Topokairos: Archaetectures for a Shadowtime Landscape by cxetheresa

Topokairos Archaetectures for a Shadowtime Landscape

Xin En Theresa Chua

2017

5 Acknowledgements 7 Introduction 17 Part I: Excavation The Things of the Archaeological Site

55 Part II: (Re)production The Thingliness of the Archaeological Site

73 Part III: (Re)burial The Landscape of the Archaeological Site

95 Part IV: (Re)construction The Speculative Histories of the Archaeological Site

111 Postscript

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This publication is made possible by the support of several incredible people. My deepest gratitude goes to my thesis advisor, Kathy Velikov, whose invaluable guidance and contributions have shaped the thesis in profound ways and whose encouragement gave me the perseverance to pursue the ambition of the book in the first place. Thank you for being a role model in the wonderful work that you do. I express my greatest thanks to Chris Ratté and the University of Michigan archaeological survey team as well, for their tireless devotion to their work, and whose generous sharing of the research gave depth to the thesis and inspired the archaeological framework of this book. Thank you to the constructive criticisms and input from my critics and professors Jen Maigret, Anca Trandafirescu, Amy Kulper, Ana Morcillo Pallarés, Mireille Roddier, Geoffrey Thün, McLain Clutter, and Dawn Gilpin. Thank you also to my teachers Perry Kulper, Robert Fishman, Bobby Wong, Lai Chee Kien, Jeffrey Chan, Tsuto Sakamoto, and Fung Jon Chye, whose teachings throughout my education have played a significant role in the gathering of attitudes in the thesis. Special thanks to my teachers Kate Tremel and John Leyland who introduced me to the poetic art of ceramics that taught me to ponder upon architecture and landscape with a refreshing passion for material, ground, and meaning. I also owe my thanks to the wonderful peers in my class Julia, Kristin, Hao, Junxing, Sebastian, Margaret, and Saumon for the conversations that have encouraged much inspiration. Thank you Jenny, Alan, Francis, David, Taka, Jonathan, Arvin, Adrian, Akshay, Will, Frank, and James for your generous help and sharing of knowledge. Many thanks to Suzanne, Peini, Cherylene, Wenlu, Chun Yong, Dishi, Cheerin, and Sejay for the care and moral support. I am also grateful to the friends back home, to Samantha,Yanling, Julian, Lynn, Shaunice, Eugene, Iven, and Gareth for keeping close in heart and mind despite the distance. Finally, this book is dedicated to my family, without whom the thesis would not have been possible. Thank you Mum, Papa, Trixie, Terry, and Aunt Poh Kiang for your endless support, enduring faith, and sustained prayers.

INTRODUCTION What is a thesis? A thesis is a proposition, an argument, an accent in a debate. It is a body of work starting with a hunch, with questions, assumptions and assertions, gradually developing into a specific path. This path and its direction change over time. A thesis ends where it is not necessarily expected to go; its form cannot be designed in advance, rather it is put on like a mantle. The beginning is intuitive, the path messy; the end remains a promise, a program. RAOUL BUNSCHOTEN, HELENE BINET, AND TAKURO HOSHINO. Urban Flotsam: Stirring the City: Chora

The Intuitive Beginning

Topokairos: Archaetectures For A Shadowtime Landscape stems out of a burdened anxiety to situate an architectural thesis in an intellectual discourse of greater width. The beginning intuition was the simple question - how does one build an architecture for the archaeological site? This enquiry then begs multiple inquiries that gradually unravel the complexities within the architectural question itself â&#x20AC;&#x201C; how, foremost, to read the archaeological site? What is an archaeological site? To preserve or to destroy what is in the site? What are the histories of the site, known and unknown? Which other practices are going on in the site and cannot be ignored? Where else in the wider territories of the context should be considered? The bombardment of histories and narratives, coupled with the realization of a lamentable lack of expertise in almost everything occurring in the site from archaeology to engineering, throws the architect into a state of disarray. While the architect can be selective in references and inspiration that informs a built project, the truth remains that the architectural gesture is inherently woven into the palimpsest of the site and the canon of the architectural practice. Architecture is an artifact in a sea of artifacts. Faced with this burden, what starts out as a personal rumination as a mode of escape and source of refuge becomes a conviction for an aspiring architect to modestly formulate a hermeneutic thesis of architecture. At times putting aside the histories, at times dwelling on them, the thesis becomes a conscious act of gathering and a speculation of possibilities that unfolds from this messy collection. Subsequently, amid the mess that shall be navigated, the only thing that remains an assertion in the book is this thesis: In order for the architecture to address the complexities and affect a

loaded site such as that of the archaeological site (i.e. Notion), it has to be situated in a fundamental series of inquiries beyond itself. Here, the choreographed lexicon of topokairos, archaetecture, and shadowtime attempts to articulate the intention of an architecture whose form, program, and tectonics are read in conjunction with, and in turn narrate the geological, anthropological, historical, scientific, and ecological layers of the landscape. Hence, while the book dabbles in the field of experimental preservation - an emergent practice that takes root in a long history of the preservation discourse (from the preservationist theories posited by Viollet le-Duc and John Ruskin in the 1860s, to the 1931 Athens Charter for the Restoration of Historic Monuments, to the 1964 Venice Charter, to the 2010 Venice Biennale titled Cronocaos by OMA, and to the most recent roundtables on Experimental Preservation in 2015), Topokairos hopes to make sense of the dialectics of preservation through a shift in vantage point from the architecture object in-and-of itself to the architectural condition in a sea of other artifacts. This book, therefore, does not aim to present an exhaustive atlas, nor does it take stock of emergent practices. Rather, through a series of ruminations on the things, landscapes, and histories of the archaeological site, the thesis projects the potential of architectural practice in preservation to encompass greater worlds of experimentation.

