rectangular pools on three sides, representing the three seas surrounding the country. The building was composed of an inner shell of steel, aluminium and glass, and a timber outer shell. The pavilion was described in the publicity booklet as follows: Light, transparent, natural, transformable . . . The Turkish Pavilion for the Hanover Expo 2000 is designed in such a way that Turkey’s contemporary outlook, which is based upon the country’s vast ancient heritage, can be reflected onto the visitor in a very short time. The building’s design principle is to create an image of the Modern Turkey via simple and distinct architectural elements . . . The building,

Turkish Pavilion, Hannover, 2000. Designed by Tabanlioglu Architects.

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in fact, is just a simple, transparent technological blanket that encapsulates the continuity in the Anatolian cultural heritage and symbolizes the ongoing journey from the traditional to the technological. Murat Tabanlioglu, the chief architect of the company, has written that the parts forming this building make reference to Anatolian vernacular architecture. For example, the timber outer shell represented the timber skeleton structure of traditional houses. In addition to such references, the timber outer shell, the water surrounding the buildings and the air chimneys were all strategies for ensuring energy efficiency. There was also an arched wooden bridge leading to the pavilion’s entrance, which ran along the south side, between the steel and timber shells. Metaphorically, it represented the country as the link between East and West. Forming architectural links between traditional and modern in such a way has been a familiar attitude within the Turkish architectural community since the late 1930s. Even in the 1939 pavilion, the attempt to bridge the gap between the two was apparent. In the official 1939 New York World’s Fair guidebook, the pavilion on Market Street was described as ‘essentially modern, although styled to conform with ancient Turkish historical tradition’.24 In a New York Times article, the same pavilion was described as suggesting ‘traditional Turkish architecture with some modern touches, as well as typical Turkish interior decorations’.25 Whether this pavilion was modern with traditional touches, or the other way round, it was aiming at bringing two qualities, modern and traditional, together.

The bridge leading to the pavilion’s entrance.

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The articles published by the New York Times during the fair juxtaposed the presence of ‘the old Eastern culture’ with the ‘new Western’ in the exhibits, stressing that the new republic represented a synthesis of the two. At the first World’s Fair, in New York, it was important to show, first, that Turkey unified East and West not only geographically but also culturally; second, that Turks were the inheritors of all Anatolian civilizations, not just of the Turco-Islamic ones; and, ultimately, that Turkey was aiming to be accepted as Western, not oriental. In the later expo pavilions, these three points were re-emphasized, either through the architecture of the pavilions or through the exhibits. In the Hanover pavilion, the architectural abstractions of the Anatolian vernacular meant to show that Anatolian vernacular was already essentially modern due to its modular logic, transparency and cubic forms. The wooden bridge leading to the pavilion’s entrance was representative of Anatolia, conceptualized as a bridge, unifying East and West. And finally, the exhibit stressed that East and West were united in Anatolia and Turks were the proud inheritors of all Anatolian civilizations. The exhibition design for Hanover Expo was executed by the company Dream Design Factory, whose general concept of the exhibition centred on the image of Turkey as a land of gathering and harmony where East and West, natural and cultural, past and future, all came together. To illustrate this point the exhibit focused on the story of the Mount Nemrut Sanctuary in south-eastern Anatolia, which was home to the Commagene civilization (162

BC– AD

17). The idea was best conveyed at the

salutation platform, where four stelae from Mount Nemrut depicting the three gods greeted visitors. Tyche, mother goddess of Commagene, King Zeus-Oromasdes, Apollo-Mithras and the demi-god Artagnes-Heracles shaking hands with King

The view from the salutation platform with four stelae.

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Antiochus symbolized the unification of Eastern and Western gods in the context of Anatolian civilizations.26 This did not only mean that East and West were in fact one, but also implied that the Anatolian peninsula was the land where such binaries were bridged historically. Contrary to its predecessor in Expo ’92, this building received wide publicity in the Turkish press, but still only few commentaries appeared in Turkish architectural publications. The articles were supportive of the pavilion and they stressed how the building and the exhibits revolved around the idea of the meeting of East and West. Journalist Nilgun Cerrahoglu stated that, in the Turkish pavilion one encountered a Republic of Turkey that was attuned to the times, spoke a contemporary language and presented a hopeful future through continuity and harmony. She compared the pavilion to the Yemeni pavilion – a replica of a traditional Yemeni house – and stated that compared to this ‘oriental’ representation, which made only literal references to tradition and the vernacular, the Turkish pavilion represented ‘an energetic new mentality, which is universal by way of abstract references to tradition’.27 Journalist and novelist Duygu Asena, in her article entitled ‘The Miracle of the Turkish Pavilion’, stated that, before going to the expo, she was obviously not expecting a stereotypical exhibition, designed by state officials and full of folksy clichés about Turkey, but she did not expect to be impressed either. She said: ‘I was not expecting to encounter a Turkish pavilion that is elegant, simple and captivating.’ To her, this was a pavilion in which one encountered ideas, not products, and it was a representation of the nation that was conceptual and cultural.28 The most prestigious international media coverage of the pavilion was a two-page article in the Architectural Review, in the special issue on Expo 2000. With the heading: ‘Turkish Essence: a clear, precise statement, the Turkish Pavilion attempts the essence of a nationality’, the article praised the scheme especially for its interior design and passive energy solutions. In this article the pavilion was described as ‘a building in a cage’: A rectangular steel structured box, some 12m high, clad in aluminium and glass, is wrapped to the south, east and west by timber screens. With their 300mm square grillages, the screens, made of treated pine, are clearly an abstraction of the Middle Eastern mashrabiya, the traditional wooden screen that protects windows from the sun and from intrusive glances, while allowing air to circulate and inhabitants to look out.29 The reading of the timber screen as mashrabiyas was perhaps understandable, but nonetheless inaccurate. It is true that this screen protected the glass surface from the sun, however, it was an abstraction of the wooden skeleton system of traditional Turkish houses. Mashrabiyas are features of North African houses and, to an extent, those of the Arabian Peninsula, but not of Anatolia. They did, however, have an important symbolic role within the representations of the Orient. Similar to the veil, mashrabiyas were one of the symbols of the oppression of oriental women in the eyes of the West. By describing the pavilion as a ‘building in a cage’, the author was recalling –

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perhaps unintentionally – this orientalist imagery, akin to J.F. Lewis’ watercolour drawing Caged Doves. Although the title’s obvious reference is to the two doves fluttering around the lady of the house depicted in her room, the fact that they are not in a cage, while she is standing behind a mashrabiya, suggests that she, more than they, may be the caged one. Back to the Hanover, a structural inspiration on the architect’s part was translated into an orientalist mark in this international encounter. The Turkish pavilion did not try to be part of either the West or the East. It located the country at the crossroads of civilizations, where new and old, modern and traditional exist harmoniously in a third place. This article showed that this message did not successfully reach its audience.

Conclusion: grey spaces Built only eight years apart but separated by a century from each other, the last Turkish pavilion in a twentieth-century world exposition, in Seville, and the first of the twentyfirst in Hanover, diverge from each other in the ways they are approached, but share similarities in the ways they are evaluated in architectural discourse. The Seville pavilion was selected as a result of a national design competition, organized by the Ministry of State, and the Hanover one was designed after the direct appointment of Tabanlioglu Architects by the Ministry of Tourism. Climatic comfort was important in both cases, but in Seville this was meant to be achieved simply by burying the building underground, whereas in Hanover passive cooling systems were used to achieve the desired comfort level. For both designs, forming relations with the past was important, but the ‘past’ was interpreted differently. Architecturally, in the Seville pavilion the historical references were in the form of elements taken from Ottoman and Seljukid public structures, used literally; whereas in Hanover, the references were taken from the vernacular and used in an abstract fashion, adopted into climatic strategies. In the exhibits, the ‘past’ was interpreted as Ottoman and Seljukid past, whereas in Hanover, it was the Anatolian past, without emphasizing its ‘turkishness’. The exhibition design in the former was done by an appointed academician, while in the latter it was done by a professional company. Overall, a more literal mode of representation was employed in the Seville pavilion than in Hanover. In the end, the Seville pavilion tried to get attention with its deceptive absence, while the Hanover pavilion stood its ground with its transparent presence. The architectural discourse surrounding both buildings heavily employed a colonialist vocabulary and used its operative, essentialist binaries like modern/traditional, East/West, progressive/stagnant. In the case of Seville the discussions vacillated between the opposite sides of the argument – either Eastern or Western, while, in the case of Hanover, they occupied the grey area left from these binaries, announcing an equal belonging to both. The employment of such colonialist/essentialist language, whether to endorse or negate them, shows the continuing strength of

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orientalist constructs, while highlighting the discomfort accompanying the question of how to separate modernization from westernization. In the twentieth century, the role of the host and the dynamics of the encounter might have shifted based on the changed status, relations and the representational priorities of the countries. Nonetheless, world expositions continue being historically, politically and culturally contested sites of international encounter. Being next to ‘others’ in an international arena triggers questions of national identity and its possible architectural representations, although these questions might have lost their relevance to architectural discourses at home. Even within the specific framework of world expositions, these are problematic questions without clear answers. Because, contrary to the abundance of nationalist styles, national monuments and national pavilions in history, identities are too dynamic to be captured in a style or a single building. Identities are processes not products. Trying to capture the process in an architectural product is almost an impossible duty. However, such attempts help us to understand how, at a certain point in time, nations see themselves, or want to represent themselves. In this light, curating national representations becomes an exercise in revealing both the most treasured, enduring elements of communal identity, as well as the most powerful desires and prejudices, which, of course, are equally constitutive of that elusive construct that is the nation.

Acknowledgement The first version of this chapter was prepared as part of my PhD dissertation ‘The Routes: Cultural Identity Discourse in Turkish Architecture, 1980–2000’ (Arizona State University, 2003), with the help of my advisor Nan Ellin and committee members the late Jeffrey Cook, Nora Taylor, Carlos Martin and Ignacio San Martin.

Notes 1 2 3 4

5 6 7

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Timothy Mitchell, Colonizing Egypt (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1988), p. 17. Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Capital, 1848–1875, 2nd edn (New York: New American Library, 1979), p. 32. BIE website: www.bie-paris.org (accessed 28 May 2008). This section was composed of a mosque, residential building and a bath, coming together around a plaza with a fountain. Zeynep Celik, Displaying the Orient: Architecture of Islam at Nineteenth-Century World’s Fairs (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1992), p. 60. Celik, Displaying the Orient, p. 63. Celik, Displaying the Orient, pp. 2–3. For more information on the impact of the expos on the architecture of Islamic countries and representation of Islamic countries in the nineteenth-century world expositions, see Celik, Displaying the Orient, and Mitchell, Colonizing Egypt. For a critical

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8

9

10

reading of orientalist paintings, see Linda Nochlin, ‘The Imaginary Orient’, in L. Nochlin, The Politics of Vision: Essays on Nineteenth-century Art and Society, (New York: Harper & Row, 1989). For a discussion of the Turkish modernization and Early Republican Period, see Sibel Bozdogan, Modernism and Nation Building (Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 2001). The need to modernize was already recognized in the Ottoman Empire and the question of how to be modern, especially in terms of culture’s relation to (Western) civilization, was debated. According to Niyazi Berkes, there were three main groups in this debate: Turkists, Islamists and Westernists. After the independence war, Berkes defines the official direction for the Republic as Kemalist Westernism. For more information, see Niyazi Berkes, The Development of Secularism in Turkey (Montreal: McGill University Press, 1964). Professor Frederick M. Thrasher of New York University, who was also the director of the Society of American Friends of Turkey, claimed in his speech of 22 July 1939: It is not difficult to see that the new Turkey will play an important role in the world of tomorrow, not only in the Near East, but in linking West with East and in setting an example of peace and progress for all the world. In ‘Turkey Stresses Desire for Peace’, New York Times, 23 July 1939, p. 27. Retrieved from Proquest Historical Newspapers, the New York Times (1851–2004).

11 12 13 14 15 16 17

18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26

Ragip Buluc, ‘Creating an architecture of our own culture’, interview conducted by Irem Maro, Domus M (August 2000), p. 83. Penelope Harvey, ‘Nations on Display: Technology and Culture in Expo ’92’, in Sharon Macdonald (ed.), The Politics of Display (London: Routledge, 1998), p. 146. Harvey, ‘Nations on Display’, p. 146. Harvey, ‘Nations on Display’, p. 146. Translation by author, Mimarlik 237 (1989), p. 72. The classification regarding commodification of culture versus commodification of goods is taken from Harvey, ‘Nations on Display’, p. 157. Sevki Vanli’s report ‘Yanlis Proje Birinci Secilmistir’ [The wrong project has been selected] was published in the journal of the Turkish Architectural Association, Mimarlik 237 (1989), p. 71. Clearly Sevki Vanli did not think that the winner could be qualified as architecture. To him, it was a garden structure. Translation by author. Originally published in Mimarlik 237 (1989), p. 71. Mimarlik 237 (1989), p. 70. Mimarlik 237 (1989), p. 70. Mimarlik 237 (1989), p. 71. Cuneyt Kizilelma, ‘Expo ’92: Bir Dunya Fuarinin Anatomisi’ [Expo ’92: an anatomy of the world fair], in Arredamento Dekorasyon 39 (July–August 1992), p. 90. Official Guide Book: New York World’s Fair (New York: Exposition Publications, 1939), p. 116. ‘Turkish Pavilions at Fair Dedicated’, New York Times, 7 May 1939, p. 41. Retrieved from Proquest Historical Newspapers, the New York Times (1851–2004). First, King Antiochus wanted to be recognized as a king of both East and West, therefore he surrounded his sanctuary with the gods of both Greek and Persian origin, represented as one. Second, the land itself was in the cross-section of many civilizations, bordering ‘Western’ Greece and ‘Eastern’ Persia. Third, the land was on the basic trade routes, where the paths of people from different cultures have crossed. Therefore these stelae, which were believed to represent ‘a universal greeting to all

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27 28 29

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humankind and an encounter between East and West’ were placed at the entrance platform to welcome the visitors from various countries. Nilgun Cerrahoglu, ‘Turkiye’nin yeni kartviziti: Expo 2000’ [Turkey’s new businesscard: Expo 2000] [Faks], Milliyet (7 October 2000). Milliyet, 15 July 2000, available online: www.milliyet.com.tr/2000/07/15/yazar/ asena.html. M.H., ‘Turkish Essence: A clear, precise statement, the Turkish pavilion attempts the essence of a nationality’, Architectural Review, 1243 (2000), p. 76.

After branding A lively downtown? Marie-Paule Macdonald

What happens after the branding of an urban district is initiated? In the case of the Quartier des Spectacles (Theatre District) in Montréal, the results have been murky, even contradicting the essential urban strategic aims. While the distinctive quality of the shabby entertainment district lies in its concentration of venues for live music and evening diversion, since branding, two pivotal venues have shut down: the Cinéma Parisien and Le Spectrum.

Cinéma Parisien, closed 2007.

Le Spectrum, closed 2007.

