About Us: Architecture and Collective Identity in the Contemporary City

Us

about

Architecture and Collective Identity in the Contemporary City

ARGUS’ Night of Philosophy 2017

Colophon

2017 Committee: Alina Paias, Arthur Schoonenberg, George Ikilikjan, Joris Klein, Mara Kopp, Skander Saâdi, Thomas Fell and Wouter Pijnenburg.

Venue

Het Nieuwe Instituut, Rotterdam Thursday 15th of June, 2017 With many thanks to Flora van Gaalen & Maximin Lavoo of Het Nieuwe Instituut, Mark Pimlott for reflecting on the topic, Motiv for their critical support and lunches, StuD for the financial support, and Manetta Berends for the design of this booklet.

All photographs by Charlie Koolhaas.

Contact

nightofphilosophy@argus.cc

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Night of Philosophy The Night of the Philosophy is a night of reflection on a theme that touches the fields of Architecture and Philosophy. Our ambitions are to broaden the audience and speakers’ field of knowledge by reflecting upon the theme in both a philosophical and architectural way and to create an informal discussion that allows people to participate and form their own questions. The night is not meant to answer questions or solve dilemmas that may arise, but to bring awareness to the theme and its different perspectives and to raise even more questions.

During the Night of Philosophy, speakers with both a practical and theoretical background will give a short presentation on their vision regarding our topic. Those will be followed by a discussion with questions from the audience.

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Table of Contents

5

2017 Committee

6

Programme

7

Biographies

9

Daniel Rosbottom

Context

Towards a Congruent Architecture

19

Neil Leach

35

2017 Committee

37

Charlie Koolhaas

42

Belonging

Is it even possible to conclude?

Photographs

Questions

Anonymous contributors

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Context Introduction This year’s Night of Philosophy ad-

dresses the question of collective identity in the contemporary city, a concept with no simple definition in today’s fragmented and interconnected world, being constantly reshaped by factors such as new forms of media, hypermobility, multiculturalism and diversity.

The disappearance of boundaries Due to advances in communication technology, the individual of a city can now not only interact and establish a network with the people of his street or neighbourhood, but with the whole world. People are able to form affinities and recognize themselves as parts of a collective not only through geographical proximity, but based on determinants that range from ethnicity to music preferences. Think about the distance that a Facebook post or a tweet can travel in a few seconds, or the amount of people it can influence.

One’s life no longer limits itself to the edges of the city.

The conflict of narratives Moreover, displacement of population on a global level has led to shifts in the composition and homogeneity of contemporary cities, especially European urban centers. On one side, cultural negotiation and exchanges turn them into multicultural and diverse spaces, with different cultures simultaneously assimilating each other’s components, and as a result tradition and identity are continuously revisited and ever shifting. On the other hand, cultural differences between different groups can lead to irreparable conflict and the impossibility of dialogue. Local identities, a reflection of local culture, historically determined and usually related to a specific territory, become harder to define under the weight of these continuous exchanges and conflicts.

Shaping the contemporary built environment

How should the built environment respond to all of the previous questions? How to make an ever shifting and fragmented collective recognize the same space as their own, where people can interact and relate to each other?

One wonders whether, under these circumstances, it is still possible to maintain a single shared and acknowledged realm.

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Programme

18:30 Thursday Bite

Dinner at Het Nieuwe Instituut,

tickets available up to one day before the event

19:30 Lectures

Fenneke Wekker Charlie Koolhaas Richard Sennett Elma van Boxel

20:45 Group Discussion

Participants will be assigned groups

which will elaborate questions for the panel

21:30 Discussion

Moderator:

Carola Hein

Debating: Fenneke Wekker Charlie Koolhaas Richard Sennett Elma van Boxel and the audience

22:40 Drinks 23:00 Closing

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Biographies

Fenneke Wekker is a lecturer and researcher at the University of Amsterdam. She is graduated in both Theatre and Social Sciences and has written on life in major cities, notions of home and belonging on an urban scale and manifestations of community and social cohesion in vulnerable areas in the Netherlands.

Charlie Koolhaas is an artist and writer from Rotterdam. She is the founder of international journal UNIT magazine and was a visiting professor at TU Delft and a visiting lecturer at ETH Zurich, HEAD Geneva and Harvard Design School. She is a photographer and a writer and her work in the field of photography deals with multi-culturalism, identity and cultural hybrids in our times of global culture and economy.

Richard Sennett is one of the most relevant sociologists of contemporary times, Professor of Sociology at the London School of Economics and University Professor of the Humanities at the New York University. He is the author of the extremely influential book The Fall of Public Man and has developed fundamental theory in the field of sociology concerning life, labour and social relations that take place in the cities we live in.

Elma van Boxel is the co-founder of architecture office ZUS (Zones Urbaines Sensibles), based in both Rotterdam and New York. Her office works on multiple scales and the designs constantly take into consideration a critical perspective towards the architect as a social actor. Their interventions aim to activate the urban space and stimulate its uses in a collective manner. They were the authors, among other projects, of the highly praised Schieblock and Luchtsingel in Rotterdam.

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Towards a Congruent Architecture Daniel Rosbottom

Contemporary architecture is often incongruous. For some architects this dislocation is a necessary consequence of prevailing cultural conditions. For others it is expressive of an overriding individual creativity. In large measure though it seems the resultant condition of an ungrounded architecture, consumed by complexities of programme and an increasingly universal and globally regulated infrastructure of building procurement.

The critic Alan Colquhoun has noted that given the “world wide and almost instantaneous dissemination of technologies and codes, which results in an underlying similarity of all Western and most Eastern countries at any one moment... modern post industrial culture is more uniform than traditional cultures, because the means of production and dissemination are standardised and ubiquitous.” 1 With that thought in mind, it is perhaps imprecise to suggest that the architecture that results from such conditions is ungrounded. It is rather that the ground that has been prepared for it is the leveled, graded resultant of the earthmover – an abstract, universal space of optimised production, rather than a particular place, in which to dwell.

Such universalising tendencies might be understood as a logical outcome of what Kenneth Frampton has described2 as civilisation’s focus upon instrumental reason, since the period of the Enlightenment. For architecture, this ideological trajectory, which has, in large measure, resulted in the abstraction and reduction of the building to the status of a product, accelerated enormously with the emergence and subsequent dominance of mainstream modernism, through much of the 20th Century.

For many of the primary protagonists of that movement though, the drive towards technical and functional determinacy was underpinned by social and moral concerns, within an essentially humanist discourse.