Topokairos thus posits a way of seeing and drawing relationships within the discipline, mulling on the strangeness of distinct practices and behaviors when gathered with other disciplines. In this respect, the product that emerges from the thesis is but one manifestation in a field of possibilities, and each position implies wider applications. It is with this ambition that the end “remains a promise”1 and the book identifies modestly with the Atlas of Novel Tectonics by scholarly architects Jesse Reiser and Nakano Umemoto, in being a preface “from beginning to end”2. The Messy Path - from Project as Book to Book as Project The Book then becomes a valued methodology for the thesis. If the site is to be read as a palimpsest of multiple layers, with each layer carrying its own meanings and implying other meanings, it only follows that the thesis book is a messy, discordant assemblage of imagery, notations, scientific diagrams, musings, quotations, projects, etc. that speaks for the series of positions. The Book is, consequently, the site that produces the architecture. It is the architectural project itself. While it is a preface in its entirety, the book is also a work-in-progress that elucidates relations between discontinuities and dissimilarities among its gathered artifacts. As a collective, the book celebrates the “smallness” of the architectural artifact within the broader context, and, almost in the fashion of a soliloquy, attempts to address the questions - what is the role of architecture in all this?

The Testing Ground - Notion INTRODUCTION

The context for the undertaking is the archaeological site of Notion. Here, the landscape serves as testing ground and architectonic text. It is to be read, excavated, and buried; its pages are to be flipped, layers peeled, and land worked for a series of speculations situated in a broader framework in the discourse of preservation.

Notion is a largely unexplored ancient city on the west coast of Turkey, just 15 km northwest of Ephesus. Situated on two promontories jutting into the Aegean Sea, its isolated location has ensured that Notion is only lightly buried, making it a desired site for archaeological survey3. Archaeological research has been conducted on the site since 1885. While the most recent archaeological survey project began by the University of Michigan and Brown University at Notion in 2014 includes extensive geophysical surveys and studies, the site is yet to be excavated. As such, many narratives of the site remain a mystery. The speculated relocation and intensive habitation that occurred between 200 BC and the 100AD4., for example, is part of a larger collective of stories that remain embedded in the landscape. They might come to light as a result of contemporary incisions in the landscape, or they might never be elucidated. The historical project is hence approached from the future. This complex of speculation, testing, preservation, and the myriad of actions occuring on this archaeological site of known unknowns turns it into a landscape of experiementation and a field of actions affecting the deep geology and vast futures of the space. To this end, just as historian Robert Fishman believes that every course should have a course quote and a course monument, Topokairos presents a thesis quote and a thesis monument as attitudes for the exposition.

THESIS QUOTE

The number of ways for things to occupy time is probably no more unlimited than the number of ways in which matter occupies space. The difficulty with delimiting the categories of time has always been to find a suitable description of duration, which would vary according to events while measuring them against a fixed scale. History has no periodic table of elements, and no classification of types of species; it has only solar time and a few old ways of grouping events, but no theory of temporal structure. GEORGE KUBLER,

The Shape of Time, 1962

INTRODUCTION

THESIS MONUMENT

PIETER BRUEGEL THE ELDER, The Tower of Babel, 1563

TOPOKAIROS - /təˈpä’kīräs/

Topo (greek) = place Kairos (greek) = time the shape and place of an indeterminate moment in time. The Ancient Greeks had two words for time - chronos and kairos. While the former refers to chronological or sequential time, the latter signifies a period or season, a moment of indeterminate time in which an event of significance happens. ________________________________________________________________________ Art historian George Kubler sets out to seek a shape that best encapsulates time, narrating a consciousness of the linguistic limits of variables in describing temporality. Similarly, the thesis wrestles with the organization and classification of histories, narratives, facts, and quantities of the site. With the many things that the book gathers, it is intuitive to order artifacts thematically, chronologically and give them hierarchical structure. On the contrary, the thesis compresses the temporality of things by adopting the attitude of the alternative Greek word for time – kairos. Kairos describes an event, a moment of indeterminate time that cannot fully be measured and registered. Unlike chronos, in which the significance of temporality is derived through a permanent, continuous order, kairos describes a temporality whose permanence is derived from its ephemerality and discontinuity. Topokairos does not posit a theory for designing for archaeological sites. It is neither solution nor prescription. Rather, in the gathering and positioning of things in relation to other things, it seeks to speculate architectural possibilities for a site that is very much characterized by the fleeting temporality of kairos - a landscape as an aggregate of disparate things that have collapsed into qualitative moments. SHADOWTIME - /ˈSHadō tīm/

a parallel timescale that follows one around throughout day to day experience of regular time. Shadowtime manifests as a feeling of living in two distinctly different temporal scales simultaneously, or acute consciousness of the possibility that the near future will be drastically different than the present5. ________________________________________________________________________ The quality of the moment is perhaps best captured in Pieter Bruegel The Elder’s painting of the Tower of Babel. No one knows what the Tower of Babel looks like, so any illustration of it is an extrapolation from a few verses of scripture.Yet, we know for sure that the most significant moment of this architecture is its divine destruction. As Michael Jakob expresses so pithily in his essay On Mountains: Scalable and Unscalable that the architectural layers of the tower only become legible in the moment where it falls to pieces6, topokairos expresses the archaeological gesture needed to read the site - an action twitching in between excavating and backfilling the land simultaneously.

