Working Papers: Architectural History MA 2017-18

Working Papers Architectural History MA 2017–18

The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL

Working Papers Architectural History MA 2017–18

The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL

This publication is a collation of final dissertation papers submitted by the 2017–18 Architectural History MA cohort, published in conjunction with a one-day symposium, held on 26 October 2018 at The Bartlett School of Architecture.

Keynotes speakers at the symposium were Felicity D. Scott (Columbia University), Helen Hills (York University) and Joy Sleeman (Slade, UCL).

Editors / Symposium organisers Stephannie Fell Emma Filippides Max Wisotsky Copy-editors Martin Alvarez Nancy Elder Fariha Faruque Eliza Grosvenor Stefan Gruber Mariana Jochamowitz Designers Stephannie Fell Emma Filippides Stefan Gruber Mariana Jochamowitz Max Wisotsky Lithography, printing, and binding Aldgate Press Published by The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL 22 Gordon St, London, WC1H 0QB Symposium supervisors Peg Rawes Tom Keeley Thanks to the following Bartlett staff Jakub Owczarek Emily Stone Laura Cherry Matt Bowles Š of the texts: the authors; Š of the images: see p. 134 No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written consent of the publisher.

Contents

8–11

Introduction: A material, a method, an object The editors

12–13

Architectural History MA 2017–18 Cohort and Tutors

14–19

Soviet Housing Architecture in Russian Cinema, 1970-2017 Elena Agafonova

20–25

Mercado 4 in Asunción, Paraguay: Street shops as enablers of everyday activities Martín Alvarez

26–31

Gender and the City: Korean Women in Gangnam.

Correlations between the Gangnam District in Seoul and the tropes of Korean Women from 1970 to 2018 Soo Jin Cho

32–37

The Archeology of Networks: Reimagining the Infrastructural Network of the Indus Valley Civilisation with Dholavira as a Portal Krishna Dadawala

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38–43

Surreal Health Centres: Dell and Wainright's Complex Photographic Modernity Nancy Elder

44–49

The Performance of the Page as a Site of Architectural Discourse Fariha Faruque

50–55

A hut above the clouds: An Image about Making Images, Accuracy and Instrumentality in 1820s London Stephannie Fell

56–61

A Queer History of Enfield Lucca Ferrarese

62–67

Self Storage: An Archaeology of Contemporary Inhabitation in the United Kingdom Emma Filippides

68–73

Spaces of Community: An Examination of the Social, Political and Architectural Significance of Community Centres in Tower Hamlets Eliza Grosvenor

CONTENTS

7

Contents

74–79

Discursive Memory Construction: Processes of Contestation and Identity Formation in the Context of Vienna’s Heldenplatz Stefan Gruber

80–85

Domesticity Behind the Urban Scene of Kufr Aqab Haneen Jadallah

86–91

Sharmanka Kinetic Theatre: Production Of Subjective Spaces Between 1970–90s Soviet Russia And Present Day Glasgow Ishita Jain

92–97

‘In Hey Perck’: Revisiting mid-17th Century Hyde Park with eight images by the Dutch Artist Michel van Overbeek Anna Jens

98–103

Inhabiting a Photograph: In Search of Material Memory Mariana Jochamowitz

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104–109

Everyday Space: a spatial investigation on Chengdu teahouses Wei Kuang

110–115

Architectural Witness: Materiality, spatiality and law in the Grenfell Tower Inquiry Anna Livia Vørsel

116–121

Architectures of Rift: Investigating Kiruna Through a Marxist Ecology Max Wisotsky

122–127

Full Circle: Charting the Road to Empire through the Architecture of Dairen’s Ohiroba Circus from 1907–1936 Michael Zhou

128–133

Index of highlighted words

CONTENTS

9

Introduction: A material, a method, an object

The editors 10

WORKING PAPERS / ARCHITECTURAL HISTORY MA 2017–2018

‘Marbreur de papier’, Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, vol. 5 (plate 1), 1767

INTRODUCTION

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“I have never had any other subject: basically, paper, paper, paper” —Jacques Derrida, Paper Machine

1

2

Paper is both a noun and a verb, moreover, a subject, a substance and a support. As illustrated by plate 1 under the heading ‘Marbreur de papier’ of Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie, paper [papier] is a viscous material; a substance that through a series of hand-crafted and mechanical processes—at least twenty-eight distinctive ones if we take those illustrated in the plates of the Encyclopédie—becomes an imprintable surface. The double viewpoint offered by this particular image—both of the spatial arrangement of ‘paper marbling’ on top and the individual depictions of the instruments that make it possible on the bottom—also highlights one of the encyclopedia’s ultimate principles: that a fuller understanding is formed through concurrent and manifold perspectives. Out of the arrangements and rearrangements of paper, knowledge emerges.

Paper itself is the absent protagonist of Diderot’s illustration, as knowledge is the abstract corollary of its existence. The result of the process of paper-making is the potential state of an empty page, meant to become an invisible support. As Derrida suggests in Paper Machine (2004), this state is moreover a space: ‘Beneath the appearance of a surface, it holds in reserve a volume, folds, a labyrinth whose walls return the echoes of the voice or song that it carries itself; for paper also has the range or the ranges of a voice bearer’. Paper—even if virtual— becomes a translation device, a prosthesis of the body and its memory, a material support and the site of its unfolding.

Bearing this in mind, the title of the symposium and this publication, Working Papers, emphasises the writing of an academic paper as

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a complex unfolding process both forward and retrospectively.

Analogous to the series of plates that dissect the spatial and material mechanics of paper-making, the focus of the symposium is not merely the exhibition of the final product of a research process, but to delve into the methods and approaches integral to its production. During this event, the cohort will present their research within a public forum of discussion for the first time.

The focus of the Architectural History MA programme, provoking interdisciplinary and critical approaches to history, encourages research in similar topics to be undertaken in myriad ways. Consequently, the papers included in this publication are situated within a network of thought and contemporary research. The structure of the book, instead of being divided into thematic chapters, attempts to chart the collisions and divergences of subject matter and approaches. For doing so, we have created a network of transversing ideas across papers, highlighted in each author’s text and gathered in an index, aimed at producing interesting and sometimes unexpected connections throughout the body of work. Within the constraints of a 1,000-word excerpt, the texts included in the book not only expose a subject matter and an approach, but engage with paper as only one of their possible material supports. In other words, in the form of the MA dissertation, these papers exist as burgeoning bodies of research, that we hope in time will take many different forms. In this sense, we envision Working Papers as only one form of assemblage, subject to manifold possible future arrangements.

WP

NOTES 1 Ben Kafka, The Demon of Writing, Powers and Failures of Paperwork (New York, NY: Zone Books, 2012) 139–144.

2

Jacques Derrida, Paper Machine (Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2005), 44.

INTRODUCTION

13

Architectural History MA 2017–18 Cohort

Architectural History MA Programme Director

Elena Agafonova Martin Alvarez Soojin Cho Krishna Dadawala Nancy Elder Fariha Faruque Stephannie Fell Lucca Ferrarese Emma Filippides Eliza Grosvenor Stefan Gruber Haneen Jadallah Ishita Jain Anna Jens Mariana Jochamowitz Wei Kuang Anna Livia Vørsel Max Wisotsky Michael Zhou

Peg Rawes

14

Architectural History MA 2017–18 Academic Staff Sabina Andron Iain Borden Eva Branscome Ben Campkin Mario Carpo Edward Denison Murray Fraser Polly Gould Peter Guillery Jacob Paskins Barbara Penner Peg Rawes Guangyu Ren Jane Rendell David Roberts Tania Sengupta Colin Thom Robin Wilson

WORKING PAPERS / ARCHITECTURAL HISTORY MA 2017–2018

Working Papers Architectural History MA Symposium + Book Launch

Keynote speakers: Felicity D. Scott (Columbia University)

Helen Hills (University of York)

Joy Sleeman (Slade, UCL)

26 October 2018 10.00 – 17.00 Room G.12, The Bartlett School of Architecture, 22 Gordon Street This event is free and open to all.

Tickets required, booking via Eventbrite.

INTRODUCTION

15

Soviet Housing Architecture in Russian Cinema, 1970-2017

Elena Agafonova 16

WORKING PAPERS / ARCHITECTURAL HISTORY MA 2017–2018

After the Second World War, mass prefabricated construction set out to solve the housing problem in Europe, particularly in eastern European countries, and to this day it remains the cheapest way to solve largescale housing problems. This type of mass-produced building made a strong impact on the urban scene and changed the character of entire cities. The Soviet government extensively utilised this scheme beginning in the 1960s, building thousands of these blocks across the country, resulting in the creation of many homogeneous residential districts.

Today, these districts still form a significant part of the housing in postSoviet areas, with the majority of Moscow’s periphery built up from prefabricated large-panel housing blocks, part of a ‘soviet leftover’.

Beginning during the Thaw era, this type of housing solution reached a status of mass application in Late Socialism and continued until after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. The residential blocks of the Soviet era were typologically close to Western social housing but were completely different in their social nature. This dissertation aims to track the shift in perception of high-rise housing in suburban districts of Moscow by means of analysing Soviet and post-Soviet films. It will provide an answer for how the image of Soviet housing in cinematography transformed over this period, what lay behind the images of housing in films and what social changes are reflected through them.

Films partake in a historical semiosis. Not only reflecting but also actively participating, they create a cultural lexicon of images and symbols that people can use to express their feelings as well as develop societal norms and habits. Through the prism of Soviet state-funded cinematography, this dissertation traces the images created during this period and their imposition on society as social clichés. Through the second prism of post-Soviet time, this work looks at how these

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images were transformed. In particular, it analyses the internationallyacclaimed movie Elena, directed by Andrey Zvyagintsev, in order to examine how the director made use of images of housing to highlight social and cultural issues, as well as the way these images were juxtaposed to ideological images of the Soviet period. This research includes an exploration of Soviet housing architecture at the intersection of ideology, anthropology and sociology in the wider context of Russian cinema and is an attempt to identify certain trends in the representation of mass housing in cinematography through a close visual analysis of several films. In order to do so, it dissects the on-screen presence of the buildings, the real history of these buildings, and the wider context driven by this imagery.

Firstly, this dissertation analyses the way housing was depicted in Russian films. It examines both the interior and exterior space and general built environment, as well as the protagonists: their ages, genders, occupations and education levels, alongside their interaction with the architecture of the housing. Secondly, it investigates the history of these buildings, focusing on their typologies, floor plans and elevations, comparing images of the building at the time of shooting with the present day, the demography of dwellers of these buildings during the time of filming, and finally how the residents interacted with the buildings. When analysing housing images as constructed by these films, this dissertation considers the filmmaking instruments used by the directors, the connotations they created and their effect on how the films were perceived by contemporary critics. Finally, this dissertation refers to the Soviet and post-Soviet social architectural processes that were reflected by these films, drawing connections between the political and ideological states of the time and how they influenced the image construction.

In the Soviet era, the visual image of Moscow’s dormitory districts

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corresponded to the ideological order of power but additionally reflected the mood of Soviet intelligentsia by means of Aesopian language. When Thaw-era optimism was replaced by stagnation and depression in Soviet society in the 1970s, cinema reproduced these changes as well. The urban environment of new mass housing quickly turned into a common background and became an illustration of vnenahodimost.

2

The portrait of Moscow apartments in Russian cinematography reflects a self-identification and relationship of Soviet intelligentsia with the state. The internal immigration and escapism were proclaimed in The Irony of Fate (1970s), class stratification of the Soviet society became an important theme of Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears (1980s) and the hierarchy of consumption and housing inequality made The Courier (1990s) into a cult movie during the Perestroika period. PostPerestroika cinema started portraying mass housing as a Soviet leftover, echoing the deep social and economic downturn of the 1990s as well as the relationship held by citizens to their recent past. By the end of the 2000s, first-generation wealthy Russians had become increasingly conscious of the need to legitimise their social position by constructing a new narrative about themselves and their past. Films were now used as an intellectual and emotional construct to display or distort the public version of a certain social formation.

In parallel to the emergence of luxury residential buildings for the new elite, Russian cinema began to discuss the huge inequality in Russian society by showing Moscow’s dormitory outskirts as a home for unsuccessful, low-income and poorly educated residents. Two of Moscow’s outskirts were chosen by Russian films as possessing particularly recognizable visual features. First Chertanovo, due to its Exemplary Residential housing architecture, and later Biryulyovo, with its industrial view of the power plant and the riots of 2013. Both areas

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were epitomized by cinematography as Moscow’s version of a ghetto.

The contrast between a bourgeois centre and the socially unsettled problematic periphery showed in Russian cinema is an important part of the new narrative for the Russian bourgeoisie and could be a source of permanent frustration for 90% of Muscovites, who were born, live and will live in similar mass housing developments of ‘Soviet Moscow’.

WP

NOTES 1 The period in Soviet history which is following the ‘Thaw’, and usually referred to as the ‘Brezhnev Era’, covers the period of Leonid Brezhnev's rule of the USSR from 1964 to 1982. This period began with high economic growth and soaring prosperity, but gradually significant problems in social, political, and economic areas accumulated, so that it is often described as the ‘Era of Stagnation’.

2 The concept of vnenakhodimost was defined by Yourchak in his book Everything Was Forever, until It Was No More: the Last Soviet Generation. He describes it as the appearance in the soviet society another kind of freedom, the freedom of being inside and outside the system at the same time. Andres Kurg, ‘Interview with Alexei Yurchak’. ARTMargins Online, 5 June 2014, www.artmargins.com/index.php/5interviews/736-interview-with-alexei-yurchak (accessed 25 August, 2018).

3 Exemplary Perspective Residential Area is an official name for the housing of Northern Chertanovo. It was built in 1975-1982 to the south-west of Moscow, combined advanced construction technologies with architectural and engineering ideas of late Soviet modernism of ideological and material formation for the ‘residential district of the near future’, which could become a main structural unit of the city.

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A still from the film The Irony of Fate, Eldar Ryazanov, 1975

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Mercado 4 in Asunción, Paraguay: Street shops as enablers of everyday activities

Martin Alvarez 22

WORKING PAPERS / ARCHITECTURAL HISTORY MA 2017–2018

The street shops in Mercado 4 in Asunción, Paraguay, have conformed to a very unique urban environment ever since the first vendors appropriated the streets sometime during the past century. The lack of official records and a very profound interest in the microcosms created by every little shop built out of wood, metal and tarpaulin motivated a spatial investigation of the stalls. They differentiate themselves from shops located inside the brick and mortar buildings that coexist with them in the market, providing a distinctive perceptual experience through colours, patterns, smells, and labyrinths.

1

Two main arguments are proposed throughout this dissertation: First, that there is more value in the study of present, everyday occurrences in the market instead of trying to circumscribe them into the limits of traditional history by finding a beginning, an evolution and a predictable future for the processes; and second, that the architecture and the spaces that are reconfigured every day in the streets either allow or thwart activities in the market.

To this end, Michel Foucault’s notion of ‘event’ is employed, as understood by Farzaneh Haghighi in Is the Tehran Bazaar Dead?

Foucault, Politics and Architecture. The ‘event’ can be considered a complex, present occurrence that has effects in and is affected by the material world. Even though Foucault does not provide a clear concept of ‘event’, he employs it both as a concept and as a method during the course of his literary work. First, during his archaeological phase, as a concept that breaks the continuity of a traditional historical timeline.

Second, during his subsequent genealogical phase, as a method in which it appears more like a process and a transformation than an abrupt rupture.

By employing the idea of ‘event’, two widespread perceptions are challenged: one that is accepted in the Paraguayan academic field, that

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tries to solve the problems of the market by attempting to circumscribe its complexities into the rigid limits of discursive formations; and another belonging to the street vendors themselves, who state that they are undergoing a period of crisis. Three events are proposed to challenge both views: the appropriation of the streets by shop owners, the everyday restacking of goods, and the conflict that takes place every day between different actors.