Moving to the present, such concerns have been almost wholly usurped by the overwhelming economic impera9

1 Colquhoun, Regionalism 1

2 Frampton, Towards a Critical Regionalism

tives of an, at best morally neutral, globalised market.

In the immediate aftermath of modernism’s apparent demise, post-modernity’s loudly proclaimed rediscovery of the rich treasure trove of architecture’s history, through which it was to relocate its traditional cultural role – turned out in most cases to be little more than the robbing of a tomb. History understood as signage, devoid of cultural meaning... or, as Loos said, ornament as crime.

In reality, the underlying conditions were little changed and the reinvention of neo- classicism as kitsch façade, was not much more than a temporary mask for what has since emerged as an almost entirely technocratic construction industry, largely uninterested in architecture’s role in the world, or in the traditions of culture and craft, except where they can be wholly commodified. The more recent resurgence of what might loosely be described as a reinvented modernism, but one severed from its ethical root, has made that schism transparent, often quite literally so.

Adam Caruso, of British practice Caruso St John, has written that ‘mainstream practice has embraced the rhetoric of the market to make work that is infused with brand recognition. Strategies of cybernetics, phylogenics, parametrics, mapping – each strive to generate completely original forms, unusual shapes, in plan, in section, sometimes both. These bold profiles can amplify or even replace corporate logos’ he says, and he wonders where this is taking us, given that ‘architecture is practiced at an unprecedented global scale, and the major players seem to be egging each other on. Who will produce the largest, and most formally outlandish project?’ he imagines them asking each other, ‘Who will finally say stop?’

And yet this desire to establish credibility through the increasingly incredible, an attribute apparently to be discovered in the endless objectification and reinvention of form and space, is sharply counterpointed by the sterile anonymity and banality of much of the contemporary architecture that constitutes our actual, everyday 10

experience. Here, un-phased by shiny improbability, we are instead confronted by scale-less, place-less, ubiquitous reality.

We should not forget that this sense of displacement is not simply a result of a building’s visual presence, but also of the way in which much current architecture engages, or fails to engage, our other senses. Heidegger suggests that ‘The fundamental event of the modern age is the conquest of the world as picture.’ 3

As Juhani Pallasmaa and others have pointed out, it is in part this undue privileging of our visual relationship with architecture that has led us to an overbearing preoccupation with its image, reducing it from a space of encounter and reciprocal experience, which situates us in the world, to mere object. For him ‘Modernist design has housed the intellect and the eye but has left the body and the other senses, as well as our memories, imaginations and dreams, homeless.’4 Because technology has allowed us to make everywhere equivalent, everywhere has, increasingly, become nowhere. The interiors of modern buildings are often hermetic spaces, held in a kind of technologically induced stasis where, on a deep floor-plate, permanently illuminated by a plethora of electric light fittings, one breathes filtered, climatically controlled air, of constant temperature and humidity. Such spaces feel the same, whether they are in Brussels or Beijing.

Of course, the massive energy consumptions and emissions of such buildings have, in the last few years, caused increasing alarm, given the scale of imminent environmental change to which their profligacy contributes. Paradoxically though, both the building codes put in place to respond to these concerns, and our responses to them as architects and engineers, largely seem to look for solutions in the problematisation of existing modes of thinking. Often employing further layers of technology in the form of screens, louvres, double skin glazed facades and ever higher levels of airtightness and thus further distancing the relationship between interior and exterior – the body and the world.

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3 The age of the world picture, Questions concerning technology and other essays

4 The Eyes of the Skin

5 Genius Loci, towards a phenomenology of Architecture

Such instrumental, technologically driven strategies might indeed have positive effects in energy use terms, yet their physical attributes only seem to exacerbate the disconnection and de-scaling of a building relative to its surroundings – often ignoring the potentially positive contributions of local topography and climate, or the form and character of existing built fabric. Given these concerns, might not another unintended effect of such strategies be to actually increase the lack of empathy between the inhabitant of a building and their wider environment? This question should concern us all.

In 1974 the Norwegian writer, Christian Norberg-Schultz5 , wrote that ‘Modern man for a long time believed that science and technology had freed him from a direct dependence on places. This belief’ he suggested at the time ‘has proved an illusion; pollution and environmental chaos have suddenly appeared as a frightening nemesis and as a result the problem of place has regained its true importance.’

Forty years on, this assertion seems optimistic but no less critical. What remains striking in his statement is the suggestion that it is contemporary society’s displacement that is both a primary cause and an ongoing concern in tackling the challenges that face it. As architects therefore, whilst it goes without saying that we should enthusiastically adopt whatever appropriate opportunities technology offers us – in order to understand what might be appropriate, we first need to conceive of and compose a building that is contingent upon its place.

Establishing reciprocity, where each is able to define, or reinforce, the character of the other.

This thought echoes Kenneth Frampton in his essay, ‘Towards a Critical Regionalism’, written ten years later, where he calls for a critical architecture ‘which distances itself equally from the Enlightenment myth of progress and from a reactionary impulse to return to the architectonic forms of the pre-industrial past.’ An architecture which instead ‘has the capacity to cultivate a resistant, identity giving culture whilst at the same time having discrete recourse to universal technique.’

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Drawing these statements into dialogue, is an understanding, from Heidegger, that the place is architecture’s share of truth, the concrete manifestation of man’s dwelling. One might then say that his identity depends on him belonging to places. If that is so, then any determination of appropriateness must first consider the manner in which form, material, structure, scale, proximity, topography, orientation and threshold can each draw out or consolidate the latent or manifest qualities of a given site. Whilst ameliorating, as far as possible, its negative aspects. Only when these conditions have achieved a particular and optimised equilibrium, does recourse to technology become legitimate.

Here, we must distinguish the idea of a building’s tectonic presence from its technological resultant.

Whereas technology offers a solution to a material problem, tectonics can be considered as having a far more encompassing role – that of making place manifest through the physicality of architecture. This pre-empts technology, ordering the inter-relationships of material, constructional and spatial structures, with respect to inhabitation and situation.

The interplay between these factors is complex, across many scales and it is unlikely ever to result in an identical outcome, without the imposition of some kind of universalising technique. Of course such processes of rationalisation have always been necessary and are often highly beneficial in determining a building’s successful outcome. As we have already discovered, it is only in the overbearing nature of such impositions, whether they are internal or external to the building itself, that modernity has undermined our sense of place.

That being said, history tells us that ‘typical’ outcomes do emerge. They might be morphological, in response to local conditions, i.e. the vernacular, or develop as a consequence of wider practical or cultural usage.

The typical forms, scales and proximities that emerge as a result of these common concerns must equally be considered as essential components in determining the resultant character of a place, constructed by culture, in 13

6 Frampton, Studies in Tectonic Culture

7 Colin St John Wilson, The Other Tradition

response to nature.