INTRODUCTION

In Part I, the site is read through an excavation that uncovers artifacts as things. Based on the premise that things are imperative in the act of gathering, Part II extends an ontological and material inquiry of the artifacts. It comments on the thingliness of artifacts as a sum of parts other than itself, i.e. replicas, information, and instruments. Situating the finds in a network of possible meanings, Part III delves deeper into the notion of landscape in the site, perceiving archaeological methods and approaches in relation to the discourse of landscape. Here the concept of reburial is examined as both scientific and ritualistic practice. Having established the excavation-reburial tempo operating between two opposing temporal vectors, Part IV extrapolates the third axis of speculative reconstruction in Notion as preface to novel possibilities in the architectural interpretations of archaeological sites. ARCHAETECTURE- /ärˈkēə, tek(t)SHər/

a portmanteau of archaeology and architecture; refers to a body of speculative propositions of spatial conditions/ processes that operate within the crevices between archaeology and architecture. ________________________________________________________________________

PREAMBLE

INTRODUCTION

I walk across, under and above. //parallel// lines, adjacent t i m e scales. across the city now, engulfed under an untouchable wholethe sky. the museum. above fragments yesterday, of which I know not since when they came into being Ruined, unchanging beneath me, above me growing rapidly. I grasp things in states of entropy artifacts architectures earth Cranes scramble to rebuild. Hands fumble to preserve. They collide ahead of me They breathe to me their memories. I inhale the dust of the artifacts, the fragments of the architecture, the remnants of the earth. They shift, twitch, rise, fall. No structure. They return. Dust to Dust, Fragment to Fragment, Remnant to Remnant. I am always in shadows Finding a place. TOPO Walking in the flicker between horizon (infinity) and moment. KAIROS I dig, I test, I guess, I find. Archaeology. I bury, I imagine, I draw, I rebuild. Architecture. ARCHAETECTURE? The rhythm of my breath Is still, always slipping in shadows. //parallel// to what is above, across, below. SHADOWTIME.

TOPOKAIROS: ARCHAETECTURES FOR A SHADOWTIME LANDSCAPE 15

Part I: Excavation The Things of the Archaeological Site

PART I: EXCAVATION

EXCAVATION

Memory is not an instrument for surveying the past but its theater. It is the medium of past experience, just as the earth is the medium in which dead cities lie buried. He who seeks to approach his own buried past must conduct himself like a man digging. , “Ibizan Sequence” in Selected Writings, Vol. 2, part 2 (1931-34)

WALTER BENJAMIN

Each thing (res), as far as it can by its own power, strives (conatur) to persevere in its own being. SPINOZA. Ethics,

part. 3. proposition 6.

The archaeological practice of excavation is an operation emerging from the desire to discover objects and material remains. It is grounded on the conviction that these objects serve as instrumental pieces of evidence to supplement known sources, and thus provide key clues in the interpretative project of understanding the history of civilization. In this regard, there is something deeply architectonic in the operation of excavation. Likewise, there is something very archaeological at the heart of ontological and ecological theories on things, such as Manuel de Landa’s Nonorganic Life, Deleuze and Guattari’s Assemblage of Inorganic Life, Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter, and Timothy Morton’s Ecological Thought. Not only do these theories believe that the power of the inanimate object lies in the object relationships beyond itself, they also argue for understanding the past and the present from an alternative perspective of multiplicities - that is reading the object and the context field together as object-field rather than isolating object from field, or field from object. It is with this ambition that Topokairos starts with the excavation of the site to uncover artifacts that vibrate material logics and relationships that would give clarity to the object-field of the archaeological site.

PART I: EXCAVATION

on THINGS The things of the archaeological site are vibrant matter1. And within each thing the thingness of the thing lies in its power to gather other elements to it2. If the fragments we gather on site each gather analogies The analogies of cultural reference, scientific discovery, aesthetic fascination, political history; If the fragments we gather on site each gather the durationsThe durations of the earth, the sky, the mortals, the immortals in a primal oneness3Then the dust of the artifacts, the fragments of the architecture, the remnants of the earth. They talk, they breathe One ecology that permeates all forms4. They assemble, a ritual of their own. The mortal is swept throughHands waving a cloud of dust, Chest tracing a mesh of fragments, Feet sinking into a mound of remnants5. A ritual, an assemblage5 of ecological oneness. Everything is alive.