The appropriation of the streets by the vendors evolved from the settlement of a few wooden boxes and baskets with umbrellas as protection from the heat and rain, to today’s wooden and metal stalls, thanks to the persistence of the street sellers and their pressure to get recognised by the municipality, which eventually resulted in the demarcation of spaces for every vendor with yellow lines painted on the streets. Today, the wood, metal and tarpaulin of every shop create narrow spaces that condition the way in which the goods are exhibited, showcasing every vendor’s ability to arrange the products and make the most out of limited spaces. Other enabled practices include the mobility of the sellers’ bodies inside the shops; the mobility of the shoppers through the pathways in between the stalls; the capacity of a shopper passing by to stop, reach and grab something that caught their attention to determine if it is worth buying; the protection of goods, sellers and buyers from the heat and the rain, and so on.

3

The everyday restacking of goods showcases the role of chance in creating spaces in the market. Every night when the market closes, the vendors that cannot close and lock their stalls have to take down what was not sold and store it in metal or wooden cabinets, which means that the next morning they have to restack the products. This also means that what was seen today will not be seen in the same way tomorrow, allowing for the ‘not-yet-seen’, ‘not-yet-experienced’, and ‘not-yetthought’ to emerge. When restacking the goods, most vendors agree

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that the main factor they consider is visibility. The products need to be seen in order for the potential buyer to stop, ask for their price, touch them, feel them, even smell them, and eventually buy them. Therefore, the street shops of the market are daily producers of the unknown, of the unexpected, of spatial surprises, of random events; and the act of selling is highly tied with notions of spatiality and visibility.

Finally, the third event revolves around conflict and power relations.

Conflict between the street sellers themselves involves the notion of visibility, combined with the amount of space available for the sellers to exhibit their goods. The more available space, the more prospects of selling because the visibility of the products improves. Conflict arises when the limits of each shop are trespassed. Another type of conflict takes place with the owners of shops inside brick and mortar buildings.

They claim that the street shops take away the visibility of their façades, therefore reducing their ability to catch the buyers’ attention and their selling prospects. Finally, there is conflict with the authority: the municipality tries to regulate what can and cannot be built, with mild success in the midst of constant challenges from the vendors: they keep using tarpaulin to protect themselves, the goods and the visitors from heat and rain, despite the danger it represents being highly flammable.

Conflict, as an event, allows for the everyday power relations to come to light. These power relations configure architecture and space and vice versa, at the same time conditioning what activities are allowed or denied.

In all three events there is a constant negotiation involving space and its configurations. Therefore, the dissertation is primarily a spatial analysis of the streets of the market, where materiality, chance and power relations come together in constructing a unique urban environment.

The study of the events in the present proves to have more significance than trying to circumscribe the processes in the market inside of

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discursive formations, and points to the spatial value created by the street shops, that in turn makes the visitor stop and potentially buy. In other words, the everyday spatial configuration of the market streets enables the exchange, which is the core activity of the market.

This everyday approach, focused on materiality, spatiality and visibility in the streets of the market represents a new perspective to study an urban construction of this type in a Paraguayan context. The ‘event’ as proposed by Foucault provides a unique method to analyse similar complexities not only in an urban scale but also in a smaller scale, proving to be useful in analysing architecture and its effects on bodies in the present, leaving behind traditional explorations in architectural history that try to unravel the architect’s initial ideas and label the buildings inside of stylistic classifications.

WP

NOTES 1

Mercado 4 means ‘Market number 4’ in Spanish.

2 Farzaneh Haghighi, Is the Tehran Bazaar Dead? Foucault, Politics and Architecture (Newcastle Upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2018), 146–147.

3 Ibid., 151. According to the author, the event erupts for Foucault when chance allows for the not-yet-seen, not-yet-experienced and not-yet-thought to emerge.

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Mercado 4: Appropriation, restacking and conflict come together in the everyday shaping of spaces, Rocío González Orué, photograph, 2018

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Gender and the City: Korean Women in Gangnam. Correlations between the Gangnam District in Seoul and the tropes of Korean Women from 1970 to 2018

Soo Jin Cho 28

WORKING PAPERS / ARCHITECTURAL HISTORY MA 2017–2018

The subject of gender has become a major issue in today’s Korean society. After a misogyny hate crime on 17 May 2016, the movement for women’s rights gained more momentum than ever before. This phenomenon seems to have affected recent research on women, gender, and sexuality in South Korea. Even though results such as the Special Act on Sexual Violence (1994) and the abolition of Hoju-je (2005) were achieved, the women’s movement was pushed back from the public eye because of what were considered more urgent issues in Korea at the time, such as the independence movement or democratic movement. However, the women’s movement entered a new phase with the online mobilisation in the 2000s and, in the present, women who experienced the Gangnam hate crime (2016) and the abolition of illegal abortion (2017) are beginning to speak out in public space beyond the Internet.

The field of architecture is not extraneous to this current growing interest in gender. With the positional progress made by Korean female experts in the architectural field, there has been an increasing focus on women/femininity as a significant research subject when compared to prior approaches that were limited to the rights of female professionals in the field. Although considerable research has been devoted to investigating the relationship between gender and space, relatively less attention has been paid to the correlation between women’s rights (social status) and space. The recent women’s movement and social concern about feminism in Korea might need to be understood in light of the social position of women in space.

This dissertation investigates the correlation between gender and urban space in the modern city. Focusing on the Gangnam District of Seoul from the 1970s to the 1990s, the tropes of Korean women portrayed by the media and the changing urban structures and organisations are examined through social-geographic theories. Looking into the

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relationship between gendered representation and urban space, the financial power of Gangnam women and how it has influenced Korean women’s power and rights is discussed. Furthermore, the rights of Korean women today are explained but also questioned as not being true rights in terms of gender equality. Then, recent social actions depolyed by women in urban space, to attain their rights and identities in the streets of Gangnam are examined.

Korean women were granted gender roles in private space to contribute to national modernisation. The authorities on one hand, and media on the other, oppressed and reproduced women by using the dichotomy of space. Women were framed as ideal Korean women by being nice wives and good mothers who stayed at home and supported the public domain constituted by their husbands, the government, and other males, such as workplace bosses. However, women started to alter these preconceived notions and to broaden their area to public space such as streets and stores after entering the Gangnam area. Gangnam was formed by male-dominated powers and women found ways to conduct their roles in this space. The conciliatory policies applied to transform the Gangnam area into an economic and education centre became significant factors, allowing Gangnam women to broaden their social positions to public space based on financial power. Their effect on society helped develop Gangnam as a desirable place that attracted the middle and upper class. However, in doing so, Gangnam women were represented negatively with terms such as ‘speculation’, ‘obtrusion’, ‘extravagance’, and ‘grooming’ by the media and society.

This stereotype of ‘Gangnam-themed women’ that both influenced and was desired by women in other parts of the country is discussed in this dissertation. Gangnam women’s gender identity which was constructed by home life and consumption tends to extend social prejudices towards the general female population. This prejudice is not only a vestige of traditional Confucian norms but also a historical and

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social product of ‘Korean-style modernisation’.

Although Korean women gained power and social status, the observation of women’s financial power consuming public space implanted the fantasy of women’s rights being achieved. However, women’s rights and gender equality have not even reached medium standards in Korea. The female worker has been regarded as secondary and subordinate to the male breadwinner. Nevertheless, public space, especially the streets, is changing into a place for political issues and the struggle to convey women’s contentions to the public and the authorities today. Korean society is working its way towards gender equality and women’s safety and rights. These issues have caught the eye of the general public, both male and female, and the ever-changing situation has to be closely observed for further progress.

This paper attempts to study the issue of women’s rights and social position through the relationship between fluctuating women’s tropes and urban space. However, there is a limitation in that the study could not cover female workers and prostitutes who are important subjects in terms of women’s rights as well as in the modernisation of Korea.

Moreover, the stereotype of Gangnam women could not represent all Korean women from the 1970s to the 1990s although Gangnam women did have a huge impact on other women. The interrelationship between other Korean women and space needs to be further studied to grasp the full problem of gender inequality. Investigating the abovementioned historical correlations might be meaningful to understand the present conditions and reasons behind gender problems today, as well as research on current women’s movements. Further studies are needed on Korean women in public spaces, conducted with an interdisciplinary approach in order to identify Korean women’s factual rights.

WP

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NOTES 1 A young woman was attacked and killed on 17 May 2016 in the public toilet of a karaoke building near Gangnam Station by a male stranger. The culprit confessed that he targeted a female victim since he suffered from delusions of persecution, imagining that women ignored and abhorred him.

2 The patriarchal family system, or Hoju-je, is an administrative structure that forms and maintains an ideological assembly with the patriarch as its centre, and inherits this family to his immediate male descendant. In other words, it provides the legal instruments needed to form a family group around the male decendants of the family and perpetuate it for the generations to come.

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A still from the film BokBoIn, Im Kwon-taek, 1980

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The Archeology of Networks: Reimagining the Infrastructural Network of the Indus Valley Civilisation with Dholavira as a Portal

Krishna Dadawala 34

WORKING PAPERS / ARCHITECTURAL HISTORY MA 2017–2018

‘India is the cradle of the human race, the birthplace of human speech, the mother of history, the grandmother of legend, and the great grandmother of tradition. Our most valuable and most artistic materials in the history of man are treasured up in India only!’ — Mark Twain, 1897 India has a long and often uninterrupted history that is undoubtedly unique in many ways. When asked to describe ‘India’, Western acquaintances convey predictable attributes: lively cultural rituals, colourful ceremonies, vast population, diverse religions, elephants, snake charmers, the Taj Mahal, Prime Minister Narendra Modi, spicy food, palaces, temples and the Himalayas. It is telling that no one mentions the Indus Valley Civilisation. Apart from the common modern view, ‘India’ is much more than a country of diversity: it was a cradle to one of the three most ancient civilisations, dating back to the third millennium BC. Mark Twain wrote the above quote in his scrapbook collection entitled A Tramp Abroad, 1891–1901. His statement, then still mythical, turned factual after the initial discovery in 1921–22 of the sites of the ancient Indus Valley Civilisation, then in British-controlled India, and after the 1947 partition between India and Pakistan. The discovery of Harappan Culture was not accidental: archaeology in India gained major importance after the British Crown assumed imperial rule following the failed 1857 Indian Rebellion. Under the leadership of the Union Ministry of Education, the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) came formally into being in 1862, with Alexander Cunningham as the first Archaeological Surveyor of India. This body was closely connected to British domination over the Indian Raj, given the empire’s need to gather and order information about its newly acquired territories.

After the 1920s finds, India’s archaeological horizons expanded

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considerably during the course of the twentieth century, as further research revealed the depth and richness of its ancient past. By the mid-century, after India's independence in 1947, the focus turned increasingly to questions of pre-history and proto-history. However, this interest in India’s ancient architecture was not long-lasting. More recently, as the nation seeks to promote heritage conservation, tourist development and a contemporary cultural identity within a rapidly changing and globalising world, it is the buildings of the later eras that play a far larger role in twenty-first century Indian archaeology.

As a result, the Indus Valley Civilisation is now to a very large extent neglected, even forgotten, and therefore this dissertation seeks to ask why this is and what might be done to remedy the situation. Sources for the dissertation include the archives of the British Library (India Office Records), newspaper and magazine articles about Dholavira (from India and Britain) and close discussion with an Indian archaeologist, K. Krishnan, who has worked extensively on the site of Dholavira.

4

The Indus Valley Civilisation, named after the rich plains of the major river that flows through the region, is also widely known as the Harappan Civilisation, after the first excavated site, Harappa, in 1921–22. It is in fact the most extensive of the world’s three primary civilisations, yet also the least known and studied. Even today, very little is known precisely about its actual inhabitants or their social, economic, political and religious institutions. This might be due to the nature of the materials unearthed, which do not enable archaeologists to comment much further. What we do know from the number of cities that have been excavated, and the dating of the structures and objects found, is that the heyday of the civilisation was during the Bronze Age, from around 2600–1900 BC, often called the Mature Harappan Period.

As mentioned, it was British colonial archaeologists who were most keen on exploring this newfound trove of treasure, enthusiastically

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digging out the major cities of this civilisation. The figures that were most important in this archaeological wave within the region were Alexander Cunningham, Sir John Marshall and Sir Mortimer Wheeler.

To date around 1,500 cities have been discovered, the major ones being Harappa, Mohenjo-Daro, Rakhigarhi, Kalibangan, Rupar/Ropar, Ganweriwala, Lothal and Dholavira.

We have some idea about how people lived in the Indus Valley Civilisation, and of facets of their culture, especially in terms of agriculture, trade, technology, art, religion and—most remarkable of all—their extraordinary sophistication in urban planning. But three decades of increasingly promising archaeology were hampered by the partition of the subcontinent into India and Pakistan in 1947. As a result of the partition, the two major sites of the Indus Valley Civilisation— Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro—are now part of Pakistan, whereas smaller ancillary sites are scattered throughout northwestern India.

This political division, thus, not only formed two distinct countries, but also fenced apart the entire Harappan Civilisation into what are now treated more or less as individual cities.

From this situation comes the urge to reunite these ancient cities and reestablish the infrastructural networks that once held them tight. What happens if we look again at the sites of these cities as part of an entire civilisational circuit? Of the main cities mentioned above, Dholavira is the prime focus in this dissertation. The reason for choosing Dholavira as the portal to understand the bigger network is mainly because of my familiarity with the particular site and my previous involvement in understanding its tangible and intangible heritage. Secondly, it is the most recently excavated Indus Valley Civilisation city in India, which means that it is still a reasonably fresh area of research that might help shape the wider discussion as it is still ongoing. As is the case in other national archaeological sites, the Indian government plays a major

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role within Dohlavira, alongside the Ministry of Culture, Ministry of Education, mass media and above all, the Archaeological Survey of India. Each of these organisations/bodies can be further broken down into smaller agencies that have clear and hermitic roles within the network. A situation so airtight that there is no space for new players to enter, thus hampering the evolution of archaeological investigations on the site. By stratifying these agencies into Political, Institutional, Physical and Social, the aim of this dissertation is to explore new permutations and combinations so as to propose a new network that can enhance the archaeological discipline and discussions around the field. It does so in a way that is accessible to everyday citizens—who are, after all, the most important stakeholders in the matter.

WP

NOTES 1 Mythical because Mark Twain stated it between 1891–1901, whereas the Indus Civilisation was discovered in the 1920s by John Marshall.

2 India Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Archaeology in India (New Delhi: Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Govt. of India, 1967), 17.

3 Nayanjot Lahiri, Finding forgotten cities: How the Indus Civilization was discovered (London, New York, Calcutta: Seagull Books, 1967), 3.

4 3000-1600 BC is the entire span of the civilisation but to this day the archaeologists and researchers have not been able to agree entirely on these dates: each source offers a slightly different timespan.

5 India Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Archaeology in India. 1861: Alexander Cunningham was declared the first archaeological surveyor of India. 1901: Sir John Marshall was appointed Director General of the Archaeological Survey of India. 1921: Sir John Marshall dug out Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro. 1944: Sir Mortimer Wheeler was appointed Director General of ASI. 6 Rama D. Datta, Indus Valley Civilization (New Delhi and Calcutta: Oxford and IBH Publishing Co PVT. LTD., 1996).

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Derelict state of Indian Archaeology, Author's own photo, 2016

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Surreal Health Centres: Dell and Wainwright’s Complex Photographic Modernity

Nancy Elder 40

WORKING PAPERS / ARCHITECTURAL HISTORY MA 2017–2018

This research looks at the particularly strange quality of Dell and Wainwright’s photographs of Finsbury Health Centre and The Pioneer Health Centre and traces how these come about. Dell and Wainwright’s photographs accompanied the media coverage of both projects' opening and their photographic methods adhered to movements in European modern photography as well as the ideals of modern architecture. Yet unconsciously, their images resonate with critical strands of European surrealism. What is revealed in the photographs differs from the original intentions of all of those involved in their production and presentation. They become disturbingly critical representations of what were considered to be two progressive and socially beneficial modern health centres.