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Both branding and curatorship have assumed prominence in contemporary urban and architectural design. In the promotion of urban centrality and density, branding could be perceived as a sort of market-exaggerated counterpoint to institutional curatorship. The recent higher profile and receptive attitudes towards curating neighbourhood identity, and branding of newly designed or renovated buildings, as well as newly planned, designated or recognized urban districts, constitute a phase of announcement and validation in present-day design process, one where possibilities for consensus can accumulate. Whereas traditional curatorial practices are welldefined, branding is a fluid pursuit that may mutate from identity and marketing strategy, to web-site design, to urban illumination contracts when applied to urban initiatives. During the last two decades, the downtown theatre district of Montréal has become the site of intense programming of summer and winter festivals, notably the International Jazz Festival that takes place in July, the international Film Festival in September, as well as a number of smaller events including festivals of francophone song, the Francofolies, African music and dance, Les Nuits Africaines, and a winter festival of light, Montréal en Lumière. These events traditionally take over empty, undeveloped lots that are common throughout the city centre. The uneven development of the theatre district, an area that more or less coincides with the ever-changing nightclub and more stable red-light district, harbours a wide range of cultural production activity associated with music and performance. The unofficial, alternative culture linked with low-rent buildings, usually incorporating dwellings, continues adjacent to official sites of culture such as a mega-block built in the 1960s called the Place des Arts that boasts a symphony concert hall, sophisticated theatre facilities and a contemporary arts museum. A recent branding project has accompanied attempts to redevelop the area. Branding so far has involved generating a web-site, some signage often simply on painted construction hoardings and a new lighting scheme and media board by a European-based graphic design agency. Behind the branding effort are plans to construct a large number of new buildings on the many empty lots. The proposed new buildings are frequently described as urban additions complementary to the cultural facilities, yet the circumstances surrounding development ventures sometimes result in a problematic lack of participation of the small-scale cultural venues that the developments officially are intended to foster. Meanwhile significant open-air festival space is disappearing, replaced with proposed building sites. The issue of formal public space versus informal streets in the district, such as boulevard St Laurent and rue Ste Catherine, places where artistic and daily life were fused, is open to question. Can contemporary real-estate development partner with the ephemeral, counter-cultural nature of this city’s cultural life? The branding process spawned a series of interventions in what is now publicly identified as Montréal’s Quartier des Spectacles. A lively, if distressed, performance district in a city that has consistently produced an interesting, significant range of performance-related cultural phenomena, from the alternative music of local

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bands that have attained international success, such as Arcade Fire and Malajube, to mainstream organizations such as the Montreal Symphony Orchestra, the Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal or OSM, or the circus performance company Cirque de Soleil, is undergoing transformation. These changes may alter the circumstances that were once favourable to fostering small, independent and innovative cultural groups. It may be worthwhile to note that, while now an international corporate entity with its peri-urban Montréal location as one of several multinational headquarters, the Cirque de Soleil began in Québec in the 1980s as a group of roving street performers. Larger questions of the authenticity of local cultural production when connected or confronted with the invasion of official capital are raised in the particular context of the arts, in a city that has used its somewhat marginal status to resist many of the homogenizing effects of aesthetic production in the early twenty-first century.

Branding as an urban design strategy: Montréal’s Quartier des spectacles What is urban branding? Why has it been perceived as a tool in urban design? Branding appears to treat cities, districts, neighbourhoods, museums and mass-produced goods similarly, as a marketing concept. A firm called Wolff-Olins that brands the Tate Modern also brands the town of Bracknell. Branding has had a real recent impact on architectural and urban design, pulling the perception of design into the realm of the purely visual or graphic, even though many, perhaps even most, aspects of urbanism are invisible. The appeal of applying branding to urban development has had a palpable impact: complex mixed-use developments in a great metropolis have spawned the term ‘brandhubs’. In reaction, a municipal administration of the metropolis of São Paulo has taken the extreme step of removing commercial billboards from view in the urban realm. From the realm of advertising comes the branding process, formerly more familiar to luxury goods than architectural and urban design. The surge of urban branding initiatives can be tied to the increased status and prominence of architectural and urban design as commodity, as well as to reinhabited downtowns and a new focus on urban centrality. Critique of the phenomenon ranges from the radical urban theory of the Situationists, notably Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle, to the work of Saskia Sassen, in which an understanding of the city and its architectural and urban precinct design is presented as an arena where local groups struggle and grapple with interest groups representing global marketing trends. An inescapable reference is Karl Marx’s chapter on Commodity Fetishism in Capital. While Marx references buildings, it is not as commodities, addressing the issue of rent rather than the commodity status of built form in the urban environment – an evolution that demonstrates the saturating reach of commodity status into layers of everyday. What are the consequences of branding? Do the results have anything to do with the intent? How is this tracked? How can one demonstrate that urban branding brings a particular result?

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Observing the Quartier des Spectacles in Montréal, although the distinctive quality of the somewhat rundown entertainment district was clearly identified as a concentration of venues for live music and evening diversion, two fundamental venues have closed. It seems like a step backwards. La Main, or the Main, is the local name for the city’s central spine – or the heart – of the lively nightlife scene in central Montréal, a city whose citizens are reputed to step out four or five nights a week. The downtown red-light district has been subject to a dubious, yet in some ways well-intentioned urban branding strategy. The area is notable for its 28 venues, and some 28,000 seats, including concert halls and theatres, as well as for its bars, discos, cocktail lounges, burlesque houses and strip joints, and its distressed population, including street people, homeless youth, drug users and addicts, and prostitutes. The cultural vibrancy of the city, in particular its literary and dramatic tradition, is interwoven with its seedy downtown.1 Low rents and rundown venues form part of its charm. There is a tradition of citizen militancy and resistance, linked to political independence movements that date from the 1960s. A recent symposium, the Fourth Citizens’ Summit, held in the district in June 2007, gave a rousing account of the citizens’ movements that had successfully either initiated projects with residents’ interests foremost, or successfully modified or restructured urban projects that were too corporate, too destructive, or simply stopped blatantly illconceived urban development proposals, such as a recent push to relocate a casino in a low-income area. The Summit’s keynote speaker, Saskia Sassen, summarized her analysis of inter-city flows of capital while praising the legacy of local citizens’ movements. Montréal is a city where contemporary urban struggles play out with odd alliances. The branding strategy for Montréal’s Theatre District sprang from an alliance of local municipal, governmental and commercial interests. In early 2005 the Partenariat du Quartier des Spectacles (Theatre District Partnership), published a call for proposals to provide an urban-branding strategy for the crucial central precinct. The Partenariat is a consortium of quasi-public bodies that includes the organization known as ADISQ, or Québecois Association for Music Industry. It organizes the annual Félix awards given out to best-selling pop music in Québec, similar to the Canadian Junos, the American Grammy or British Mercury awards, aimed at raising the profile of the area and marketing its music halls with a new visual identity strategy. As such, it represents an astonishingly literal link between the urban and the spectacle industry. The scenario and strategy were provocative, as if the American Grammy organization were to call for urban-design proposals for troubled downtown Detroit, or a European music competition were to propose changes to central Lille. The Partenariat sought out designers through a workshop-style competition, showing a flair for innovation in the call for proposals, and a jury with sympathetic members. The dAb collective responded to the open call for proposals with a rhetorical critique of the notion of urban branding as a means to conduct urban planning in such a vital part of town. Their statement explicitly criticized the graphic emphasis on urban design of the call of proposals, so selection of the collective as one of the finalist

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teams was a surprise. Its proposal incorporated the celebrated Debord citation, ‘Spectacle is capital accumulated to such a degree that it becomes image’.2 Organizers may have been intrigued that, up until then, no one had observed the obvious relation between Debord’s theory and the localized branding exercise.

The dAb collective proposal The dAb collective developed a three-pronged strategy for approaching urban issues in the area. The main aim was to rhetorically inject ‘real’ urban design – as opposed to the ersatz urban design of branding – into the branding exercise. The anti-branding proposal by the dAb collective linked urban wandering to issues of urban ecology and sustainability, to social activism, to an urbanism sensitive to hearing and smell, and to the network of urban music-hall venues in the district. Research provided by the City of Montréal, a member of the Partenariat and host to the competition, indicated that there are many venues and seats concentrated in the area. Visitors to the city tend not to purchase tickets when in town, tending instead to frequent the free festival events they wander into. This corresponds to many traditions of urban analysis, from the Baudelairian or Benjaminian ‘flâneur’ to the architectural promenade and the Situationist ‘dérive’.

dAb Collective proposal: Composite map of the Quartier des spectacles district, superimposing analysis and design strategies. Graphics by Andrea Kordos.

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Socially sustainable communities Like many central districts, distressed citizens live in or frequent the precinct because there is a street life, social programmes are located there, and they belong to the neighbourhood. The theatre district is an urban home to a variety of street inhabitants, and that sense of belonging can be incorporated into the urban-design process. The collective interviewed social workers, and digitally recorded Aki Tchitacov, of Le Bon Dieu dans la Rue (loosely translated as A Benevolent God in the Streets), a local organization that works with street youth. He explained how radical transformation of the neighbourhood destabilizes homeless youth. He cited several successful initiatives, including outreach projects such as a roaming book-lending programme: One of our more successful little programmes, that we started and spun off, was a mobile library, but run by somebody who knows the street population . . . and have books and magazines and just go to the park and have the kids, have people come and pick up what they wanted and discuss everything from politics to the environment.3 Most importantly, he described the street youth as ‘artistic’, linking them to the desirable programming of the area. New university facilities in the area already demonstrated insensitivity to existing social programmes. In one case, a major new university cafeteria building entrance faced the main door of a church-organized meal programme for street people that had been operating for some time. Two years later, while those facilities have garnered architecture awards, local organizations representing social workers made public announcements suggesting that the reduction in the number of social workers is causing an exodus from the profession. The aim should be to preserve existing programmes as well as conserve small business in the area.

Ecological urbanism The group mapped topography in the precinct to launch an ecologically sensitive approach to urbanism: to encourage walking in the city, to connect the subway to grade, to manage water resources. The fine-grained network of existing lanes and lane fragments would expand to a tissue of paths and laneways that privilege all-season bicycle and pedestrian movement through the city. Another strategy that is becoming more prevalent is the greening of roofs for institutional buildings: proposals depicted large government structures and police headquarters with a green roof. As lighter plantings become more available, existing public buildings can realistically contribute to a comprehensive water-management strategy by installing green roofs and vegetal walls on a broad range of buildings from the podium of the major arts centre, Place des Arts, to offices for civil servants, to large commercial buildings, private and public. The low-lying areas could become sites of new storm-water-retention basins, as part of a

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larger strategy of sustainable urban drainage systems, wherein water infrastructure in cities is attuned to the value of integrating landscape with the rainwater flow, as opposed to more traditional and decorative approaches to landscaped parks. The study of topography also identified a natural amphitheatre next to the Place des Arts that could be intensified with a proposal for a new structure for bicycle parking, that would serve as well as a sound-attenuating wall as well as a listening and observing balcony for festival events. The attention to such amenities as bicycleparking structures, examples of which can be found in bicycle-oriented cities such as Amsterdam, related to a larger infrastructure integrating bicycle laneways with a network of green laneways. Linked to the water strategy would be the use of more ecologically appropriate porous ground surface treatment in the areas used for festivals, as well as use of conifer trees planted to create sonic screening. Another facet of the proposal was a lighting strategy inspired by the visual character of many distinctive existing marquees. The Collective favoured ecological lighting strategies, including directing lighting towards the ground or towards reflective materials, intensifying luminous effects, and the use of phosphorescence.

Acoustic urbanism The Collective experimented with mapping sound in the district, producing a test cartography of urban noise, recognizing the established soundscape awareness in Canada in the tradition of R. Murray Schafer. Street performers were video documented: performances in the subway, break-dancers spinning on their heads, a flute player playing two instruments at once. The creative performers who spontaneously entertain in the streets were seen in continuity with the official performances in the local venues. In addition to the existing visual marquees of the neighbourhoods, a proposal for a range of street furniture that would accommodate street performers included sound marquees, discrete amplifying walls and small acoustic shell installations for pocket parks and vacant lots. Media artist Lorraine Oades proposed a prototype real-time video link between the underground subway and the sidewalk, so that transit users would be aware of street events happening above the station. These proposals were accompanied by mapping of festivals and demonstrations in the area. Designer Tony Round adapted his proposal for an innovative acoustic web-site to the area, allowing the potential audience to sample the sounds of a performance as part of the process of choosing a performance, concert or sound event according to a test listening using a customized web-site with an ear icon instead of an arrow. Anti-branding is not anti-building. The dAb proposal advocated new smallscale affordable housing and criticized demolition proposals, where vernacular buildings accommodating small business were to be torn down to create empty public squares, while outsize-scaled development projects were proposed for adjacent vacant sites. These inappropriate kinds of projects contradict the urban commercial patterns of the downtown. Suggestions for small-scale development that could still be relatively

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high-rise, in particular, respecting the traditional small property lot patterns in the neighbourhood, were advocated, in contrast to the massive lot consolidation and bloated volumes characteristic of the proposals in recent competitions. The scale of new building could positively affect the acoustic environment, creating pockets of varying character of sound. The team advocated development of smaller parcels of land, as potential small high-rise residential and mixed-use projects. This runs counter to the large, entire-block developments typically proposed by the alliance between government and commercial concerns.

Real-estate events After selecting a conventional, graphic design-based branding strategy, the urban redevelopment process continued. In March 2006, the Partenariat du Quartier des Spectacles held another kind of spectacle, a four-day real-estate fair called ‘Montréal of the Future’. According to the press release, the central theatre and arts district was deemed under-built, with a potential 1.3 million square feet of buildable area. Brochures declared, ‘The Quartier des Spectacles is an extraordinary opportunity for real estate decision makers to work together and invest in Montréal’s creative heart’. The proposals – architectural and urban models, posters, projections, audio-visual displays, drawings and photographs – included two modest proposals for artists’ live-in studios, but much more significant in proportion were projects for office and condominium use. The marketing strategy reared into view: vacant lots used for festivals were to be prized as market condominium and office development opportunities. Such a scenario of artificially stimulated, absurdly inflated rent and hyper-building appears as the underbelly of the branding strategy. What comes along with rampant redevelopment is an unwanted de-stabilizing of many of the more fragile and vulnerable of the creative residents of this pivotal precinct. Even the director of the Montréal Jazz festival publicly criticized the proposed loss of empty lots used for temporary staging for the festival. In the light of the proposed new building projects, Jazz festival director Alain Simard inserted an editorial in the 2007 schedule of events, asking where the festival would take place in the coming years, once its downtown performance sites were built over.

Branding aftermath By summer 2007, several venues had installed the sidewalk lighting scheme recommended by the branding, identity and graphic design specialist. It consists of a play on the red-light district status of the area: in front of each venue, a double row of red downlights illuminating the sidewalk. Another new addition to the sidewalk has been an illuminated board, called Le Vitrine, indicative of the special influence of advertising traditions on branding:

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Results of branding: a new lighting strategy on the sidewalk outside the Monument Nationale.

lighting schemes, illuminated panels and luminous screens are especially prized as a means to communicate urban identity. The media screen echoed an unbuilt competition-winning proposal by architects Atelier Big City from 2002, a scheme that stalled because of concerns that it would become a focal point for the most marginal denizens of the area. While Atelier Big City’s inventive marquee design was to have provided relevant local information, Le Vitrine is a decorative illuminated screen with no functional component. Yet media-wall technologies are evolving rapidly: luminous walls and urban lighting schemes may be powered by renewable technologies, as is the case in the Greenpix media wall.4 Another kind of initiative undertaken independently of the competition was completed. The St James church received an architectural facelift: scraped off, a layer of offices that had stretched across the church façade was erased, what had been an eccentric, unique hybrid feature became a small and somewhat useless plaza. After an official plan document appeared in 2007, an extravagant, questionable large road-works project was rapidly implemented. Instead of demolishing an existing block for a plaza, this time the target was a gentle, tree-capped hill. The initiative added to the sense of incoherence in the urban design strategy, as if adhering to a bizarre construction principle that obliged excavation. The decision to remove a hill adjacent to the west side of Place des Arts would create another plaza, but one whose ground had been lowered to adjacent street level. The element of non sequitur that juxtaposes lighting plans with the expensive flattening of existing landscape features indicates a confusion that is quite possibly the result of the design approach, one that robotically affirms and tends to exclude any discourse of debate. Critic Benjamin Buchloh has remarked, ‘critical opposition is ultimately, perhaps, less efficiently erased by ideological and social repression than by cynical affirmation’.5 By the summer of 2008 the row of mature trees were gone and the pleasant mound of the Balmoral block was deeply excavated. The prime losses of key significance were two pivotal venues: an independent cinema and a famous live-music venue. The Cinéma Parisien, former host venue for the Montréal World Cinema Festival, stands empty. The cinema festival found its interiors too run down. The ‘sprucing-up’ process that is most obviously associated

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Unbuilt Competitionwinning proposal for a luminous marquee for the Place des Arts, design by architects Atelier Big City, 2002.

with branding could have been put to use, in this instance, as the fundamental qualities of the building are manifest in its vertical stacking and its urbanity. The façade, now boarded up, manifested several remarkable architectural qualities: while not noble architecture but rather the cheap construction of commercial ventures, the façade featured an almost monumental void with mirrored ceiling, managing to terminate the street connecting Ste Catherine with Sherbrooke. Within the cinema façade void, on axis with the end of City Councillors Street, figured a wrap-around reverse marquee: the movie titles punched inward at the perimeter of a grand rectangular void, its outdoor ceiling clad in a mirror ceiling tile. Inside the cinemas themselves are traditional, generously scaled spaces suitable for the large crowds of a festival. Only the interior finishes needed updating. Another modest lost landmark was the Stelly shoe store, a seedy shop that sold thigh-high red vinyl boots with platform heels, seen mainly on the sidewalks of the red light district a block away, at the corner of St Laurent and Ste Catherine. There had also been a mystifying development project to knock down an entire block, including Le Spectrum, a long-standing live-music venue. This plan was put on hold and then plans for redevelopment of the block were announced as proceeding without the renowned music hall. Le Spectrum was revered for its conviviality and warm sound quality. Journalists wrote of the legendary role of the 1,200-seat, cabaret-style venue, its bookings fostering numerous local performers and featuring international performers in an acoustically intimate hall, while noting that several renovated theatres, such as the recently reopened Olympia, provided competition for Le Spectrum. The loss represents the most glaring inconsistency in the urban-branding strategy: destroying an urban block with an important music venue in the name of reinforcing its character. Before the branding initiative, several original music halls had relocated to the area. Le Nouveau Club Soda moved down from a location on Avenue du Parc. A renovation by architect Luc Laporte remodelled an existing building on St Laurent into a classic rock venue, its marquee jutting over the street, its façade merging seamlessly with the urban character of the red-light district. Just south of it, and just after, the SAT (Société des Arts Technologiques/Society for Arts and Technology, a publicly funded digital cultural group) remodelled a corner location for a more experimental music venue and sound-art gallery. In the flesh-eating tradition of competing venues, these

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fine new music halls rendered Le Spectrum obsolete – or at least that was the perceived opinion.