THE THINGS OF THE ARCHAEOLOGICAL SITE Notion is the collection of

artifacts. surface finds excavated finds coins pottery bronzes tools votive offerings burial figures loom weights treasures statues sculptures inscriptions

THE THINGS OF THE ARCHAEOLOGICAL SITE Notion is the collection of

artifacts. surface finds excavated finds coins pottery bronzes tools votive offerings burial figures loom weights treasures statues sculptures inscriptions

architecture. surface ruins excavated ruins walls, fortification walls, terrace walls, threshold monuments temples columns roof tiles altars cisterns pipes

THE THINGS OF THE ARCHAEOLOGICAL SITE collision of Notion is the collection

artifacts. surface finds excavated finds coins pottery bronzes tools votive offerings burial figures loom weights treasures statues sculptures inscriptions

architecture.

instruments.

plasticppebbles architecture. ebbles heat

surface ruins excavated ruins artifacts.walls, walls, fortification surface finds walls, terrace excavated finds walls, threshold monuments coins pottery temples bronzes columns roof tiles tools altars ivory objects cisterns

aerial photogrammetery camera tethered blimp instruments. surface ruins photographic scaleaaerial erial photogrammetery excavated ruins 3D software camera drone walls, fortification tethered blimp walls, terrace thermal imagery photographic scale walls, threshold thermomap camera3D software monuments total station drone RTK satellite navigation temples thermal imagery magnetic gradiometer columns thermomap camera laser scanner roof tiles total station tools altars RTK satellite navigation faulttrowel breccia cisterns magnetic gradiometer hammer pipes tools brush trowel wheelbarrow hammer screen

gold

leadbones magnetic field marble

shell limestone bronze

votive offerings burial figures pipes treasures statues sculptures

rubberstone wood

terracotta

schist

steel

electrum ivoryw weeds eeds

grasses

aluminium silt horn bone

brick amber clay silver

motor

glass rock

seeds insectsearth

fiberglass infrared waves carbon fiber

brush wheelbarrow screen

GILLES DELEUZE AND FELIX GUATTARI, A Thousand

Pleateaus

The things of the archaeological site collide to form a vibrant materialism. When settled into a museum, they gather in a cabinet of entropic conditions...

PART I: EXCAVATION

In short, what metal and metallurgy bring to light is a life proper to matter, a vital state of matter as such, a material vitalism that doubtless exists everywhere but is ordinarily hidden or covered, rendered unrecognizableâ&#x20AC;Ś

6 PART I: EXCAVATION

THE RITUAL OF SURVEY

LASER RANGEFINDER A Laser Rangefinder is an active time of flight sensor that is used to determine the distance to an object with a concentrated beam of light.These sensors send out a collinear beam of light and look for its reflection. There are multiple ways to measure the distance the light travels. One approach is the time-of-flight principle, â&#x20AC;&#x153;time of flightâ&#x20AC;? principle where a short laser pulse is emitted towards the object and is reflected on its surface; a part of the reflected radiation comes back to the scanner where it is detected by a sensor. As the light-speed is well known and time elapsed between emission and reception of the pulse can be measured, the range to the object can be determined by half of the round-trip distance. The second approach as illustrated here is based on the phase-shift principle, where the phase shift between the original and reflected laser pulse is measured6.

TOP Laser rangefinder used to 3D scan a cistern at Notion BOTTOM Principle of phase-shift measurement

D’ = L + 2·D - L+ (θ·λ)/(2·π) D = (λ·θ)/(4·π)

c=f·λ

Visible Light Phase Shift Through a Laser Scanner and Cistern

3*108 ms-1

PART I: EXCAVATION

MAGNETIC GRADIOMETER An instrument used in the geophysical survey of archaeological sites. A magnetic gradiometer measures the magnetic field gradient by moving a pair of sensors. Gradiometers consist of a pair of proton precession magnetometers, cesium vapor or other optically pumped sensors, or fluxgate sensors. Fluxgate magnetometers utilize two ferromagnetic cores each wound with a primary coil and an outer secondary coil attached to amp meter. When an alternating currents passed through the primary coils, it creates two opposing magnetic fields that vary in intensity based on the outside magnetic fields. Burnt features, buried features and other features that cause a localized magnetic anomaly can be detected from a discrepancy in the ambient magnetic field. The ability to detect an object depends on its magnetic properties and distance from the sensor. In most cases anomalies detected with a magnetometer of any type lie in the uppermost 1-2 meters, with a maximum of about 3 meters7.

TOP

Bartington Grad 601-2 fluxgate gradiometer used for geophysical survey of 64 full and 40 partial 30 X 30 m grid squares at Notion BOTTOM Principle of magnetic gradiometry

l dat

pixe

magnetic gradiometer

Ear

th m

agn

etic

field

measure of current

fluxgate sensor

~50 000 nT nT nanotesla

localized magnetic anomaly

measured response

Ambient-Hidden Magnetic Anomaly Through buried features and gradiometer

PART I: EXCAVATION

UNMANNED AERIAL VEHICLE (UAV) Commonly known as a drone, the UAV, is able to collect different data depending on the camera technology mounted on it. In Notion, the eBee lightweight drone with a S110 RGB camera to map the visual spectrum, generating a spatial resolution ranging from 2 to 6 cm. Using the imagery, a detailed digital terrain model (DTM) was created. The drone was also mounted with a thermoMap camera for thermal sensing of the site. Thermal imaging registers infrared wave radiation from the differential heat dissipation from the surface. The spatial resolution of drone imagery depends on the Ground Sampling Distance (GSD), which is affected by focal length of the camera and altitude of the drone8.