Within historiographic accounts of the Pioneer Health Centre, opened in 1935, and Finsbury Health Centre, opened in 1938, the projects have mainly been considered in terms of their architecture, socio-medical innovation and commitment to social improvement.

Although established on two different conceptions of healthcare, both centres aimed to provide a progressive solution to issues of urban modernity. The Pioneer Health Centre aimed to strengthen the fitness of a deprived nation whilst re-establishing the benefits of the familiar village-like community within the modern urban context.

Finsbury Health Centre provided up-to-date healthcare free of charge to some of the poorest members of the working class and became a symbolic embodiment of a better, healthier future British society.

In writing about Dell and Wainwright’s photography, Robert Elwall and Valeria Carullo acknowledge the eeriness and sinister quality of Dell and Wainwrights photographs. Yet they primarily focus upon the modernity of Dell and Wainwright’s photographic methods and how these complimented the formal and theoretical attributes of modern architecture. Such qualities could be exploited by the editors of the

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Architectural Review (AR) who used Dell and Wainwrights photographs as a significant component to their campaign during the 1930s to gain widespread support for British modernism.

While itself the product of an automatic process, the photograph is far more than a mere reproduction of the real insomuch as it holds an interpretative quality. It is the result of chance encounters, or in Susan Sontag’s terms, ‘a loose cooperation (quasi-magical, quasi-incidental) between photographer and subject—mediated by an even simpler and more automated machine.’ Sontag considers it the only form of artistic production to be ‘natively surreal.’ It is the very production of the uncanny, picturing the real and making it strange, making the familiar unfamiliar. By taking photography as its primary object, this dissertation provides a new way of seeing architectural space that goes against dominant trends in historiography. It reveals how the intentions of those involved in the production of both architecture and photographs transformed photographic representations of real medical environments, in a way that unconsciously relays something else.

Through a process one might describe as automatic writing, my thesis begins by engaging with the photographs on a primarily sensational level. Through it I fuse the artist Paul Nash’s style of surrealist narrative with the modernist, technological interiors of the health centres that take the reader on an imaginative journey through the spaces purely as they are portrayed in the photographs. Dell and Wainwright’s photographs can be read to provide an alternative and distinctly unsettling impression of the health centres. The interiors of both appear banal and hostile, overwhelmingly open and sparse or oppressively enclosed. Objects are attributed an unsettling sense of significance and autonomy, whilst the representation of the spaces’ physicality appears illogical, confusing and disorientating. Abstracted

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from the theoretical contexts within which they are usually considered, the photographic representations speak for themselves, no longer considered purely as a ‘mutually reinforcing’ reference to the ideas put forth in the articles that accompanied them.

The dissertation draws together architectural historical understan­ dings of both health centres, the photographic developments that led to the production of a very particular aesthetic and the socio-historical and editorial context within which the photographs were reproduced in the AR. It reveals how these elements converge within Dell and Wainwright’s photographic representations of both health centres in a way that resonates with surrealism’s particularly disconcerting themes. Situated within intentionally factual representations of social and medical environments, the eeriness produced by Dell and Wainwright’s working methods becomes powerfully disturbing.

Rather than portraying the sociable and mentally uplifting qualities that the editors of the AR and subsequent historians describe—or the ‘better future’ that modern production of space was allowing for—, the photographs provide an implicit critique of modern architectural space. They reveal the propensity for disorientation of architectural modernism through its confusing spatial ambiguity and unsettling monotony. The structural rigidity and architectural simplicity of rational functionalism appear brutal and inhuman, and the presence of the machine appears ominously pertinent. Drawing largely on the works of Anthony Vidler, David Pinder, Laura Rosenstock, Franklin Rosemont and Sigmund Freud’s understanding of the uncanny, an analysis of Dell and Wainwright’s interior photographs of Finsbury Health Centre and The Pioneer Health Centre reveals how they provide a representation of contemporary modern anxiety, a critique of modernity's effects of alienation, dislocation and rootlessness, and a conveyance of the suspected threat of the machine.

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A light from beyond the curtain coats the room in a silver glow. Curtains turned solid white, shadows frozen behind semi translucent walls, the mirror glass turned liquid molten.

Here the serenity has a subtle irony to it, holding the room and its subjects within an eerie stillness. Forms appear clarified, perfectly realised in a way that transcends the capabilities of worldly matter. Yet the strange beauty of this silvery world appears ominous somehow. With their metal limbs glinting in the strange, unnatural light, the patients await their treatment in the cubicles under the close scrutiny of their mechanical attendants. The scene is vaguely sinister, the unfamiliarity of these beings is faintly terrifying. Even the presence of the mundane and ordinary seems poignant. The chair, hauntingly empty, poses as a disquieting symbol of the rooms lack. The tap of the sink arches elegantly, its black form defined against the white of the wall. It remains poised, silently still but heavy with meaning.

WP

NOTES 1 Elizabeth Darling, Re-forming Britain: Narratives of Modernity before Reconstruction (London & New York: Routledge, 2007).

2 Valeria Carullo, ‘Image makers of British modernism, Dell and Wainwright at The Architectural Review’ The Journal of Architecture 21, 7 (2016): 10–12.

3

Susan Sontag, On Photography (London: Penguin Books, 2008), 53.

4

Ibid., 51.

5 Robert Elwall, Photography Takes Command: The Camera and British Architecture 1890–1939 (London: RIBA Heinz Gallery, 1994), 127.

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Finsbury Health Centre’s foot clinic, Dell and Wainwright, 1938. RIBA Architecture Image Library

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The Performance of the Page as a Site of Architectural Discourse

Fariha Faruque 46

WORKING PAPERS / ARCHITECTURAL HISTORY MA 2017–2018

In her book Site-Writing: The Architecture of Art Criticism, Jane Rendell asserts the importance of the page as a potent instrument of architectural criticism: [A]rt critics are also beginning to consider the possibilities that the medium of their work affords, but as yet, although many have written about the spatial potential of writing, fewer have actively exploited its textual and material possibilities, the patterning of words on a page, the design of a page itself—its edges, boundaries, thresholds, surfaces, the relation of one page to another—or wondered what it would mean for criticism to take on new forms—those of art, film or even architecture.

While architecture is perceived through its materials, spaces, forms and details, it is explained, illustrated and disseminated almost entirely through its representation on media. The page as a surface of representation—with all its graphical notations, materiality, textuality, imagery and ‘intrusion of visual form’ into its spatial extensions—plays a powerful role in communicating to the reader what it documents. The page is, therefore, not only a medium of documentation, but a dynamic plane of performance that becomes a site of architectural history and criticism.

In this dissertation, the page is examined as an active site of architectural discourse. The content of the subject matter is studied through its relation to the graphics of the page on which it is documented, thus exploring new ways of understanding the work. In order to understand the role of the page as a medium of architectural representation and criticism, this dissertation engages with published and unpublished works of Alison and Peter Smithson, who were not only the key propagators of a radically new movement,

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‘New Brutalism’, but, despite having few built projects, produced an extensive archive of meticulously composed and documented writings which deployed graphical annotations on the page to divulge important architectural issues. By studying the graphical and interactive qualities of their pages, a number of questions are addressed: how did the Smithsons’ ideologies influence the graphical presentation, reflecting their viewpoints and manifesting their persona? How did their representation on the pages across different platforms translate onto the pages of the journal, thus reflecting the complexity of their relationship with publications such as the Architectural Review (AR) and Architectural Design (AD)? How does the graphic scheme of the page elucidate the concepts of the subject matter and generate new ways of understanding architectural history?

By interrogating the role of the page in architectural representation, this dissertation thus aims to form a holistic understanding of architectural discourses prevailing in post-war Britain.

The Smithsons propounded the ‘as found’ aesthetic through their built and written works, exploring the ways in which the ‘ordinariness of everyday’ aspects could be evident in architecture. Their developing awareness towards different environmental and technological aspects influencing architecture, such as the automobile, climate and social cohesion, would translate onto the surface of the page through various graphical notations, aimed at communicating to the reader their theories and principles of designs. To investigate this relationship between their architectural perspectives and the performance of their pages, the Smithson’s CIAM 10 scroll and the pages of Alison Smithson’s books, AS in DS: An Eye on the Road and Imprint of India are critically examined, exploring new ways of understanding the subject matter in relation to architectural history and theory.

At the CIAM 10 conference in Dubrovnik in 1956, the Smithsons gave

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each member of Team 10 a metre-long scroll that was designed in their symptomatic graphics, combing cluster diagrams, ideograms and texts to communicate a unified language of architectural treatise.

Likening the surface of the scroll to a physical architectural site, the Smithsons made their erratic graphics on the page analogous to the ‘random aesthetic’ of their proposed irregular town patterns. With a growing interest in urban design, the Smithsons attention extended to post-industrial developments that were beginning to change the relationship between people and location. During the 1970s–80s, Alison Smithson wrote AS in DS: An Eye on the Road, relating the sensibility of a passenger in a moving vehicle to the picturesque postindustrial landscape. Highlighting the linkage between automobiles, architecture and ecology in a post-industrial society, she transformed the page into a site of spatial hierarchies of texts, drawings and photographs. Eventually, with a heightened awareness of the environment, the Smithsons’ attention broadened towards climate and location, which led Alison Smithson to write Imprint of India in 1994, narrating a young British girl’s experience of travel in India.

With an overlay of ‘as found’ images, drawings and textuality, the pages of Imprint in India become a trope for the various overlapping impacts of environment, climate, culture and locality on a person, which in turn influence the built environment.

The Smithsons’ use of the page reflects their ‘as found’ aesthetic of the ordinariness of daily life, not just through written descriptions but perhaps primarily through the raw qualities of their graphics, which continuously evolved along their expanding sensibilities. Through characteristic semiology, the Smithsons conveyed architectural philosophies while also underlining the ongoing architectural debates of the time. This performative role of the page, created through the abstraction of ideologies, is key in obtaining a holistic perception of the subject matter and its context, enabling new ways

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of comprehending architectural history and theory.

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Architectural representations are in perpetual shift between the ‘status of artefacts and the delineation of processes’. The Smithsons' performative graphics transformed the page layout work into productions of art, simultaneously demarcating the distinct emergent architectural ideologies regarding war, social relations, mobility and climate, as the CIAM 10 scroll, AS in DS and Imprint of India illustrate. Performative representation engenders thus a shift from ‘the architectural object to the architectural system’, which shows that beside pragmatic, building or functional requirement, architecture is also ‘the “image” or “symbolic expression” of a society that defines itself in scientific terms’. This symbolic expression takes over the surface of the page, transforming it into an extraordinary site of architectural discourse and a dynamic space of performance.

WP

NOTES 1 Jane Rendell, Site-Writing: The Architecture of Art Criticism (London and New York: IB Taurus, 2010), 17.

2 Ric Allsopp, ‘Itinerant Pages: The Page as Performance Space’, Performance Research, 9, 2 (2004): 4.

3 Steve Parnell, ‘Alison Smithson (1928-1993) and Peter Smithson (1923-2003)’, Architectural Review, January 2012.

4 David Robbins (ed.), The Independent Group: Postwar Britain and the Aesthetics of Plenty (London and Cambridge: MIT Press), 242–3.

5 Alison Smithson, AS in DS: An Eye on the Road (Delft: Delft University Press, 1983) and Alison Smithson, Imprint of India (London: AA Publications, 1994).

6 Pari Riahi, ‘Expanding the Boundaries of Architectural Representation’, The Journal of Architecture, 22, 5 (2017): 823–4.

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Excerpt from: AS in DS: An Eye on the Road, Alison Smithson, 1983. The Smithson Family Collection. Source: Delft University Press

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A Hut Above the Clouds: A drawing about making drawings, accuracy and instrumentality in 1820s London

Stephannie Fell 52

WORKING PAPERS / ARCHITECTURAL HISTORY MA 2017–2018

During the summer of 1821, a man climbs 415 feet (127 metres) daily in order to make a drawing of the city of London from ‘the summit of St Paul’s’. In addition to the 616 steps that comprise the regular ascent to the Golden Gallery of the Cathedral, Thomas Hornor, a Yorkshire land surveyor, architect, landscape gardener and draughtsman, climbs four exterior hand-ladders perched to a scaffold built around the lantern to reach a platform above the ball and cross. On top of this platform, lies a hut of his own construction which he calls his ‘Observatory’. The aim of this construction, as stated in the opening lines of a self-published prospectus, is to house an apparatus by which he will produce ‘a full and accurate representation of the Metropolis, and all the surrounding country, from which the ball and cross of St. Paul’s are visible.’ The result of this endeavour, he announces, will be four engravings organised by cardinal points that amount to a linear extension of 140 inches (3,55 metres), along with one hundred street views to be offered in ten parts. The prospectus announced them both for late 1823.

The prints were first delayed to 1824, but in the end they were never produced. At some point between June 1823 and early 1824, Hornor appeared to revise his original intent. He was no longer producing four panoramic views, but a building, a panorama building to be more precise, designed by Decimus Burton and located on the southeast corner of Regent’s Park. Hornor’s story is full of ‘missing things’— it eventually ends with his own disappearance in 1829—, yet the publication of the prospectus with his ideas on image-making occurs at an interesting period. Before what French critic Jean-Louis Comolli terms ‘the frenzy of the visible’ of the second half of the nineteenth century, set off by the public announcement of the invention of argentic photography in 1839 and the ubiquity of image reproduction in periodicals as of 1841, mechanically re-produced images circulate within a circumscribed public realm: visual references and

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conventions of representation belonging to the sciences, literature and arts find in printshops and magazines a shared repository. Hornor publishes and circulates his story about making images by means of an image in 1823. Through it, he asserts the credibility of his quest and puts forward a notion of accuracy for his own attempt to render, what I will argue, are photographic images of the city.

Technical change is always an encounter of material innovation and a favourable environment. Alexandre Koyré argues that for modern technology to emerge, the tool had to be transformed into the instrument, that is, theory had to replace tradition as the guiding force behind technique. Drawing on his idea of accuracy and instrumentality, this dissertation contends that a specific notion of visual accuracy had to become desirable—a theoretical demand—for a technology of mechanically capturing images to become conceivable.

At the same time, the status of the drawing instrument had to shift from a mere aid, to a position in which its view could be equated with reliability, correctness and precision. What Hornor was trying to establish in his prospectus was the ‘correct value’ to which urban images were judged by the public. From his observatory, the city didn't conform to the picturesque renderings of panorama paintings, nor to the topographically exact but visually inaccurate representations of Merrian, Vischer or Hollar’s views of London. Urban reality, he claimed, was ‘intricate’, ‘detailed’ and geometrical, thus could be accurately captured and described pictorially with instruments.

Although Hornor’s observatory was portrayed above the clouds, it wasn’t intended for atmospheric measurements or the observation of celestial events. At the height of the balloonacy era, he was striving for what naturalists and literature figures alike historically described as the ‘all-encompassing view from above’, without sacrificing the ability to see the particulars in detail. He assured his readers that

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the technological solution to representing all the particulars in the extensive views rested in the application of an apparatus, ‘adapted for delineating the most complicated objects with perfect accuracy.’

Everything in the scene would be portrayed with the same accuracy, commanded not by the artist’s ideas but by the distance of the object to the instrument in the observatory. The image would emerge as a result of meticulous observation and delineation under the best possible conditions.

The scaffold gave Hornor not only an opportunity to rise a couple of feet above the popularly-accessible spot where he initially executed his drawings in 1820, but the opportunity to create a memorable image about making an image. His observatory image took on a life of its own. In subsequent reprints of the engraving, the promises of instrumental accuracy were embodied by the small hut above the clouds. In fact one could say the instrument is the visual protagonist in absentia of every image about the observatory. Always a closed box, a darkened room, a camera with an unrevealed interior. The observatory, against a blank background, shown simultaneously in a close-up from a slightly elevated vantage point, and at the top of the scaffold seen from below, becomes both a building and an object.

The scale in feet, the series of ‘parts’ referenced by the use of letters, resemble the drawings published by magazines like the London’s Mechanic’s Register. While his instrument might not have been an invention, it became a machine by being circulated as one in printed media.

