be strategic. be-e strategic. s-t-r-a-t-e-g-i-and-c.

…interventions in places become self-constitutive acts. The state intervenes to control space, to dictate the meaning of urbanity, to shape the evolution of the public sphere, and to suppress contending ideologies. It does so by strategically placing squares, parks, statues and monuments, cultural centers, and public buildings; by monitoring architectural styles; by dictating urban design and development agendas.[1]

One quote that didn't make it into my paper for Schoeberlein's Culture Wars, but which reminds me at this juncture of the usefulness of the concrete. Although Çinar is operating more at the level of urban design here, what we do as architects is generally, I think, a similar act of strategic spatial arrangement, only deployed at a different scale. I've been wading somewhat self-indulgently (and unapologetically) in cultural theory and all that talk doesn't necessarily inspire doing or making...which is why it's safe and indulgent and warm and fuzzy. Okay, time to get strategic and specific.

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[1] Alev Çinar. Modernity, Islam, and Secularism in Turkey: Bodies, Places and Time. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005: 101.

Constructing the Ineffable

I left New Haven this weekend thinking that the YSOA’s conference on sacred space (Constructing the Ineffable: Contemporary Sacred Architecture) had little relevance to my thesis. I didn’t expect it to be especially revelatory, but I had hoped that Friday’s topic, Memory and Identity, would at least give me something to think about. Now, a few days out, I’m thinking that maybe it did give me something to consider.

The weekend’s proceedings lingered over the question of what makes space sacred, with words such as “transcendent,” “beautiful,” “aesthetic,” and “symbolic” surfacing repeatedly. While I am not explicitly interested in spaces of transcendence, I am concerned with spaces that transport or translate—that re-frame the view or re-position the viewer. Everyone at the conference seemed to agree that sacred space was somehow special, apart from daily life, and that its meaning was personal yet also communal, deriving its significance in part through historical narrative. I suspect that these same terms apply to the kind of space in which I am interested—space that shifts and re-frames. At the very least, both types of space are trying to do something, to provoke an altered state, rather than merely accommodating or sheltering.

I’ve been preoccupied with the construction of identity and the way such identity is perceived. At the conference, Miroslav Volf spoke of sacred memory that shapes identity to define sacred communities, claiming that architecture becomes sacred only when it is a site of remembrance, of sacred memory. He also spoke of the manifestation of the sacred as unpredictable and experiential—its meaning found through experience and presumably thus variable based upon individual subjectivity. Interestingly, Volf framed [sacred] memory as concerned with the future (“remembering the future”) insofar as memory shapes our hopes (for the future) and hope influences memory. Sacred space is thus a space not only of experience—of the past made present—but also a horizon—the present projected to the future. Sacred memory defines horizons of expectation: Who we are; Where we belong; What we expect; and What or Whom we ultimately trust.

These four parameters, which Volf identifies as abstractions of the marks of sacred memory, are certainly connected to memory and identity. Whether or not they actually characterize the sacred doesn’t really matter to me, but I do feel the need for some other term to stand in for sacred (a term which I haven’t yet found, or at least haven’t claimed). I’m interested in space that—through its relationship to memory, to self-consciousness, to the positioning of self—looks toward Volf’s “horizons of expectation” without being explicitly sacred space itself.

Given that the manifestation of [sacred] space is unpredictable and experientially based, and that it occurs through inherently personal processes and with probably a high degree of specificity, how can it be…designed? Or, as Mark Taylor put it: if the sacred is ineffable, if it cannot be thought, then how can it be figured? His response was to suggest that perhaps it may be figured through de-figuring. I don’t know what this means, but it sounds snappy. Also snappy was his assertion that violence and the sacred are inseparable, that both provoke terror. He asked what it would mean to memorialize, to imagine, to figure absolute terror, to figure the unfigurable.

Peter Eisenman suggested one possible approach in presenting his Berlin Holocaust Memorial, noting that what is important is the memorial’s silence, its denial of image. And Taylor suggested that (rather than dwelling on the absence of sacred representation) architecture should embody the failure of representation through its gaps and fissures—through the “unavoidable imbrication of the rational and the irrational.”