Conclusion In the case of the Quartier des Spectacles in Montréal, branding has often run at cross purposes with the underlying aim of reinforcing the distinctive quality of a raffish entertainment neighbourhood, even when that aim was clearly identified as a concentration of venues for live music and evening diversion. Two pivotal venues closed since the branding process began. The cultural generation that relies on cheap rent, an open structure of easy-to-find dwelling, hang-out and performing space, open to marginal citizens and related social programmes, is threatened by the upscale interventions and is at odds with the effects of tourism and gentrification. In a recent blog, Mark Jarzombek asked rhetorically, ‘When are we going to reclaim the unmarginal spaces?’.6 A music hall such as Le Spectrum may have appeared unattractively old and dilapidated, while remaining the antithesis of marginal in its role as the crucial venue for the local live-music scene. The posturing that constitutes branding, with its emphasis on newness, cleanliness and the visual, demonstrates how the process of reclaiming marginal – or at least visually unkempt – pockets of central downtown raises the question of what is essential and what is marginal. The central part of town would be well-served by smaller-scale precinct planning and development that recognizes the advice of perceptive urbanists, experts ranging from Françoise Choay to Jane Jacobs to Christian Devillers. Both Devillers and Price have written to adamantly reject any practice that misconstrues iconic graphic design as architectural design. This view informed the perspective of the dAb Collective: the ideal of an urbanism that integrates the concerns of ecology, the sounds and senses of the city, and the social needs of the neighbourhood to come together in a collective project and process that aims to connect the urban population with its urban form and landscape. As for the effects of the branding exercise: it appears that urban liveperformance venues remain vulnerable to large-scale urban-development proposals. Branding cannot replace investment in real infrastructural initiatives, from affordable housing, to transport that emphasizes pedestrian and bicycle travel, to unseen and critical issues of drainage and water conservation, to useful urban planting. The downtown vacant lots and under-used buildings became key sites for significant urban festivals as they were just leftovers from dysfunctional 1970s urban expansion, so agents of the creative sector appropriated what was unused. Branding re-evaluates as a prelude to snatching the sites back. Ultimately, branding a downtown is no substitute for a well-rounded, sensitive, socially and ecologically relevant urban design intervention. A last question is whether there is any place for the seedy part of downtown. Arcade Fire, one of the city’s cultural exports, began in shabby small clubs in downtown Montréal. With the opening of some, and the closing of the more legendary venues, urban branding must do more than play a game of musical chairs.

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Notes 1

2

Michel Tremblay set his play ‘Saint Carmen de la Main’ in the red-light district, known as ‘La Main’ in 1976. Characters included a chorus of transvestites and of prostitutes (une choeur de travesties et une choeur de putains). Guy Debord, The Society of Spectacle, 1967, chapter 1, p. 34 (1). The dAb Proposal incorporated the well-known quotation, reading, Under capitalism, all is spectacle. Branding is the antithesis of neighbourhood. How can the symbolic language inherent to branding adjust to the reality of a process that includes a local community: those neighbourhood residents who study and work there, plus the daily flux of permanent and temporary occupants. dAb takes up the radical theory of the text, The Society of the Spectacle, by Guy Debord, in order to suggest alternatives to work and leisure, in the light of contemporary problematics of technology and the environment in the city. An approach influenced by Lacan emphasizes games of symbolic language in the creation of an urban identity. Branding connects consumer culture to raging capitalism, this global economy that, in North America, leads to incoherent urbanism and banal architecture. How can the slow tempo of long duration, that of architecture and urbanism, influence the rapid cycles of advertising and capital accumulation? The neighbourhood undergoes extremes of spectacle, of population flow, of culture, of temperature. Its urbanism must connect permanent and temporary daily living. Neighbourhood residents include small shopkeepers, homeless youth, suburban teens, a symphony conductor, civic employees, musicians. One must avoid sterile profiles and offer an intense diversity to correspond to the pivotal place. This approach thus privileges recognition of the full range of occupants of the area, beautiful and ugly. The dAb collective proposes a three-pronged approach, adding the importance of an approach to urban form that is sensitive to urban acoustics, to the urgent themes of the environment and the questions of an urbanism that is sustainable from both a social and ecological perspective.

3 4

5 6

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The members of the dAb Collective: Cecilia Chen, Andrea Kordos, Marie-Paule Macdonald, Lorraine Oades, Ana Rewakowicz, Tony Round, Frances Stober, Steve Topping. The urban proposals can be found at www.collectifdab.ca. Aki Tchitacov, interviewed and digitally recorded by Lorraine Oades and Ana Rewakowicz, 2005. The Greenpix media wall by Simone Giostra & Partners captures solar power in the day to power a luminous wall at night. Available online: www.dezeen.com/2008/ 05/09/greenpix-media-wall-by-simone-giostra-partners-2/#more-12515 (accessed 9 May 2008). Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, ‘The Group That Was (Not) One: Daniel Buren and BMPT’, Artforum, May 2008, p. 313. Mark Jarzombek, ‘An Anti Pragmatic-Manifesto’, available online: http://varnelis.net/ blog/anti_pragmatic_manifesto_mark_jarzombek (accessed 1 November 2007).

The necessity of distance Setting the position for critical spatial practice Catharina Gabrielsson

The shift of focus from forming to curating the city marks a significant change within architectural discourse. Not only does it confirm an interest in other cultural fields (which has characterized architectural consciousness for a good many years now), it means looking directly at issues of spatial representation and interpretation, rather than form as an end result. This is a positive sign. While art has been intensely preoccupied with problematizing its own identity and legitimacy in the so-called post-medial era, targeting critical questions as to the nature and status of the artwork, the meaning of authorship vis-à-vis the beholder etc., architecture has shown an amazing disinterest in performing a similar act of self-scrutiny. The professional role of the architect has, to a large degree, remained unchanged, founded on an assumed expertise in thinking and forming space that simply has been handed down since early modernity. Curatorship involves a different conception of space, not as primarily designed or controlled by the architect/planner, but as a temporal, social and cultural phenomenon that is only partially defined by form. Yet, much like the architect, the curator is a person who is supposedly in control of a conceptually complex situation. Bridging the expanse between production and interpretation, author and reader, the curator is the ultimate mediator.1 So how can this shift of focus shed light on the conditions for not merely exhibiting urban space, but for its actual production? That is, for what Jane Rendell has referred to as ‘critical spatial practice’, the practice of transforming the material and imaginary reality of an existing site through the means of art and architecture?2 In a conversation with Allan Kaprow from 1967, Robert Smithson makes some comments that I find relevant to this theme. Speaking at a time that was characterized by ‘escape attempts’, when artists were breaking loose from what Smithson called their ‘cultural confinements’,3 the idea of site-specificity was yet in emergence and the urban landscape had only recently been drawn into an artistic context. Smithson remarks that he would prefer a useless and empty museum to one that deals with art as a kind of entertainment. ‘Installations should empty rooms, not fill them’, he says; what interests him is the blanks, the gaps, the left-outs; the possibilities inherent in the disappointments of life, rather than the confirmation of pre-existing ideals.4 Today, with the

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prolific expansion of art institutions and pseudo-radical buildings across the world, places where the critical or even mildly disturbing aspects of either discipline are effectively annihilated by their immersion into the logic of global capitalism, Smithson’s remark is a reminder of the ideological content in any aesthetic practice. What I would like to focus on here, however, is his notion of distance. In reference to the edges of cities, the endless undefined stretches of urbanity that we today refer to as ‘sprawl’, he says: I’m so remote from that world that it seems uncanny to me when I go out there, so not being directly involved in the life there, it fascinates me, because I’m sure of a distance from it, and I’m all for fabricating as much distance as possible. . . . By a distance, I mean a consciousness devoid of self-projection.5 How can this notion of distance be seen as an asset in addressing the city? Why distance, when the allegedly radical position in matters of art, power and space is nearly always described in terms of engagement? After all, the reconfiguration of ‘place’ into ‘people’, ‘creation’ into ‘collaboration’, is, arguably, the single most influential theme determining the production and dissemination of public or site-specific art in the last decade.6 So distance from what, and from whom? Using one of my own projects as reference (and therefore writing from a juxtaposition of different roles), I will examine how the notion of distance comes into play on a number of different levels. Not only in terms of the position of those involved with this project, the regeneration of Stortorget in Kalmar (1997–2003), but also as to the farreaching implications concerning the nature of art, of self and of reality, disclosed by Smithson’s comment. Set in the middle of Kalmar, a small town in the south of Sweden, Stortorget, the main square, is a far step removed from the lumberyards, shopping malls and deserted housing areas outside New York in the late 1960s. Yet the sense of meaninglessness that Smithson refers to was just as apparent here. Originating from the mid seventeenth century, dominated by its vast baroque cathedral and lined by official buildings, this 100  100 m large open space was planned and implemented as an overt manifestation of the aesthetic and political ambitions of the then-emerging Swedish national state.7 Over the centuries, however, the gradual withdrawal of its original functions – military parades, church assemblies and large recurrent markets – had left the place in a state of neglect, reducing it to a kind of backyard to the commercial streets in the vicinity. Having lost the logic between cause and effect, intentions and form, the identity of Stortorget had become confused. The situation was thus epitomizing what critics have called the ‘end’, even ‘death’ of public space.8 This not only in terms of commercialization, technological advances and the domination of traffic, but as an outcome of the very process of democracy as one of spatial and social disintegration. Once representing absolute power, the transition into liberal democracy had emptied the place of its meaning, its tarnished state illustrating the fate of a space belonging to all, thus no one.

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Stortorget paving detail.

The very emptiness of Stortorget could, in fact, be seen to illustrate Claude Lefort’s concept of how power in democracy constitutes a lieu vide, an empty place, a locus devoid of content. Taken as a definition of public space, it implies a space where ‘in the absence of foundation, the meaning and unity of the social is negotiated – at once constituted and put at risk’,9 a space which must remain empty in order to let injustices and differences in society come into view. But Lefort’s metaphor also captures the instability and even tragic dimension of democracy, answering to the groundlessness of human existence as such. He characterizes democracy as the ‘the dissolution of markers of certainty’, as it confronts us with an endless series of questions concerning the legitimacy of power and the nature of society; a state of existence where every meaning must be kept provisional since certainty amounts to nothing less than religious and ideological closure.10 The perceived lack of meaning at Stortorget was a symbolic token for the existential trauma connected to this emptiness. After years of fruitless discussions, the local government finally decided to invite an artist to ‘bring life’ into the place. Much as usual, public art was called on as a last resort, a provider of content and meaning. Working as a project organizer on behalf of the Swedish National Public Art Council, the sense of being fundamentally remote from this place was my first experience of it. As a representative of governmental cultural policy, I was definitely an outsider to Kalmar, but without the authoritarian position of a more hierarchical political structure. The role of the project organizer, as defined by the Swedish authority, is closely related to that of the curator combined with that of a commissioner. It involves everything from defining the nature of an artist’s assignment within a project and

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choosing the artist, to setting up the organization, financing and executing the project, in collaboration with other authorities and those directly involved, such as architects, constructors and members of the public.11 Operating in this literal ‘expanded field’, the position of the project organizer is highly exposed, with little to depend on, lacking much of the back-up provided within an institutional context or in the shadow of the museum’s walls. Constantly working on new sites, involving new people, it is a peculiar line of work that, so far, has been very little discussed.12 It is the very distance of this position – a distance from the local context, as well as from the institution – that makes it different from that of the traditional curator. Early on, it became clear that the historic and symbolic significance of Stortorget called for extraordinary measures. The issue at stake was how its identity could be strengthened, rather than restored, and its inclusion into the modus for commissioning public art paved the way for inventing a tailored procedure. After an initial run for proposals, carried out by three different multidisciplinary teams, the scheme proposed by London-based architects Caruso St John and the Swedish artist Eva Löfdahl was chosen for execution. Their central idea in revitalizing the square was to treat it as one large, continuous surface, providing the means for different uses while allowing the domination of none. By removing street curbs, parking meters, traffic signage, etc., the place could be appropriated with a minimum of obstructing fittings. Drawing on

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Detailed drawing of Stortorget.

The necessity of distance

borrowed or imagined elements from its history, Stortorget was interpreted as ‘a field of stones’, its surface crossed by ‘paths’ and marked with flatter areas, where use had given rise to ‘clearings’. Consequently, the existing areas of field stones – the oldest untouched and dating from the mid seventeenth century – were extended and complemented, so that a consistent layer of stone carpeting paved the square from side to side. Rather than addressing the condition of Stortorget as an illness to be cured, the scheme was based on an enforcement of its emptiness as one of its most important features. Balancing between roughness and subtlety, the unobtrusive quality of the project was indeed a disappointment to those who would have wanted ‘more life’ on Stortorget. Transforming an existing site means having to make do with patchy knowledge. It is a situation that can never be controlled in full. Public space is in itself a phenomenon full of contradictions, a medium for political protests and commercial desires alike. As a social sphere for discourse and communication, it is impregnated with a Western rationality of truth and critique – yet, interpretations of its physical manifestation disclose a wide array of meanings, spanning from the formlessness of everyday life to the orchestrated manifestation of power.13 Working in and with public space is always difficult, because these places and the things that go on there generate an almost automatic engagement with their immediate context. Our project of transforming Stortorget was thus lined with obstacles, reflecting the difficulties at the heart of any public intervention. I am not just referring to conflicts about the meaning and value of public art – what Rosalyn Deutsche has identified as ‘the struggle over the meaning of democracy’14 – but to an even more troublesome question, that of the link between art and life, between the aesthetic and the political. As one of the residing paradoxes within the cultural avant-garde, it is an issue that has continued to haunt art since early modernity. The assumed conflict between ‘political’ and ‘aesthetic’ art seems to recur in different variations, not least as shown by the so-called relational aesthetics of the 1990s and its focus on ‘social’ practices. Jacques Rancière’s attempt to abolish this polarity is relevant in this context. One of his arguments is that art is always political in its capacity to divide and assemble, in its production of a time and a space set apart from the everyday – in short, in its production of distance.15 But although Rancière targets the fundamental issue of art’s otherness in relation to other forms and practices, it still comes across as relying on the continuous support of the institution. Understanding something as art and not, for instance, as architecture or social work, depends on a conceptual framework that guarantees its status and issues the keys for its interpretation. Working outside the domains of art, this framework is notably weakened: at worst, the work must speak for itself. Thus, a project like Stortorget has the capacity of revealing the problems and the potentials of art when solely defined as a practice based on aesthetic judgement. It immediately comes into conflict with other fields of knowledge, other values and claims, but it serves as a means of bringing things forward that otherwise would have been left undone or unspoken. Distance, in the sense of Rancière, means that objects presented within the framework of art are set apart from their surrounding context. But his conception

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Stortorget as a ‘field of stones’.

of distance can also be interpreted differently, as a capacity of the work itself to bring about a sense of estrangement. In order to intensify the vastness of the site, Caruso St John and Löfdahl also introduced two more spatial levels: an ‘underworld’ of buried wells and a ‘heaven’ of red light sources. The wells were constructed as underground fountains, fitted with objects such as percussions and wooden balls, in order to create differences in the sound of running water. With their lids of polished concrete, carrying the reflections of light and water below through circular grills of steel, they somehow distort the perception of ordinary urban objects. A similar strategy informed the execution of the masts, placed with the precision of acupuncture needles in the nerve system of the place. Nine metres high and made of polished stainless steel, they were made to sway slightly in the wind. At the top of each mast is a red armature of hand-