Hornor’s balloon-observatory, that could view further and record ‘accurately’, was—unlike other instruments of the time and deployed from the Cathedral’s dome—not one for making maps, but for making images. Hornor’s visual accuracy was still a fictional narrative that started with the real as a medium in which to project theoretical

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thought, through the development of an instrument. One could contend, that between the shift in principles of scientific illustration that historians Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison identify between the eighteenth-century ‘truth to nature’, and the mid-nineteenthcentury ‘mechanical objectivity’ attained by the camera, there was an intermediate state in which a virtual ‘truth to instrument’ had to be championed. The praised mechanic virtues of the draughtman in his observatory would eventually become light-sensitive materials and lenses in a machine. But for the machine to be invented, the need to produce fac similes of the world, in all its intricacy and detail had first to become a cultural preoccupation. In this sense, Hornor’s story can be read then as a sign of the emergence of a cultural demand and the forthcoming dominion of the eye, in which a visual format founded upon instrumental veracity (‘truth to instrument’), mechanical reproducibility, and indexicality will become the primary mean of recording and transferring knowledge.

WP

NOTES 1 Hornor announced them by means of a prospectus that went through several print runs throughout 1822–23. He seems to have realized the importance of the scaffold, by changing first the title and then the cover image of subsequent editions.

See 1822 and 1823 editions of: Thomas Hornor, Prospectus. View of London, and the Surrounding Country, taken with Mathematical Accuracy from an Observatory purposely erected over the Cross of St. Paul’s Cathedral (London: T. Hornor, 1822/3).

2 On the illustrated press and architectural images see: Anne Hultzsch, Mari Hvattum (eds.), The Printed and the Built: Architecture, Print Culture and Public Debate in the Nineteenth Century (New York, NY: Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2018).

3 ‘Mr. Hornor’s View of London from Above St. Paul’s’, European Magazine, 83 (1823): 542.

4 An afterword: Throughout this research I haven’t found entirely conclusive proof that Hornor’s observatory existed. The common stance in architectural history is that it did. The event is described echoing Hornor’s Prospectus, validated by

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magazine publications in 1823­—which merely reproduced his story retrospectively— and accounts by his friend James Elmes and by ‘A Stranger’ in a 1823 newspaper article. There is no mention of him nor the observatory in London periodicals during the summer of 1821, in contrast to the ample coverage of the scaffold during the renovation of the ball and cross. But its existence notwistanding, the observatory illustrates how writing about images tends to focus on content, considering photography a transparent rendering of reality and eschewing the particular technical means by which the camera constructs its fiction of a ‘truer way of seeing’.

Exterior of Dome with Hornor’s Observatory, S. Rawle (engraver), engraving, 1823. Source: British Museum, Prints and Drawings Archive

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A Queer History of Enfield

Lucca Ferrarese 58

WORKING PAPERS / ARCHITECTURAL HISTORY MA 2017–2018

Those that pass through, visit, or, like myself, have resided their entire life in the North London Borough of Enfield may have initially been mesmerized by its boasted diversity. Throughout the suburban borough there are spatial indicators of identities that fall outside of the historically white, conservative, British, Christian and middle-class normative. At first glance, it seems every community is represented in some way or another: delicatessens selling Eastern European culinary delights; music festivals celebrating counter-culture British acid house and garage, to Ghanaian, UK afrobeat or Bangladeshi songwriting; plaques for the socio-historically conscious commemorating racial-equality activists, feminist poets and authors, Evangelical missionaries; parking spots for the professional football player’s sports car, and the dial-a-ride bus service stations next to them. If we take socio-spatial scholar Amos Rapoport’s hypothesis that, ‘[b]uildings and settlements are the visible expression of the relative importance attached to different aspects of life,’ Enfield’s built environment seems to embody all of its residents’ significant cultural, economic, and historical identities. However, it is with closer inspection that when taking into consideration people’s sexual identity, Enfield’s sociospatial condition seems to indicate an absence of anything but the heterosexual norm. If we are to take Rapoport and others’ claim that there isn’t a relationship between space and society, rather that ‘space is society’ seriously, are we to suspect that Enfield has not, and has never had, a queer history? In brief, this dissertation sets out to tackle three central issues: to represent a portion of Enfield’s queer spatial history, producing an object that has the ability to reify queer identity in the borough; to problematize the heteronormativity present in the architectural discourse that serves typology; and to demonstrate the consequences of relegating particular histories to the background.

Chapters 1 and 2, ‘The Archive’ and ‘Coffee Evenings’ respectively, situate their discussions predominantly around the 1970s, following

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the response of Enfield’s residents—homosexual and heterosexual alike—to the social and political movements regarding gay liberation.

Focusing on Bill Verity’s documentary Warhol (1973), and the Swedish film, More About The Language of Love (1970), directed by Torgny Wickman, Chapter 1 demonstrates that, historically, Enfield has rejected publicly visible queer representation, censoring objects that exhibit sexual difference. Those who identified as queer therefore had to manage the clashing of identities within the borough and as a consequence, Enfield became a site of tension: a person had to opt between outwardly performing any aspects of a queer identity and risking confrontation, or repressing this performance, restricting a redoubling of their sexual identity in the built environment.

Chapter 2 looks specifically at how and where the Enfield chapter of the Campaign for Homosexual Equality (CHE) were able to reappropriate or create space for themselves. Following the national model of CHE group formation, a large emphasis was placed on establishing ‘safe spaces’ in the community—spaces where members would be able to express themselves free of any exterior societal pressure or prejudice.

This chapter begins by examining how the Enfield group were able to subvert the hegemonic gendered and hetero-sexualised ideas of space by demonstrating their frequent use of two specific public locations: the Angel Community Centre, and the Jolly Butchers pub.

Having contextualized the socio-historical atmosphere towards gay liberation and representation since the 1970s in the previous chapter, this chapter turns to the necessity and role of private space—the home—in forming community and support networks. In doing so, this use of the home will show it as a site with potential to ‘queer’ the heteronormative expectations of what home can be, serving to problematize the heteronormativity present in the architectural discourse that serves typology. Through this exploration of the reappropriation of home as a private residential architectural identity to

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a ‘safe’ site for meetings—public in nature, but also held in private—a parallel queering of types in built-environment is performed. In this way, the power structure that emerges from the architect as an allknowing persona, and the State as an apparently benevolent social structure can be implicated as the creators of heteronormativity in the discourse surrounding built-environment.

Chapter 3, ‘The Individuals’, highlights the issues in placing too high a reliance on the visibility of queer identities when forming ‘a queer history’. Histories or experiences of identities that fall outside of the ‘neat course’ expected of queer sexualities—from repression, to coming-out narratives, followed by the liberation trajectory—have the potential to be further pushed to the background. As Robert Mills explains, ‘queer histories should also be alert to the role of queer identifications and desires of all kinds in the daily life of the city’. In understanding that the discourse on gender and sexuality is a relational construct, subject to cultural and temporal variation, this chapter employs a historical analysis of how Enfield residents Radclyffe Hall and Harry Lloyd were seen to queer the borough in their sociohistorical contexts, rather than to assign contemporary gender and sexual orientation identifications. Situating the discussion around feminist ideals of the late nineteenth century—a movement of ‘New Women’ who fought for autonomy, to stay single, defying traditional family and gender roles—it acknowledges how discourses on class and gender risk being lost in the production of a ‘queer history’.

Throughout this dissertation, mapping is used as a method to visually represent Enfield’s queer past. This builds upon growing work to increase public awareness of queer spatial histories, in particular, the National Heritage institution, Historic England’s Pride of Place: an interactive crowd-sourced map committed to bringing greater attention to histories of marginalised, under-researched and under-

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represented groups. At the time of writing, Enfield has a complete absence of contributions or findings. The interest in representation is more than just inclusivity within the realm of map making, rather it follows, as cultural theorist Lawrence Knopp has it, that ‘very real sexual [sic] interests are at stake here, in that those who benefit from certain codings are those whose particular sexual practices and preferences are privileged in those codings.’ Whilst this absence exists, the heterosexual image of Enfield continues to produce, reproduce, and influence social and sexual relations within the borough. Mapping Enfield’s queer history within this thesis acts as a correction to both Pride of Place’s absence of contributions, and to the cliché that has become all too familiar whilst researching this project, that: ‘perhaps you can’t find any material because the Borough doesn’t have any queer history’. Throughout the dissertation this map collects information that acts to dispute any claims of absence; its outcome is an object that provides an initial step towards spatially representing Enfield’s queer history.

WP

NOTES 1 Amos Rapoport, House Form and Culture (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1969), 47.

2 In particular Bill Hillier and Julienne Hanson's The Social Logic of Space that came in the last quarter of the century; and Thomas Markus’ 1993 Buildings and Power: Freedom and Control in the Origins of Modern Building Types which progressed the ideas that buildings are social objects, reinforce the structures of control in society and are tied to images of power.

3 Robert Mills, ‘Queer is Here? Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Histories and Public Culture’, History Workshop Journal, 62, 1 (2006): 259.

4 Lawrence Knopp, ‘Sexuality and Urban Space: a framework for analysis’, in, D. Bell and G. Valentine (eds.), Mapping Desire (London: Routledge, 1995), 153.

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Self Storage: An Archaeology of Contemporary Inhabitation in the United Kingdom

Emma Filippides 64

WORKING PAPERS / ARCHITECTURAL HISTORY MA 2017–2018

As the historic site for the cyclical process of inhabitation, the traditional domestic interior is defined by traits such as ownership, rootedness, stability, and long-term tenure. As such, personal identity comes to be closely mediated in association with the way material contents are displayed, stored, kept, or expelled from the home. Subject to the pressures of the housing market, the reality of contemporary inhabitation potentially undermines these traits. By nature of density and market demand, this fact is especially prominent in urban and suburban housing, both rented and privately owned.

While the domestic interior of today remains recognisably similar to historic examples, its conditions are notably less permanent, secure and adaptable.

It is no coincidence that the demand for storage has risen in relation to the increased pressure in the UK on housing of all kinds, a burden compounded with the effects of reduced space standards. If the domestic interior is the primary site for storage and these provisions are reduced to a minimum, the problem of the requirement for space still remains.

The self storage unit is rented month-to-month, secured by the customer’s own lock and key and accessible on a twenty-four hour basis. The individual self storage unit neighbours many others within the site of the self storage facility. Typically situated on the industrial outskirts of towns or cities in purpose-built steel warehouses, the typology of the self storage facility can appear innocuous in the urban landscape. In locations where space is a prized commodity, facilities are covertly situated in repurposed industrial buildings and underground car parks. In examining the architecture of this obscured and uninhabitable location for a household’s contents, contemporary storage practices can be explored at a material level.

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In weighing up the economics with the rituals of contemporary living, this dissertation interrogates the symbolism wrapped up in the way people inhabit, interpreting the phenomenon of self storage as a rational, economic solution to what is fundamentally an irrational and emotional problem. While the precarity of the contemporary home might demonstrate a failure of domestic ideals, the phenomenon of self storage offers a means through which these failures can be mediated at a monthly rate, fulfilling domestic storage requirements in place of the home. By approaching the domestic realm through its overspill into self storage, this thesis brings to light fundamental patterns in domestic inhabitation.

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If a self storage customer fails to pay their rent, the facility redefines the rented unit and its contents as ‘abandoned’ and undertakes a process to empty the unit. In these cases, the contents of the abandoned unit are often auctioned off on eBay as a publicly accessible online auction. An eBay listing for an abandoned storage unit follows a standard format: a seven-day online auction is posted, with bids for such contents most often starting at a conservative £0.99. A selection of what are presumed to be the most valuable contents are photographed and described in some approximation of detail. Within the constraints of the eBay format, no more than twelve photographs will be used to convey the contents. The authenticity, quality, and functionality of the contents is to be taken at face value, and payment for the purchased contents is to be made upon arrival at the facility, within a week of winning the auction. The payment of a deposit is often required upon arrival to ensure the clearance of the unit. Once all items are cleared, the facility is once again able to rent the vacant unit afresh.

A contemporary archaeology is undertaken as a primary tool for this architectural historical study of abandoned self storage units, hastily

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photographed and catalogued for sale on eBay by the employees at the storage facility. In these interrogations, the material contents of self storage are able to reveal the conditions of dwelling in contemporary rented and privately-owned British housing. As such, this research speculates on the influences which prompt urban and suburban inhabitants to engage in the practice of renting units of self storage.

Given the conditions that influence the nature of contemporary inhabitation, modern forms of self storage are worth being studied alongside the home and read as an exteriorised appendage of domestic architectural forms. Through this dissertation, self storage and domestic storage practices operate as a valuable lens through which meaningful and revealing architectural histories can be charted.

On the surface, self storage may appear to be a practical solution to a simple problem. This dissertation argues to the contrary, revealing that the problems and solutions pertinent to the rental of a self storage unit might not be as straightforward as one might immediately assume. As soon as one considers the premium cost of self storage, especially within and around London, the logic of ‘extra space’ breaks down. Why would people pay such steep fees to deposit seemingly unnecessary things? The only answer to this disconnect is that owners must deem their belongings valuable enough to store. As I explore within this dissertation, ‘value’ may well attribute towards a span of ritual, social, temporal and spatial forms which perform alongside, or in opposition to, economic worth. In this way, the contents of self storage speak to our enduring attachments to objects and the emotional and symbolic desires which drive people to acquire, keep, and pass along belongings.

The discussions within this dissertation pertain to the enmeshed nature of the economic and the emotional, as they play out within the deeply metaphorical spatial phenomenon of self storage. Nestled in

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this way between rational and irrational human motives, self storage performs a valuable and unprecedented role in capitalist society. This research has only begun to probe the intertwined conceptions of economic and symbolic value within the commodified home and the ways in which the rituals and spatiality of self storage practices bear an influence upon, and mediate the psychic relationship between inhabitant and home.

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NOTES 1 A search for ‘abandoned storage’ on eBay will reveal the breadth of abandoned storage contents up for auction in the UK.

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Plan of Urban Locker self storage, Proun Architects, 2012. Source: Islington Planning Division

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Spaces of Community: An Examination of the Social, Political and Architectural Significance of Community Centres in Tower Hamlets

Eliza Grosvenor 70

WORKING PAPERS / ARCHITECTURAL HISTORY MA 2017–2018

The community centre has been around in one form or another since the nineteenth century. However, it was in the post-war period where it really came into its own as a typology, as an integral part of governmental reform. Speaking to certain ambitions for an open space dedicated to the building and enhancement of a community, as well as the nurturing of community interests, the community centre would become the physical space that allowed these to occur. It would be a modest space but one which was nonetheless highly aspirational.

Because of this state of modesty, however, the community centre has often been overlooked. Despite having played a significant part in the lives of many individuals and local communities, thus far there has been surprisingly little written about it. Similarly, although the concept of community has received great attention, only a handful of examples have attempted to examine the specific topic of spaces of community.

Despite being less obviously recognisable due to its expanded variety of forms, the community centre still exists today and remains vital to the health of communities, general civic life and negotiations of public space. The sites examined in this dissertation are three of many examples which could have been addressed within this topic.

Nonetheless, they were chosen specifically to incite a reflection on the evolving phases through which the typology has progressed or regressed. All situated within the borough of Tower Hamlets, the sites include St John’s Community Centre, a very local community centre and space for the performance of history; Jagonari Women’s Educational Resource Centre, a former community centre for Bangladeshi, Pakistani and Indian women; and St Katharine's Precinct, a temporary project working with the community to fulfil local needs.

Tower Hamlets is a borough with one of the highest levels of diversity and impoverishment in London, with rates of unemployment and child poverty significantly above the London average.

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This dissertation brings together the little research on the topic which does exist with the presentation of new research as understood from interviews and the reading of relevant documents and publications.