TOP eBee

drone launch at Notion of Bundle Triangulation for photogrammetry BOTTOM, RIGHT Infrared imaging camera technology

BOTTOM, LEFT Principle

infrared sensitive OLED

Infrared-to-visible converting lens complex

infrared focusing lens

orthorectified imagery

focal length

altitude photogrammetry triangulation to determine point in space

IFOV in mrad

ground sampling distance

image overlap

spatial resolution

field of view

Flight of Infrared Variation and Triangulation Through a UAV and surface things

As these cultural materials accumulated, they mixed in various ways, forming novel meshworks and hierarchies. MANUEL DE LANDA, “Geological

History 1000-1700 A.D.” in A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History

The archaeological site is alive. The things breathe, gathering; they breathe, assembling. They stand scattered, yet adjacent to other things. They answer one another. The body weaves through the things, becoming tangled in their web. Organism-person-environment9 becomes one. The thing becomes bigger than the body. The site grows bigger than the thing. Forging silent dialogues of new relations A sea of convenientia, aemulatio, analogy, sympathies10. Now as these relationships are not fixed in time, They are fuzzy. Existing in a weird looping sprawling temporality11, In a space that flickers within, around, beneath, and to the side of our artificially demarcated history12. The things then speak of a world bigger than all the things put together. A world of hyperobjects13. An ecology darker than the voids between flashes of light, A strangeness stranger than the uncanny familiar. You never know when the next column might fall. And the other things that fall with it.

PART I: EXCAVATION

7 on THINGS AND OTHER THINGS

on THE STRANGENESS OF THINGS IN THE ARCHAEOLOGICAL SITE

Museums are tombs, and it looks like everything is turning into a museum. Painting, sculpture and architecture are finished, but the art habit continues. ROBERT SMITHSON, Some Void Thoughts

on Museums, 1979

Either we accept the fact that it is almost like a perverse act to remove the sculptures from the temples and put them in a museum. Or one could go to another extreme and maybe we should let them decay as a manifestation of the stupidity of mankind or at least of the stupidity of our civilization. RAIMUND ABRAHAM, The

Silenece of the Muses, Lecture for: The International Competition for the New Acropolis Museum in Athens, 1991

Archaeological sites are a strange phenomenon. The rigorous study of a site embodies a committment to finding some sort of objective truth by actualizing speculative histories through accurate, careful documentation and reconstruction of artifacts and conditions.Yet, the practice of archaeology does not necessarily engage in the complexities embedded within the archaeological site in order to extrapolate possibilities for a space in place of the ruin. The archaeological practice often remains in the conservative realm of convention. The museum becomes the default end to the mission. The architect, tasked to design the loose end, enters the dialogue following the excavation. In contrast to the archaeologist, the architect operates in a realm of imagination ex-situ. The result is an uncanny paradox: The archaeologist begins work through studies and fieldwork. The archaeologist derives and imagines a reconstruction. The speculative reconstruction of an architecture of the past takes place historical truth, checked. Architecture in space-time. The artifacts go to the museum. The architect is tasked to design the museum. The architect tries by all means to curate a history within the built space - historical truth, checked. Space-time in Architecture. Yet, in between architecture in space-time and space-time in architecture resides the moment of slippage for experimental preservation to occur.

PART I: EXCAVATION

Space-Time Architecture Paradox TOP

Architecture in Space-time Space-time in Architecture

BOTTOM

9 THE DEATH OF THINGS

The archaeological site dies. In a state of entropy, it burns out. Flickering, withering, Decomposed into an all-encompassing sameness14. While mortals live, They send the things to death, Usher them into the Museum of the Void15.

Preserved behind layers of immortality, the things are overcome with mortality. Cranes scramble to rebuild, Hands fumble to preserve. Mortals dig up the things of the ritual, exposing them to the sky, seemingly breathing into them new life. But this new breath, plunges them into their death. They gather no longer. They assemble no longer. In that moment of preservation The memories of the things vanish. The human attempts to encourage the things to gather once more But they have forgotten how to.

PART I: EXCAVATION

The Inevitable Death of the Object TOP

Death by deterioration Death by preservation

BOTTOM

Part II: (Re)production The Thingliness of the Archaeological Site

(RE)PRODUCTION We find authenticity by selectively encouraging nature’s own paradigmatic process of reproduction, using humanity’s own natural aesthetics together with feedback from the ecosystem as a guide -- a process that then becomes the real meaning of preservation. , “The Invented Landscape” in Beyond Preservation: Restoring and Inventing Landscapes

FREDERICK TURNER

The inevitable death of things appears to be the only certain condition of an object. Is there, then, not any intervention that would reverse this inevitability, bestowing upon the object a transcendence of its own mortality? In the exhibition ‘A World of Fragile Parts’ at the 2016 Venice Architecture Biennale, the Victoria and Albert Museum presented a range of artifacts, information, and technologies that compose the lineage of reproduction and replication. Provoking to erase the stigma of the copy and to argue for copies as key instruments in the preservation of cultural artifacts, the exhibition radically reexamines the definitions of an artifact and a monument. The artifact-monument is now not only a thing composed of the physical manifestation of itself, but a total manifestation of its reproductions, replicas and, in sum, the means of its storage and information transmission1. The mortal object lives on, through its multiple reproductions. The object dies but lives distributed in space time. In the practice of replication, as embodied by the V&A, preservationists work against time to protect notable artifacts and sites of heritage against permanent decay and destruction. The questions raised by the practice becomes especially relevant and urgent with the recent destruction of heritage sites such as Palymra in Syria and Timbuktu in Mali. If the reproduction of artifacts and architecture becomes a normalized vehicle for the dissemination of cultural knowledge, then copying could, in theory, be pivotal in the salvage of endangered heritage. Preservationists are also holding on to International Criminal Court’s (ICC) Timbuktu verdict the first ruling of the destruction of cultural heritage as a war crime - as a beacon of hope for the safeguarding of heritage sites. Additionally, recent discourse led by theorists like David Gissen and Lucia Allais has expanded beyond the notion of cultural heritage as a fundamental human right, to rethinking the monument as not only an object, but an animate thing commanding its own rights and responsibilities2. But what are the rights of the monument, and if the line of debate is extended to the replica, what is the nature of the copy and would the copy have similar rights? The complex issue of the artifact and its copy then raises a host of questions concerning authenticity, aura, and the methods of reproduction. Granted that the monument-artifact can be reproduced and distributed, what makes a monument what it is?