Gaps and disjuncture; silence; layering; re-positioning experience; shifting perception by moving through space—these are the thoughts that I’ve come away with. Hopefully not so ineffable after all.

Starting to Think About Cultural Landscapes

When we think of the physical landscape, it’s easy to conceive of it as the interplay of contrasting and complementary forms, textures, materials, and so on. It is also fairly straightforward to think of landscape as layered: we have been conditioned to think of the spatial layering of the landscape in terms of fore-, middle- and background; we are aware of the historical layering of landscape as it is uncovered through archeological investigation; and landscape is also, of course, the physical manifestation of geological layering.

Left: Sanford Robinson Gifford, A Gorge in the Mountains (Kauterskill Clove), 1862; Right: Geological Map of Pennsylvania, 1960

Appending the term “landscape” to a description of culture implies that the cultural is not unitary, that culture never exists as a discrete, objectifiable, or constant expression but rather results from the layering and overlapping of different elements. Even a relatively specific cultural subset could not be equally and uniformly experienced by all those who construct it. Take, for example, Pennsylvania Dutch as a cultural mode identifiable by characteristic sartorial, culinary, ideological, linguistic, and practical markers. Like any cultural mode, it is the product of those who identify themselves according to its terms and who conversely establish the parameters by which it is defined as a cultural mode. But while there are many similarities amongst those who participate in the construction of Pennsylvania Dutch culture, not all participate in cultural production to the same degree, nor do they share constant, uniform attributes of and attitudes toward said culture. They could be described as polythetically overlapping—as occupying distinctive positions but with enough overlap to identify commonly as a group. Enlarging the frame of cultural reference from the specific to the broad brings us to the concept of American culture. If the fairly specific Pennsylvania Dutch cultural mode was itself marked by a layering and overlapping of distinct positions, then the broader mode of American culture must be necessarily more densely layered and divergently experienced.

Returning to the idea of physical landscape as layered assemblage, I would suggest that the way in which one perceives a landscape reflects more upon the position of the viewer than the inherent properties or composition of the landscape itself. Experienced from different perspectives, the landscape resolves into a multiplicity of distinct views. One achieves a varied experience of landscape primarily by moving through it—that is, by engaging it both spatially and temporally. It seems clear that the perception of a cultural landscape is also entirely dependent upon the position from which it is viewed, but while most individuals have the mobility to move through the physical landscape, our relationship to cultural landscapes is basically limited by our very subjectivity, by the degree to which we are embedded in our own constructed identities.

This raises several questions:

How does one become aware of the layering of the cultural landscape? Can one view a cultural landscape from any perspective other than that of individual, embedded subjectivity? And…what role can architecture play in revealing the multiple experiences of cultural landscape?

culture/religion/place

Excerpts from The Guardian, 10.11.2007

In Italy the mayors of Bologna and Genoa last month cancelled or delayed planning permission for mosques after a vociferous campaign by the far-right Northern League, one of whose leaders, Roberto Calderoli, threatened to stage a "day of pork" to offend Muslims and to take pigs to "defile" the site of the proposed mosque in Bologna.

This opposition is on a collision course with an Islam that is now the fastest-growing religion in Europe and which is clamouring for its places of worship to be given what it sees as a rightful and visible place in west European societies.

"The whole idea of having these huge mosques is about being part of Europe while having your religion," says Thijl Sunier, a Dutch anthropologist. "You have young Muslims showing their confidence, stating we are part of this society and we want our share. And you have growing anxiety among many native Europeans."

"We've got nothing against prayer rooms or mosques for the Muslims," he insists. "But a minaret is different. It's got nothing to do with religion. It's a symbol of political power."