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Detailed drawing of the square as a whole, showing its ‘paths’ and ‘clearings’ as well as the position of wells and masts.

blown crystal glass, and five more identical lamps have been positioned on the rooftops or chimneys of the surrounding buildings. The points of dim red light create a surreal atmosphere at night, blurring the distinction between nature and culture, art and technology. By their insertion into an urban context, they create a strangeness that keeps the interpretation of the place open. In its three discrete spatial levels, there is a distinct mythological aspect to this work, implying a simple narrative structure that recurs in cosmologies and religions everywhere. So why distance? The idea of distance as a requirement in addressing a particular site, whether as an artist, planner or architect, is one of the most discredited notions in contemporary critical discourse. Distance is equal to seeing New York from the top of the World Trade Center, which is how Michel de Certeau has described the fictive position of absolute knowledge, the viewpoint of ‘a solar Eye’.16 The violent

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destruction of this viewing platform on 9/11 is but an echo, however, of the deconstruction it has undergone philosophically through the postmodern unlearning of reason. Distance conjures up the heartless expertise of modern planning, the nullifying forces of global capitalism, the separation between subject and object as a requirement for scientific thinking and all the other manifestations of rationality that, although contested, still pertain to the logic of Western culture. But it also brings the artist to the fore as the romantic genius, the avant-garde outsider who is the teller and maker of altogether different kinds of truths. Again, it is the very distance of this position – a distance from ‘real’ people and places – that has been so rejected by contemporary artists who, to an increasing extent, tend to interpret site in terms of engagement with the local community.17 So, all in all, distance is bad. Instead, we find ourselves immersed in the streets, only occasionally wondering what sources to draw on in order to legitimize our practice. If the former foundations for knowledge, authority and critique have been pulverized through a combination of disciplinary, philosophical and democratic proceedings, on what grounds, and how, can we again speak of distance as a necessity in matters of architecture and art? Distance has to do with power – in this case, the authority and the legitimacy of the artist or architect as the author of his or her work. In an essay on art’s involvement with ethnography, art theorist Miwon Kwon notes that the shift from interpretation to experience has involved a problematical dimension concerning the professional status of the artist. Today, she claims, we see an overvaluation of personal experience in popular media that reflects the traditional understanding of art as an expression of the artist’s subjectivity. ‘Understood as the only source of real and authentic knowledge’, she writes, ‘ “experience” validates personal opinions and subjective feelings as an inviolable, irrefutable, undeniable terrain, no matter how uninformed such opinions and feelings might be’.18 On the other hand, continues Kwon, by embracing the scholarly critique of the ‘I’ as a relational, unstable and uncertain formation – thus contesting the authority of the self as unique witness/author – many artists have turned away from claiming a voice to deconstructing it (‘one’s own, someone else’s, or the institution’s’). ‘To speak authoritatively now’, she concludes, ‘that is, to assert one’s knowledge and know-how, is considered an oppressive act’.19 As a reflection of a wider problem in today’s culture, that of the relativism which threatens to emerge as a result of epistemological critique, Kwon’s observations are highly relevant – especially, I would say, when related to the conditions for working outside the protected domains of art. For, strangely enough, claiming authority through mere subjectivity – through works that express the thoughts or emotions of the artist – seems to be the least oppressive choice when working in public space. In general, traditional art holds a greater chance of gaining approval than artworks that question their own means. As public art is called for in order to ‘bring life’ into a place, or to put some sparkle into the ‘dull conformism’ of architectural space, it usually involves an expectancy of art to function as a sign of ‘presence’. But by neatly positioning itself as a value in opposition to architecture, this kind of art merely confirms the dichotomies – personal vs. anonymous, irrational vs. rational, warm vs. cold, real vs. abstract, free vs.

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restricted and so on – that prohibit any serious professional exchange across the disciplinary borders. Furthermore, it tends to fulfil common expectancies as to the value of art in an economical context, serving as an embellishment of real-estate values – which is why it is often asked to contribute in the first place. It seems simple enough to reject this position, opting instead for a more politically informed, socially engaged and critical practice. The problem is, however, that the idea of art’s criticality is drawn into the same polarized scheme. The dichotomy of confirmation vs. critique, of integration vs. intervention, is a recurring figure of thought that positions art and architecture in entirely different corners – especially noticeable as the disciplines compete for dominance, as they do in public space.20 Rejecting traditional aesthetic criteria and ‘the logic of the monument’, artists have gone to great lengths to avoid any association with the idea of permanence, the fixing of meaning and the commercial value, which are assumed to converge in the object. The foundation for a critical, process-based and participatory or social art is carefully covered over, buried along with the modernist avant-garde that presupposes it; a heritage that is paradoxically denied, rejected and embraced through a diversity of positions and theoretical readings. Whether set on disclosing structures of power within the museum, or constructing ‘authentic’ relationships outside it, it is the very framework of art that gives artists their privilege. The critical act itself is therefore readily reduced to a lame gesture, merely confirming the expectations of the institutions, the audiences and the market within the enclosed art system.21 Moreover, it tends to come across as meaningless, insignificant or simply insulting when dislocated outside the gallery. In my own experience, as a project manager, artists who take their logic solely from conditions inside the institution have a difficult time in recognizing the full implications of what it means to be working in public. I am critical of the idea of art’s critique because, more often than not, it means adopting the familiar position of the artist as a glorified ‘outsider’, projecting his or her intentions onto the ‘expanded field’, oblivious to the fact that this ‘field’ is already known and practised by others. This is especially true of artists claiming ‘engagement’ as a basis for their practice, for, while collaborations and public participations supposedly entail a delegation of authority, ultimately they are still dependent on the signature of the artist. The theme of curating the city, then, brings this whole set of difficulties to the fore. If artists have explored every possible way of working in public, from locating place to dislocating it, it is not so much proof of the freedom of art as of the contradictions and paradoxes within it. So far, architecture has only just begun to enter into a similar process, one that necessarily entails a problematizing of the role and legitimacy of the architect.22 Understanding architecture as based on means – tools, processes and competences – rather than end results, Doina Petrescu has described it as something that informs the everyday, rather than forms it.23 And perhaps it is through their reconfiguration into architecture that these art-related, process-based practices can make a real impact. Released from their dependency on the institution and used to inform the conception of architecture, they may actually take part in changing the use

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and perception of the city. The focal point here is the shift to means, rather than ends. Instead of taking part in the distribution of values between artistic and architectural products, what is made to matter is the particular competence developed within each field. This is exactly what I believe to be at stake in what Robert Smithson refers to as ‘distance’. ‘By a distance’, he says, ‘I mean a consciousness devoid of selfprojection’24 (my italics). Such a distance implies something other than the artist imposing his or her ideas onto the outside world. It is not a matter of expressing personal subjectivity, of adopting one’s self as a unique source of knowledge. But then again, it cannot be a matter of objectivity either. Rejecting the humanism of Western epistemology, Smithson was very clear that objectivity presupposes a Cartesian split between matter and mind, subject and object – in short, a notion of ‘man’ as ontologically separate from the world.25 Nevertheless, for him, art did provide a means for understanding reality, for explaining its visible and invisible forces. His notion of distance must therefore be seen as a particular border situation. It is one where the artist is able to question his or her inner self as well as external reality. The ‘outside world’, for Smithson, emerges as equally produced by human and non-human forces. His idea of ‘the crystalline’ conceptualizes an understanding of the world as partly escaping us, imposing an authority of time and space that defy our sense-making mechanisms. The distance he refers to can be compared to an extended consciousness, where the sense of self is but a temporary trajectory between socio-historical conditions and the singular experience of the individual. It positions the artist between subjectivity and society, equally aware of inner and outer conditions, not giving priority to either one but set on developing a set of tools to examine this situation. With Smithson, art emerges as a specific competence detached from specific media. I would like to read something similar to this in what was done in Stortorget. The project was imbued with conflicting conceptions and ideals from different fields. The roles and definitions of art, architecture, public space, history and the mundane mechanisms of politics and planning on a small urban scene all influenced the project, whose formal clarity belies the messiness of the process it involved. Inexplicably, though, almost everything turned out in line with the original intentions. Although the project has been criticized locally as a violent manifestation of ‘naked force’,26 the budget was low and that the intervention was as minimal as possible. Hovering between ‘the ordering function of the monument and the disappearance of the object’,27 the architecturally favoured phenomenological logic of providing ‘ground’ – reflected in the grounding of the stone surface of the square – was simultaneously questioned within the project itself, through a series of destabilizing factors. The addition of a space beneath – running water – and above – a dissolved sky – extended the dimensions of the place and complicated its sedimentary logic. This expansion was, in fact, one of the central motivations for the project. In their initial proposal, Caruso St John and Löfdahl had written: ‘By concentrating on the surface of the square we want to give a higher potential to its imaginary levels, not by over-determining them but by giving them a stronger presence’. Adam Caruso’s interest in the atmosphere of archi-

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Stortorget by night.

tecture, its potential to evoke sensations, insights and feelings, merged with what Eva Löfdahl has written on ‘the fantasy of another space’ as an expression for an unsatisfied longing for substance and truth.28 The element of irrationality in the scheme, impossible to defend by any other argument than that it was based on aesthetic competence, was founded in this kind of reasoning. The scheme, on the whole, can be seen as a way of stabilizing the energy flows of the place, anchoring it in a material existence – yet, by a series of careful choices, allowing for a fundamental openness in terms of accessibility, experience and use. With the completion of the project in 2003, the formal identity of Stortorget had not been restored as much as multiplied. Officially declared a historical heritage during the course of the project, performing as the local centre of a small town and an

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example of interdisciplinary work, each identity is linked to its own set of meanings and represented by its own authority. As Stortorget is drawn into the world of thoughts and ideas, the site itself is dispersed, addressing a wider and less recognizable audience than that of the local inhabitants. The sense of distance in this project was not founded on rationality, on the familiar although contested source of authority within architecture or planning. Distance was what made it possible to detect things that had become subdued by the familiarity of everyday life. It created an awareness, a certain sensibility of the material and imaginary potential of a site which is particular to art and architecture. Distance is what allows one to sense the energy that radiates from a particular surface, the importance of an exact location and a measurement – and also to realize the fantastic uncertainty of it all, the ambiguity of meaning. From a more pragmatic point of view, the project-management strategies of framing or scaleshift – techniques for altering social processes and resolving conflict through recontextualization and widening of perspective – are also dependent on creating distance from the situation at hand.29 Creating distance: maybe that is the most important part of what a curator does in the city. Not to mediate the reception of art, to make links between the artist and the beholder, but to multiply the site, to widen the context for the interpretation and experience of a specific space, be it architectural or involving works of art. Adopting the notion of distance as a necessity for site-specific work means distancing oneself from the view of place as defined by local culture, that is, as closure, as a fixed reality.30 It marks a distance from the immediate here-and-now, its pressing needs and preconceived ideas, but it is also a distance from the self-righteous and self-appointed elevated position of the artist or the architect. Lacking the means to identify sources and influences, unable to discern between valid and invalid standpoints, the arrival at a new place with an assignment to work there is always a peculiar situation. A sense of distance is a very basic experience that qualifies most people who are professionally involved with spatial transformations. It is a distance from the existing, whether defined as material culture, social communities or political/economical conditions, but it is this very distance that makes it possible to question the given and to envisage things differently. It is a critical distance – not in that it is removed from the world, but in that it produces the ability to create something else, ‘new ideas, new standards, new forms of thought that establish this distance’, to quote Cornelius Castoriadis.31 This distance does not imply an ‘outside’ position, since we always work with the existing, be it in the form of history, language or our personal experience. But it forces us to focus on our real abilities in the interaction with others.

Notes 1

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For an interesting reading on the curator as the mediator, see Søren Andreasen and Lars Bang Larsen, ‘The Middleman: Beginning to Talk about Mediation’, in Paul O’Neill (ed.), Curating Subjects (London: Occasional Table, 2007).

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2 3 4

5 6

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9 10 11

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14 15 16 17

Jane Rendell, Art and Architecture: A Place Between (London; New York: IB Tauris, 2006), Introduction. Lucy R. Lippard, ‘Intersections’, Flyktpunkter/Vanishing Points (Stockholm: Moderna Museet, 1984), p. 26. ‘What Is a Museum? A Dialogue between Allan Kaprow and Robert Smithson’ (1967), in Jack Flam (ed.), Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1966), p. 44. ‘What is a Museum? A Dialogue between Allan Kaprow and Robert Smithson’, p. 45. A sampling of publications related to this theme are Suzanne Lacy (ed.), Mapping the Terrain: New Genre Public Art (Seattle, WA: Bay Press, 1995); Hal Foster, ‘The Artist as Ethnographer’, in H. Foster, The Return of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996); Nick Kaye, Site-Specific Art: Performance, Place and Documentation (London; New York: Routledge, 2000); Alex Coles (ed.), Site-Specificity: The Ethnographic Turn (London: Black Dog, 2000); Miwon Kwon, One Place after Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002). According to urban researcher Nils Ahlberg, the founding of cities and relocation of existing ones within the Swedish Empire during the sixteenth century is only outnumbered by the co-eval colonialization of Latin and South America. Nils Ahlberg, Stadsgrunder och planförändringar: svensk stadsplanering 1521–1721 (Uppsala: Ultuna, Inst. för landskapsplanering, 2005). The rhetoric of loss that characterizes the conception of public space (among its best known interlocutors being Jürgen Habermas, Hannah Arendt, Richard Sennett, et al.) is well-known. An explicit example in relation to urbanity and architecture is Michael Sorkin’s equally well-known collection of essays in Variations on a Theme Park: The New American City and the End of Public Space (New York: Hill & Wang, 1994). Rosalyn Deutsche, Evictions: Art and Spatial Politics (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), p. 273. Claude Lefort, ‘The Question of Democracy’, in C. Lefort, Democracy and Political Theory (Cambridge; Oxford: The Polity Press, 1986), p. 19. For a more detailed description of the Swedish Art Council and its modus operandi, see my own ‘Definitions and Presuppositions: Stortorget as a Work of Art’, in Helena Mattsson (ed.), Kalmar Stortorget: Art/Architecture in Urban Space (Stockholm: Statens konstråd, 2005). Although it could be said that ‘everywhere we turn these days, there seems to be a new book on curators and curating’ (Annie Fletcher, as quoted in Paul O’Neill (ed.), Curating Subjects, p. 12), there seems to be an ontological link between this curator and the culture of exhibitions. While not excluding temporary events or urban interventions within the framework of public art, the role of the project manager is different in the sense that it also involves the production of permanent structures. See, for instance, Margaret Crawford, ‘Blurring the Boundaries: Public Space and Private Life’, in John Chase, John Kaliski and Margaret Crawford (eds), Everyday Urbanism (New York: The Monacelli Press, 1999); Rosalyn Deutsche, ‘Agoraphobia’, in Rosalyn Deutsche, Evictions: Art and Spatial Politics (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002). Deutsche, Evictions, p. 258. Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics: the Distribution of the Sensible, transl. Gabriel Rockhill (London: Continuum, 2004). Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley, Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1988), p. 92. Suzanne Lacy, ‘Cultural Pilgrimages and Metaphoric Journeys’, in Suzanne Lacy (ed.), Mapping the Terrain: New Genre Public Art (Seattle, WA: Bay Press, 1995).