THE ETERNALLY ENTROPIC MONUMENT

Has Passaic replaced Rome as The Eternal City? ROBERT SMITHSON, A Tour

of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey

As a thing is its own becoming in its thingliness, so is a monument monumental in its monumentality. The history of the idea of monumentality is fraught with complexity. As a large symbolic structure embodying meanings of a people, collective experiences, rituals, and cultures, the monument is an artifact - the thingliness being the monument-artifact noteworthy of an entire discourse. The post-war discussion of monumentality, from Giedion, Léger, Serts’ Nine Points of Monumentality to Louis Kahn’s Monumentality, was obssessed with the expression of spirituality and timelessness renewed by modern materials. They called for the need to articulate the inherent monumentality in architecture, challenging the modernists’ attitude of disdain toward history. The result of this obsession was, most significantly, an expanded vocabulary of monumentality - not the perfect proportions of the column orders but the new structural possibilities of building elements; not the power of the creator to erect the monument, but the inherent power of architecture to exude eternity more than ever before. Whereas architecture was for the gods in the Greco-roman ruins that inspired Kahn, architecture was god in his work. Like Kahn, the artist Robert Smithson was obsessed with monuments and ruins. In his trip to Passaic, New Jersey, he catalogued five types of monuments of dysfunction, decay, and emptiness. While Kahn saw the monuments in Rome as ruins indicating a timeless presence of a building, Smithson perceived the monuments of Passaic to be “ruins in reverse”3, presencing an eternal absence instead. This time, Smithson has also expanded the vocabulary of monumentality. In naming banal infrastructures of the suburbs monuments, he identified “monumental vacancies”4 as the inherent monumentality of these artifacts. The new monuments were not just architectures suspended in eternity, they were structures that compressed time and surfaces that told the meanings of an entropic condition5. While the modernists created monumental forms that presenced in absence, artists Dan Flavin, Donald Judd, Sol LeWitt, and Will Insley made monumental forms that were eternally absent. In the expansion of its lexicon, monumentality has witnessed its own subversion. The countermonument now supplied a whole alternative lexicon in the vocabulary of monumentality. Kahn was inspired by the ruins as things that disappear, and designed ever-presencing monuments; Smithson saw things that would eventually be built, and named monuments of an ever absence. The monumentality of a monument thus resides not in its eternal presence or absence, but in its state of uncertain ruination between the entropic poles of presence and absence, and this is made evident in the moment when the inherent monumentality of the thing is subverted.

PART II: (RE)PRODUCTION

TOP

The Monumentality of Eternal Presence is felt in the moment of absence. The Monumentality of Eternal Absence is felt in the moment of presence.

BOTTOM

DAN FLAVIN,

Monument for V. Tatlin, 1966-9

Rather than saying, “What time is it?” we should say, “Where is the time?” “Where is Flavin’s Monuments?” The objective present at time seems missing. Robert Smithson

THE (RE)PRODUCIBILITY OF THE MONUMENT-ARTIFACT Just as Louis Kahn and Robert Smithson sought a new monumentality in the 1940s and 1960s respectively in the advent of new technological developments, preservationists have also been examining the definitions of a monument. The discourse, however, has shifted from the inherent monumentality of the object in question to its pragmatic focus on the role an artifact plays in the preservation of a heritage belonging to the people.

PART II: (RE)PRODUCTION

Numerous attempts have been made to expand the vocabulary of monumentality once more, especially in the digital turn of the 21st century. The proliferation of replicas has cast the spotlight on issues of authenticity, integrity, and the ethics of copying. The reversed, entropic conditions that surfaced in the reading of Kahn and Smithson’s definitions of monumentality can also be read in the concept of the replica as we consider two exhibits at the V&A show A World of Fragile Parts. The replica of the Palymra Arch made of digitally carved marble is juxtaposed against a stone cast of a refugee tent in the Calais’ Jungle by architect Sam Jacobs. The reproduced stone cornice of the Palymra arch appears to have been reduced to a replica. In contrast, in the words of research curator Danielle Thom, the refugee tent in being cast in stone is elevated to the status of a sculptural monument6.Yet, it is difficult to conclude whether the monumentality of one has been reduced or elevated, simply because both artifacts have undergone an inversion in their monumentality. In fact, in the aforementioned examples, the inherent monumentality of the monument-artifact only becomes even more visible when inversed. Just as reburial is to excavation, so is the collapse of the monument to its monumentality. Monumentality is found in the first moment of collapse - whether altered or subverted by a network of power relations and social constructs- of being unstuck in time7 from a linear decay to a concentric fluctuation between its decay and rebirth. We realize the monumentality of a monument at the brink of its destruction, when its rights tip in a state of unbalance. We experience the monumentality of a monument in its alteration and reproduction. In Integrities: The Salvage of Abu Simbel, theorist Lucia Allais observed in the Danish relocation scheme of the Abu Simbel temples that the integrity of the temples resided not in the “doctrinal pronouncements of conservationists”, but in the “salvage apparatuses they were forced to use” such as the technologies of cutting, moving, and reconstructing8. The integrity of the monument, in the collective moment of relocation, became unstuck in time9 as new technologies and ancient materials formed an assemblage - a new monumentality. A similar reading can be applied to the reproduction of original monument-artifacts. If the collective interventions in the salvage of a monument-artifact contributes to the latent integrity of the original object, can they not be part of the aura of the object in question? In fact, if the monument is now an assemblage of the original

