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"Hornstrumpet! We shall not have succeeded in demolishing
everything unless we demolish the ruins as well. But the only
way I can see of doing that is to use them to put up a lot of
fine, well-designed buildings." - Père Ubu (1)
The city, that most significant repository of identity, often
finds its fate decided by real-life versions of Alfred Jarry’s
mischievous despot, by politicians and planners. While destruction
in the name of regeneration marks every city every day, nowhere
is the issue of identity and memory in urbanism as critical as
in post-war reconstruction. From Warsaw to Beirut, to Sarajevo
and back to a projected Baghdad, recent history is full of Père
Ubus leaving their marks on the tattered fabric of the city. With
various degrees of intention, good and bad (2),
attempts at post-war recovery have produced irreversible breaks
in the continuity of urban identity as it is manifested in the
notion of memory as built form, complex and problematic in the
case of cities.
In Hebrew, as in Arabic, “man” (zakar or
zekher) and “memory” (zaakira) share
the same root. Beyond the immediate temporal (or historical) dimension
of the concept, the Arabic language also uses zaakira
to signify the navel: the central point (a spatial dimension),
but also the tip of the umbilical cord that connects mother and
child (a social dimension). If man is memory, then memory is an
absolute necessity in his continuous connection with himself,
his life and his social, spatial, and temporal dimensions (3).
In highly charged post-war contexts, the significance of this
link between man and urban setting through memory is at its zenith,
ripe for recovery but prey to propaganda. Faced with the realities
of politics and economics, the therapeutic role of urbanism is
often misused. Presented with the physical, political, and economical
realities of such contexts, decision makers often opt for the
easy erasure of the traces of conflict, while designers often
opt for a fetishization of the same traces.
Following on from work in Beirut and Sarajevo we propose a strategy
for damaged urbanism that both retains the characteristics of
charged sites and transforms the significance of those characteristics
- walking a fine line between amnesia and trauma. We suggest a
neutral recognition of certain artifacts, and equally recognize
qualities that make such sites unique in their social, spatial,
and historical dimensions.
Even in places with as difficult a recent history as Bosnia,
memory, as embodied in urban form, should not be eradicated. This
would induce a form of civic amnesia that the eviscerated central
district of Beirut most clearly evokes. There the demolition of
most structures in the downtown and the more extreme erasure of
the street pattern has produced a void that will now be filled
by the forms of speculation and invented tradition. The radical
erasure and reformation of war-damaged cities in Europe, east
and west, after 1945 is another negative example of amnesia as
urban strategy. In psychotherapeutic terms this is the equivalent
of shock-therapy, the erasure of unbearable memory, allowing the
recreation of personality in a more docile mode. In urban terms
it subdues cultural flux permitting an intensification of the
marketplace and a redefinition of cultural values.
On the other hand, the maintenance of traumatic urban form, the
celebration of war damage as in the projects of Lebbeus Woods
for various devastated sites including Sarajevo, represents another
extreme. Here the Pastoralism of War (4) becomes
voyeuristic and painful memory is institutionalized, encouraging
a numb indifference that is also extremely vulnerable to the worst
sorts of development. The "Meta-Institute" visit to
and subsequent projections for Havana resonate with similar contradictions.
This group, consisting of Woods and fellow neo-expressionists,
initiated a process of cultural colonization that I imagine neo-avant-gardists
around the globe will be continuing. Visiting Cuba would ratify
their own aesthetic formats and self-proclaimed radicalism. In
fact the ACSA (Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture
- the consortium of American schools) International Conference
was held in Havana last year. Possibly the advantages for this
struggling nation, beyond the revenue derived from such visit,
is the publicity, however exploitive, derived from their chest-pounding.
While the same issues somewhat taint all endeavors in war-damaged
areas, their value is that they can attract patronage. The sympathy
directed toward these environments that the ex-Cold-War is producing
wholesale, means funding for research and strategies for action
in other quarters. Less overtly imagistic projections than Woods'
may be laboratory experiments for damaged urbanism world-wide.
Dilapidation and fragmentation are global problems for cities
of the ex-second and third worlds and ironically those of the
United States as well. Generously funded work in battle-scarred
cities can then produce proposals with implications for other
tattered cities like Havana, Lima, Lagos or Detroit, for whom
funding and compassion are scarce.
The traumatic retention of the forms and damage of war, while
possibly picturesque in a romance-of-the-ruin way, can be entertaining
only for those who have not lived through the suffering and loss
embodied in those ruins. That is one reason most such projects
remain theoretical, while the other extreme – the amnesiac
destruction of the ruins becomes the norm. If, outside of historical
collages like Rome, removing ruins is inevitable, what is necessary
to keep at least a memory of their removal itself?
In one sense, cities already answer this question. For the habitual
forms of urban development, the three-dimensional armature produced
by convention and ordinance in which buildings are shaped, has
a lot more to do with the retention of cultural value than objects
themselves. Thus such projects as the eradication of the ancient
borgo to expose the fragments of the Roman Forum and create a
boulevard for Fascist display have produced a culture of urban
aphasia. More radical still, is the erasure of downtown Beirut
and the reconfiguration of the street pattern. This loss of civic
organization, of plan and volume, is even more extreme than the
obliteration of the two thousand buildings that accompanied it.
We have wandered this late-capitalist ruin with Beirutis of the
pre-war generation who invariably cannot find the cardinal spaces
of their youth. "No....the Place de Martyrs was over here,"
"No it started here." or "Was this Bab Idriss?";
"I used to meet my father for lunch here, no there."
Interestingly, many of the buildings around these historic spaces
still stand but without the urban morphologies, they become like
isolated words floating on a page.