The idea of building ‘type’ again needs to be distinguished, this time from the postmodern appropriation of typology that we touched upon earlier. The latter addresses purely formal concerns, through an abstract, instrumental and reductive relationship to the history of architecture. A ‘type’ on the other hand might be understood as a paradigm to be developed through creative, interpretive actions, in response to history – rather than as a literal model, to be copied.

Drawing these thoughts together, as Frampton succinctly puts it ‘the built comes into existence out of the constantly evolving interplay of three converging vectors, the topos (site), the typos (type) and the tectonic’ 6 .

The issues and concerns I have outlined thus far are well rehearsed. Colin St John Wilson and others have long championed ‘the other tradition’ of modern architecture, exemplified in the work of architects such as Aalto and Lewerentz, and characterised by exactly the balance of relationships between the universal and the particular; the tectonic and the technical; the poetic and the pragmatic or culture and nature for example – that I have referred to. Indeed such debates have been occurring since at least the birth of modernism. St John Wilson recounts Hugo Haering at the very first meeting of CIAM, calling for an architecture ‘that would not impose a regime of pre-ordained geometrical forms on the one hand, nor the mass produced models of industrial technology on the other,’ but would evolve through ‘a less pre-judged enquiry into the way things ‘wanted to be’ 7.

Unfortunately, such practice has remained marginal and it is with increasing difficulty that the contemporary architect achieves anything like such a sense of balance. In fact, the concern in any such discourse is that when one attempts to apply it within an actual situation it appears, to a greater or lesser extent, as a romantic idealisation, out of touch with the pragmatic and contingent realities of day-to-day practice – a sense that crystallises as projects grow in scale and complexity.

Let us refer back to Norberg Schultz, for example, 14

and his assertions that ‘Man dwells when he can orientate himself within and identify himself with an environment’ and, following on, that ‘the task of the architect is to create meaningful places whereby he helps man to dwell.’ Underlying these statements is a strong sense that the architect needs to be able to identify with the place in which he builds, to an extent at least equivalent to the person or community for whom he is building. Yet the reality, as we noted earlier, is that architecture has become an increasingly global enterprise. Other concerns, which might be understood as equally valid, such as economic and political transparency or equality of opportunity, have led instead to trans-national systems of procurement that deliberately invite the architect to work in unfamiliar territories. How then is it possible for him or her, within the commercial restrictions of a given project, to attain sufficient knowledge to be able to offer a meaningful interpretation of place?

To take another example, Frampton concretises how one might manifest a situated architecture, in ways that initially seem self evident – through the establishment of responsive topographic and tectonic relationships. Yet how does one negotiate the tension between the desire for a building to acknowledge the irregular topography of its site, as he suggests, and the ever-multiplying panoply of regulations that govern fundamental issues such as disability access or, at another scale, flood management. The wholly legitimate prioritisation of such concerns often denies the opportunity to work with existing topographies or to form ‘natural’ relationships with a building’s surroundings. Indeed often, contemporary strategies of urban planning and regeneration result in a reconstruction of a site’s topography and character that is almost total, prior to the architects’ arrival.

Similarly, the complex inter-relationships of legislation, economics and liabilities, which inevitably govern performance criteria, product specification or procurement systems, restrict the architect’s ability to have free-rein in establishing tectonic relationships – relative to, say, local materials or traditional construction meth15

8 Uncommon Ground, Chapter 4, Pg. 120

9 Colin St John Wilson, The Other Tradition

ods. As David Leatherbarrow has wryly suggested ‘The orders of contemporary architecture are not types of column, but purchase agreements for the production of shop made elements’ 8 .

Conversely, misunderstandings or oversimplifications of how the character of a place can be enhanced could be seen as equally problematic. How does the architect negotiate the uncomfortable ‘fit’ between an overly restrictive, typologically driven local plan, which might seek to establish local rules on heights, roof pitches and materials for example, relative to contemporary programmatic needs that require a sensitive adjustment in scale, or a different, emergent type?

One could go on and on...and thus we arrive at a dilemma. We have understood the pressing need for contemporary architecture to re-situate itself in response to place. Clearly though, if we are also to understand it as a ‘Practical Art’ 9, then we cannot ignore the myriad opportunities, benefits and restrictions offered by an increasingly rationalised, global infrastructure, nor our lack of intimate knowledge, as international architects.

In identifying criticality with the regional, Frampton inadvertently allows its dismissal as some kind of mythic nostalgia. We need to find the means to critique from within this globalising condition.

This suggests that his apparent condensation of ‘topos’, ‘typos’ and ‘tectonic’ into a kind of trinity, a concrete set of conditions to be systematically addressed, might be better understood as a looser constellation of inter-related, emergent concerns – both determinate and indeterminate. As architects, our approach to such a constellation might have to oscillate, metaphorically, between the precisely calibrated observations of astronomy and the figurative, mythic narratives of astrology -constructing a common ground from which to build, that lies somewhere between a physical site and the site of the imagination.

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Appropriating the words of Vittorio Greggoti, we might describe such an architecture ‘as a system of relations and distances, as the measurement of intervals rather than isolated objects’ 10.

We might call such an architecture ‘Congruent.’

This essay was originally the introduction to a keynote lecture ‘Distant Relatives’, on the work of DRDH, the practice co-founded

by Daniel Rosbottom.

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10 Territory and Architecture

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Belonging

Neil Leach

Architecture is always linked to questions of cultural identity. For what sense would discourses such as Critical Regionalism make unless they assumed some connection between identity and the built environment?

Indeed, the implication that critical regionalism may contribute in some way to cultural identity is implied, at least, in one of the chapter titles used by Kenneth Frampton: ‘Critical Regionalism: Modern Architecture and Cultural Identity’.1 And yet architectural theorists have seldom broached the question of how people actually identify with their environment. Instead they have been preoccupied almost exclusively with questions of form, as though cultural identity is somehow constituted by form alone. It is clear, however, that if theorists are to link architecture to cultural identity they must extend their analyses beyond any mere discourse of form to engage with subjective processes of identification. This has long been acknowledged by cultural theorists, who have developed a sophisticated understanding of the mechanisms by which culture operates. For them culture is constituted not by a system of objects alone, but by a discourse that imbues these objects with meaning.

Cultural identity, therefore, emerges as a complex field of operations that engages with – but is not defined by – cultural artifacts such as architecture.