From this process of gathering and assembling, three main stages through which the typology has progressed are identified. The first is the ‘neutral’ community centre, a term introduced in a significant report by the Ministry of Education entitled ‘Community Centres’ (1944), referring to spaces ‘where people meet as individuals, and not as members of a church, a trade union or political party’. The second is the ‘specific’ community centre, a space conceived for a specific group or community of people. The third is the ‘meanwhile’ community centre: not a centre per se, but projects of temporary nature—and often with a particular community focus—that intervene sites which are to be redeveloped but that are vacant at the present moment.

The predecessor to the community centre as we know it today, emerged as part of the Victorian settlement movement in the form of settlement houses. In the age of reform, due to the amount of legislation that passed through Parliament at the time, settlement houses predominantly worked in inner areas of fast developing cities with the mission of bringing about social improvement by setting up interactions between young educated students and those in need.

The movement was led by Samuel Barnett and was established in Whitechapel in 1884 with Toynbee Hall.

The next significant phase in the evolution of the typology arrived with the post-war expansion of state responsibility and the provision of a comprehensive welfare system, which remains largely in place today. This new welfare state and reform emerged as a consequence of work by William Beveridge, a former resident of Toynbee Hall between 1903–1905. In ‘The Beveridge Report’, delivered in November 1942, Beveridge identified five issues that needed to be tackled to

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improve Britain and made the proposal for a government-run benefit system to help people from the ‘cradle-to-grave.’ As part of this, he presented recommendations which involved a new formation and emphasis on community centres, many as part of new council-built and run housing projects. These community centres would attempt to foster a sense of community and improve social wellbeing, principally among the working class who had been uprooted from their homes during the war. This period also brought about consequential social and academic reassessments of the concept and definitions of ‘community’ itself, becoming a major academic concern in fields such as the social sciences. Additionally, the term ‘community architecture’ was coined, involving the production of responsible buildings, environments and landscapes for community.

The contemporary community centre is now in the process of transitioning a third time. Several urban critics and sociologists agree that our relations to leisure and community have changed and social patterns have become increasingly privatised. Against this, there has been a conscious effort amongst many social and civic groups to foster social interaction and sense of community once again, stepping into the void left by governmental withdrawal from certain key roles. New aspirations have begun to emerge for the improvement of community health and wellbeing at a time of mass displacement, migration, housing speculation and lack of official offers of aid and support. Using non-traditional methods to achieve their aims, these new spaces of community frequently employ more collaborative methods of design—working closely with those who will use the space—and are shifting how spaces of community are thought about, designed and used. Interestingly, these new centres are no longer referred to as ‘community centres,’ increasing the difficulties when tracking their existence within a specific typology. Nevertheless, they uphold many of the principles and functions which were essential to

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the distinctiveness of the typology in its initial formation.

While the form and function of community centres may have shifted over time, their place in civic infrastructure has remained consistent.

The drive of post-war community centres, that is, promoting a cooperative spirit which would help overcome difficulties following the war, can be seen in contemporary projects that strive towards finding distinctive solutions to the issues present in the life of large cities today.

It is hard to fully examine the final phase of the typology, as it has yet to complete its evolution. Nevertheless, through looking at vital reimaginations of the community centre throughout the twenty-first century we can begin to track potential directions for the typology moving into the future, in addition to tracing the shapes and patterns of what has come before and what exists at present. Considering ideas of function, potential success, significance, community and identity, we can critically examine the all-too-frequently overlooked space of community: the community centre, a modest space still full of aspiration and significance to society to this day.

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NOTES 1 Ministry of Education, Community Centres (London: His Majesty’s Stationary Office, 1944), 6.

2 Mark Swenarton, Cook's Camden. The Making of Modern Housing (London: Lund Humphries, 2017), 13.

3 Hannah Lewi, ‘Catalysing Communities,’ Architectural Review Australia, 121, (2011): 23.

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Jagonari Women’s Educational Resource Centre, Author’s own photo, 2018

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Discursive Memory Construction: Processes of Contestation and Identity Formation in the Context of Vienna’s Heldenplatz

Stefan Gruber 76

WORKING PAPERS / ARCHITECTURAL HISTORY MA 2017–2018

The Heldenplatz in Vienna’s city centre, a remnant of imperial fantasies, has witnessed several dramatic changes to the political and social landscape of Austria. Its visual identity is composed of the imperial architecture surrounding it and its importance derives from nearby political and cultural institutions. Among the many events held there, none has had a stronger impact on the site than Adolf Hitler’s ‘Anschluss’ speech on 15 March 1938 in front of hundreds of thousands of people on the Heldenplatz. The result of this multifaceted history is a complex heterogeneous material and immaterial construction; its use by political figures, protesters and visitors alike evokes reactions that interact with the notion of memory stored at the site.

Today’s Heldenplatz is the result of the unfinished Kaiserforum masterplan by Gottfried Semper. It was conceived as the Emperor’s response to the visible uprising of the bourgeois on the newly inaugurated Ringstraße in Vienna’s city centre. The masterplan suggested the expansion of the Hofburg—the imperial palace— with two additional buildings, entitled Neue Hofburg. Opposite the Ringstraße two new museums would align with those two buildings to form a holistic and monumental design. Semper also envisioned a new national theatre—the Burgtheater—which changed its location throughout the planning process until it was finally situated opposite the City Hall, serving as the monarchical counterpart to the democratic institutions.

Decades later, in the 1980s, it was at the Burgtheater where Thomas Bernhard’s play titled Heldenplatz sparked one of the biggest controversies in Austrian society up until that day. In the aftermath of the ‘Waldheim affair’—concerning Austrian president Kurt Waldheim’s alleged membership in National Socialist organisations during the Second World War—, the play stirred up a repressed episode of Austrian history and forced the nation to confront its past.

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As a consequence, the debates on the new president and Bernhard’s Heldenplatz led to a re-evaluation of the policies of denial and appeasement practiced by parts of the society and official institutions, as so prominently displayed in both cases. The victim narrative, which portrayed Austria as the first country to be occupied by the aggressive German expansion in the years preceding the Second World War, was confronted with images of the crowds standing on Heldenplatz as Adolf Hitler announced the annexation of Austria in 1938. As a symbolic event, this compliance with National Socialist ideas is thematised in the play.

Heldenplatz premiered at the 100th anniversary of the inauguration of the Burgtheater, yet instead of a celebratory play, spectators were confronted with an unconvenient topic. The play opened with Jewish professor Josef Schuster’s suicide, commited by jumping out of his flat near the Heldenplatz. Professor Schuster, his wife and his brother had fled the country following the annexation of Austria. After their return from exile in Oxford, the professor and his wife moved into a flat close to Heldenplatz. In 1988 they decided to return to Oxford prompted by—as the play points out—the apparent hostility against the Jewish community and the concealed National Socialist tendencies within Austrian society. Sparked by harsh dialogues, the play becomes an indictment of Austrian and especially Viennese society.

Thomas Bernhard uses a complex construction of interpretative layers and referrals to connect the play with reality. Not only does the title physically locate the discussion and evoke Austria’s suppressed past, it also addresses the political institutions around the square and incorporates their comments and actions into the interactive play.

Consequently, the fictional 1988 resembled the real political climate in 1988. The play further exemplifies the importance of spatial relationships and the use of appropriation and seizure of specific

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meaningful spaces. The theatre stage consists of references and symbols which are used to connect the enclosed space of the theatre with a wider context and to provide certain additional information, resembling commemorative processes as evoked by memorials and monuments. Consequently, the ‘Anschluss’ event in 1938 entered collective memory ever since Thomas Bernhard’s play and the subsequent public debate in which Heldenplatz served as a moral reference.

In this dissertation, the specific historical context of the ‘fictional’ play Heldenplatz serves as a starting point to investigate the real Heldenplatz. The analysis of the specific theatrical components emphasises the investigation of topics such as forms of memory, aspects of references and symbolism, and processes of spatial production through means of occupation and arrangement.

Since its formation, Heldenplatz was used as a stage for manifold events, both political and cultural. The controversy caused by the Waldheim debate and Bernhard’s play in the late 1980s echoes the political and social landscape of the twenty-first century, with events such as the National Day celebrations, the protests against the Akademikerball [Academic’s Ball] and the introduction of the Fest der Freude [Festival of Joy]. Each of the three cases epitomizes different aspects of these debates as they cover the political struggles of nationalist celebrations at the site of the castle gate called Totengedenken [Commemoration of the Dead], the public protests against the political right-wing Akademikerball and the formation of national identity as performed on the National Day at Heldenplatz. The research on these events unveils some of the mechanisms in place in these instances, such as the occupation of space in order to evoke intended memories, as well as references or spatial and visual superposition. Furthermore, the series of events illustrate the commemorative as well as conflicting

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potential of the discursive processes at work at Heldenplatz, which form a heterogeneous identity construction of material and immaterial elements. The various participants—performers as well as spectators—and interdisciplinary formats of representation add to this narrative, as the nation’s progress in handling the ongoing dispute with its intricate past is staged on Heldenplatz.

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Discursive Memory Construction of Vienna's Heldenplatz, Author's own collage, 2018

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Domesticity Behind the Urban Scene of Kufr Aqab

Haneen Jadallah 82

WORKING PAPERS / ARCHITECTURAL HISTORY MA 2017–2018

Kufr Aqab is a neighbourhood of East Jerusalem in which a unique urban phenomenon is occurring. As a result of systematic displacement, local Palestinians are attempting to create and recreate a new definition of daily residual spaces under the current political regime in Israel/Palestine. Jerusalem’s boundaries have been shifting ever since 1967, and continue to do so to this day. This change has affected Palestinians living in the city, and occurs alongside an ongoing struggle to protect their identity papers from being confiscated by the Israeli government. The constant requirement to live within Jerusalem’s municipal boundaries through what is termed the ‘Centre of Life’ policy, along with the unjustified prohibition of family reunification of Palestinian spouses who happen to have a different legal status, have had major effects on Palestinian citizens as individuals, families and communities. It has caused Palestinian Jerusalemites to seek alternative solutions through which they can meet the requirements of the ‘Centre of Life’ policy, while still being able to live with their families in the same urban spaces.

By referring to Henri Lefebvre’s concept of ‘The Right to the City’, this dissertation provides an analysis of the aforementioned phenomena, drawing attention to the fact that the point of departure for this problematic urban situation was Israeli occupation and not capitalist industrialisation—as Lefebvre primarily argued. This dissertation discusses a manifestation of how the right to a proper urban life has been completely denied in the process of the Israeli government's aim of the ‘Judaisation of Jerusalem’, by seeking a transformation of the city’s physical and demographic landscapes and an enhancement of its Jewish character in detriment of its Christian and Muslim ones. As a result, Kufr Aqab has become an area that is strongly segregated—both physically and politically—from its Jerusalemite context. Since 1967, the Israeli government has exercised full power over East Jerusalem in terms of spatial planning and development. This has created a shifting

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status for Jerusalem’s municipal boundaries throughout this period.

While these urban boundaries are elastic enough to accommodate any desired Jewish expansion through settlements (especially in the areas surrounding Jerusalem), they simultaneously exhibit a strict rigidity towards any form of Palestinian expansion.

The unique urban duality of Jerusalem imposes severe building regulations on Palestinians who live within these boundaries. As a consequence, space has become politically contested and reshaped by bureaucratic politics. According to Lefebvre, this can be described as a ‘social space’, in that it arises as a product of the alienation of human labour from its representational context. Driven primarily by people’s needs and necessities, space steps out of its abstract form.

Nonetheless, it remains a product of social behaviour by a specific group of people (in this case Palestinian citizens). ‘Social space’ may seem ambiguous, but it can be purposefully interpreted by analysing its form, structure and function. Hence, the aim of this dissertation is to shed a light on these social spaces, produced and occupied by displaced Palestinian Jerusalemites, and to examine the extent to which they are politically and economically influenced.

Furthermore, this dissertation argues that this act of displacement is closely related to patterns of inhabitation, and above all, to the emergence of a new mode of domesticity with which Palestinian people are trying to adapt to their new context, while striving for security and better living standards. In addition, it explores the ways in which displaced Palestinian Jerusalemites have challenged and/or adjusted to the existing circumstances they have had to face. This involves examining these new domestic environments, as shaped by the displaced demographic impulse, in a way that can contain them and their families, which transformed the nature of the neighbourhood after the sudden increase in population.. The

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dissertation also highlights the means and approaches employed to (re)locate and (re)root themselves within the new context they were forced into. It also provides a reflection on architectural design, building typologies and residual spaces that have emerged as new domestic environments. Moreover, since the phenomenon at Kufr Aqab stems from the struggle between the colonisation policies of the Israeli government and the aspirations towards nationhood among the Jerusalemite Palestinians, this dissertation examines the urban district through the lens of these opposing forces, while also delving on the effects capitalism has had on shaping the area.

Overall, this dissertation seeks to fill the gap between the displaced condition of the Palestinian Jerusalemites in Kufr Aqab and their attempts to survive economically by establishing some form of stability and domesticity in this unfamiliar area; a condition that has arisen and is still evolving under its own unique circumstances. The aim is to particularly draw attention to emerging Palestinian concepts of domestic and urban life. The methodology to conduct this study combines the theoretical analysis of Lefebvre’s writings on the ‘right to urban life’ with an analysis of urban space, developed through my own personal observations of the area of Kufr Aqab and relying on my own ‘situated knowledge’ as a Palestinian who lives in Ramallah (just two kilometres away from Kufr Aqab).

This dissertation also intends to articulate Palestinian Jerusalemites’ own visions of what the future of this area should be and, through these observations, elucidate a series of patterns of behaviour. This leads to an exploration of the attempts by Palestinian Jerusalemites to domesticate their current estranged environment, including, in some cases, the process of (re)appropriating spaces, transforming or shifting them away from their original functions. Between the question of displacement and domesticity, Kufr Aqab now lies between the

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permanence and temporariness of an ambiguous political situation that might fall apart in any given moment, depending on which conflicting authority it will end up with.

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NOTES 1 The idea of there being one, united Jerusalem arose after the Six-Day War in 1967, also known as the Arab-Israeli War, in which the Israelis claimed victory. Previously divided into West Jerusalem, which was occupied by the Israelis, and East Jerusalem, which belonged to the Palestinians, the reunification of Jerusalem has since taken place under Israeli governments by extending its laws and jurisdiction to the eastern parts of the city.

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A view of Kufr Aqab from the edge of Ramallah, Author’s own photo, 2018

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Sharmanka Kinetic Theatre: Production Of Subjective Spaces Between 1970–90s Soviet Russia And Present Day Glasgow

Ishita Jain 88

WORKING PAPERS / ARCHITECTURAL HISTORY MA 2017–2018

Sharmanka Kinetic Theatre in Glasgow is an assemblage of many sites encountered by sculptor-mechanic Eduard Bersudsky as he navigated the spaces of making and exhibiting art in Soviet Russia as a non-conformist artist. He occupied the spaces created by the regime and through his occupation changed the function of these spaces. This, in turn, changed his subjective states as well. These changes cannot be accessed if a conventional historical method is used. This dissertation is an attempt to unpack these sites and their respective subjective transformations through three distinct modes of research—immersion, investigation and co-creation. This process also allows an exploration of evidences that are found in art practices, that are born as affective encounters within the gallery space. Such evidences may become key to those accounts that are created and hidden within totalitarian regimes.

What is Sharmanka Kinetic Theatre? Is it sculpture, or space? Is it theatre or a sophisticated socio-political critique? Sculptor-mechanic Eduard Bersudsky refuses to answer these questions. He wants us to find what we want to find in his world. His world is atypical. Dominated by ravens hanging from roofs, bears that dance, and monkeys that fish in the air, it is also a world where humans are chained, and busty rats rule from the pulpit of a typewriter. These wooden anthropomorphic forms are put together with wheels, cogs and pulleys, reminiscent of an economy of production—the end or beginning of which is not seen. When stationary, it is a world to look at. You see the carved wooden forms in a frozen relationship with the underlying system that holds them together—a circular system of power and subject creation. You are outside of those relationships. When in motion, it transforms into a world you are part of. The sculpture takes over the space and there remains no distinction between the two. You become a subject, too. An image is produced that merges space and sculpture, creating a spatial relationship between you and the image. This image

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is superimposed with music, sound and shadow-plays under theatredirector and critic Tatyana Jacovskaya’s direction. This collaboration transforms Bersudsky’s moving sculptures—‘kinemats’—to a theatre, and under Sergei Jacovsky’s expert technical direction, the theatre is transformed into a spatial experience.