There are at least three types of memory that built form embodies,
and that risk being lost in the process:
1 the subjective memory related to meaning, and directly linked
to each individual’s sense of personal and group identity
(zaakira - memories);
2 the collective memory of preceding civilizations or even close
ancestors (zaakira – umbilical cord);
3 the recorded memory of the knowledge and worldview of those
who built and lived the place (zaakira – navel
of the world).
The existence of these sorts of memory in urban form is nebulous.
Identity, one of the most abused terms in modern discourse of
any sort, finds itself blurring with memory. Current attempts
to locate identity in architectural form have turned out to be
inadequate at best and crassly commercial more typically. Real
estate is well served by the production of identity and the exploitation
of memory. The erasure of history through the annihilation of
the urban fabric in which it embedded offers a chance to rewrite
that history. Regionalism and nationalism are different cuts of
the same ideological suit of which identity is also a variation.
“Consider for example, what is already happening in those
nations lately released from the grip of Russia – Hungary,
Poland, Romania – where architecture is seen as the most
potent means of restoring and representing the national identity.
Students are encouraged to resurrect ancient mysteries, that is
to imagine objects that may unwittingly reinforce racial and tribal
differences. In spite of good intentions, the monsters may return…”
(5)
Despite the compromised conditions that must be faced in such
a situation, each one of these memories implies different effects
on built form. Some examples are given below as the rudiments
of an urban manifesto with buildable implications:
• We acknowledge the importance of "therapeutic"
urbanism in equal relation to given landscape.
• Morphologies are identified and reconfigured through a
new equivalence between mass, void, and organism.
• A nervous field is produced where rules appear precise
but edges overlap and definitions remain fuzzy.
• Armatures of violence and authority may be formally transformed
while remaining recognizable typologically or morphologically.
Traumatic form may thus remain but finds new significance.
• Programs can be determined by need, and can be directly
influenced by the action of the end users. The spatial relation
between them will conform to certain urban requirements however.
• Centers of gravity in the urban field will be identified
and new events are injected into existing morphologies. Points
of extreme activity generate pressure, triggering the gradual
colonization of the development area.
• This does not imply the uncritical retention or restoration
of existing damaged fabric, but rather the recognition of existing
urban configurations.
• In fact the physical fabric of space may be reversed.
Void can become solid as in the castings of Rachel Whiteread.
• "They shall beat their swords into plowshares, and
their spears into pruning hooks." (6)
This passage describes the strategy, for a plow is still a blade
and a hook still a lance, but their function and significance
are overturned.
"New built form should not force any particular non-contemporary
‘style’ on coming generations, but rather respect
their own capacity of adding meaning layers to whatever is built
today, which means new built form should have a wide range of
adaptability, both physical and aesthetic. On the other hand,
existing built form should be judged according to the same rule
– in other words, even settings with no immediate architectural
or historical value should be respected, saved and/or upgraded,
if found to have particular meanings attached to their current
users.” (7)
Spaces and objects propose a general strategy for producing new
density in suburban sprawl while avoiding the nostalgic recreation
of archaic urban structures as has been mandated in Berlin, for
instance. Vast new programmatic areas can be accommodated and
urban spaces that address the concerns and activities of progressive
communities are generated. An urbanism that may now be lacking,
an urbanism that values space as much as object, is reasserted
here.
Maximum formal diversity is encouraged within the urban limits,
not just in the configuration of the buildings and their program
but also in the spaces that form between them. As the project
develops, a system of envelopes for building construction will
interact with a series of urban spaces, changing with the seasons
and the flow of users. The "authorities" only set out
the rules of the game. The users (players) develop the patterns/configuration
of the game along each turn's needs and implications. Like the
game of Go, a certain inevitability will link what can never be
random development.
A therapeutic urbanism may heal on two levels: on the level of
the individual, of the citizen/user, and on that of the urban
fabric. Action is by the individual, moved by both practical need
and resonant memory. Random needs produce inevitable results.
The consequence of such action affects the fabric, creating practical
spaces and new associations, which in turn feed back into the
therapeutic process.... The result is a feedback-driven process
constantly linking citizen, memory, and physical form.
Ayssar Arida is an architect & urban designer,
living and practicing in London and Beirut. His first book Quantum
City defines a new language for the development of theories for
the 21st century city.
Michael Stanton is an architect, Associate Professor
and Chairman of the Department of Architecture and Design at the
American University of Beirut. Scholarly interests include Italian
Modernism, contemporary architectural theory and culture, and
urbanism.
The authors can be reached for comments/reactions
at tu@quantumcity.com
1 Jarry, Alfred « Ubu enchaîné
», in Œuvres complètes, tome 1, Gallimard, Bibliothèque
de la Pléiade, Paris, 1972. p 427. English translation
from Anastasi, William: « Jarry, Joyce, Duchamp and Cage
» in Tout-Fait Vol.1/Issue 2, May 2000. http://www.toutfait.com/issues/issue_2/Articles/anastasi.html
2 Various passages in this essay are sampled from Stanton, Michael,
"The Good, the Bad and the Ugly: Urbanism and Intention"
in Mining Autonomy — Perspecta 33, The Yale Architectural
Journal, New Haven, 2002.
3 See Arida, Ayssar, Quantum City, Architectural Press, Oxford
2002, pp. 192-195.
4 See Stanton, Michael, "On Realism and the Observer,"
ARCHIS 9, September 2000, pp. 51-55. With illustrations by Arida,
Ayssar and Khodr, Nesrine.
5 Kelbaugh, D. (1997), Common Place: toward Neighborhood and Regional
Design. University of Washington Press.
6 Old Testament, Micah iv 3. 2.
7 Arida, Ayssar, Quantum
City, Architectural Press, Oxford 2002, p 193.
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