It is perhaps by following the notion of the nation as ‘narration’ – of identity as a kind of discourse – put forward by cultural theorist, Homi Bhabha, that we can grasp the importance of understanding form as being inscribed within a cultural discourse. The nation, for Bhabha, is enacted as a ‘cultural elaboration’. To perceive the nation in this way in narrative terms is to highlight the discursive and contested nature of such identities: ‘To study the nation through its narrative address does not merely draw attention to its language and rhetoric; it also attempts to alter the conceptual object itself. If the problematic ‘closure’ of textuality questions the ‘totalization’ of national culture, then its 19

1 Kenneth Frampton, Modern Architecture: A Critical History, London: Thames and Hudson, 1992.

2 Bhabha, ‘Introduction’ in Bhabha (ed.), Nation and Narration, London: Routledge, 1990, p. 3.

3 Bhabha, ‘DissemiNation’ in Bhabha (ed.), Nation and Narration, London: Routledge, 1990, pp.

298- 299.

4 Derek Robbins, Bourdieu and Culture, London: Sage, 2000, p. 30.

positive value lies in displaying the wide dissemination through which we construct the field of meanings and symbols associated with national life’.2 Of course, it would be wrong to reduce the nation to mere narration as though form were totally unimportant. Rather we have to recognise the nation as being defined within a dialectical tension. It is a tension, for Bhabha, between the ‘object’ and its accompanying narrative: ‘signifying the people as an a priori historical presence, a pedagogical object; and the people constructed in the performance of narrative, its enunciatory ‘present’ marked in the repetition and pulsation of the national sign’ 3 . If then the nation is a kind of narration, it is never an abstract narration, but a contextualised narration in which certain objects are inscribed. And it is precisely here within this field of objects which have themselves become the focus of narrative attention that we must locate architecture, as a language of forms not only embedded within various cultural discourses, but also given meaning by those discourses.

This brings us close to Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of habitus, as a non-conscious system of dispositions which derive from the subject’s economic, cultural and symbolic capital. Habitus, for Bourdieu is a dynamic field of behaviour, of position-taking where individuals inherit the parameters of a given situation, and modify them into a new situation. As Derek Robbins explains: ‘The habitus of every individual inscribes the inherited parameters of modification, of adjustment from situation to position which provides the legacy of a new situation.’4 Such an approach supposes an interaction between social behaviour and a given objectified condition. It is here that we could perhaps locate the position of architecture in Bourdieu’s discourse.

Architecture, in Bourdieu’s terms, can be understood as a type of ‘objectivated cultural capital’. Its value lies dormant and in permanent potential, but it has to be reactivated by social practices which will, as it were, ‘revive’ it. In this respect, architecture belongs to the same category as other cultural objects: ‘Although objects – 20

such as books or pictures – can be said to be the repositories of objectivated cultural capital, they have no value unless they are activated strategically in the present by those seeking to modify their incorporated cultural capital. All those objects on which cultural value has ever been bestowed lie perpetually dormant waiting to be revived, waiting for their old value to be used to establish new value in a new market situation.’ 5 In other words, what Bourdieu highlights is the need for praxis to ‘unlock’ the meaning of an object. In a sense this comes close to the Wittgenstinian model of language wherein meaning is defined by use. Just as words can be understood by the manner in which they are used, so buildings can be grasped by the manner in which they are perceived – by the narratives of use in which they are inscribed.

This opens up a crucial problematic within an architectural discourse that has traditionally been premised almost solely on questions of form. It is as though narratives of treatment and use stand largely outside architectural concerns. Thus Critical Regionalism, for example, in investing form with such significance, does not recognise how the same form will take on radically different connotations in different cultural milieus.

The same concrete tower block – replicated in, say, New York, Hong Kong, Latin America and Eastern Europe – will effectively appear different as it is treated and used differently in each context. Furthermore, in standard architectural theory there is no accepted framework for exploring how people make sense of place and identify with it. Without this, the relation of architecture to cultural identity can hardly be addressed. In order for architecture to be understood in terms of cultural identity, some kind of identification with architecture must have taken place. But how exactly does this identification occur?

This article attempts to offer one model that might help to explain this process, and that might therefore address one of the crucial problems that exists within theories such as Critical Regionalism that restrict them21

5 Derek Robbins, Bourdieu and Culture, London: Sage, 2000, p. 35.

selves to a discourse of form. It argues that a highly suggestive model for understanding the relationship between physical form and cultural identity – ‘belonging’ – can be drawn from Judith Butler’s work on ‘performativity’.

6 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble, London: Routledge, 1990, p. 140, as quoted in Vikki Bell (ed.), Performativity and Belonging, London: Sage, 1999, p. 136.

7 Butler, Bodies that Matter, London: Routledge, 1993, p. 12.

Butler and Performativity

Judith Butler has elaborated a vision of identity which is based on the notion of ‘performativity’. It is an approach that allows her to perceive identity in a far more fluid and dynamic way than traditional approaches to the question. It is an approach, moreover, that recognises identity politics as a field of individual empowerment.

Butler is a theorist of gender politics – and more specifically lesbian politics. Her concern is to formulate a notion of identity that is not constrained by traditional heterosexual models and to offer a radical critique of essentialising modes of thinking. According to Butler, it is precisely our actions and behaviour that constitute our identity, and not out biological bodies. Gender, she argues, is not a given ontological condition, but it is performatively produced. It is ‘a construction that conceals its genesis,’ such that, ‘the tacit collective agreement to perform, produce and sustain discrete and polar genders as cultural fictions is obscured by the credibility of those productions.’6 We may effectively rearticulate our identities and reinvent ourselves through our performativities. Here it is important to note that identity is the effect of performance, and not vice versa. Performativity achieves its aims not through a singular performance – for performativity can never be reduced to performance – but through the accumulative iteration of certain practices.

It is grounded in a form of citationality – of invocation and replication. As Judith Butler explains: ‘Performativity is thus not a singular ‘act’, for it is always a reiteration of a norm or set of norms, and to the extent that it acquires an act-like status in the present, it conceals and dissimulates the conventions of which it is a repetition.’ 7 22

Butler figures identity not as something interior – an essentialising ‘given’ – but rather as something exterior, a discursive external effect. It is borne of ‘acts, gestures and enactments’ that are ‘performative,’ as Butler puts it, ‘in the sense that the essence or identity that they otherwise purport to express are fabrications manufactured and sustained through corporeal signs and other discursive means. That the gendered body is performative suggests that it has no ontological status apart from the various acts which constitute its reality.