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18

19 20

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23 24 25 26 27 28

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Miwon Kwon, ‘Experience vs. Interpretation: Traces of Ethnography in the Works of Lan Tuazon and Nikki S. Lee’, in Alex Coles (ed.), Site-Specificity: The Ethnographic Turn (London: Black Dog, 2000), p. 76. Kwon, ‘Experience vs. Interpretation’, p. 77. Perhaps the most famous example of contested public art, Richard Serra’s Tilted Arc, commissioned for Federal Plaza on Manhattan 1979 and removed some ten years later, shows distinct traits of this polarity. A recurring topos within the discourse on public art, most critics agree on regarding it as a confrontation against architecture, supported by Serra’s own statements. The naturalized view of architecture as a representation of power, an instrument of repression, anonymous control, etc., seems to be standard in American art theory. As based on my own experience and in accordance with the reasoning of Miwon Kwon in One Place after Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002). I am referring here to experiments on unsolicited and self-managed architecture, as performed by Doina Petrescu of L’Ateliér d’Architecture Autogérée (AAA) in Paris; a network of local inhabitants, academics and architects who are developing alternative strategies for urban regeneration combined with ‘situated research’. For a documentation of projects in this vein, see Urban Act: A Handbook of Alternative Practices (Paris: Preprav, 2007). Doina Petrescu, ‘How to Make a Community as well as the Space for it’, available online: www.re-public.gr/en/?p=60 (accessed 16 June 2008). ‘What is a Museum? A Dialogue between Allan Kaprow and Robert Smithson’, p. 45. Flam, Robert Smithson, p. xix. ‘an elitist project by powerful artists with millions at their disposal’, Kurt Lundgren, ‘276 sidor obegriplig text om Stortorget’, Kalmar Läns Tidning 060512. Mattsson, Kalmar Stortorg, p. 47. Adam Caruso, ‘The Emotional City’, Quaderns: Urban landscapes, 2001: 228; Eva Löfdahl, ‘Kommentar’, in Gunilla Lundahl (ed.) Byggnadsintegrerad konst på Kemiska övningslaboratoriet, Stockholms universitet, Frescati. Eva Löfdahl: Sila mygg och svälja kameler & Utskjutning (Stockholm: Statens konstråd, 1996), p. 72. Doug McAdam, Sidney Tarrow and Charles Tilly, Dynamics of Contention (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Robert Benford, ‘Framing Processes and Social Movements’, Annual Review of Sociology, 26: 1. For a seminal analysis on the ideological implications of phenomenologically defined place, see Doreen Massey, For Space (London; New Dehli: Sage, 2005). The full quote goes: ‘Critique entails a distance relative to the object; if philosophy is to go beyond journalism, this critique presupposes the creation of new ideas, new standards, new forms of thought that establish this distance’. Cornelius Castoriadis, ‘The Retreat from Autonomy: Postmodernism as Generalized Conformism’, World in Fragments, transl. David Ames Curtis (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997), p. 36.

Urban fictions with the office for subversive architecture Alexandra Stara

Where is public space? Is it in designated areas, like main streets, squares and public buildings? Is it in marginal, leftover spaces like abandoned lots, or even at the boundaries of legal accessibility? Perhaps public space is not a place, but situations for engagement. This is a very old idea, as old as the city itself, with ‘polis’ in classical Greece standing for a composite of urban fabric, its people and their culture. The nature of public space in the contemporary city is more ambiguous and problematic. Traditional ideas of commonality and shared ethos may be at the foundations of the idea of the ‘public’, but they no longer suffice to encompass the aggregate of personalities, media and combating interests that compose the urban condition of our times. The office for subversive architecture (osa), a loosely structured group of architects in various European cities, have made it their business to explore, celebrate, question, subvert (of course) and ultimately enrich the composite of contemporary public space, through a wide range of projects and interventions. They are a proposition for an alternative stance to urbanism that operates through drawing attention to neglected aspects and possibilities of the city instead of imposing a ‘vision’. The responsive, curatorial nature of osa’s work, ‘collecting’ the overlooked and transforming it into the unexpected, suggests the possibility of rethinking the city beyond the limited terms of established practice.

osa The group originated 12 years ago as part of a student project and began to grow as a collective of practitioners with similar ideas on architecture and public space. Their consistent aim has been to develop what they call ‘untraditional approaches’ to reinterpret architecture in the city.1 The practice currently numbers eight partners, all full-time architects, based in five different cities and three different countries in Europe. Their projects cross the boundaries between art and architecture, varying from minimal or moveable installations to the construction of actual buildings.

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The looseness of their design methods is reflected in the group’s composition and mode of operation. The various partners, as well as a host of other practitioners not ‘officially’ part of osa but, through essential supporting roles, annexed in the practice’s ‘Hall of Fame’, come together on an individual project basis, depending on time and interest. All projects are attributed both to the collective practice and the individuals involved in them who, in all cases, hold other professional jobs outside osa. It is worth noting that the Internet plays a central role in the mode of operation of osa and is acknowledged as such – as a reflection of the medium’s participatory potential and lack of hierarchy.2 All this highlights the openness of the practice and suggests that osa should not be seen merely as a professional office but as an attitude, encompassing both makers and consumers, inviting everyone to look at, think about and inhabit the city differently. In June 2008, osa principals Kastern Huneck and Bernd Truempler joined forces with Blueprint, the British design journal, and produced Point of View as a response to the secrecy surrounding the development of the Olympic site in London. The project consisted of a stepped timber platform, designed to be placed adjacent to the wall fencing the Olympic park, allowing an adult of average height to poke their head just above the parapet and have a look inside. The platform was painted the same bright blue of the wall – a gesture that emphasised the symbiosis of the clandestine object with the original structure even as it subverted it, while at the same time drawing attention to that garish colour, so out of step with its bleak surroundings and bleaker purpose. One cannot help imagining clichéd conversations among the ‘authorities’ – a favourite summary term of Huneck and Truempler for any and all official guardians of the city – concluding that a ‘cheerful’ colour might somewhat compensate for the prohibiting nature of this fence, blocking both access and view. The Olympic Delivery Authority employs guards to patrol the perimeter of this wall and remove any curious visitors, as well as to paint out any graffiti that might have made it through their lines. Under the circumstances, it is remarkable that Point of View managed to remain in place close to three days, creating a powerful instance of public space through the simple transformation of a prohibiting structure into an enabling one. Such a project is no more exhausted in the physical object bearing its title than the city is in

Point of View. Installation by osa and Blueprint magazine (2008).

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the slabs of its pavements. Point of View ‘took place’ through its situated use and, crucially, its eventual removal, confirming the ambiguity, fragility and yet insistence of public space to appear wherever people become mutually interested. Although social and political criticism is embedded in osa’s projects, this is not their primary modus operandi. Their work is much more indeterminate, open and playful, relying largely on excitement and surprise to draw people in and engage them. The possibility of meaning or critique emerges later, as a result of this engagement, rather than pre-emptively announced. The Accumulator3 was a major installation in the disused Leeds International Swimming Pool, due for imminent demolition. Fascinated by the resonant absence of water in the competition-sized pool, the architects responded by designing a giant, funnel-like construction that was meant to collect rainwater from a hole in the roof and conduct it into the pool. Upon discovering that the roof structure was too deep and complex to puncture through, the funnel was adjusted to hang from the existing beams, and the project transformed from a collector of water to one of light. The shift from material to immaterial opened up a series of associations, which, in conjunction with the significant role of the much-loved building in the city’s life since the 1960s, began to resonate with the idea of memory and its fleetingness (not unlike sunlight in Leeds). In Huneck and Truempler’s own words, their intervention assisted the building in becoming an ‘emotional accumulator’ in the city. Richard Waite, writing in the Architect’s Journal about The Accumulator, confessed that upon hearing about the project before actually seeing it, he wondered what was the point of such a thing. But when he found himself there, he felt that the installation was a perfect fit with the building and that it ‘almost completed it’.4 The projects of osa resist making explicit statements. The ‘point’ of the projects is latent and situated. Like good authors they rely on the imaginative engagement of their readers to make their stories come alive. In this light, thinking of osa’s work as ‘fiction’ could be revealing.

The Accumulator.

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The necessity of fiction We are used to interpreting fiction as falsehood, as a construct concealing and often attempting to substitute the real. Jean Baudrillard, as a protagonist of postmodern critical discourse, devoted much of his work analysing the substitution of reality by such fictions in our era of information overload and unilateral mediatisation.5 In the relentless quest for the new and the interesting, the real remains relevant only as a conceptual marker, against which the ‘even better than’ is established and legitimised. On the other side of this malign fictionalisation of the world, however, the fictional plays a part of profound significance for the establishment and continuity of culture. One of the definitions of ‘fiction’ suggests that it can also be ‘a supposition that a possibility, however unlikely, is a fact’.6 The fine line between this ‘unlikely’ and the possible has been trod for centuries by literature, fiction’s ‘legitimate’ incarnation, and, even earlier, by myth. It merits consideration whether the mechanisms of the fictive in literary, as well as filmic, narratives, may have a wider applicability in a culture all but consumed by artifice. The continuing relevance of myth in modernity as the framework of foundational narratives through which culture is structured and identified, has been the subject of a number of important studies in the past few decades.7 Cultural anthropologist and theorist of modernity Marc Augé, in his book The War of Dreams, contributes to this discourse through a discussion of the links between myth, dreams and fiction.8 The crucial element in this study is the distinction between the covert fictional substitutes, or pure fictions, that invade reality with catastrophic consequences (Baudrillard’s simulacra) and the collectively composed hybrid fictions through which mankind has sustained a sense of shared identity since the dawn of civilization. Augé clearly distinguishes between the nature of such mythical fictions in pre-modern societies and modernity, but what he suggests is that the dissolution of traditional structures in the modern world has not dispensed with the necessity of a collectively composed artifice as reality’s other, so that reality can continue to be meaningful. Identity relies on the recognition of alterity and needs to be tested by it regularly in order to maintain its legitimacy and strength. This is not conceived as a relationship of mere opposites, which would be mechanistic and sterile, but as an ongoing process of reciprocity, which transforms conflict to creativity, the same way that it transforms the personal into the communal. Ritual and myth were the traditional mediators enabling this transformation to occur, but the modern world is not without certain equivalents. Those, claims Augé, are fictions as socially regulated regimes of perception, which, although not exclusive to it, abound in art of all forms. Writing about films he says that they are ‘a claim to everyday evidence, to existence; they suggest a space, a history, a language, a way of looking at the world; with the specific they aspire to the universal’.9 On the one hand, therefore, such ‘positive’ fictions need to draw from an established and tested common ground – that is, from reality – in order to have any relevance and participatory potential for their audience; but, on the other hand, they also need to be clearly distinguished from reality as fictions. A positive, or what might be also called a

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‘self-conscious’ fiction, relies on the mechanism of aesthetic distancing – that is, a confirmation of the gap between life and art. The traditional ‘suspension of disbelief’ required for the full enjoyment of theatre or storytelling, implies precisely that distance, which may be temporarily bridged but never abolished, if both art and life are not to be compromised. Augé suggests that this ‘discrepancy’ or ‘play’, in more than one sense of the word, operates on several levels and is quintessential to the legitimacy of fiction. It is not only imagination and the possibility of each individual to find their fit in the communal that requires this looseness, it is the very possibility of fiction – in other words, art – to contribute to culture creatively that hinges on this. He writes: The experience of literary play is perhaps the obligatory preliminary to any development of philosophical thought and the intellectual freedom which it institutes in relation to established cosmologies – a freedom which moreover assumes the existence of writing as a guarantee of memory and a support for argument.10 Imagination plays a central part in the workings of fiction as a ‘bond of socialisation’, which allows the individual imagination to transcend its boundaries by experiencing others, as well as constructing the collective imagination, while maintaining its relative autonomy. Architectural theorists Alberto Pérez-Gómez and Louise Pelletier, while discussing the origins of architecture, appear to echo Augé on the importance of imagination. Pérez-Gómez and Pelletier refer to the space created from the ontological distancing at work in aesthetic differentiation as the ‘bittersweet space of desire’ and to imagination, the faculty which allows this space to be activated creatively, as ‘perhaps our finest accomplishment as a species; it is the medium of ethics and our best assurance against self-destruction’.11 Talking about ethics in this context is highly significant as it suggests that the creative and imaginary are not exempt from responsibility. The role of imagination as an essential dimension of cultural and social engagement bears underlining, as does the understanding of memory as imagination’s essential ‘other’. What this implies is that a potentially creative and socially bonding imagination is distinct from a mere flight of fancy because it emerges in reciprocity with the world, as both experienced/remembered and anticipated. The fictions in question do not function merely as triggers for obscure free-associations, but provide a ground, a stable reference point for the play of imagination to occur reciprocally with the real and shared. In the light of all this, perhaps the missing term that would enforce Augé’s reading of fiction as a safeguard of cultural ground and continuity is metaphor. Hermeneutic philosopher Paul Ricoeur defines metaphor as an ‘emergence of meaning’.12 As a privileged linguistic trope, metaphor increases our sense of reality mediating between the given and the possible, the expressed and the unexpressed, the perceived and the imagined. Metaphor does not invent language or the world – it is firmly rooted in and conditioned by them – but it pushes their boundaries and reveals layers previously unknown. Often operating through contradiction and surprise, metaphor confuses the established logical boundaries for the sake of detecting new

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similarities that previous categorisations prevented us from noticing. This is a process of defamiliarisation or ‘making strange’: disrupting the recognisable and familiar, in certain ways that allow it to reveal meaningful relationships with the world, beyond the already established. If memory is the keeper of the familiar, which becomes unsettled through the rupture of the strange, then imagination is its essential counterpart which allows for the rift’s creative overcoming and the leap into ‘the place of nascent meanings and categories’.13 The possibility of transposing the creative potential inherent in Augé’s fictions and Ricoeur’s metaphors beyond language and narrative media, into the embodied, everyday realm of the city is deeply intriguing. But thinking of osa’s projects as fictions does not mean reading them as a single narrative – or ‘reading’ them at all, in the sense of a purely mental activity. The hybrid projects open up a space of imagination, but they invite us ‘to take our bodies with us’, to use an expression by philosopher of phenomenology Maurice Merleau-Ponty.14 Against the scientific/Cartesian paradigm which would divide body and mind, favouring the latter as more ‘objective’, Merleau-Ponty reminds us that the two are ultimately one, and so our sensory/sensual relationship with the world and our mental/imaginary one cannot be dissociated.

Going to town osa state that their projects are focused on the reinterpretation of public space and driven by an ambition to push the boundaries of common practice.15 In the first instance this refers to architectural practice and its established ways of shaping public space, but it is even more interesting to read ‘common practice’ as that which we, the users, do in public spaces. The work of osa issues an invitation for engagement, for action. Their projects do not give us something to simply think about, any more than they give us an object. Despite their thoughtful and challenging nature that generally bears the scrutiny of an analytical eye well, their projects are not ‘conceptual’. They are neither exhausted in their description, nor are they conceived at a distance, independently of site. In a recent conversation, Huneck and Truempler said that responsiveness to site lies at the foundations of osa’s work. For that reason, they have mixed feelings about the term ‘guerilla’, frequently used in the press to describe their practice, because it implies destruction.16 Neither ‘construction’ as imposition nor ‘destruction’ as reduction, osa’s interventions reciprocate with a given place to begin unravelling and revealing the other possible places to be found there. In 2004, a disused signal box on the railway tracks of Shoreditch station, east London, attracted osa’s attention and was transformed into the project Intact.17 Intrigued by the shape of the concrete box, which suggested that of a scaled-down suburban cottage (albeit on storey-high stilts), the architects were prompted to ‘refurbish’ the structure as if it were, indeed, such a home. It is worth quoting their own description of the refurbishment:

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Two sides of the building structure were painted ‘brilliant white’, artificial geraniums were ‘planted’ in typical green window flower boxes and fixed to the windows. A hanging basket, also with artificial geraniums, was installed alongside the front door. The balcony was converted with the finest artificial long grass. A regular but colourful ‘director’s chair’ rested alongside the cheapest BBQ on sale. The door was painted gloss black and conventional suburban ironmongery was installed. Without any supplied electricity, a car battery suitable for a small family car was installed with a light hooked up to a timer. The timer was set for 2100hrs each night.18 The architects attempted to gain permission for this intervention, but not getting anywhere with ‘the authorities’, they proceeded with their scheme regardless and competed all works within the space of ten hours. The project remained in place for three days and was then stormed by said authorities, who mistook it for a squat and vandalised it so as to render it uninhabitable. The osa team returned and renovated the ‘house’ once more, as part of Open House Weekend, during which they set up a whole-day event at Buxton Gardens, overlooking the project. Following the inevitable destruction of this second renovation as well, osa returned for a third time, only to

Intact.