Sharmanka Kinetic Theatre, as a site, is also an assemblage of many other sites encountered by Bersudsky as a non-conformist artist in Soviet Russia. Physical sites like the communal apartments where he lived, carved, and exhibited, criss-cross with the metaphysical sites he experienced as torture, imprisonment, or an exposure to the system of subject creation in Soviet Russia. This dissertation is an attempt to unpack these sites that have been encoded as part of the narrative at Sharmanka through three different modes of engagement— immersion within the gallery space to posit Sharmanka in Glasgow, investigation of the archival material and the lack of it to unravel Bersudsky’s journey in Soviet Russia, and co-creation of the process of construction through the act of writing. This mode of writing is resultant of the problematics of the definition of evidence, and access to evidence of events that have been ignored or deliberately hidden in a totalitarian state. Operating from within these constraints, the dissertation aims to understand whether and how ‘artistic truth’ can be understood to fill in the gaps of evidence when official records have been employed to serve the political agenda of the state. By writing this alternative historical account of the spaces Bersudsky encountered, this dissertation wishes to make visible not just the spaces that have been hidden, but the act of hiding facts, and consequently, through alternate modes of participation, the act of revealing them.

Being at Sharmanka is also being in Sharmanka. Visitors effectively co-inhabit a semi-gothic palimpsest of historical and a-historical events and characters instrumental in the shaping of an ultra-

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regimented state. By alluding to timeless myths in his world, Bersudsky has neutralised the specificity of Soviet Russia as a regime bent on producing a specific subject to serve the State. Instead, the architectonics of Sharmanka can be read as a construct that is mimetic of all colonizing activities—imperial and non-imperial; across sites which are geographical and historical, while being abstract and conceptual at the same time. The architectonics at Sharmanka have given birth to spatial typologies born of experience of already being in them, rather than that of an architectural impulse—to create spaces to be in. A prison that physically tortures, the market place as a tower in perpetual circular motion, a circus arresting and freeing time and people in itself—such is the architecture born of the theatre.

When observed through Walter Benjamin’s mode of ‘thinking-inimages’, Sharmanka emerges as a place where complexity of the world exists concurrently without suppressing one thought by another, favouring one event over another; in short without exerting any kind of conceptual violence. This synchrony makes possible several voices to co-exist in a space; disciplinary thought explodes and becomes useless. This fragmentary experience at Sharmanka also finds its roots in the fragmentary history of Soviet Russia, where personal and social experiences have had to find niches/voids within an existing historical narrative to make them visible, and hence history proper has had to rely on artistic expressions to be remembered.

This dissertation is constructed within three spatio-temporal registers.

‘Glasgow-Theatre-Immersion-The Present’ posits Sharmanka as a site of critique and performance. It is charted as a looking at Sharmanka through its theatrical technicity, as it is today. It records the production of meaning in space in an immersive theatrical mode. The immersion produces a rupture, leading to a critical inquiry about the origins of the thought at Sharmanka. ‘Russia-Archive-Investigation-

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The Past’ begins with the unusual spatial typologies at Sharmanka and traces a historical journey to look for the spaces encountered by Bersudsky and how they shaped his artistic practice. This chapter also acknowledges the lack of official records, the voids in Soviet historiography mapped by many scholars since the opening of Soviet archives in 1991, and the reliance on personal testimony to build a historical account. The last section, ‘The Page-Image-Co-creationThe Future’, looks into Sharmanka as an assemblage of historical and ahistorical events—as a critique of the spaces created by the regime, and Bersudsky’s journey of subverting the functions of those spaces.

The assemblage aims to produce a ‘moving image’—the dynamics of which testify to the non-totalitarian reading and writing of history, that of events that have escaped the archival impulse and have found a ‘home’ in Bersudsky’s art, any art. This way, when the regime hides, or destroys, not all may be lost.

WP

NOTES 1 Sharmanka is Russian for barrel organ, or hurdy-gurdy. This mechanical music device came to Russia from the West 200 years ago. The most popular tune of their repertoire was ‘Charmante Catherine’ from which Russians made the name Sharmanka. In Western Europe, they are associated with fairs, a good time and a certain amount of nostalgia. In Russia, they are associated with the repetitiveness of life, with patience, fate and hope.

2 Tatyana Jacovskaya is now married to Bersudsky, and Sergey, Tatyana’s son, joined Sharmanka as a technical assistant at the age of 13, and is now the technical director at Sharmanka after receiving a BA in Technical Theatre from the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama.

3 Lenin speaking from a pulpit, Stalin standing with his axe raised for a blow and ‘Aurora’—the battleship that announced the beginning of October Revolution— are some of the many historical references that Bersudsky’s kinemats make. His ahistorical references include Kafka’s torture machine, angels on rooftops, jesters in a choreographed performance within an invisible structure, a king who waits for a

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subterranean signal before making his decision, to name a few.

4 Iva Jevtic, ‘Between Word and Image: Walter Benjamin’s Images as a Species of Space’, Inter-Disciplinary.Net (2012). Jevtic cites Benjamin’s ‘Angel of History’ to make this argument for thought-images to have two structures: macro and micro—the contradictory inner movement of meaning and the oppositional movement of discourses, and how writing in images successfully allows for the motion to be seen.

She furthers the importance of this mode of discourse that generates space—where the reader is made to follow multiple paths of meaning without being able to define for themselves a definite position on. This multiplicity of insecure positions creates the space between the reader and the author.

The creation of an image, Sharmanka Kinetic Theatre, Glasgow, Author’s photo, 2018

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‘In Hey Perck’: Revisiting Mid 17th Century Hyde Park with eight drawings by the Dutch artist Michel van Overbeek

Anna Jens 94

WORKING PAPERS / ARCHITECTURAL HISTORY MA 2017–2018

Centring around eight topographical drawings which are prominently titled ‘In Hey Perck’, this dissertation invites the reader on a stroll through the forgotten world of mid-seventeenth century Hyde Park. The images offer the opportunity to rediscover this famous site through the eyes of the relatively unknown Dutch draughtsman Michel van Overbeek, who visited the park in the summer of 1663 while on a visit to England. During his travels through the south-east of the country, van Overbeek produced at least eighteen drawings of various sites; not less than eight of which depict Hyde Park. As these drawings are the only known images of the site during the Steward Era and show the park in its ‘natural state’—before it was formally planned and divided into Kensington Garden and Hyde Park at the beginning of the eighteenth century—, they are of great historical value. At the time of van Overbeek’s visit, the park scarcely resembled the iconic green space that it is today, located in the heart of the western part of the city and a highly important site for the identity of London. In essence, Hyde Park in the mid-seventeenth century was nothing more than a ‘glorified field’ in the middle of other fields, not yet set within the parameters of London. The rural park was established as a royal hunting ground by Henry VIII in 1536, described by a contemporary French visitor as: ‘a field near the town, which they call Hide Park’. The park opened to the general public sometime around 1637, whence it became a favourite meeting place for London’s society, a status that was ongoing when van Overbeek visited in the 1660s.

In contrast to an art historical analysis, which would mainly focus on the images themselves—their compositional strategies and pictorial techniques—this architectural history dissertation focuses on the site visible in the images. It intends to use the images along with other sources of the time to create a more vivid representation of the park and allow for a deeper understanding of the images themselves. As van

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Overbeek’s depictions remain the only known visual representation of Hyde Park at the time they can only be compared to written accounts.

Additionally, it is difficult to determine just how authentic the images are, mainly because no matter how realistic Dutch landscape paintings may seem, they cannot be taken as literately as photographs.

Dutch artists at the time mostly did not aim for realistic documentations of their surroundings but rather to create artistically pleasing images. Still, the fact that the images in question were most likely produced on site, and van Overbeek’s particular devotion for realism suggest that he had little freedom of alterations, especially when considering his painting of the old St. Paul’s Cathedral, a painting crucial to the dating of his stay in England. Additionally, the title of his drawings—variations of In Hey Perck—indicate that he wanted the site to be recognised. Nonetheless, it is important to bear in mind the many interpretation of the site, therefore, in order to be able to use them as historical evidence of Hyde Park’s condition more than 350 years ago, they ought to be compared with other accounts or recollections of the site in the seventeenth century or shortly thereafter. Contemporary witnesses to the site would include foremost the two London diarist John Evelyn and Samuel Pepys, who wrote about visiting Hyde Park on multiple occasions during this period—Evelyn even referred to the park as ‘our Hyde Park’ in 1645, emphasising the frequency of his visits. An architectural history approach to the images also entails an attempt to determine the exact location within the park, as well as the time of day in which the images were made. Comparing images of the buildings and general surroundings of the park with written accounts and subsequent visual documentation, as well as the analysis of the shadows in the images, helped to determine the approximate location of most of van Overbeek’s images, allowing for the construction of an aproximate map of the area and its surroundings.

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Seventeenth-century Dutch landscape art, and its mediums of documentation, often emphasised different appreciations of nature and its meaning for the respective society as well as of the time in which they were produced. However, whereas the documentation and visualisation of landscapes was an imported part of Dutch culture in the seventeenth century, this was not the case in British culture until the eighteenth century, where they remained in very close proximity to their natural surroundings, appreciating a site only for its necessity. Hyde Park in the seventeenth century was, therefore, not a site appreciated for aesthetic reasons but rather for its usefulness. A site to see and be seen, to meet one’s peers and admire one’s superior. Additionally, it was a site in which a person could ‘take the air’, reflecting a growing concern with health and the changing philosophies of the time—that suggested people could become actors of their own lives, not merely being contempt with the will of God. According to contemporaries of van Overbeek’s the site was illustrated as being scarcely noteworthy. Accounts of his fellow countrymen like artist William Schellinks reveal how these men were more concerned with the activities at the Ring—a favourite gathering place—than with the park itself. Van Overbeek’s images show a different Hyde Park, a modest landscape away from the hustle and the bustle that the contemporary site holds within the city, a site that effectively united people and nature.

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NOTES 1 Although it is believed to be Michel van Overbeek, it is not possible to determine with certainty the identity of the artist.

2 John Evelyn, A character of England as it was lately presented in a letter to a noble man of France, (Oxford: Ann Arbor, 1659/2003).

3 Jacob Larwood, The Story of The London Parks (London: Chatto & Windus, 1881), 17; Eric Dancy, Hyde Park (London: Methuen & Co. Ltd., 1937), 27.

4 Peter Sutton and John Loughman, The Golden Age of Dutch Landscape Painting (Madrid: Fundacion Colección Thyssen- Bornemisza, 1994), 16.

5 John Evelyn, The Diary of John Evelyn (Miami: Alexandria Library Publishing House, 2013).

6 Ian Mortimer, The Time Traveller’s Guide to Restoration Britain 1660–1700 (London: Penguin Books, 2018), 32.

7 Maurice Exwood and H.L. Lehmann, The Journal of William Schellinks’ Travels in England 1661–1663 (London: Royal Historical Society, 1993), 84.

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In Hey Perck, Michiel van Overbeek, pen and brown ink, 1663-66. Source: Rijksmuseum Amsterdam

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Inhabiting a Photograph: In Search of Material Memory

Mariana Jochamowitz 100

WORKING PAPERS / ARCHITECTURAL HISTORY MA 2017–2018

This dissertation is an exercise towards ‘inhabiting’ a photograph as a way to reach the material world. It does not take the photograph as factual of that which is photographed, but understands it as something in translation between the material world and our memory and knowledge of it. It is an exploration of the relationship between matter and memory, where memory allows access to the material world in an extended sense, beyond present inhabitation and without the use of abstraction or representation. * I will ‘inhabit’ a photograph of a place I have never been to and never will. The photograph is Chicha y Sapo, by Peruvian photographer Martin Chambi, taken in Cuzco in 1931.

The title Chicha y Sapo is a reference to the two main characters in the photograph: Sapo is being played and chicha is being drunk. A man is playing, throwing brass coins to the sapo. A second man stands next to the sapo, checking where the coins fall. A small child is crouching on the floor, probably picking up an astray coin. The rest stand around, spectators of the game. Two men are holding huge glasses filled with chicha. One holds a glass up to the camera, as if saying ‘cheers!’.

The scene is set in a courtyard. The walls seem old, made of adobe. The floor is cracked, comprised of different materials, as if it had undergone clumsy repairs over time. The walls are crowned by a climbing plant.

My description of Chicha y Sapo does not account for an inhabitation.

Roland Barthes, in his book Camera Lucida, Reflections on Photography (1980), argues that the inhabitation of photographs opens up a double movement ‘which seems to bear [him] forward to a utopian time, or

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to carry [him] back to somewhere in [himself]…as if [being] certain of having been there or of going there’. The inhabitation is a half remembered, half envisioned reality, much like memory.

Memory does not bring the past back. Instead, it engages with it from the present. Every time we remember, we generate something new, something that has not (yet) occurred.

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Not every photograph is habitable, of course, but this particular photograph ‘affects me at a depth and according to roots which I do not know’. If one is to find those roots, one must proceed like a man digging.

I’ll dig deeper this second time…

There is a game going on, I know how to play.

You take the golden coins. This usually means rummaging blind in the slots of the sapo for a few seconds. Then, a big irregularity on the already fairly irregular floor marks the place where to stand. From there, you recalculate: the distance, the weight of the coin, the narrowness of the toad’s mouth. Complete silence while you throw the coins.

After, they will cheer. When the match ends a coin will go missing—one always does.

Someone once told me my house looked like a sapo belonged in it. I have a courtyard. Like the one in the photograph, my courtyard is crooked.

The walls in the photograph are soft. Like a meringue, you could dig a fingernail in them and disintegrate it into the soil

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that it’s made of. On the wall behind the sapo are the marks of the many stray coins that without much effort have left a dent on their losing path. I know how that wall feels, the temperature it accumulates in summer, the smell when it has a damp patch. I even know how the soil tastes. My childhood home had walls like that. Old, thick walls that crumbled with age but still stood strong. I would, sometimes, eat a tiny bit of the fine dust inside the cracks on the wall, just to see what it tasted like—children eat the silliest things, don’t they? * Interpolation: About the Memory of Earth The walls are beginning to fall. Destruction enters the house through its openings. There are no more windows or doors protecting it. They have been taken down and now stand next to their old place, looking powerlessly at the ruination creeping in.

The walls have been cracked open, eviscerated. Their interior matter exposed and scattered around. It is a painful and embarrassing sight. Thick, strong, tall walls, that once looked dignified—especially when freshly painted—now seem weak and defeated.

Even if the house looks quite different than it used to, it feels deeply familiar. Somehow, amidst the wreckage, I see the house as it was and I recognise myself in it. Not the ‘me’ in that moment, but me, as I once was—a child—when the house was still whole and I lived there.

At some point after leaving that house I had figured out that my childhood ended abruptly the day I

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moved out. I knew then, my childhood would be forever kept inside the house. But this revelation did not truly sink in until I came back on the day of its demolition, to see, springing from within the very matter of the remnants, my childhood, that had up until then, been tightly immured. * I return to the courtyard. Nothing seems to have changed. Sapo is still being played and chicha is still being drunk.

It turned out, I knew something in the photograph quite well.

Particularly, the walls. I followed them into my own memories and they took me places I cannot go anymore. Extinct places, like the one on the photograph. I know how it was to live among those walls. I remember it now.

I take a new look at Chicha y Sapo and I notice something new. The man playing sapo—his hand—, he is about to throw the coin. Any second now…

There is a game going on, I know how to play.

It is a rare occurrence, but when the coin passes through the toad’s mouth, the thrill is overwhelming.

I take the coin to throw it… any second now… Oh, the thrill!