This also suggests that if that reality is fabricated as an interior essence, that very interiority is an effect and function of a decidedly public and social discourse, the public regulation of fantasy through the surface politics of the body, the gender border control that differentiates inner from outer and institutes the ‘integrity’ of the subject.’8 Importantly, this relates not just to lesbian sexuality, but to all sexualities, such that heterosexuality itself emerges as a socially transmitted construct that depends upon a behavioural norm being ‘acted out’.

Here the connections between gender and ‘mime’ begin to emerge. Indeed Butler’s whole discourse, it would appear, depends upon mime in general and the mimetic in particular. All behaviour is based on a kind of mimicry, including normative heterosexual behaviour that is thereby ‘naturalised’ and instantiated by the force of repetition: ‘All gendering is a kind of impersonation and approximation. . . the naturalistic effects of heterosexualised genders are produced through imitative strategies; what they imitate is a phantasmatic ideal of heterosexual identity, one that is produced by imitation cover up of a possible discourse, without 9 Butler, ‘Imitation as its effect.’ 9 allowing herself to be operation of the femand Gender Insubordination’, in D Fuss (ed.), Inside/Out: Lesbian and Gay Theories, New York: Routledge, 1991, as quoted in Bell, p. 137.

There are parallels here with Irigaray’s use of mimesis in the constitution of gender: ‘to play with mimesis is thus, for a woman, to try to recover the place of her exploitation by

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simply reduced to it.

It means to resubmit herself – in as much as she is on the side of the ‘perceptible’, of ‘matter’ – to ‘ideas’, in particular to ideas about herself, that are elaborated in/by a masculine logic, but so as to make ‘visible’ by an effect of playful repetition, what was supposed to remain invisible: the

inine in language.’

[Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which is not One, trans. C Porter and C Burke, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985, p. 76.]

There is an important distinction, however, between Butler’s and Irigaray’s use of the term. For Irigaray mimesis is at work in feminine language and offers a means

8 Butler, Gender Trouble, London: Routledge, 1990, p. 136, as quoted in Vikki Bell (ed.), Performativity and Belonging, London: Sage, 1999, p. 136.

of resisting a dominant, masculine logic, while for Butler mimesis explains the manner in which gender of whatever kind is constituted. As Bell notes: ‘For Irigaray, mimesis is on the level of strategy – one that reveals through its repetition of ideas about women – and not of constitution, as it is for Butler.’

[Bell, p. 139.]

10 This leads to a certain pessimism in Butler’s work. As Vikki Bell argues: ‘The category of mimicry as Butler employs it in her work is one that I would argue carries with it a sense of sadness, both of forfeiting (possibilities of being otherwise) and of resignation to ‘carrying on’ under duress.

There is no playful repetition here.

Gender performance is regarded as

11 Butler, Bodies that Matter, p. 125.

12 Butler, Gender Trouble, p. 112.

Cultural practices are governed by the hegemonic. They instantiate a certain order, and encourage acquiescence to that order.

They are propagated through a desire to conform. This is particularly evident in the case of gender practices.10 Normative gender practice is controlled by the logic of camouflage. To subscribe to the dominant cultural norm is to avoid conflict and to follow the behavioural systems of a naturalised, hegemonic order. And it is as a camouflage that gender can be understood as an ‘effective’ cultural praxis.

Gender, in this sense, approaches a notion of drag. It is a position that is ‘assumed’, and played out within the logic of conformity to some accepted norm. In making this claim, Butler destablises the traditional authority of heterosexuality: ‘To claim that all gender is like drag, or is drag, is to suggest that ‘imitation’ is at the heart of the heterosexual project and its gender binarisms, that drag is not a secondary imitation that presupposes a prior and original gender, but that hegemonic heterosexuality is itself a constant and repeated effort to imitate its own idealisations.’11 Butler is concerned to challenge the hegemony of the given. Nothing is authentic in itself. Everything is authorised through repetition. Yet through its own repetition it begins to instantiate a certain norm. It is important to recognise, however, that any norm can be destabilised. And it is precisely the normative nature of received views on gender that Butler seeks to undermine. For Butler, gender should be seen not as a given state, but as a condition of ‘becoming’. Echoing Deleuze she sees it as a rhizomatic condition, that is an actative process: ‘If gender is something that one becomes – but can never be – then gender is itself a kind of becoming or activity, and that gender ought not to be conceived as a noun or a substantial thing or a static cultural marker, but rather as an incessant and repeated action of some sort.’12

a strategy of survival, formed within a heterosexual matrix which, while not compulsory, is hegemonic, such that the psychic structures it deploys are analogous to melancholia, in which the lost object is incorporated into psychic life as part of the ego, object of ambivalence, ie both loved and hated.’

[Vikki Bell (ed.), Performativity and Belonging, London: Sage, 1999, p. 140.]

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Butler’s discourse is effectively an extension to Pierre Bourdieu’s debate about habitus as a dynamic field of behaviour, of position-taking where individuals inherit the parameters of a given situation, and modify them into a new situation.13 But what Butler brings to that debate is the possibility of political agency, and of subverting received norms. It is through its repetitive citational nature that performativity has the power to question and subvert that which it cites. Whereas Bourdieu stresses the production of the subject through culture, for Butler, social structures have themselves been ‘performed’. Hence performativity offers an obvious mode of challenging such structures. Imitation lies at the heart of all cultural practices. It is that which reinforces them, but – equally – that which potentially destablises them.

This is a radical re-evaluation of the mechanics of cultural practice, that has ramifications for every aspect of cultural life. Without collapsing sexuality, class, race and ethnicity into the same category, all types of identity can also be interpreted as dependent upon performative constructs.14 While each operates within its own individual paradigms, the general framework remains similar. Each depends upon the performative, each is citational in character, and each is ‘effective’. This is not to overlook the significance of physical characteristics, but rather to challenge the notion that these characteristics are the sole determinants of identity.

According to such a view, the constitution of one’s identity through performativity extends beyond questions of appearance into modalities of behaviour and modes of perception and expression. In the context of race, for example, we have toacknowledge how the process of ‘racing’ something or ‘being raced’ might operate.

Butler herself has a certain conjuring For performativity also operates 15addressed this quesand a certain contion: ‘I do think that struction. How do in modes of perception, such as there is a performawe describe that? tivity to the gaze It seems to me that the ‘gaze’ which, as it were, ‘colour’ that is not simply that is a modality of the transposition of performativity, that it and frame our view of the world, a textual model onto is radicalization, that a visual one; that the kind of visual when we see Rodney reading practice that but – importantly – also conKing, when we see goes into the viewing video we are also of the video is part of stitute it. To be ‘black’ is to view that reading and we are what I would underalso constituting, and stand as the performthe world with a ‘black’ gaze.15 that the reading is ativity of what it is 25

13 As Derek Robbins explains: ‘The habitus of every individual inscribes the inherited parameters of modification, of adjustment from situation to position which provides the legacy of a new situation.’ Derek Robbins, Bourdieu and Culture, London: Sage, 2000, p. 30.