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place an oversized blue furry creature named Schlampi – a sculpture by Simone van gen Hassend – on the ‘terrace’, like a contemplative alien. The element of humour present in several of osa’s works is perhaps at its strongest in Intact. But this is not a scathing or unkind humour. It is the humour of clichés and clashes, of oddness and surprise, which illuminates and uncovers. In the end, we may fruitfully ponder from a distance the meaning of Intact, but the real significance of the project is an accumulation of the experiences of the group who set it up and maintained it as an image of the suburban ‘dream house’; the local gang of youths who dubbed it the ‘ghost house’; the ‘vandals’ who repeatedly destroyed it in the name of public order; the people participating in the picnic during Open House Weekend; and every other local/passer-by/viewer whose experience of the area was altered by this transposition of the ‘ideal home’ cliché – complete with visiting alien – in such an unlikely place. The projects of osa are generated directly as a response to site, as an attempt to enrich it through degrees of ‘fictionalisation’. As a result, their scale, form and ambition vary considerably. Whether a proper architectural structure like the Kunsthülle,19 a temporary pavilion made out of clear PVC strips on the roof of a factory, or a piece of graffiti like Anwohnerpark,20 where car parking spaces were marked up a vertical wall, the practice strives to set up the conditions for various ‘transportations’ – the literal translation of the Greek word ‘metaphor’. The difficulty of transposing the play of fiction in an architectural context lies not only in the solidity of building but also in its responsibility to address purpose and function in an encompassing but non-prescriptive way. In other words, a building needs to be inhabited and this inhabitation, although purposeful, should not be subject to the restrictions of a simplistic narrative or representational one-liners, if it is not to become a theme park. The Kunsthülle constructed its metaphors and proposed its playfulness eschewing the language of signs and relying instead on an embodied, participatory mode for the activation of its fictional potential. The building was commissioned by Liverpool’s A Foundation, as the first of the Greenland Street projects, an annual architectural intervention in the three factories on the eponymous street turned contemporary arts centre. The Kunsthülle – loosely translated as ‘Art Wrapping’ – was made entirely of hung plastic sheeting, which foregrounded the industrial origins of the surrounding buildings, while creating a series of distinct yet fluid boundaries. Although the appearance of the project from a distance was solid and striking – accentuated by dramatic lighting – and thus served the purpose of ‘beacon’ for the arts, upon closer encounter the structure dissolved into something more indeterminate and playful. The transparency and mobility of the sheeting, which formed the various outer and inner thresholds, allowed all manner of play to occur, through the movement of the wind, of people, of shadows. Rather than merely setting up a place for interaction – through the debates and other events organised there – the pavilion was offered as an interactive piece itself. During particularly windy days – of which autumn in Liverpool is never short – the Kunsthülle appeared in extremis, swaying and rippling violently, melting the too solid flesh of architecture.

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Kunsthülle.

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Anwohnerpark.

‘Where’ and ‘what’ is this (or any) building, were questions inherent in the experience of the scheme. With projects like the Anwohnerpark the margin for engagement is more limited, but the sense of ‘making strange’ and its possibilities is as powerful. Continuing the grid of a parking lot in Cologne up a dramatic vertical wall adjacent to it, this project performed a simple yet highly effective act of dislocation. Whether perceived as a commentary on the clash of locals and visitors of the nearby trade fair over parking in the area, or an agenda-free surrealist intervention, or more, the gravitydefying ‘Residents Park’ transformed the mundane into the extraordinary, creating a space where gravity has never pulled us more forcefully. Performing a similar crossover between the playfulness of the medium and the possible seriousness of the message, mediated through an unfailing appreciation of site, was the project Campinski.21 Several members of osa orchestrated a series of interventions conceived and executed by students of the Darmstadt University of Technology in the industrial part of the city’s harbour, using exclusively ‘igloo’ camping tents. Appreciating the potential of the reciprocity of imagination and memory for public space, osa look for the hidden intrigue of each site, of what its occupants may think or hope or fear, and work to bring it to the fore, to visualise and embody it. In that sense, osa are setting up journeys in the liminal space between our inner world of dreams and memories, and the everyday inhabitable place we share with others, which shapes our dreams and, in turn, can be shaped by them. Choosing, as they do,

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Campinski Medienfassade. Building by index architects, installation by osa.

to operate ‘in between’ so many levels, one should not attempt to pin osa down to a signature style, project or tagline. What they do is an ongoing process, which follows and mirrors the life of the city (albeit through something more akin to Alice’s looking glass rather than the mirrored façades of corporate architecture). Like Borges’ literary fictions, these works are meditations on the real and the possible, interpreting and imagining the urban palimpsest in equal measure. For all its potential political relevance and the subversion in its name, osa’s stance is ultimately optimistic and creative. The many and varied people gathered under the auspices of osa seem to be accepting Augé’s invitation to be among the ‘resisters’ of the tyranny of the image, and ‘the dreamers . . . who are skilful enough to cultivate their own phantasies so that the offthe-shelf imagination of the illusionists of the all-fictional becomes an object of private derision’.22

Conclusion Sebastien Marot writes: The history of cities and of urbanism . . . undoubtedly furnishes many further examples in support of a vision of urbanism as an art of collective memory, applied to bring order and orientation into the urban settlement, that confused, saturated and living theatrum memoriae.23 Later in the same book, Marot quotes William Carlos Williams upon visiting Rome, saying that ‘to create is no longer to be an emperor; but to create is to shoot a clarity through the oppressing, obsessing murk of the world’.24 Both these instances suggest

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that our attitudes to the city, whether as makers, readers or users, need to be readjusted to a more complex and demanding, but potentially more rich and rewarding mode of engagement. The solipsism and cynicism of urban design in its most established and persistent form – from planning as an exercise in analytic abstraction and commercial gain, to the public as passive consumers – is becoming a cure deadlier than the illness for our rapidly transforming cities. The urban fictions of osa, as an ongoing curatorial project of the urban palimpsest, are taking on the challenge of alternative practice with serious playfulness and ‘the dislocating energy of poetry’.25

Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

8 9 10 11 12

13 14

15 16

17 18 19 20 21 22

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Online: www.osa-online.net/de/frameset/zenset.htm (accessed 8 September 2008). Online: www.osa-online.net/de/frameset/zenset.htm (accessed 8 September 2008). Karsten Huneck/Bernd Truempler (2008). Richard Waite, ‘What Is the Point of This’, AJ, 6 March 2008. See, for example, the seminal Simulacra & Simulation, transl. Sheila Glaser, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1994, originally published in French in 1981. The Chambers Dictionary, 1993. See, for example, Paul Ricoeur, ‘Myth as the Bearer of Possible Worlds’, in M. Valdés (ed.), A Ricoeur Reader (Hemel Hempstead: Harvest Wheatsheaf, 1991); and the definitive work on myth and its relevance to modernity, Hans Blumenberg, Work on Myth, transl. R.M. Wallace (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985). Marc Augé, The War of Dreams: Studies in Ethno-Fiction, transl. Liz Heron (London; Sterling, VA: Pluto Press, 1999). Augé, War of Dreams, p. 90. Augé, War of Dreams, p. 102. Alberto Pérez-Gómez and Louise Pelletier, Architectural Representation and the Perspective Hinge (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997), p. 12. Paul Ricoeur, ‘Creativity in Language’, in E. Strauss (ed.), Language and Language Disturbances (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1974), pp. 49–50; on metaphor, see also his classic work The Rule of Metaphor, transl. R. Czerny (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997). Ricoeur, ‘Creativity in Language’, p. 67. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, ‘Eye and Mind’, transl. Carleton Dallery, in James M. Edie (ed.), The Primacy of Perception (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964), p. 162. Online: www.osa-online.net/de/frameset/zenset.htm (accessed 8 September 2008). Organized by the curator Deborah Smith as part of her project The Space of Elsewhere, at the Stanley Picker Gallery, Kingston University Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture, 2008. Karsten Huneck/Bernd Truempler, in collaboration with Harald Hughes and Trenton Oldfield (2006). Online: www.osa-online.net/de/flavours/up/intact/a/index.htm (accessed 8 September 2008). Karsten Huneck/Bernd Truempler (2006). Anja Ohliger/Oliver Langbein/Anke Strittmatter/Britta Eiermann/Bernd Truempler, in collaboration with Kunstwerk (2006). Oliver Langbein/Anke Strittmatter/Britta Eiermann, with students (2005). Augé, War of Dreams, p. 120.

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23 24 25

Sebastien Marot, Sub-Urbanism and the Art of Memory, transl. Brian Holmes (London: AA Publications, 2003), p. 18. William Carlos Williams, A Voyage to Pagany (New York: New Directions, 1970), p. 116, as quoted in Marot, Sub-Urbanism, p. 68. ‘What is reality without the dislocating energy of poetry?’ writes Maurice Blanchot, implying that the metaphoric and creative power of poetry challenge, in order to finally affirm and enrich, our reality; in The Infinite Conversation, transl. S. Hanson (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), p. 307.

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Afterword Please do not touch Jeremy Till

Just as I sit down to write this chapter the news comes out that the Golden Lion at the 2008 Venice Architecture Biennale has been awarded to Greg Lynn for an installation of toys made out of recycled furniture. No. That sounds wrong. Let’s try again. Just as I sit down to write this chapter the news comes out that the Golden Lion at the 2008 Venice Architecture Biennale has been awarded to Greg Lynn for an installation of furniture made out of recycled toys. That’s better; if still a bit bemusing. So I look up the jury’s citation. ‘The recycled-toy furniture advances the digital-form problem to a new level that intrinsically engages traditional architectural concerns such as meaning, aesthetics, and advancing fabrication technology with the recycling, an issue of broad, immediate and pressing concern.’ Isn’t that heartwarming? You can be aesthetically and technically progressive, and save the planet at the same time! In Technicolor!! Even making allowances for the touching portentousness that translations from Italian so often engender, this justification, and the award itself, takes us to the furthest shores of architectural hubris. But this is only to be expected, because exhibitions like the Biennale serve to fuel architecture’s self-aggrandisement. They set up a bubble of false hope, in which the visual noise blocks out any evidence of dirty realism beyond, and so in which a closed set of architectural values is played out. This invokes a state of removal in which the objects on display, in all their visuality and abstraction, are seen to stand for architecture. What, you might ask, is wrong with this? Why shouldn’t we be allowed to indulge in this innocent pleasure of being seduced or stimulated by form? Isn’t this what happens in art – so why not let it happen with architecture, the mythical mother of the arts? The answer is that whereas the cycle of production in the art world is often instigated by and then finishes with the gallery, the production of architecture has a much more extended and tempestuous path. Within the gallery, the artist’s artefact exists precisely as a removed object, with its production and reception highly mediated

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by this context. The architectural object of display within an exhibition is, however, only a tiny part of the wider context within which architecture is situated. The problem is that limit is not recognised, and so the architectural exhibition presumes an equivalence between the objects on display and architecture. Of course the objects, in all their fixity, could never begin to represent the dynamic and contingent presence of architecture. Indeed this very dynamism and contingency presents a challenge to the stability of the profession. Faced with this threat, the best thing is to deny that openness to other forces and pretend that architecture exists over and above time and society. Where better to do this than in the exhibition – a place in which conditions can be controlled and one can present a fiction of a world set apart? In this light, as Florian Kossak notes in his chapter in this book, the exhibition plays a rather more important part in the production of architectural culture than is perhaps recognised. This is why the two key architectural movements of the twentieth century, modernism and postmodernism, are so closely associated with two exhibitions, the 1932 Modern Architecture exhibition in New York and the 1980 Venice Architecture Biennale. It was these exhibitions that established the international authority of these movements, and they did so by gathering the innumerable variables associated with any architectural project and then presenting them as a coherent body, removed from the contexts that had given rise to the projects in the first place and suppressing their differences. In this condition of removal – removed in the sense of being apart but also of eliminating – a certain set of values is privileged, which are then carried over into the heart of architectural culture. Most obviously the visual dominates, but in a very particular manner that displaces any bodily engagement with space. Because of the impossibility of recreating the scale of architecture, the exhibition necessarily ‘reduces’ the visual experience to abstractions, within which the foreground issues of style, surface and form override the background sense of space and occupation. The viewer is kept at bay within this visual field. PLEASE DO NOT TOUCH. Signals of control are given, either literally or by implication. Please do not touch my world; please do not besmirch it with your presence. The visitor is reduced to being a passive observer of things, which in all their beauty shrug off the stains of future occupation, of time, of mess. The exhibited object thus reproduces – or more precisely actually helps produce – a certain architectural value system in which the user is reduced to passive occupant and the building is conceived apart from contingent reality. And so, if these objects that are seen to stand for architecture are then taken out into the real world and become architecture they carry with them that attitude of distancing, yet in that moment the viewer of the object has become the user of the architecture. Please do not touch my building! Of course occupants will touch (and much, much more) and in so doing upset the values first perfected in the exhibition gallery, but by then it should not matter: the photographs have been taken and the architects have left the scene with their trophies of style and form. It was to counter this controlling and distancing of viewer/user that we introduced an object with a twist into the British Pavilion at the 2006 Venice Architecture Biennale. A big sign – PLEASE DO NOT TOUCH – hung over a model with bits of

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cities on it encouraging the people to rearrange the space of the model. The twist was that these multiple reinventions were filmed and then projected onto a big screen, and at the same time carefully mixed with a live projection of the room itself, confusing scales and realities. In this way the viewers became occupants of the city that others were creating. The distance between viewer and model, user and space, was collapsed in a conscious attempt to invoke messy participation in the production of architecture. In all its playfulness this installation managed at the same time to invoke the wrath of the architectural press but also the delight of the lay audience and mainstream press. With this very minor intervention in the annals of architectural exhibitions comes a call for architectural exhibitions to face up to both their limits (they can only present a cipher of architecture) and their role within architectural production. The curatorship of any exhibition, as so many chapters in this book persuasively argue, is hardly an innocent act, so any control should not be abused. If, as that Golden Lion suggests, architecture really is reduced to matters of taste and style, then we are rapidly moving to the condition predicted by Manfredo Tafuri of architecture as pure form. If curators have been complicit in joining, and to a certain extent propelling, this trajectory, then equally they have the opportunity, and responsibility, to help us get out of it before architecture is forever trapped in a prison-house of formal gymnastics. But for this to happen curators will have to seize architecture’s wider social and political context, in all its contingency, as a strength to be worked with and not a threat to be suppressed. If they don’t, I will throw all my toys out of the pram in a fit of pique. Or maybe not. I could not bear the idea of them being transformed into fatuous form.

PLEASE DO NOT TOUCH. Installation in British Pavilion, 2006 Venice Architecture Biennale.

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Index

2001: A Space Odyssey (Kubrick) 148 A Foundation 240–2 Abalos & Herreros 31 abandoned house project 180, 182–3, 187, 189; categories 183; objectives 183; Projection of Life/From here and there 185, 186–7; Seven Samurai 188–90; Shedding House 187, 188, 190; What Happened! 183, 184, 185 Abbas, Ackbar 64 Accumulator, The (osa) 235 acoustic urbanism 213–14 Acoustiguide 78 Adler, Gerald 167–77 ‘aesthetic’ art 223 aesthetic distancing 237 aesthetics 70, 94, 150–2, 156–7 affordable housing 213, 217 Aisthetik (Boehme) 109 Aktüre, Zeynep 145–59 Akurgal, Ekrem 156 Albert Memorial, London 168 allegory 103 Alpers, Svetlana 151 Amann, Matthias Albrecht 103–16 Amnesiac Shrine (Nelson) 97 L’Amour Fou (Breton) 40, 41–2, 46 L’Amour Fou (Krauss & Livingston) 42 Ancient Civilizations and Ruins of Turkey (Akurgal) 156 Ando, Tadao 55–6, 168 ‘Andorak’ project 55–6 anti-branding 211–14 anti-Semitism 170–3 Antisemiten Liga (League of Anti-Semites) 171 Anwohnerpark (osa) 240, 242

Appadurai, Arjun 63 Apprentices’ Home for the Teaching Estate for Young Israelite Farmers, Steinhorst (Tessenow) 173, 175, 176, 177 Aragon, Louis 40, 43–4 Arcade Fire 217 architects, relevance of travel 31 architectural design: branding in 208; characteristics 25; and iconic graphic design 217 architectural education, in Pérez-Gómez 28 architectural entrepreneurship 71 architectural history: defining 167–77; status of Tessenow’s ‘Jewish’ projects 170–6 architectural installations: versus art installations 117–20; see also installations architectural order 155–8 architectural space: flattening 45–6; and Surrealism 43 architectural tourism 32, 36 architectural typologies/tropologies 69–71 Architecture and Ethics Beyond Globalisation (Pérez-Gómez) 28 art, architecture as 81–2, 84, 86–7 art galleries 129–42 art installations 117–20 Artemis Ephesia sculptures 145; Artemis the Beautiful 145–6, 151, 152, 156; Artemis the Colossal 145, 151, 152, 156; curiosity potential 148; descriptions 146; discovery 145; display location 146; display setting 151–2; as ‘museum without walls’ 148; as theatrum mundi 147; see also Artemis Hall; Efes Museum Artemis Hall: entrance 155; modifications 156; post-renovation 157; pre-renovation 152; programmed narrative 156