work, the lineage of its analog and digital replicas, and the human conservationists and nonhuman instruments involved in its salvage and dissemination, the definition of every monument-artifact can be expanded on two levels. On the level of scale, the reproduction of the monument-artifact does not compromise, but contribute to its integrity. The new monument is no longer whole, it can be represented as an assemblage of fragments and fragmentary experiences10. On the level of authenticity, the reproduction of the monument-artifact has to be reconsidered in a post-digital environment. On one hand both analog and digital techniques have enabled the perfection of copies, on the other hand the pervasiveness of digital networks like the Internet have paved way for the easy access and dissemination of the copy. The positioning of the monumentartifact in the post-digital environment is then akin to a Robert-Smithson-meets-LIDAR-scanningtechnology-moment -- endlessly chaotic but teeming with possibilities. Digital reconstructions attempt to digitize aura, but the acceptance of copies and digital transmissions of information do result in a loss of the original rituals surrounding the original artifact-monument. Yet, since the digital manifestation might never replace the inherent authenticity of the artifact-monument, it is imperative that the authenticity of the object be reexamined given that data has become the default condition through which we understand the artifact-monument of the past today. The aura of the monument-artifact, if considered as an assemblage, lies not in its irreproducibility, but on the contrary, in its capacity to be digitized, reproduced, and disseminated into a myriad of dissimilar fragments of auralessness. Therefore, the expanded monument-artifact is fragile. Not because the original is in danger of decay, but because it is read in infinitely varied conditions of flux between past and future, existing precariously as fragments in varying states of decay, distributed in invisible networks of information and culture. Reproduction, in keeping the monument in constant flux, is instrumental in expanding heritage. Consequently, the monument should be granted â&#x20AC;&#x153;copyrightsâ&#x20AC;? - defined by architect Inez Weisman as the right to be copied, replicated, and disseminated11. The new monument of today is monumental because of its inherent reproducibility and transmission. Then, the question of copying is not whether the monument should be replicated or not, but how it should be done, to preserve the sum of its dispersed parts.

PART II: (RE)PRODUCTION

BOTTOM

TOP The Salvage of Abu Simbel The Palymra Arch, replicated, at A World of Fragile Parts by the V&A

(RE)PRODUCTION FRAMEWORKS

thermomap camera

cast replica

artifact remains

3d printed replica

3d scanner

casting mold

The reproduction of a thing is a ritual. Like the cremation of a body that produces remains that are in turn inurned and memorialized forever â&#x20AC;&#x201C; the artifact, when replicated, is cremated. When it is memorialized in a chamber â&#x20AC;&#x201C; it is inurned.

The remains and their parts are inurned. Every artifact room is a unique urn.

PART II: (RE)PRODUCTION

The aartifact is the sum of its dispersed parts. Its parts pa are assembled back in the agora.

The remains of the artifact remain in situ, exposed to the weathering forces of entropy.

Instruments and a vital materialism survey the columbarium. The human becomes part of the ritualistic landscape.

The artifacts are cremated and buried.

A pit is dug for the artifact cremation to take place.

THE POST-ARCHAEOLOGICAL MUSEUM IS A COLUMBARIUM.

The expanded artifact-monument, overcome with death, yet enbalmed for life, dwells in a columbarium. The Museum is a tomb for cremated artifact remains. The artifact-monuments, its ashes; The walls of the museum, its urns. The things of the site are preserved eternally in death. Yet they live eternally through their replicated remains. Casts and molds tell their story, the instruments interpret their profiles. Metals scan the horizons of the columbarium, Everything becomes captured in digital sight Artifact, wall, roof, ground, human, become one image. Hands excavate, cremate, rebury, reharvest, all at once. Every cinerarium speaks of unearthed wonders Of the artifactâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s very present. Each inurned artifact- monument sings to the sky, the sky rains blessings on them. The things are assembled in the field of the agora. They trade, exchange, gather to themselves and others Replicating things and histories, Dispersing parts and sums of meaning, In obsession with an archaetectural ritual.

the Agora of Notion

PART II: (RE)PRODUCTION

The image of the world vanishes and is replaced by the towering realities of technology. Despite their solidity they are fragile, for they are condemned to be negated by new realities. The second origin, which I consider a true origin of architecture, is that of the grave. The grave protects a human being who needs no protection anymore. It is, as it were, a purely symbolic program which no longer signifies the presence but the absence of man. RAIMUND ABRAHAM, The Reality of the Unbuilt

0 1

15m

14 THE ARTIFACTS ASSEMBLE IN THE AGORA COLUMBARIUM.

PART II: (RE)PRODUCTION

Perhaps a better way to approach the object and its preservation is to foreground uncertainty in the name of “quantum” relativities: that of undecidability, diffraction, and entanglement...Preservation is not about capturing and “freezing” the moment. It is, instead, at least in part, about how that moment can continue to generate curiosity, wonderment. ADAM LOWE, in the London Meeting of the roundtable on Experimental Preservation, July 2015