14 Bell discusses the possibility of understanding Jewishness in this light in Vikki Bell (ed.), Performativity and Belonging, London: Sage, 1999. See also Sneja Gunew, ‘Performing Australian Ethnicity: “Helen Demidenko”, in W. Ommundsen and H. Rowley (eds.) From a Distance: Australian Writers and Cultural Displacement, Geelong: Deakin University Press, 1996, pp. 159-171.

‘to race something’ or to be ‘raced’ by it. So I suppose that I’m interested in the modalities of performativity that take it out of its purely textualist context.’

[Judith Butler (interviewed by Vikki Bell), ‘On Speech, Race and Melancholia’, in Vikki Bell (ed.), Performativity and Belonging, London: Sage, 1999, p. 169.]

16 Marc Augé, A War of Dreams, trans. Liz Heron, London: Pluto, 1999.

17 Sherry Turkle, Life on the Screen, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995.

18 Butler, Bodies that Matter, London: Routledge, 1993.

What applies to the gaze also applies to other modes of perception or expression.

Butler importantly locates performativity at the heart of our cultural identity today. In an age increasingly colonised by ‘fictional worlds’, as Marc Augé has observed, where fantasy allows identities to be assumed and discarded like fashion accessories, and where self-realisation often conforms to models drawn from Hollywood, the concept offers a more productive alternative to traditional understandings of the constitution of the self.16 The whole notion of identity as some fixed and stable condition deserves to be re-interrogated in an age of theming, role-playing and identity politics, where identities must be perceived in the plural, as multiple and often seemingly contradictory modes of personal expression. Nor is this necessarily negative. Indeed such tactics can be analysed as a defensive mechanism that allows the individual to ‘survive’ within contemporary cultural conditions. Indeed, as Sherry Turkle has argued within the context of a proliferation of ‘screen identities’ as a result of the increasingly widespread use of the computer, multiple personality disorder can be seen less as a problematic symptom of an age of instability and depthlessness, and more as a strategy of survival – a kind of cultural camouflage – that enables individuals to operate productively in a variegated and multi-faceted world.17 Politics and Space The emphasis which Butler places on performativity does not undermine the underlying value of form. Indeed this is the main message in Butler’s seminal work, Bodies that Matter.18 Hers is an essentially corporeal philosophy of identity. Butler’s discourse also serves, however, as a corrective to a certain positivistic theory of form that is still pervasive. Matter – in Butler’s terms – does not exist outside of discourse. As Mariam Fraser observes, following Butler: ‘Matter does not ‘exist’ in and of itself, outside or beyond discourse, but is rather repeatedly produced through performativity, which 26

“brings into being or enacts that which it names”.’19 This has obvious ramifications for any discourse of gender and space. Butler’s incisive comments on gender – gender identity being defined not in biological terms, but in performative terms as an identity that is ‘acted out’ – can be profitably transposed to the realm of physical space. For if identity is performed, then the space in which that performativity takes place can be seen as a stage. After a certain number of performances that stage will no longer seem neutral. It will be imbued with associations of the activities that took place there, on the part of those who witnessed those activities. If identity is a performative construct – if it is acted out like some kind of ‘filmscript’ – then architecture could be understood as a kind of ‘filmset’. But it is as a ‘filmset’ that it derives its meaning from the activities that have taken place there. Memories of associated activities haunt physical space like a ghost. It is here that Butler’s thinking can be deployed as a way of cutting through much confusion that exists on the question of the gendering of space. Too often there has been a simplistic collapsing of a particular political ideology on to a particular form, as though a political ideology can be conflated with an aesthetic ideology. This refers as much to politics in general as it does to the specific question of gender politics. According to this logic, certain forms are in and of themselves imbued with a certain content. Just as there are seen to be certain ‘democratic’ forms, so there are certain ‘feminine’ forms. It is this thinking that Fredric Jameson has sought to challenge. Form, for Jameson, is essentially ‘inert’ and whatever content is grafted on to 20 ‘I have come to it is ‘allegorical’ in character.20 There is think that no work of art or culture no intrinsic meaning or political potential can set out to be political once and to any form. Whilst there may indeed be for all, no matter how ostentatiously it certain forms that ‘lend’ themselves to labels itself as such, for there can never be any guarantee that it democratic purposes rather than totalitarwill be used the way it demands. A great ian ones, and – equally – no doubt certain political art (Brecht) can be taken as a forms that ‘embody’ a feminine sensibility, pure and apolitical art that seems it is surely a mistake to map certain activi- art; to want to be merely aesthetic and decoties on to certain forms, as though those 27

19 Mariam Fraser, ‘Classing Queer’ in Vikki Bell (ed.), Performativity and Belonging, London: Sage, 1999, p. 111.

rative can be rewritten as political with energetic interpretation. The political rewriting or appropriation, then, the political use, must be allegorical; you have to know that this is what it is supposed to be or mean – in itself it is inert.’ [Jameson, ‘Is Space Political?’, in Neil Leach (ed.), Rethinking Architecture, London: Routledge, 1997, pp.258-59.]

activities were a consequence of those forms.

What Butler’s logic seems to suggest is that particular spaces are given meaning by the practices that take place there. The gendering of space, in other words, depends more on the performativities that are articulated there than the form itself. A space can only be gendered by association. Certain associations are ‘projected’ on to those spaces, but those associations are defined not by the material properties of those spaces, but by the activities that take place there. Moreover, they depend upon the memory of those associations being kept alive.

In this sense, a space used for particular activities will accrue a certain character over time, but as new activities take over – and as memories of the former activities fade – the space will take on a different character.

A ‘masculine’ space may invert into being a ‘feminine’ space. A ‘fascist’ space may turn into a ‘democratic’ space. And, by extension, a ‘colonial’ space can be turned into a ‘post-colonial’ space. Often these processes are charged with a sense of strategic reappropriation, and are set against the memory of previous associations. At other times they may be facilitated by conditions of amnesia or the repression of memory, factors which release a space from its previous associations.

21 Vikki Bell (ed.), Performativity and Belonging, London: Sage, 1999.

Identification with Place

Symbolic attachments may be grafted on to physical form. This opens up the possibility, as Vikki Bell has explored, of a discourse of performativity and ‘belonging’, where ‘belonging’ might be perceived as an identification with a certain place.21 It suggests a way in which communities might colonise various territories through the literal ‘performances’ – the actions, ritualistic behaviour and so on – that are acted out within a given architectural stage, and through those performances achieve a certain attachment to place.