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artists, professional status of 226–7 Asena, Duygu 202 Atelier Big City 215–16 Atget, Eugene 46–7 audio guides 78–88 Augé, Marc 2, 236–8, 243–4 Augustine, Saint 95 Auschwitz 176–7 Avenarius, Ferdinand 171 Ayse Erkmen project 183–5 Banham, Reyner 26, 32 Barbara Hepworth Museum, St Ives, Cornwall 52 Baroque masques 120 Barozzi da Vignola, Giacomo 112 Bataille, Georges 42 Baudrillard, Jean 108, 236 Bauhaus 173 Be Kind Rewind (Gondry) 73–4 Beaux Arts Society 30 Being and Time (Heidegger) 95 Beistegui, Charles de 43 Benjamin, Walter 46, 64, 71, 129, 215 Bergson, Henri 14–15, 52–3 Berlin 26, 31, 131, 169–72 Bernini, Gianlorenzo 121 BIE (Bureau International des Expositions) 193–4 Bilbao Guggenheim: accolades 78; atrium 79; criticisms 80; entrance 81; ‘fish’ gallery 80–1; Frank Gehry exhibition (Venice) 131; versus Seattle Central Library 82, 84–8; tour programme 78–82; video performance piece 80; on YouTube 87 Block group 169, 173 Blockhead (McCarthy) 136 Blueprint (journal) 234 Bochardt-Hume, Achim 138 body: role in perception process 52–5; see also female body ‘body-in-the-world’ 52–3 Boehme, Gernot 109 Bonatz, Paul 169 ‘book-on-the-wall’ 51–2 Borromini, Francesco 121 Börsen und Gründungsschwindel in Deutschland, Der (Stockmarket and Foundation Swindle in Germany, The) (Glagau) 171 Bötticher, Karl 169 Boulevard de Strasbourg (Atget) 47 Boullée, Etienne-Louis 137 Bourgeois, Louise 138 branding: aftermath of 214–17; anti-branding

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proposals 211–14; in location databases 70–1; as urban design strategy 209–11 Brassaï 41–2 Breton, André 40–4, 46–8 British Landscape Character Assessment (LCA) 69 British School, Rome 30 Bruges-la-morte (Rodenbach) 103 Bruno, Giuliana 2 Budgen, Frank 15 Buick, Robin 10–12, 14 Burckhardt, Jacob 124 Bureau International des Expositions (BIE) 193–4 ‘cabinet of curiosity’ 147–54 Cadiz: architectural proposals 28; City Model 25, 29; field trip 24; market sellers setting up 35; Old Town overview 27; urban block in the New Town 27 Camillo, Giulio 147 Campbell, Hugh 9–22 Campinski (osa) 242, 243 Capital (Marx) 209 Carl, Peter 93 Cartier Bresson, Henri 42 cartography 39–40, 42, 213 Caruso St John 222–3, 224, 228 Casey, Edward 14 Castoriadis, Cornelius 230 Celik, Zeynep 194 Centralverein deutscher Staatsbürger jüdischen Glaubens (Central Association of German Citizens of Jewish Faith) 171, 172–3 Centre Pompidou, Paris 132 ‘chaotic urbanism’ 26 Chaplin, Sarah 1–5 Chapman, Michael 39–48 chauvinism 46 chiasm, Merleau-Ponty’s concept 53 China 131 Choay, Françoise 168–9, 173, 176, 217 Cicero 147 ‘cinema effect’ 72 Cinéma Parisien, Montréal 207, 215–16 cinematic practice 64–5 Cities, Architecture and Society (Burdett) 26, 36 city: definition of the idea of 26; curation and mapping 39–40; as fragmentary experience 39; Hays on the 26; Koolhaas’s rejection of the European 32; Le Corbusier’s condemnation of the historical 43; Surrealist perspective 40–8; Wright on the 27–8

Index

‘city in the making’ 129–30 City of the Future, The (Popova/Vesnin) 124 Clap in Time (Beier/Lund) 137 Co-op Himmelblau 123, 125 cognitive neurosciences 54 collage 41, 44 collective memory 105–6 commemorative values 169 Comments on the Society of the Spectacle, The (Debord) 130 Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment (CABE) 136 commodification 119, 126, 197 Commodity Culture of Victorian England: Advertising and Spectacle 1851–1914; The (Richards) 129 commodity fetishism 46, 130, 209 Conroy, Gabriel 18 Consciousness Explained (Dennett) 16 consciousness, nature of 14–21 ‘consecration phase’ 169 conservation and use 181–2 Constructivists 120–6 contemporary architecture 78–88 contemporary displays 129–42 Coral Reef (Nelson) 97 Corboz, André 2 Corner Counter-Relief (Tatlin) 118 Costa Iberica (MVRDV) 32 counter-spectacle 137–40 Crimp, Douglas 133 critical spatial practice 219–30 Crystal Palace, London 129, 194 cultural identity 193–204 cultural regeneration projects 130–1 culture, Japan 179–80 curate, etymology 27 curated desires 39–48 curating: architecture on-site 51–60; and cartography 39; changing nature of 1; of cities 93–102; contemporary architecture 78–88; choosing as act of 23–37; definitions 26–7, 95–6, 167–70; multiple forms of 87–8; and neighbourhood identity 208; root meaning of 95–6; the social/architectural 167–77 curator: interpretive role of 52; as ultimate mediator 219 curatorial models: museums 158–9; unoccupied houses 108–9 curiosities 146–8 dAb collective 210–11, 217; Quartier des Spectacles proposal 211

Daddies Bighead (McCarthy) 136 Dalí, Salvador 43, 45 Damasio, Antonio 15 Davidts, W. 134, 136 de Certeau, Michel 136, 225 dead architecture: concept analysis 103–4; Eastern German cities see Eastern Germany; gestalt maintenance 110; the problem of use 109–10; reconfiguration model 111–13; and the storeroom analogy 108–9 Dead, The (Conroy) 18 Dean, Corinna 129–42 Debord, Guy 72, 124, 130, 140, 209, 211 Deleuze, Gilles 71, 93–5 deliberate commemorative value 169 democracy, Lefort’s characterization 221 demolition, housing 106 Dennett, Daniel 16 Descartes, R. 16, 93–5, 228–9, 238 design studio 34 Devillers, Christian 217 disbelief, suspension of 64, 237 Displaying the Orient (Celik) 194 distance: as discredited notion 225; and power 226; Rancière’s conception 223–4; Smithson on 228; in Stortorget restoration project 230 Dohrn, Wolf 173 domesticating devices 78–9 Dorner, Cie Willi 57–9 Double Bind (Muñoz) 138 Drancy, Paris 176 Dream Design Factory 201–2 duality 16, 93–5, 228–9, 238 Dubai 131 Dublin 9–22 Duchamp, Marcel 43 Duncan, Carol 150 duration 15 Eastern Germany 104–5; demolition programme 106; ‘mothballing’ proposals 107; performance-oriented concepts 107–8; unoccupied flats 104, 106; unoccupied houses 105 Echigo Tsumari Art Triennial: goals 179–80; impact 190; location 179; public opinion 180; ‘Scarecrow Brigade’ 190; see also abandoned house project Eco, Umberto 148, 159 ‘ecological’ theory of perception 53 ecological urbanism 212–13 education-curation, urban see urban educationcuration

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Efes Museum: comparison with Natural History Museum 148–50, 158; curatorial message 158; display strategies 150–4; images at entrance of Artemis Hall 155; layout 148–50, 155; see also Artemis Hall Eliasson, Olafur 134, 138–9 Ellmann, Richard 16 Elsaesser, Thomas 72, 73 emerging architecture 117–26 End of Capital, The (Popova/Vesnin) 123, 124 Enlightenment 147, 148, 150–2, 153 environment, Bergson on our understanding of 52–3 Ephesos, Selçuk 145; see also Efes Museum Erkmen, Ayse 183, 185–6 Ernst, Max 44–6 ESC (Gunning) 97–101 ethics 237 ethnography 226–7 Ewing, Suzanne 23–37 ‘Exhibition Architecture’ (Ursprung) 129 exhibitions: ‘Andorak’ 55–6; architectural 117–26; ‘book-on-the-wall’ approach 51; curating on-site 51–60; design dichotomy 52; Future Garden 57–9; Making a Move 56–7; mobile digital technologies’ impact 59–60; self-guided walks 51, 55–7; Serota’s curatorial alternatives 52; Turkish pavilions 193–204 experience, shift from interpretation to 226–7 Experience or Interpretation: The Dilemma of Museums of Modern Art (Serota) 52 experimentation 119–20 Expo 1992: Seville 195–9, 202 Expo 2000: Hanover 199–203 Falkaner, Edward 146, 154 Father Ted (Channel Four) 64–5 Feeling of What Happens, The (Damasio) 15 female body and Surrealism 43–8 festivals 56–7, 72, 120, 179, 190, 208, 211, 213–17 fetishism 46–7, 130, 209 Feuerstein, Günther 125 fiction: bond of socialisation 237; difficulty of transposing in an architectural context 240; function 237; the necessity of 236–8 field-based design studio 32 field trip: core ethos 24–5; the Grand Tour as 30–1; see also site visit Fillon, Jacques and Debord, Guy 124 film: as ‘creative geography’ 62; location databases see location databases; role of architecture in 63–4 film cartolina 68

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Film London 65, 68 filmic urbanism 64–5 ‘fish’ gallery, Bilbao Guggenheim 80–1 five orders 111, 112 Flash Art (magazine) 130 flash-mobbing events 138 ‘flesh of the world’ 53–4 For Dublin 12–14, 17–20 ‘form follows function’ 84, 169 ‘formless’ as creative strategy 42 Forty, Adrian 105 Foucault, Michel 69, 104, 130, 136, 138, 140, 147 Fraser, Andrea 80 Freud, Sigmund 46 Fried, Michael 119 Frisch, Max 104 Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) 54 Future Garden (exhibition) 57–9 Gabrielsson, Catharina 219–30 Galleria Vittorio Emanuele, Milan 134 gallery spaces, Tate Modern 135–6 Gallese, Vittorio 54 Gan, Aleksei 123 Ganser, Karl 107 Garden of France, The (Ernst) 44–6 Gartenlaube, Die (magazine) 171 Gehry, Frank 78, 80–2, 131; see also Bilbao Guggenheim Gehschule (Haus-Rucker-Co) 125 gentrification, cultural impact of 217 German Federal Development Programme ‘Stadtumbau Ost’ 106 Germany: Tessenow’s ‘Jewish’ projects 170–6; see also Eastern Germany Gestalt psychology 110 Ghost (Whiteread) 134 Gibson, James J. 53 Glagau, Otto 171 global dissemination 63–4 global signifiers, spectacle/museums as 130 Golden Lion, Venice Biennale 246, 248 Goldstein, Moritz 172 Gondry, Michel 73–4 Gough, Maria 120 Gough, Tim 93–102 Grand Tour: Academy associations 29; to fieldbased studio 28–33; itineraries 26; rewards offered 30 Graves, Michael 30 Great Exhibition, Crystal Palace, London 129, 193–4 ‘Great Modern Buildings’ (Guardian) 168

Index

Greenland Park projects 240–2 Grizedale Arts 188–90 Gründerzeit 104, 110 Guard House (Schinkel) 169, 170 Guasch, Anna Maria and Zulaika, Joseba 132 guided tours 78–88 guided walks 56–7 Gunning, Lucy 96–7, 99, 100 Hadid, Zaha 123 Halász, Gyula see Brassaï Hale, Jonathan 51–60 hand-held computers see PDA Harbison, Robert 31 Haus-Rucker-Co 125 Hays, Michael 26, 35 Hegarty, Francis and Stones, Andrew 12, 13, 14, 18, 19, 20 Heidegger, Martin 95, 104 Held, Richard and Hein, Alan 54 Hellström Reimer, Maria 62–74 heritage: definition 168; architecture as 167; attitudes towards 176; cultural versus architectural 170 Herzog and de Meuron 96–7, 98, 129–30, 133–7, 140–2 heterotopic spaces 130, 136–7, 140–2 Hetherington, Kevin 148 Hilberseimer, Ludwig 40 historic heritage 167–77 historic monuments: conservation of 168–9; Tessenow’s work as 173, 177 historic value 169, 176 historicism 147–9 historiographic methodology 104 Hollein, Hans 125 Höller, Carsten 130, 139 Holzer, Jenny 80 Horwitz, Maximilian 172 House (Whiteread) 134 houses: abandoned 179–91; unoccupied 103–16 Hugo, Victor 168 ‘humanist’ 197–9 Huneck, Kastern 234 Hunt, Tristram 176 Husserl, Edmund 52 Hyde 146 ‘ideal’ 197–9 Image of the City, The (Lynch) 19 ‘imageability’ 19 imagination, role of 237–8 Important Cultural Property designations, Japan 182

India 131 Industrial Revolution 40 inhabitation, interplay with spatial realm 93–102 installations: The Accumulator 235; Anwohnerpark 240, 242; architectural versus art 117–20; Campinski 242, 243; commodification 119, 126; crossdisciplinary cooperation 125; defining characteristics of art 118–19; Intact 238, 239; Kunsthülle 240, 241; ‘laboratory work’ 120–1; The Magnanimous Cuckold 121–3; Matt’s Gallery 97, 98, 99, 100; osa’s 234, 235, 238, 240; for outdoor spectacles 123–4; PLEASE DO NOT TOUCH 247, 248; Point of View 234, 235; recycled-toy furniture 246; Smithson on 219–20; Tate Modern 137–8; theatre 120–3; viewer participation 124–5, 139 Institute for Hospital Pharmaceuticals, Basel (Herzog and de Meuron) 98 Institute for Rhythmic Education, Hellerau (Tessenow) 175 institutional framework, Tate Modern 131–2 Intact (osa) 238, 239 intermediality 64–5 ‘international recognized exhibitions’ 194 International Style, The (Hitchcock and Johnson) 51 Invention of the Historic Monument, The (Choay) 168 Invisible Theatre 138 Islamic cultures 194–5, 202–4 Israelitische Erziehungsanstalt (Israelite Educational Institute) 172 Izenour, Steve 26, 33, 35 Izvestiya pavilion (Niva/Gladkov/Kester) 122 Jacobs, Jane 217 Japan: abandoned houses in 181; cultural effects of economic development 180; vernacular houses 182 Jarzombek, Mark 217 ‘jewel of democracy, A’ (Hunt) 176 ‘Jewish’ projects, Germany 170–6 Jones, Inigo 121 Jormakka, Kari 109–10 Joyce, James: boast about Dublin 9; literary technique 16; memorials 9; and memory 14–15; statue 9; see also Ulysses Kalmar, Sweden: main square see Stortorget Kamph, Stefan 123 Karl Friedrich Schinkel’s Guard House, Berlin 169 Kerr, Alex 180

253

Index

Kiesler, Frederick 43 Kitagawa, Fram 179, 183, 190 Kochenhofsiedlung 168; Stuttgart 168 Kollwitz, Käthe 169 Koolhaas, Rem 26, 32, 84–6, 133, 137 Kossak, Florian 117–26, 247 Krauss, Rosalind 41–2, 46, 118–19, 131, 222 Kuleshov, Lev 62 Kumar, Shiv 15 Kunsthülle (osa) 240, 241 Kunstwart, Der (journal) 171 Kwon, Miwon 226 Kyrieleis, Helmut 154 laboratory exhibitions 117 Lagos 23, 26, 36 ‘landscapization’ 63–4 Laporte, Luc 216 Las Vegas 23, 26, 32–5, 37 LCA (British Landscape Character Assessment) 69–70 Le Corbusier 30–1, 40, 43, 48, 168 Learning from Las Vegas: The Forgotten Symbolism of Architectural Form (Venturi/Scott Brown/Izenour) 32, 33–6 Leeds International Swimming Pool 235 Lefort, Claude 221 Libeskind, Daniel 31 libraries, guided tours 78–88 Little Frank and His Carp (Fraser) 80 liturgy 101 living architecture 103–4 locality, outreaching notion of 63–4 Locamundo 68 location databases: Danish–Swedish Öresund region see OFC: and the ‘de-auratization’ of architecture 72; entrepreneurship 71; global 68; London 68; Malta 68; Rotterdam 68 Lodder, Christina 120 Löfdahl, Eva 222–3, 224, 228–9 ‘logic of the monument’ 227 London, England: film shoots 66 Loos, Adolf 43 Los Angeles 23, 26, 32–3 Los Angeles: Architecture of Four Ecologies (Banham) 32 Louisiana, Mumlebaek 133 Lynch, Kevin 19 Lynn, Greg 246 Maar, Dora 44 McCarthy, Paul 136 Macdonald, Marie-Paule 207–17 Magnanimous Cuckold, The (prod. Meyerhol’d) 121–3