WP

NOTES 1 Sapo is a game played in several countries in South America. Originally, the game came from Europe where there are several versions of it. In Spain it is called ‘Juego de la Rana’ and there is also a version in Britain, a traditional pub game called ‘Toad in a

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hole.’ Sapo is the Spanish word for ‘toad’.

2 Alcoholic drink made from corn, also called ‘chicha de jora’, typical of the Andes of Perú.

3 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida. Reflections on Photography (London: Vintage Books, 2000), 40.

4 Walter Benjamin, ‘Excavation and Memory’, in Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith (eds.), Selected Writings. Volume 2 (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2001), 576.

Through the Window, Eduardo Jochamowitz, photograph, 2007. Source: Author's personal archive

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Everyday Space: a spatial investigation on Chengdu teahouses

Wei Kuang 106

WORKING PAPERS / ARCHITECTURAL HISTORY MA 2017–2018

The old teahouse in Chengdu serves many purposes: it is a shelter for the unemployed, a commercial opportunity for the vendors, a place to experience new trends, and a room for gossip. Existing discussions on Chinese citizen culture tend to focus on a broader field instead of a specific activity or space. In The Teahouse, Di Wang focuses on the conflicts between political power and the local everyday culture, ‘how the country gradually interfered with people’s everyday life’. In The Teahouse under Socialism, Wang argues that at the beginning of socialism authorities controlled almost all the resources. This dissertation’s main focus is based on Wang’s study and aims to cover the lack of research on the aspect of everyday space in China. Three research questions are put forward based on Wang’s study: why and how has the teahouse transformed in the recent decades? were politics the main influence? and, what role does the teahouse, as an everyday space, perform in the urban environment?

Before the Reform and Opening-up of 1978, political ideology infiltrated everyday life in China by means of the promotion and gradual expansion of policies. However, this effect is somewhat superficial. Although teahouses, as a physical space, declined rapidly and nearly disappeared during this period, people’s activities and attitude changed little. In contrast, since the 1980s, the social functions, forms and locations of the teahouse changed dramatically as China underwent modernisation.

This dissertation investigates the history of the Chengdu teahouse through visual records and materials, as well as interviews, archival research, and personal memoirs. However, it is restrained by materials relating to the physical structures of the teahouse. As an informal leisure space for the public, there are minimal records by historians and no official archive of their previous conditions. With the restriction of censorship, many personal memoirs in China are published on BBS,

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Blogs, and the WeChat App. Acknowledging the unique condition of personal information regarding a specific political period, these online articles are regarded as credible references in this research.

While this research is conducted according to a historical timeline, its discussions are organized around topics such as feminism, political ideologies, urban planning, economy, new culture, etcetera, rather than by a chronological narrative. The research object is not the teahouse as a physical structure or typology, but its function as an everyday space. Time and historical events are considered influences on the space. The first section deals with the theories concerning the everyday space; the second section aims to piece together an image of Chengdu teahouses through the lenses of gender, war, urban planning, and freedom of speech; the third section seeks to identify the endurance of everyday spaces under the pressure of modernisation and economic development.

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From the beginning of the twentieth century, female journalists have become a dominant presence in Chinese media, bolstering feminism by participating in, editing and leading independent journals and magazines discussing political events. Based on articles translated from English and Japanese, Jin Tianhe published Nv Jie Zhong in 1903, a book promoting the freedom and equality of women. Since the 1910s, more and more articles on feminism were published in different journals and newspapers. Before 1919, the journal Xin Qing Nian [New Youth] mainly discussed the debate between liberal and conservative positions concerning women’s liberation. After 1919, Xin Qing Nian was influenced by Marxism and advocated that the liberation of women was part of the social revolution. The Da Gong Bao [Big Fairness News] founded a new periodical called Women and Family on 11 February 1927, encouraging women to write and publish their own life, advocating them to change their life. From

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the ninth issue, the journal gradually became the critical platform for promoting gender equality.

Although feminism began to draw people’s attention in China, it was not a thought everybody could accept. In the early twentieth century, women weren't encouraged to go to the teahouse. Although there weren't explicit rules forbidding their entrance, their presence in the teahouses often sparked gossip and discrimination. The teahouse was a space dominated by the male with the only females being prostitutes looking for business opportunities, while the ‘decent women’ would prefer to stay at home or socialise with other women.

Some commented the waitresses were ‘frivolous, debaucherous and dissolute’, and even criticised that ‘the extravagance and prurience [which] showed up in Chengdu since the Republic of China’ should be attributed to them.

The teahouse became one of the first public places to accept women in Chengdu, it was where the breaking news spread from, and the fashion began. Aware of the burgeoning feminist thoughts in China, Li Jiuru, the owner of the Yongju Tea House, created the first place allowing women’s presence in the teahouse in Chengdu. In 1913, Li reconstructed and expanded the Yongju Tea House to provide private rooms and spaces convenient for women to interact and date. The participation and needs of women altered the spatial arrangement of the teahouse. New areas, entrances and corridors were designed, so that female customers would not meet men. From then on, the trend of women's presence at the teahouse began to spread throughout Chengdu, and Yongju Tea House become a model of how to design space for women. In the next year, the Da Guan Tea House and the Ke Garden Tea House began to provide movie theatres for women.

On 27 April, two owners applied to the police department for opening a female-only movie theatre in the daytime. They argued ‘although

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the movie theatre is a place to make money, the movies can inspire people’s thoughts and improve the aesthetical ability and can learn the local customs in the other countries.’ The application included a description of the theatre: ‘There is a hall especially for the female customers, without men inside. The services are provided by waitresses. Although the person who plays the movie is a man, the projection room is located outside of the hall.’

The restriction of gender in the teahouse was not only due to the traditional mindset but also the New Life Movement promoted in the 1930s.

WP

NOTES 1 Di Wang, The Teahouse Small Business, Everyday Culture, and Public Politics in Chengdu, 1900-1950 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008), 3.

2 Di Wang, Teahouse under Socialism: The Decline and Renewal of Public Life in Chengdu, 1950-2000 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2018).

3 Xiaohong Xia, ‘Nv Jie Zhong: The Jin Tianhe's Theory of Feminist Revolution [Nv Jie Zhong: Jin Tian He De Nv Quan Ge Ming Lun],’ Journal of School of Chinese Language and Culture, 1 (2015).

4 Xiuyun Li, ‘Woman and Family and the Women's Life,’ in The Special Study on the Big Fare News [Da Gong Bao Zhuan Kan Yan Jiu] (Beijing: Xin Hua Press).

5 Chengdu Goverment, ‘The Tea House Should Hang on the President's Portrait and It Will Be Check from Tomorrow’, Xinxin News (Chengdu), May 15, 1941.

6 Anonymous, ‘The Waitress in the Tea House’, Xinxin News (Chengdu), April 21, 1938.

7 Zhenxiang Huang and Zhouhou Wu, Application for opening the female cinema written by 27 April 1914, 93-6-1176, Chengdu Archives, Sichuan Province, China.

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An old teahouse in Chengdu, Author’s own photo, 2018

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Architectural Witness: Materiality, Spatiality and Law in the Grenfell Tower Inquiry

Anna Livia Vørsel 112

WORKING PAPERS / ARCHITECTURAL HISTORY MA 2017–2018

On 14 June 2017, a fire started in the kitchen of an apartment on the fourth floor of Grenfell Tower, a twenty-five-storey residential block in the Lancaster West Estate in the northern part of the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea. The fire spread from the kitchen to the façade of the building and rapidly engulfed the entire tower in flames.

Smoke and heat filled the building, making the internal environment lethal for its inhabitants. The Grenfell Tower fire claimed 72 lives. It is a tragedy of unprecedented scale.

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The Grenfell Tower Inquiry sits as an official independent legal review and public assessment of the fire. ‘It will establish the facts and will make recommendations as to the action needed to prevent a similar tragedy happening again’. In the UK, public inquiries follow the philosophy and norms of the British legal system and, alongside assembling an explanatory account of the event in question, publicly allocates responsibility and blame. The Grenfell Tower Inquiry seeks to do so by firstly examining what happened at the fire and secondly, why and how the events unfolded as they did. The inquiry operates alongside many other ongoing debates, which continuously investigate and discuss the fire in social, political, academic and cultural contexts. This dissertation exclusively looks at the inquiry and does not attempt to contain the many voices, narratives and experiences located adjacent to it.

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The inquiry is publicly accessible, and the research for this dissertation is drawn from several visits to hearings as well as its online archive, an archive that is continuously evolving as the inquiry sits. This dissertation does not speculate on the inquiry’s conclusions regarding the responsibility and blame of the fire, but recognises the inquiry as a space in which we can gain an understanding of how the architecture and materiality of Grenfell Tower speak of and reveal the industrial, legal and political infrastructural processeses behind its construction.

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Additionally, this dissertation seeks to understand how the inquiry unpacks some of the complex relations that exist between material constituents of the built environment and the law and juridical language which regulate, define, guide and structure it.

The fire at Grenfell Tower was devastating, and the flames destroyed the very same material that caused it. By looking at the inquiry, some of the evidential materials presented in it and the modes through which they aid in unveiling how and why the fire happened as it did, this dissertation assess how the architecture of Grenfell Tower—its material composites, chemical compositions and internal geometries—give testimony to its destruction. It looks to Susan Schuppli’s notion of ‘material witness’, of matter which records and stores traces of events as a methodology.

The Inquiry: The Grenfell Tower Inquiry takes place at Holborn Bars and is formed through daily hearings. Its assessment and subsequent recommendatory report rely, like other legal proceedings, on the presentation and analysis of physical and visual evidential material as well as on written and oral witness testimonies. Its hearings need to take place in a physical space in order for the inquiry to make its assessment, ruling and recommendations. The inquiry’s Chairman and Counsel need to physically be in the same room as the core participants, evidential materials and witnesses.

For the duration of the inquiry the hundreds of people connected to the fire, and to Grenfell Tower, are simultaneously present in the inquiry’s hearing room. Some in person, others represented by legal teams. Here, the architectural and legal requirements of the inquiry place the bereaved families, survivors, and local residents in close proximity to the companies and public bodies who built,

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designed and managed Grenfell Tower. In this room, the people who built and managed the tower are confronted with the people who lived in it. Through a specific placement of chairs and tables in the hearing room, the proceedings can take place according to juridical procedure. The hearing room is filled with screens and technological infrastructure that mediates Grenfell Tower into the room, and from that room out to the public realm. These structures emphasise the workings of the inquiry as truth-seeking machinery.

The Witness: The Grenfell Tower Inquiry relies on the witnesses of the fire to give testimony, to narrate their individual experiences of the fire and answer questions from the Counsel to the Inquiry. As people are able to recall events and experiences, so is matter. As Schuppli states, a material witness: [is] an entity (object or unit) whose physical properties or technical configuration records evidence of passing events to which it can bear witness. Whether these events register as a by-product of an unintentional encounter or as an expression of direct action, history and by extension politics is registered at these junctures of ontological intensity. Moreover, in disclosing these encoded events, the material witness makes ‘evident’ the very conditions and practices that convert such eventful materials into matters of evidence.

In the inquiry, through its infrastructure and the testimonies of witnesses, material evidence from Grenfell Tower is given the capacity to give testimony to the fire that destroyed it.

The Evidence: Throughout the inquiry’s proceedings materials have and will be

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presented as evidence to the fire. Evidential materials adduced in hearings are published and stored in the Inquiry’s online digital archive. This dissertation looks in detail at three modes of evidencegiving materials used in the inquiry and interrogates how these reveal how the architecture of Grenfell Tower has been a sensor of its conditions. The mechanics of the inquiry aid to reveal the behaviour of the building, letting the mode of operation of its architecture give testimony to the fire that destroyed it.

The fire that destroyed Grenfell Tower, and the hundreds of lives lived in it, revealed the conditions at the core of its architectural conception and construction. The building, its elements, materials and products existed in an assembly which was consequently lethal for seventy-two of its inhabitants. The mechanics of the inquiry aid to reveal the behaviour of the building, allowing the mode of operation of its architecture to give testimony to the fire that destroyed it. The mediation of evidence of the conditions of the building and the fire in the inquiry helps to do this. In the space of the inquiry, the architecture of Grenfell Tower performs as evidence for its destruction. It becomes an architectural witness.

WP

NOTES 1 On 21st – 30th May 2018 commemorations for the victims were held at The Grenfell Tower Inquiry. The commemoration hearings are publically accessible on the inquiry's website: https://www.grenfelltowerinquiry.org.uk/ ‘The Lives of Grenfell Tower' in The Guardian portrays all 72 people through testimonies from family and friends. https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/nginteractive/2018/may/14/lives-of-grenfell- tower-victims-fire 2 Activist groups supporting bereaved, survivors and local residents include Grenfell United, Justice for Grenfell, Grenfell Speaks and Grenfell Action Group.

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These groups have, since the fire, advocated for justice for the people who lost their lives in the fire, for the people responsible for the fire to be held accountable, for safe and better housing, and for a change in the attitude towards council tenants in local governance and regulations, amongst other issues.

3 Susan Schuppli, ‘Material Witness,’ Susan Schuppli, Research, http:// susanschuppli.com/research/materialwitness/ (accessed July 31, 2018).

4 Eyal Weizman, Forensic Architecture: Violence at the Threshold of Detectability (NY: Zone Books, 2017), 52.

Chairman, Lead Counsel and Witness in the hearing room: Grenfell Tower Inquiry, YouTube video, 56:43, 2018. Source: https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=7okxMQsveQw

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Architectures of Rift: Investigating Kiruna Through a Marxist Ecology

Max Wisotsky 118

WORKING PAPERS / ARCHITECTURAL HISTORY MA 2017–2018

In Northern Sweden, in the area known to Swedes as ‘Norrland’ and to the indigenous Sámi people as Sápmi, the mining town of Kiruna/ Giron is on the verge of going through a radical change. After a hundred-plus years of mining operations, the ground beneath large sections of the city is becoming unstable—cracks are appearing in the roads, buildings are being abandoned, and, consequently, the city-centre is being forced to relocate. Through a mixture of building relocations, new construction, and expanded urban planning, the city is on track for a complete transformation—for better or worse. Issues surrounding how the architecture and urbanism of this mining town affect local environmental degradation, socio-economics, and the rights of the local Sámi community are central to the current situation and its historical formation. Yet, to fully unpack and understand what has led to this, a critical method is required to dissect and frame the relationships between the formation of this urban landscape and the environment and territory in which it sits, in order to uncover its ‘ecological’ condition. For this, I turn to a new theory of ecology based around the idea of ‘ecological rift’. Essentially, humanity has become estranged from an authentic and sustainable relationship with the material natural conditions of our existence—the rifts referred to in the title of this paper are between humanity and our encompassing environments. The origin of these rifts, that both result from and further this estrangement, is the capitalist society in which we live. In Kiruna/Giron, the exploits and architectures of the mining company embody this ecological rift both physically and theoretically.

In Volume 3 of Capital, from a passage at the end of ‘The Genesis of Capitalist Ground Rent’, Marx writes of rift as: the ‘irreparable rift in the interdependent process of social metabolism’. In response to the writings of German chemist Justus von Liebig, Marx discusses the growing issue of soil fertility, resulting from the shift from small-scale communal farming to large-scale industrial agriculture. Recognizing

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that agriculture under capitalism was no longer self-sustaining—the natural biogeochemical cycles were broken. Nature, or what Marx termed the ‘universal metabolism of nature’, is reduced to a mere ‘free gift…to capital’ to be used and ‘abused’ at will. This idea of ‘rift’ represented Marx’s key conception of ecological crisis tendencies under capitalism and the core of a systematic critique of capitalist exploitation of the soil—a robbery of its means of production.

‘Metabolic’ or ‘ecological rift’ is a term introduced by contemporary sociologist John Bellamy Foster referring to this notion of the ‘irreparable rift’ in the ‘metabolic interaction between man and the earth’ that ‘enabled [Marx] to develop a critique of environmental degradation that anticipated much of present-day ecological thought.’