This is based on the idea that just as communities are ‘imagined’ communities, so the spaces of communities – the territories that they have claimed as their own – are also ‘imagined’. ‘Imagining a community’, 28

as Anne-Marie Fortier observes, ‘is both that which is created as a common history, experience or culture of a group – a group’s belongings – and about how the imagined community is attached to places – the location of culture.’ 22 Fortier has explored how through ritualised repetition of symbolic acts, often conducted within an overtly religious context and performed within specific architectural spaces, these ‘imagined’ communities can ‘make material the belongings they purport to dein the pews, it seemed of Belonging(s)’, 23 Vikki Bell (ed.), scribe.’ 23 in Vikki Bell (ed.), as if I was watching Performativity and Performativity and a re-run of part of Belonging, London: Central to this Belonging, London: an identity in the Sage, 1999, p. 3.

Sage, 1999, p. 48.] making: the ‘stylised Fortier’s own study sense of belonging Fortier concludes: ‘St repetition of acts’ is of a specific Italian Peter’s is a place of emigré community in reached into some re-membering. It is deep-seated sense of is the principle of London, whose rituselfhood that had sed- a place of collective alistic performances memory, in which imented into my body. often bound to specifritualistic repetition. elements of the past The rituals, in turn, ic religious festivals, are cobbled together cultivated a sense negotiated a sense This can be underto mould a communal of belonging.This of spatial belonging of belonging. short episode made that was both part stood within the logic of an emigrant – and me realize the extent body It is a place where individual lives, to which cultural specifically Italian of psychoanalytic the- – community, but present and past, identity is embodied, are called upon to and memories are quintessentially ory that posits repe- also inhabit the present incorporated, both as ‘in Britain’. The space, to ‘member’ a result of iterated was based on tition as a means of study it. Finally, it is a site actions. And how a community and its where individual these, in turn, are association with a miming and thereby particular church – lived as expressions bodies circulate, come and go; where bodies St Peter’s – its rituals of a deeply felt sense are signifying actors of identity and becontrolling trauma. and forms of cultural longing.’ [Anne-Marie in claims for, and expression. Her practices of, the idenFortier, ‘Re-memstudy relies heavily Just as the child in tity of St Peter’s and bering Places and on Butler. As Fortier former Little Italy. the Performance puts it: ‘As I sat there Freud’s famous example of the fort-da game seeks to overcome the anxiety of being abandoned by the mother by acting out that process of departure and return in various games about ‘loss’ and ‘retrieval’, so repetition of certain spatial practices amounts to a kind of overcoming the alienation of abstract space, and a means of inscribing the self in the environment. Repetition leads to a normalisation and consequent familiarisation. When acted out within a particular context it may lead to an associative sense of belonging that effectively materializes this process of identification. ‘The repetition,’ Bell notes, ‘sometimes ritualistic repetition, of these normalized codes makes material the belongings they purport to simply describe.’24 What then happens through these stylised spatial practices is that these spaces are ‘demarcated’ by certain groups by a kind of spatial appropriation. This is a visceral process of identification which depends upon bodily 29

22 Anne-Marie Fortier, ‘Re-membering Places and the Performance of Belonging(s)’, in Vikki Bell (ed.), Performativity and Belonging, London: Sage, 1999, p. 42.

These bodies, in turn, are projected into a structure of meaning that precedes them and re-members them into gendered definitions of identity and becoming. Re-membering “The Hill” works through bodies that are ethnicized and gendered at once, while the circulation of these bodies that are ethnicizes and genders a space in the process of claiming it as an Italian (terrain of) belonging(s).’

[Anne-Marie Fortier, ‘Re-membering Places and the Performance of Belonging(s)’, in Vikki Bell (ed.), Performativity and Belonging, London: Sage, 1999, p. 59.]

24 Vikki Bell (ed.), Performativity and Belonging, London: Sage, 1999, p. 3.

25 Anne-Marie Fortier, ‘Re-membering Places and the Performance of Belonging(s)’, in Vikki Bell (ed.), Performativity and Belonging, London: Sage, 1999, p. 42.

memories. Through the repetition of those rituals these spaces are ‘re-membered’, such that those participating reinscribe themselves into the space, re-evoking corporeal memories of previous enactments. The space becomes a space of projection, as memories of previous experiences are ‘projected’ on to the material form of the space. At the same time, the body becomes the site of introjection, as a recording surface registering those previous spatial experiences. As a combined result of the echoing and reinforcement of these two sets of experiences – introjection and projection – over time, a sense of mirroring and consequent identification is achieved. Identification is always specular. It is always a question of recognising the self in the other. The rituals are naturalised through these corporeal memory acts, and the spaces in which they are enacted become spaces of belonging for those involved. These spaces are ‘appropriated’ through these rituals and become communal sites of embeddedness. As Fortier observes: ‘Belongings refer to both ‘possessions’ and appartenance. That is, practices of group identity are about manufacturing cultural and historical belongings which mark out terrains of commonality that delineate the politics and social dynamics of ‘fitting in’.25 What is so suggestive about the concept of ‘belonging’ as a product of performativity is that it enables us to go beyond the limitations of simple narrative. It exceeds the ideas of Michel de Certeau for narrativising the city through spatial tactics that amount to types of ‘pedestrian speech acts’, as a means of ‘making sense of’ the city, to suggest a mechanism of identification. De Certeau, after all, although positing a theory of overcoming alienation, does not fully articulate a theory of identification.

It also privileges the idea not of reading the environment, as though its meaning were there and simply waiting to be deciphered, but rather of giving meaning to the environment by collective or individual behaviour.

‘Belonging’ to place can therefore be understood as an aspect of territorialization, and out of that ‘belonging’ a sense of identity might be forged.

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The attraction of the application of performativity to place is that it resists more static notions of ‘dwelling’ emanating from Heideggerian discourse that seem so ill at ease with a society of movement and travel. The increasing homogenisation of space within a world of global capital has indeed led to a predominant condition of ‘non-place’ – as Marc Augé has coined it. But this should not lead us back to old models of ‘dwelling’ as a way of resisting this condition, as though models formulated in the past will necessarily still be relevant in the present.

Rather it encourages us to formulate new paradigms for understanding attachment to place that are in tune with contemporary modes of existence.