254

Magritte, René 45 mainstream culture, Japan 180, 181 Making a Move (sculpture) 56–7 Malraux, André 148 Maman (Bourgeois) 138 Mamiya, Yosuke 181 Man Ray 41, 43–4, 45 Man Who Was Thursday, The (Chesterton) 124 Mancke, Carol 179–91 Mankell, Henning 65 mapping: city, curation and 39–40; heritageoriented landscape 73; methods 34–5; traditional cartographic concept 39 maps: concerns of early urban 39–40; medieval 39 marginal spaces 217 Marot, Sebastien 2, 243, 245 Marr, Wilhelm 171 Marsyus (Kapoor) 139 Marx/Marxism 46, 130, 209 mashrabiya 202–3 Master’s Bedroom, The (Ernst) 46 materialism 93–5 Mathesis, Science and Philosophy (Deleuze) 94 Matt’s Gallery, East London: artists’ response 97; curatorial strategy 93, 96; Helen Robertson’s installation 97, 98; Lucy Gunning’s installation 99, 100 Matta, Roberto 43, 112–13, 140 Matta-Clark, Gordon 112–13 Matter and Memory (Bergson) 52–3 Mayakovskii, Vladimir 120 media-tourism 65 mediatization 62–74, 236 Medici Chapel, Florence (Michelangelo) 99 Meierkhol’d, Vsevolod 121–2 memorial value 176–7 memory: collective 105–6; in Dublin and Ulysses 9–22; as imagination’s complement 237, 242 memory theatre 15, 147 Merimée, Prosper 168 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 53, 238, 244 Merz-Bau (Schwitters) 118 metaphor: literal translation 240; Ricoeur’s definition 237–8 Michael Graves: Images of a Grand Tour (Ambroziak) 30 Michelangelo 99 Miller, Lee 44–5 Miltner, Franz 145, 151 ‘minka’ houses 182 Minor, Vernon Hyde 146, 148 ‘mirror-neuron’ system 54–5 Mitchell, Timothy 193

Index

mobile digital technologies 55–60 ‘modern’ 197–9, 200–1 Modern Movement 27–8, 33, 40, 42–3, 47–8, 247 modern museum galleries 148–54 Moderne Denkmalkultus, Der (Modern Cult of Monuments, The) (Riegl) 169 modernity, relevance of myth in 236–8 Modulor (Le Corbusier) 48 MOMA 51, 132–3, 137 Montréal: Cinéma Parisien 207; festivals 214, 215; Le Nouveau Club Soda 216; Le Spectrum 207, 216, 217; Theatre District see Quartier des Spectacles Monument to Sade (Man Ray) 44, 45 Morgan, Catherine 154 Morgan, Jessica 130, 140 Morris, William 168 ‘mothballing’, housing 107 ‘Multiple Drafts’ model of consciousness 16–17 Mumford, Lewis 121 Muñoz, Juan 138 Murono community project 186–7 Muschamp, Herbert 133 museum architecture 131, 137, 158 ‘museum without walls’ 148, 150, 154, 158 museums: Artemis Hall 148–54; Barbara Hepworth Museum, St Ives, Cornwall 52; Bilbao Guggenheim see Bilbao Guggenheim; as global signifiers 130; guided tours 78–88; James Joyce 9; Sir John Soane 52; Nottingham Castle 56 Muss, Ulrike 153 myth, continuing relevance of 236–8 Nadja (Breton) 40–2 National Gallery, London 167 National Portrait Gallery, London 167 Natural History Museum, London 148–50, 158 Nelson, Mike 96–7 Neue Wache (Schinkel) 169, 170 Neues Bauen movement 169, 173 new architectural order 111–13 New York World’s Fair 1939 195–6, 200 newness value 169 Nicholson, Robert 10, 12, 14–15 Nihon University College of Art, Japan 187–8 NottDance06 festival 57–9 Nottingham Castle Museum and Art Gallery 56–7 Le Nouveau Club Soda, Montréal 216 OBMOKU 21 exhibition (Moscow) 122 OFC (Öresund Film Commission) database:

overview 62–3; versus assessment protocols 70; assignment 66; entrepreneurship 71; regional ‘branding’ potential 70–1; screenshot 66, 67; typologizing scheme 69 Ohtani, Shunichi 186–7 Olympic site, osa/Blueprint installation 234–5 Onal, Maruf 198 opera aperta 148 Oppenheim, Meret 44 Öresund Film Commission (OFC) 62–3, 65–71 Oriental other 194–5, 202–4 osa: design methods 234; humour 240; installations 234, 235, 238, 240; modus operandi 235; origination 233; principals 234; project focus 238 Ostwald, Michael 39–48 Oswalt, Philipp 108 Ottoman Empire, world exposition representations 194–6, 198, 203 Özeren, Öcal 146, 156 palimpsest 41 Palladio, Andrea 121, 123 Paris Peasant (Aragon) 40 Paris: Centre Pompidou 132; cultural regeneration projects 130–1; Drancy 176; Le Corbusier’s proposed annihilation of 43; Surrealist experience 40–8; world expositions 194 Partenariat du Quartier des Spectacles, Montréal 210, 214 Parvillée, Léon 194 PDAs (hand-held computers), use in exhibitions 51, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60 Peponis, John and Hendin, Jenny 148–50 perception: role of body in 52–5 Pérez-Gómez, Alberto 25, 28, 237, 244 performance orientation, housing 107–8 peripheral cities 131 Peruzzi, Angelo 121 perversion 94–5 Petrescu, Doina 227 phenomenology 52–5 photography 39–48 Piazza del Popolo, Rome 121 ‘Pilgrim’s Progress: On the latter day Grand Tour’ (Harbison) 31 Plan Voisin (Le Corbusier) 43 PLEASE DO NOT TOUCH, installation 247, 248 Point of View (osa/Blueprint) 234, 235 ‘political’ art 223 Popova, Lyubov 121–4 postmodernism 247 present-day values 169

255

Index

Prix de Rome 30 problem setting 32, 37 ‘progressive’ 197–9 Project on the City (Koolhaas) 32 project organizers, role of 221–2 Projection of Life/From here and there (Ohtani/Nakamura) 185, 186–7 Proust, Marcel 15 ‘psychological shrinkage’ 106 public space: contradictions of 223; ‘death’ of 220–1; definition of 221, 233; difficulties of working with 223; expanding 179–91; formal versus informal 208; history of 120–6; in Japanese installations 185, 188; Lefort’s metaphor 221; reinterpretation of 238–43; revitalizing 219; rural Japan 180; Turbine Hall as new paradigm of 129, 134, 138, 140 Qatar 131 Quartier des Spectacles, Montréal: branding strategy 210, 214; building proposals 213–14; character and location 210; dAb collective proposal 211; ecologically sensitive approach 212–13; expanding through collaborative action 179–91; festival sites 213–17; inhabitants 210, 212; losses 215–16; luminous marquee proposal 216; map 211; Olympia 216; political independence movements 210; social programmes 212; soundscape awareness 213 Radley, Alan 158 Rancière, Jacques 223–4 ‘real before the real’ 120 Reformbewegung (Reform movement) 171, 172 Regola delli cinque ordini d’architettura (Vignola) 112 Regole generali di architettura (Serlio) 112 Rendell, Jane 219 Representation of the Past, The (Walsh) 151 Rickard, John 15 Ricoeur, Paul 237 Riegl, Alois 168–9 Rijksmuseum Kröller-Mueller, Otterlo 133 ritual 150, 155, 236 Robertson, Helen 96 Rodchenko, Aleksandr 122 Rodenbach, Georges 103 Roller, Lynn E. 154 Rome 23, 26, 30–1, 33–5, 121, 243; student visit 30 Rotterdam Film Fund 65 rural culture, Japan 179–80

256

Ruscha, Ed 35 Ruskin, John 168 Russian Constructivists 120–2, 125 St Mary’s Axe (Foster) 136 St Mary’s church, Putney 176 Salcedo, Doris 140 Saltz, Jerry 130 ‘salvage yard’ approach 51 Sassen, Saskia 63, 209–10 SAVE (Danish Survey of Architectural Values in the Environment) 69–70 scale, art’s preoccupation with 136–7 Scamozzi, Vincenzo 121 ‘Scarecrow Brigade’ 190 Schafer, R. Murray 213 Scherrer, Peter 153 Schinkel, Karl Friedrich 169, 170 Schmitthenner, Paul 169 Schnädelbach, Holger 51–60 Schön, Donald 25, 32 Schwitters, Kurt 118 Scott Brown, Denise 26, 31–5 Seattle Central Library: architecture tour 84–5; audio tour 83–5, 86; versus Bilbao Guggenheim 82, 84–8; docent-led tour 83; frequently asked questions 85; general tour 83–5; tour options 83–4; virtual tour 83–7; on YouTube 87 Segrest, Robert 33, 35 self-guided tours 83–8 self-guided walks 51, 55–9 Seligmann, Ari 78–88 semiotics 146–8 Semper, Gottfried 194 Seneca, Lucius Annaeus 95 Sennett, Richard 2, 133, 136 Serlio, Sebastiano 111–12, 121 Serota, Nicholas 52, 131–2, 134–6 Serra, Richard 80 Servandoni, Giovanni Niccolò 121 Seven Samurai (Grizedale Arts) 188–90 Shedding House (Nihon University College of Art sculpture course/Mancke) 187, 188, 190 Shibboleth (Salcedo) 140 Shoreditch station, London 238–40 Sieg des Judentums über das Germanentum, Der (Victory of Judaism over Germany, The) (Marr) 171 signature architecture 131–4 Simon Foundation, Peine, Germany 170–6 Simon, Moritz 172–3 Simpsons Movie, The (Silverman) 64 single consciousness 17–18 site-specificity 118, 219

Index

site visit field trip: definition 32; distinctions 24–5; history of the international 28; modes of operation 26 Situationists 107–8, 124, 209, 211 Slough, England 65 Smithson, Peter 120 Smithson, Robert 219–20, 228 Snake (Serra) 80 Sneinton Market site, Nottingham 57–9 social history: defining 167–77; status of Tessenow’s ‘Jewish’ projects 170–6 socially sustainable communities 212 Society of the Spectacle, The (Debord) 130, 209 Soft Space (Co-op Himmelblau) 125 Sourvinou-Inwood, Christiane 153 spatial representation/interpretation 62–74, 219–30 spatiality 118 spectacular spaces: accumulation of 72; Andorak project 55–6; contemporary art displays 119–30, 137–40 Spectrum, Le, Montréal 207, 216, 217 ‘sportification’ 107–8 Stadtumbau Ost (German Federal Development Programme) 106 Stalker collective 36 Stara, Alexandra 1–5, 233–44 Stenberg, Vladimir 122 stereotypization 68 Stonehenge 148, 158 Stones, Andrew 12 storeroom analogy 108–9 Stortorget: chosen scheme 222; completion and impact of restoration 229–30; detailed drawing 225; emptiness of 221; as a ‘field of stones’ 223, 224; by night 229; project influences and criticisms 228 subversive architecture 233–44 Sullivan, Louis 169 Surrealist movement: architectural practice and 43; dislike of modern architecture 42; gender balance 44; primary literary texts 40–3 Surrealist photography: Bataille’s perspective 42; female representation 43–8; L’Amour Fou exhibition 42; relationship with text 48; store-front windows in 46–7 Survey of Architectural Values in the Environment (SAVE), Denmark 69–70 ‘suspension of disbelief’ 64, 237 Swedish National Public Art Council 221–2 System of Objects, The (Baudrillard) 108 Tabanlioglu, Murat 200 Tabard, Maurice 45, 46 Tafuri, Manfredo 248

Taniguchi, Yoshio 133 Tate Modern: branding 209; and cultural regeneration 130–1; establishment 131–2; flash-mobbing events 138; hierarchy of the space 134; signature architecture 132–4; sponsorship 139–40; Turbine Hall 118, 129–31, 133–42; Unilever Series 129, 136–40 Tate Modern: The First Five Years (Gayford) 136 Tatlin, Vladimir 118, 122 Teachers’ Training College, Peine (Tessenow) 173, 174, 177 Teatro Olimpico, Vicenza (Palladio/Scamozzi) 121, 123 temporality 119–25 temporary event time 138 Tessenow, Heinrich 168–9, 170, 173, 174, 175, 176, 177 Test Site (Höller) 130, 139–40 text and the city 9–22 theatre, Constructivist use 121–2 Theatre District, Montréal see Quartier des Spectacles theatre installations 120–6 theatrum mundi 147, 149, 152–3 Tiatro Olimpico, Venice 121, 123 Till, Jeremy 246–8 Tokyo 131 Toshinobu, Yasunaga 180 ‘touchability’ 80 tourism: architectural 32, 36; critique of the relationship between architecture and 31; cultural impact of 217; as form of curation 78; and location databases 68 Trading Station Alpha (Nelson) 97 ‘traditional’ 200–1 travel, relevance to architects 31; to learn 25 Tribute to the Marquis de Sade (Man Ray) 44 Truempler, Bernd 234 Turbine Hall, Tate Modern 118, 129–31, 133–42 Turkish national pavilions: Hanover Expo 199, 201, 202–3; New York World’s Fair 195, 200–1; Seville Expo 195–9, 203 typologies 69–71 Tzara, Tristan 43 Ubac, Raoul 41, 46 Ulysses (Joyce): commemoration projects see Ulysses commemorations: final words 9; Joyce’s famous boast about 9 Ulysses commemorations: Bloom plaques 10–12, 17; Molly’s thoughts in neon 12–14, 17–21

257

Index

Unilever Series 129, 136–40 United States 26, 30, 64 Universal Exposition, Paris 194 University of Nottingham 55–6 unoccupied houses 103–16 urban culture, Japan 179–80 urban design strategy, branding as 209–11 urban education-curation: contributions 37; examples of 26–7; the Grand Tour 23, 26, 28–32, 36; in Pérez-Gómez 28; conclusions about 36–7 urban fictions 233–44 urban growth 107 urban planning: and branding 210–11; as practices in transformation 62 urban redevelopment, Montréal 208 urban regeneration, Bilbao 82 urban shock effect 64 urban shrinkage 105 urban sprawl 33–6, 220 urban transformation: and critical spatial practice 219–30; visual 39–48 urbanism: acoustic 213–14; alternative 233; current ideological concept 107; ecological 212–13; filmic 64–5; overview 2 Ursprung, Philip 129, 134 use and conservation 181–2 use problem, housing 109–10 use value 169, 176 Vanli, Sevki 197–8 Venice Biennale: British Pavilion installation 247; Cities, Architecture and Society exhibition 26, 36; Golden Lion 2008 winner 246 Venturi Scott Brown Izenour model 33, 35 Venturi, Robert 26, 33, 35 Verein deutscher Studenten (Union of German Students) 171 Verein zur Verbreitung der Handwerke unter den Juden (Association for the Spread of Trades amongst the Jews) 172 Vesnin, Aleksander 123–4

258

‘video follow’ approach 58–9 viewer engagement, exhibitions 119 Vignola, Giacomo Barozzi da 112 Vignola’s universal modulus 111 Viollet-le-Duc, Eugène 168 virtuality 93–5 Visible and the Invisible, The (Merleau-sPonty) 53 Vitruvius 104, 109, 112 Voyage d’Orient (Le Corbusier) 30 Waite, Richard 235 Walker, Ian 42 Wallander (Mankell) 65 Walsh, Kevin 151 War of Dreams, The (Augé) 236 Weather Project, The (Eliasson) 138–9 Weissenhofsiedlung, Stuttgart 168 What Happened! (Erkmen) 183, 184, 185 Whiteread, Rachel 134 Wiemar Republic 169 Willi Dorner, Cie 57–8 Williams, William Carlos 243 windows, in Surrealism 44–5, 46–7 Wolff-Olins 209 World Cinema Festival, Montréal 215 world expositions: BIE categories 193–4; Hanover 195; London 194; New York 195; Paris 194; representations of Islamic cultures 194; Seville 195; Turkish national pavilions see Turkish national pavilions world order, changes in 194 World Trade Center, New York 136, 225–6 Wright, Frank Lloyd 27 Young, Sebnem Yücel 193–204 YouTube, Bilbao Guggenheim/Seattle Library 87 Ystad, Sweden 65 Zaug, Rèmy 135 Zionistische Vereinigung für Deutschland (Zionist Union for Germany) 171