Built form is a powerful representation of identity. In the Swiss village of Wangen, citizens are mobilizing against a Muslim meeting house that wants to erect a minaret. The meeting house (described as a nondescript house with a prayer room in the basement) is not a problem in and of itself. It’s (supposedly) fine with the mosque’s ethnically/historically Swiss neighbors for Muslims to meet and pray in their neighborhood. But they will not tolerate the 6-meter high minaret that has been approved…because it is un-Swiss. It’s a problem of representation. The majority of the village residents want their hometown to represent them and their identities which, having defined (or been defined by) the character of the village throughout living memory, they take to be quintessentially Swiss. They want no visible symbols of Islam in their hometown—or perhaps even their country—because Islam is not Swiss.

The article describes protestors’ (and legislators’) efforts to “keep [their] country culturally Christian.” Notable here is that keeping Switzerland Christian is not what matters so much as keeping it culturally Christian, which probably has less to do with religion than lifestyle. Again, it’s a problem of representation: people may believe whatever they wish to believe, but they need to blend into the perceived cultural landscape (which is in many ways a matter of visually blending in). Also of note is the implied claim to Switzerland as our country, not theirs. Muslims are the largest religious minority in Swizterland, but it is implied that they are still guests; they don’t belong there, and Switzerland is not (and never will be) their country.

Individual identity is closely linked to place. If a Swiss village no longer looks “Swiss” because its skyline is punctuated by a minaret, then the city’s historically Swiss residents may perceive the city as an inaccurate reflection of their personal identities, and when the city no longer reflects the individual, the individual looses some of his or her sense of place in the world. Thus, the built environment becomes a staging ground for deciding who belongs and who doesn’t.

can there be a productive ambivalence?

Bernard Khoury’s early work (1998-2002) feels antagonistic yet it is largely ambivalent. Khoury is obsessed with the willful amnesia of elite post-war Beirut, and his buildings are redolent with reminders of the conflicted past. But despite being hung up on the negation of social memory, he doesn’t really want to do anything other than remind people that memory is still present.

B018 Beirut, Lebanon

His formal language speaks sharply of violence and power in B018, a subterranean club on the site of the French quarantine (which could easily be mistaken for an underground bunker or missile silo) and decay in Centrale, a chichi restaurant near the demarcation line between east and west Beirut (the crumbling historical façade of which he encases in steel mesh), and yet he does not admonish the socialites who frequent these places for having forgotten their city’s recent troubled past. His buildings don’t have a didactic imperative, they simply state what he sees as blunt realities: this is a site of former violence, this is the product of decay, and you are seeking pleasure in this place.

What, then, do these projects actually produce? Given their popularity as absurdly decadent social venues for the well-heeled of Beirut, it would seem that these buildings do not make their inhabitants uncomfortable. Do they even cause people to pause and reflect? And are they any more or less successful if they do? Khoury’s projects are mirrors on the current social climate in Beirut—they reflect an unapologetic culture of consumption while referencing the political and social backdrop against which pleasure now occurs. As Khoury notes, his projects “are not moralistic projects; they are not about what is good or what is bad. They are about the harshness and sometimes the beauty of those realities.” Khoury’s architecture, as I have already stated, feels very antagonistic to me (this is why I like it). And yet it does not antagonize. Is that good or bad? I’m leaning toward the latter.

In a recent interview in Metropolis (Jul/Aug 07), Khoury says of his work:
"My projects are not manifestos. They take a very specific situation and try to dig into that situation, push and reinterpret it, and flip around these realities in the most pertinent way. But I am not being cynical here, because I think each of these projects has a dose of pleasure in them and that pleasure is extremely important to me."



10/5: After talking with T. Hyde this morning, I think my earlier statement requires an acknowledgment that ambivalence is, at the very least, an active stance in Khoury's case. I took Khoury's lack of commentary as, perhaps, a lack of theorization. One of the few questions he explicitly asks regarding/through his architecture is 'what does it mean to rebuild?.' It may be that in the face of on-going strife in Beirut, this question can't be answered. Khoury's ambivalent response is an active deferral that maintains the possibility of change. TH pointed out that the program--the bar--is the very image of deferral, of biding one's time, glass of champagne in hand...