Indeed it could even be claimed that new types of attachment are a direct result of a cosmopolitan culture of ‘non-places’, in that place and non-place are locked into a dialectic of reciprocal presupposition. Just as globalisation leads to regionalisation – or even the hybrid manifestation of ‘glocalisation’ – so placelessness automatically encourages an attachment to place, as though the blurring of spatial boundaries leads to a corresponding increase in awareness of those boundaries.26 This new condition, though, must be seen as a product of – and not a resistance to – the homogenising placelessness of global capitalism. Any theoretical formulation of new kinds of attachment must address the very mechanisms of late capitalism itself – its transiency, provisionality and ever-renegotiable field of operations – and not fall back on models formulated in different cultural conditions.

Equally, such understandings of ‘belonging’ should be inscribed within a context of ‘non- belonging’. The very notion of ‘belonging’ contains within itself a certain sense of initial alienation. The possibility of forging an attachment necessarily follows hard upon the heels of This echoes in non-differentiation the very act of detachment.27 We 27 part the discourse of between the self and identity that emerges the environment. might therefore posit ‘belonging’ from Lacan’s formu- The condition is lation of the Mirror problematic because as a form of attachment to place Stage. Significantly, identity depends on Lacan refers to Cailthe ability of an orthat operates as a ‘gestalt’ forma- lois’s earlier essay on ganism to distinguish ‘Mimicry and Legend- itself from its surtion, as a kind of ‘figure-ground’ ary Psychasthenia’. roundings. Jacques 31

Caillois’s concern is not for identification, but the horror of

Lacan, ‘The Mirror Stage’ in Anthony Easthope (ed.),

26 This is in line with Foucault’s thinking that transgression of the limit does not deny the limit, but rather illuminates it in the ‘flash of its passage’. On this see Foucault. ‘Preface to Transgression’ in Donald Bouchard (ed.), Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, Donald Bouchard and Sherry Simon (trans.), Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1977, pp. 33-4.

Contemporary Film Theory, London: Longman, 1993, p.

35; Roger Caillois, ‘Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia’, October, 84, pp.

16-32, reprinted in October, the First Decade, 1976-86, pp.

58-74.

28 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, London: Athlone, 1988, p. 10 and passim.

29 Vikki Bell (ed.), Performativity and Belonging, London: Sage, 1999, p. 9.

relation between the self and the environment. It depends upon a certain differentiation of the self from the environment, but that differentiation itself invites a reciprocal sense of attachment. Yet equally that sense of attachment presupposes a sense of differentiation.

What is being proposed here through the model of ‘belonging’ derived from Butler’s thinking is not some discourse of fixed ‘roots’, but rather a more transitory and fluid discourse of territorialization – in the Deleuzian sense – which provides a complex and ever renegotiable model of spatial ‘belongings’. The model is essentially a rhizomatic one of nomadic territorializations and deterritorializations. For territorialization belongs to the same logic as deterritorialization. It is precisely because of the ‘deterritorialised’ nature of much of contemporary existence that some sense of ‘territorialisation’ must be forged. But this very ‘territorialisation’ necessarily presupposes a consequent form of ‘deterritorialisation’.

What we find, then, is that the very provisionality of such territorializations colludes with the ephemerality of any sense of belonging. Just as territorializations are always shifting, so too identifications remain fleeting and transitory, while all the time leaving behind traces of their passage. In this sense ‘belonging’ comes close to the rhizomatic sense of ‘becoming’ described by Deleuze and Guattari in their evocative description of the interaction between the wasp and the orchid, where the wasp ‘becomes’ like the orchid, just as the orchid ‘becomes’ like the wasp.28 And like ‘becoming’, ‘belonging’ remains an actative process, and not a given state. As Bell comments: ‘The rhizome has been an important analogy here, conveying as it does an image of movement that can come to temporary rest in new places while maintaining ongoing connections elsewhere.’ 29 It is clear that, within the context of post-colonial studies, architectural theorists can profit from engaging with the theories of cultural identity emanating from the work of Homi Bhabha and Judith Butler. Not only will this open up a debate trapped within a discourse of form to engage with sophisticated discourses outside the 32

discipline of architecture, but it will also introduce new and more subtle ways of understanding attachment to place. In this regard, Butler’s work on ‘performativity’ and the consequent notion of ‘belonging’ are particularly productive.

It may well be that the concept of ‘belonging’ – an ever provisional, rhizomatic model of attachment to place – offers us a viable paradigm to replace the now somewhat outmoded model of ‘dwelling’ that once so dominated architectural discourse. For just as identity itself is today no longer a fixed condition, but a continually re-negotiable site of individual expression, so ‘belonging’ offers an equally flexible concept that can accommodate the transitory nature of contemporary existence. In a realm whose paradigmatic figures include the ‘wanderer’, ‘migrant’, ‘refugee’ and ‘exile’, the notion of ‘belonging’ offers a more sympathetic framework for understanding contemporary modes of identification with place.

This essay was published on the AA Files, 49, 2003, and the version printed here is available on Neil Leach’s personal website.

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Is it even possible to conclude?

2017 Committee

The notion of collective identity is both a challenging and callengeable one in the cities of nowadays. This event’s purpose is not to arrive at a strategy or solution to the questions that may come, but rather, to broaden our understanding of what that notion even means in today’s world. For architects and urbanists, this would allow a more critical view at how and for who they design and build.

Any type of architecture can be considered a response to such questions, willingly or not. If a square is already conceived as public, the façade of a private dwelling can be just as collectively perceived. Some buildings have on their collective use or perception one of their most substantial dimensions. The Bilbao Guggenheim museum by Frank Gehry is a purely sculptural building resulting from the architect’s personal fascinations. Its abstract forms, however, seem to succeed in expressing an international language, without being anonymous and generic, and engendering actual urban change and a shift in the city’s self-perception. It is not a surprise that the Bilbao museum became a model from which every big city in the need to lift its own morale began to invest in similarly iconic buildings. On a different stride, the Museum of Arts in São Paulo by Lina Bo Bardi or the Architecture School in Marne-la-Vallée

by Bernard Tschumi result from a programmatic and spatial response to the question of the collective identity.

The buildings, rather than focusing on direct symbolic relationships, create unprogrammed and positively anonymous spaces where different collectives can meet and interact with each other.

Different scales of collective are represented (whether it is the neighborhood, the city, the nation, or even the world) and different architectural tools are used to achieve that. Some do so by simply providing qualitative public space and allowing public interactions to happen. Others through a symbolic gesture more or less abstract and identifiable. Others focus on the phys35

ical perception of the building by giving attention to the articulation of materials, creating a connection with the local landscape and traditions, but also with a deeper shared human physical perception of the environment.

All of these simple categories are interrelated and can be disputed and disapproved. Nonetheless, they highlight the complexity of the topic and ways to respond to it.

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