MIRACLES AND MONSTERS BAKAVOU VASILIKI
miracles
monsters
“the Dualit y of one is the Unit y of t wo”
DUAL
ENS
Athens sits at the threshold between the past and the future. The city center is characterized by historical changes with intense heterogeneity. Two centuries of architecture are reflected in the types of buildings and from the variation a diverse mosaic is made up. The center is a multifunctional condensing of the city, almost identical with it. The parliament, ministries, universities, large hotels, theaters, cafes, itinerant trade and road shows, residents, immigrants and passengers compose a patchwork of spatial situations and people that mingle and clash. At the same time the center of Athens spatially reflects the presence of both the political power, the emerging bourgeoisie and the popular class: the day laborer, unemployed, small traders, itinerant and students. Athens center used to house, and still houses the public sphere of the street. Intense, confrontational presence of the city’s people, in all major historical moments, making their voice heard in the public space.
H
istorically, Athens was an Ottoman village characterized by irregular streets and a relatively organic and unregulated fabric. A strict border around the city was defined by a wall. The sudden increase of population leads to the implantation in irregular urbanization, the classical geometry of major arteries. The assignment of the new plan of Athens was given to Kleanthis and Schaubert. The existing settlement was not taken into account, but the Byzantine monuments (mostly churches) halted the march planned roads. The first to be drawn was Stadiou street, as an extension of Panathenaic Stadium. At the junction with the street Piraeus a square is placed (Omonia). The base of the isosceles triangle is Ermou street located in the limits of the Acropolis hill. The bisector of the triangle is Athinas street which starts from Omonoia and points to Acropolis. A strong limit that separates the eastern and western parts of the triangle as to social reality, cultural background and design. Evripidou street is the median of the triangle and the boundary between the old and the new city, resulting from the strong differentiation of geometrical characteristics urban fabric in the northern and southern part and the oldest installation of Haseki wall about at this point. Dozens of different sections in length of road give an unimaginable variety to the street. Manos Hatzidakis from the album “Ballads of Athinas Street” describe it as a street “of monsters and miracles”. So Evripidou street became the rupture of past and tomorrow and the point of the coexistence of the Neoclassical and the Medieval city, of East and West.
Paris
Barcelona
New York
Few years before Athens extension, another city, Barcelona, was able to expand both physically, with the long-awaited demolition of the walls, and psychologically, with economic expansion and the cultural awakening. The goal was to spread the city based on the great grid-iron plan of Eixample (Ensanche or Extension) by Ildefons Cerdà. Cerdà loved straight lines, and his idea was to place one of the Eixample’s main avenues crosses diagonally from west to east. So, Avinguda Diagonal, one of Barcelona’s broadest and most important avenues splits the city in two parts. Simultaneously, the Parisian emperor Napoleon II entrusts to Georges Eugène Haussmann, the urban plan of restructuring the city. In the center of Paris, Haussmann’s workers tore down hundreds of old buildings and cut eighty kilometers of new avenues, connecting the central city points. This time the city separation appeared through Avenue de l’Opera. The practice of the division crossed the ocean with the example of New York. A city with a strong internal border, Broadway avenue. Carved into the brush of Manhattan it stands as the oldest north–south main thoroughfare in New York city.
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Over the years the idea of the border and the separation remains charming because contains a system of multivalent relationships. The action of splitting or rupturing the constraints of a flat geometric canvas creates a surprising sense of movement and abandonment. Attempting to capture this dual sense, Gordon Matta-Clark created the project ‘’Splitting’’. He tried to redefine architectural space by cutting particularly a wood-frame house in New Jersey in the middle and split the house in two parts. In this way someone finds it difficult to walk inside the house but in the same time shadows, light, weather were allowed into the house making the space accessible to an external kind of voyeurism. Similarly, Doris Salcedo with ‘’Shibboleth’’ approach the issue of the border by a two feet deep crack in Tate Modern. The importance of this gesture was not only the two separated parts of the floor but the experience of the crack itself. An opportunity was given to the viewers to bend and glimpse inside it appreciating its content. In a way, borders reveal layers of history that were covered.
These borders which appear in cities or in works of art are inextricably connected with the term of dual. Duality as the word implies, means two states, two poles, both of which arise from a division of unity. Heracletus, the Greek philosopher, taught that the universe was a conflict of dipoles controlled by what he called eternal justice. However, by the dipoles the contradictory forces of nature are brought into reciprocal unity, equilibrium is established and unity prevails. The life of the universe moves through a series of evolutionary oscillations between rest and activity. During one phase, this movement seems to be constructive, but in a later phase seems to be destructive. There are two poles of this universal movement: the one, a going-out, affirming, and the other a coming-back and denying. All nature is bisected by this two-way process. It’s like the negative and positive poles of the primordial energy. Cause of everything is dual in nature for example night and day, binary numbers 0 and 1, black and white, electrical “off ” and “on” switch, joy and sorrow and on.
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IT IS S U O U N I A CONT MOVEMENT BETWEEN
S S E N W O T OWNESS
A
human being, therefore, is dual too, the mortal (finite) which constitute his lower self and immortal (infinite) which constitute his higher self. Because human existence is a bridge spanning two worldsabsolute and relative, freedom and limitation, indestructibility and vulnerability-it requires a capacity for double vision. The ancient Greeks distinguish profoundly the soul and the body as the dictum states: “The body is a tomb’’. Meaning that the soul could exist separately from the body after death. At the mind level this duality is the nature of the ego: thinking in dichotomies (good or bad, etc.), carrying out selfish acts, and just emphasis on self and what is considered normal. In psychology the human mind is composed of two systems, a conscious one and an unconscious one. But sometimes balance is lost, and when this occurs, the two parts are driven so far away that they don’t connect any more. Somehow like the split personality condition, when one has two very different ways of behaving which lead to two different personalities. The crack here becomes so vast that unity turns into duality. It is a continuous movement between oneness and twoness