Foster’s ideas serve as the basis for a Marxist theory of ecology: one which recognizes that a capitalist society, through its unwavering pursuit of more profit and production, produces unnatural rifts in the sustainable relationship between humans and the planet. We have left behind an embedded and embodied relationship with our encompassing environments in return for the disembedded technocentric view of modernity and capitalism—one in which the natural world is seen as, at best, a passive backdrop for human activity, and, at worst, a pile of supplies waiting to be plundered.

Rift ecology states that, instead of relying on the panacea of sustainable technologies and the oxymoronic idea of so-called ‘green capitalism’, to fix climate change and global environmental degradation, we must work to reframe, and critique, our relationship to nature.

Thereby recognizing our multi-layered failures of engagement with our environmental, cultural, and social ecologies, and their degrees of ‘alienation’ of and ‘affinity’ to local and global environments. The theory of rift provides a critical method to understand the role that architecture plays in our unhealthy relationship with the ecologies

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of our lives. It highlights the fact that architecture as a cultural/ social technology is inextricably linked with this hegemonic view of capitalist-nature—and therefore only furthers in its production.

Therefore, the aim of this dissertation is to understand Kiruna/ Giron in relation to modern architectural and capitalist processes of alienating nature, as well as the complicity of the ideologies of capitalism, architecture and urbanism in framing the city not in a local embedded nature, but through the lens of colonialism and the extraction of wealth and resources, by non-Sámi Swedes. The research engages with three concepts of rift: environmental rift (via landscape degradation, pollution, ground subsidence, and a new cityplan seemingly designed to be consumed, demolished and rebuilt), cultural rift (via suppressing Sámi traditional embodied landscapes and impacting the important cultural identity and economy of reindeer herding), and social rift (via questions around the economics of rent, value of important social spaces and heritage buildings, and the democracy of the relocation and displacement). A city that was built to last is being replaced by one that is built to be destroyed. A city that was built on stolen land will take even more of that land. A city that was based around important historical social spaces has had them torn down.

An important part of the method of producing this dissertation stems from my situated knowledge and experience of visiting Kiruna/ Giron to do field research and conduct interviews, as well as my past field-study with the Sámi people. My personal experience of being in the town, its spaces, of speaking to and interviewing the people whose lives are being directly affected, are here as key methodological elements of this research. I situate myself explicitly into the project and recognize that I, my previous experience with the Sámi, and my Swedish cultural heritage/responsibility, are part of its construction.

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6 *

Together with research into the historical and contemporary situation in Kiruna/Giron, this dissertation tries to find ways to reconnect, re-embed, and re-embody space as a way to overcome the hegemonic capitalist view of nature and architecture—I propose a sort of heteroglossia. To do this I use transgressive footnotes, alongside the main body of the essay and its traditional footnotes.

These ‘Subterranean Feelings’SF express my embodied experience of being in Kiruna/Giron, providing a space for a subjective study of site, acknowledging the blurred boundaries between fiction and fact which we continuously negotiate — questioning the nature of complete unbiased truth. They are intended to cause an intervention, to disrupt the objectivity with which the information is received, to encourage the reader to take into account the embodied situation hiding beneath the academic investigation into these rifts.

WP

NOTES 1 Sápmi is the Northern Sámi word for the historic territory of the Sámi people, that stretches over four nation states: Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Russia. In Sweden, it covers five counties - Västernorrland, Jämtland, Gävleborg, Västerbotten and Norrbotten – which are collectively known as ‘Norrland’. Even though the territory occupied by Sápmi is nowadays cut by political borders, it has never had explicit borders, that is, in the Western sense of perception of strict territorial boundaries.

2

Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. 3 (New York: Vintage Books, 1867/1976), 588.

3 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Collected Works, vol. 29, 298; vol. 30, 54–66; vol. 37, 732–33, as cited in John Bellamy Foster, ‘The Expropriation of Nature’, Monthly Review, 69, no. 10 (2018) 4 John Bellamy Foster, ‘The Metabolism of Nature and Society’ in Marx’s Ecology: Materialism and Nature, John Bellamy Foster (ed.), (New York: NYU Press, 2000), 142.

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5 The fundamental idea of a ‘green’ or sustainable capitalism ignores the material reality that, as a system for amassing capital, capitalism recognizes no physical boundaries or barriers, it fundamentally has no parameters. From a wider social and ecological standpoint, it is an unstoppable and crushing force—a ‘juggernaut’, as Marx states in Chapter 25 of Capital Volume 1.

6 I draw upon both Bahktin’s idea of heteroglossia as ‘another's speech in another's language, serving to express authorial intentions but in a refracted way,’ and Haraway’s ‘powerful infidel heteroglossia’, one that imagines ‘a feminist speaking in tongues to strike fear into the circuits of the supersavers of the new right.’ One is a tool for multiple identities and one is a tool for counteracting the suppressive narratives of pure objectivity and academic writing: M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination and Donna J. Haraway ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’. * SF Throughout my text these bolded words adorned with the ‘SF’ indicate to the reader that they should go to the bottom of the page, below to the footnotes, and find the voice of my experience.

Demolished bridge from town to mine, Author’s own photo, 2018

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Full Circle: Charting the Road to Empire through the Architecture of Dairen’s Ohiroba Circus from 1907-1936

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Japan’s astonishing defeat of Soviet Russia in the 1905 Russo-Japanese War led to the ‘bloodless capture of’ the Russian colonial capital Dalny, located on the southern tip of China’s Liaodong Peninsula. The Japanese commanding officer Nishi Kanjiro renamed the city Dairen [大连] and established the Kwantung Leasehold Territory [关东州] around it, which became Japan’s first foothold in Manchuria. From this point on, the city became contested by three political forces: the South Manchuria Railway (SMR), or Mantetsu [满铁株式会 社], that controlled the city and the Manchurian railway zones; the Kwantung viceroy’s institution that controlled the broader leasehold territory and the military zones; and the Western ‘Great Powers’ that had geopolitical interests in the region. These political factions either employed architecture or established their own architectural institutions, which used architecture as a tool to achieve pragmatic political goals and assert their cultural hegemony.

Among Dairen’s numerous architectural ensembles, the Ohiroba Circus was a site that continuously reflected the link between architecture and the colonial condition under Japanese control. The Circus was originally designed by Russian architect Vladimir Sakharov and modelled on the Place de l’Etoile in Paris. During the ‘Russian to Japanese overlordship’, the circus assumed its new name O-hiroba [大广场], which meant ‘The Big Plaza’ in Japanese. Thereafter, the Circus became the political centre of Dairen, and the most important construction site for competing power brokers in the colony. From 1907 to 1936, nine buildings dedicated to specific political, cultural and ideological connotations gradually formed a ‘full circle’ of public architecture that embraced the Circus.

This full circle was a physical canvas that charted Japan’s road to empire. It recorded the weakness of the Japanese regime when the colony was first established; the transformation of the city into an

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1

2

imperial bridgehead in the late Meiji era; the expansion of Japan’s power to other parts of Manchuria in the 1920s; and it witnessed the total annexation of Manchuria in 1932 under the Manchukuo puppet state, and the emergence of a totalised urban empire in Northeast Asia prior to the Second World War. This dissertation investigates the formation of the Ohiroba Circus through key buildings as an architectural metaphor and means of understanding Japan’s empire building process in Asia from 1905 to the eve of the Second World War. Due to the complexity of Dairen’s political infrastructure and the coexistence of different political forces, the analysis is arranged thematically rather than chronologically and is divided into three chapters, each relating to a theme in Japan’s empire building process and its architectural ideology. The first chapter examines the British Consulate and considers how this building reflected the shifting geopolitical relations in the region from a diplomatic perspective. The second chapter focuses on the public sphere and Japan’s transition from colonialism to imperialism through an analysis of Japanese public buildings. The third chapter focuses on the transformation of Japan’s self-image through the changing definition of modernity and modernisation by investigating three cultural buildings.

Among the few existing scholarly works, research on Dairen’s architectural history and the Ohiroba Circus is uncommon and embryonic. In the West, due to the lack of relevant information and research, there are no monographs dedicated to the discussion of Dairen’s architectural history. However, scholastic works on the architecture of Manchukuo provide useful fragments of Dairen’s colonial architecture. Notably Edward Denison’s Ultra-Modernism: Architecture and Modernity in Manchuria, which discusses Dairen’s architecture in relation to the context of modernisation prior to the

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annexation of Manchuria, and David Tucker’s Our Manchukuo, which provides the progress of Dairen’s urban evolution in early 1930s.

In east Asia, the most prominent historian of Japanese colonial architecture is Yasuhiko Nishizawa [西泽泰彦] from the university of Nagoya. Throughout his career, he established a series of monographs on Japan’s architectural activities in Manchuria, which included Japan’s Oversea Architectural Adventurers (1996), Japan’s colonial architectural theories (2008) and The architectural institutions in the South Manchurian railway zone (1988). These works created a chronology of Dairen’s architectural evolution and linked this chronology to the political changes in northeast Asia. However, as the first expert in Japanese colonial architecture, Nishizawa dedicated his work to understanding the broader picture, and was unable to investigate detailed architectural connotations and specific architectural sites.

The intention of this dissertation is therefore, to provide a more detailed account of one of the most significant spatial settings created under Japanese imperialism and, most importantly, to frame this experience within a theoretical context that argues for the wider significance of Dairen’s colonial architectural history and to encourage further investigations into this comparatively overlooked subject and its wider historical and architectural significance.

Due to the incompleteness of the existing knowledge on this subject, the main research methodology focuses on known and new archival materials combined with empirical research over several years prior to and including this specific study. Through various online sources, databases and archives, relevant maps were obtained that revealed the Circus’s development. Moreover, the Manchurian Architectural Association Journal is consulted, which is a record of the principal

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architectural constructions in Dairen from 1924 to 1945 and of texts that described the architectural evolvement of the Circus.

Extensive archival research has been carried out and systematically arranged into various categories. These include textual materials that described the changing political conditions in the city, such as the Modern Manchuria Journal and the Manchurian Economical Review, which were directly published by the colonial authorities in Manchuria for a foreign audience; visual materials that described political propaganda, such as a 1935 advertisement pamphlet that publicised the Ohiroba Circus as a great architectural achievement; and private correspondence by British officials and Japanese statesmen casting light on the region’s geopolitical struggles. Most importantly, the research has successfully retrieved architectural drawings for most buildings that surrounded the Circus, notably a full set of original drawings of Dairen’s British Consulate, which are here published for the first time.

WP

NOTES 1 Emer O’Dwyer, Significant Soil: Settler Colonialism and Japan’s Urban Empire in Manchuria (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2015), 23-26.

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Ibid., 23-26.

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‘The Central Circle’ in The Manchuria Journal, South Manchurian Railway Co., May, 1938. Source: The British Library

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Index alienation: 41; 82; 118-19 appropiation: 22; 77-78; 82-84 archive/archival: 34; 46; 57; 88-90; 105; 111-12; 125-26 archaeology: 21; 33-36; 64 authority/authorities: 23; 28-29; 126 Britain/British: 33-34; 39-40; 46-47; 57; 65; 71; 94; 111; 124-26 capital/Capitalism: 66; 81-83; 117-20 censoring/censorship: 58; 105 chance: 23; 40 China: 105-107; 123 climate: 46-48; 118 colonial/colonialism/colonizing: 34; 119; 123-126; 88 community/communal: 39; 57-58; 69-72; 81; 88; 117 conflict: 22-4; 77-78; 105-108

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criticism: 45 displacement: 71; 81-83; 119 domestic/domesticity: 63-65; 82-83 ecology: 47; 117-118 economy/economics: 17; 28; 57; 64-66; 82-83; 106; 117-19 everyday: 21-24; 46; 105-106 evidence: 88-89; 94; 113-115 Feminism: 27; 57-59; 106-107 fiction: 53; 76-77; 120 film: 15-18; 58 gender: 27-29; 58-59 Grenfell: 111-114 hegemony: 58; 119-120; 123 heritage: 34-35; 59; 119

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historical method/historiography: 21-24; 40; 87; 93-94 housing: 15-18; 63-65; 71 ideology/ideologies: 16-17; 46-48; 105-106; 119; 123-124 identity: 28; 57; 63; 72; 75-79; 93; 119 inhabit/inhabitation: 63-67; 82; 99-103 imperial/imperialism: 33; 75-79; 123-127 images/imagery/image-making: 15-19; 39-43; 45-49; 51-55; 87-91; 93-95 India: 33-37; 47 industry/industrialisation: 81; 117 institution/institutional: 34; 75-79; 123 interviews: 70; 105; 119 landscape: 47; 63; 71; 81-85; 94; 93-97; 117-121 law: 111-115 London: 57-61; 63-67; 69; 93-97; 51-55

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map/mapping: 59-60; 90; 95; 125 material/materialism: 21-24; 45; 52-54; 63-65; 75-78; 99; 111-114; 117 Marx/Marxism: 106; 117 media: 28-29; 39-41; 45; 51-53; 106-107 memory/memorial: 75-78; 99-102 modernisation: 28-29; 105-106; 124 modern/modernity: 27; 39-41; 52; 65; 118-119; 124-126 monument/monumental: 75-77 narrative: 17-18; 40; 53; 59; 76-78; 88-89; 111 nature: 95; 118-120 panorama: 51-54 performace: 45-47; 58-59; 69; 77-78; 89; 114 perception: 15; 21; 47 photograph/photography: 39-42; 47; 51; 64-65; 99-102

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politics/political: 16; 29; 35-36; 58; 75-77; 81-83; 87-88; 105-106; 111-113; 123-126 post-war: 46; 69-72 prejudice: 28-29; 58-60 public/public space: 27-29; 58-60; 69; 77; 105-107; 123-125 representation: 16; 28; 39-41; 45-48; 51-52; 58-60; 78; 93-94; 99 queer: 57-59 science: 48; 52-54 Second World War: 15; 75; 124 sexuality/sexual identity: 27; 57-60 situated knowledge: 83; 119 Soviet Russia: 15-18; 87-90; 123 subjective/subjectivity: 87; 120 suburban: 15; 57; 63-65 surreal/surrealism: 39-42

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storage: 63-66 symbol/symbolic/symbolism: 15; 39; 48; 64-66; 76-77 technology/technological/technicity: 40; 46; 52; 79; 113; 118-119 temporal/temporality: 59; 65; 89 territory: 33; 120; 123 truth: 54; 88; 113; 120 urbanism/urban planning: 15-17; 21-24; 27-30; 35; 39; 47; 52; 63-65; 71; 81-83; 105-106; 117-119; 124-125 visibility: 23-24 women/women’s rights: 27-30; 69; 106-108 writing [mode of]: 40; 88-90; 120-121

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Image Credits

p. 9 Public Domain. Reproduced courtesy of ARTFL Project, University of Chicago; p. 19 Copyright ©Mosfilm Studios; p. 25 Copyright ©Rocío González Orué. Reproduced courtesy of the author; p. 31 Copyright ©Se-kyeong Productions; p. 37 Copyright ©Krishna Dadawala; p. 43 Copyright ©Dell & Wainwright / RIBA Collections.

Reproduced courtesy of the RIBA Architecture Image Library; p. 49 Copyright ©A & P Smithson, Publication of the Smithson Family Collection / Delft University Press. Reproduced courtesy of The Smithson Family Collection; p. 55 Copyright ©Trustees of the British Museum; p. 67 Copyright ©Islington Planning Division; p. 73 Copyright ©Eliza Grosvenor; p. 79 Copyright ©Stefan Gruber; p. 85 Copyright ©Haneen Jadallah; p. 91 Copyright ©Ishita Jain; p. 97 Public Domain. Reproduced courtesy of the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam; p. 103 Copyright © Eduardo Jochamowitz. Reproduced courtesy of the author; p. 109 Copyright © Wei Kuang; p. 115 Copyright © YouTube; p. 121 Copyright © Max Wisotsky; p. 127 Copyright © The British Library Board

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