Part III: (Re)burial The Landscape of the Archaeological Site

(RE)BURIAL

The practice of archaeology is itself a form of dwelling...For both the archaeologist and the native dweller, the landscape tells -- or rather is -- a story. TIM INGOLD, The Temporality of the Landscape

The death of things is neither tragedy nor virtue. Instead, it is a strange condition. With its strangeness, then, the phenomenon of the inevitable death of things calls for an equally strange act that would recite valuable readings of its weirdness and mysteriousness. The archaeological gesture of reburial is a such a strange act. Strange, because the reburial is seemingly an undoing of the painstaking action of excavation. Even stranger, because it represents moments of uncertainty between a completed excavation and the anticipation of a future excavation. After the point of reburial, the temporality of the artifact is no longer one of permanent entropy but one of an impermanent fuzzy concentricity spiralling between the ends of its past and its future. The reburied artifact is returned to its original condition of its past, the landscape looking as pristine as before.Yet, something within its condition has changed, leaving an uncanny shadow of the future lurking in its estranged past. The calculated act of archaeological reburial, laying upon an artifact layer by layer of earth and material, produces a ceremonial sequence of measurement, irrigation, and compaction of the landscape. Like an elaborate burial sequence of antiquity that articulates the passage of the dead to the afterlife, and anoints the dead with dignity, the archaeological reburial becomes a ritual, marking the land with the memory of its artifacts and commemorating the histories associated with the things in the landscape.

THE RITUAL OF (RE)BURIAL Historically, the focus of archaeological excavations was on the archaeological material itself. Because of this, sites were seen as containers for the archaeological material, with little value themselves. However, as archaeological interpretation has moved to place a focus on the relationship between the archaeological material and its context, there is a new importance placed on the archaeological site itself. Where previous archaeological excavations were content with recording and removing the finds, modern sites seek to give a holistic interpretation by employing both site and contents. The reburial of archaeological remains offers an attractive alternative for in-situ conservation. PEREZ MEJIA, A. A. An Engineering Approach for the Design of Archaeological Reburial Systems.

Reburial system originally installed for the Rose Theatre

Reburial is a basic, low-tech protective measure commonly known in archaeology as back-filling. In-situ preservation has been a recommended strategy in the past 80 years, but modern reburial projects began with the Rose Theatre in England. Although reburial has been practiced in the archaeology for nearly twenty five years, research in the design and assessment of burial systems remains in its infancy1. The layers of reburial vary depending on the type of ruin, climate, soil conditions, duration of protection, and other variables. Typically, a geotextile membrane is draped over the ruin, and backfilled with an intermediate layer2. Since the discipline of archaeology has not arrived at a strict reburial formula, the continual research and evaluation of past reburial systems creates a feedback loop of excavation, documentation, and reburial that becomes an obsessive ritual in its own right.

A main dimension of expression of status was the mound over the grave. This was linked to glory in two ways: the dead man’s honour, time, made a great mound of his due, and having a great mound was a further source of kleos, or fame, and hence grounds for renewed time for his descendants... The size of the mound was directly determined by time. Achilles asked the Acheans not to raise a huge mound for Patroclus, since his ashes were not be finally buried immediately, but rather “something just” for the time being. Later, though, they must build a mound that was wide and tall. Achilles and Patroclus were buried together under such a mound in a golden urn, an honour otherwise reserved for Hector.

PART III: (RE)BURIAL

IAN MORRIS, Burial and Ancient Society: The Rise of the Greek City-State

Burial mound of the North East Necropolis at Colophon, excavated in 1922 by Carl Blegen

The building of burial mounds, or tumuli, date back to the Neolithic Revolution between 5500 and 5000BC. The settlement of nomadic hunter-gatherer populations, with the new capacity to control the land by farming, gave birth to this geomorphological interventions of tells, watch-mounds, and burial mounds in the history of man’s dwelling in the landscape. The construction of tumuli take on a ritual significance of their own. Constructed in stages with the digging of a pit and a subsequent construction of a ramp lower masonry into the pit that was used to build the tomb, the erection of the tumulus was the final proceeding to cover all the preceding steps in the funeral ritual3. The tumulus, an artificial mountain, stands as a significant monument in its own right and speaks of greater historical meanings of the pursuit of sacredness, memorialization, and of man’s tumultously intimate relationship with the land.

BURIAL FRAMEWORKS ARCHAEOLOGICAL REBURIAL

Histor i

Components of system4 Infiltration layer geotextile - geosynthetic clay liner - compacted clay liner Irrigation and Drainage polyethylene pipe - soil - geotextile - geonet Reinforcement geosynthetics - geogrid- geocell

Kingdoms - empires -

Ter r i t o

Expulsion - Mi g rat or y f low

Sedimentation - siltation - Geo Fill sand - soil - cohesive soil - in situ soil - gravel - eps- vermiculite - eps - wood fiber controlled low strength material relig ion - ar t - legends - Cult u Protection layer mortar - geotextile - geomembrane Cap and Vegetation cover mortar- concrete - soil

Geophysical sur vey - Arc haeol

Separation and Filtration layer polyethylene sheeting - geotextile - geomembrane - natural soil Monitoring points Measurements of pH, redox, dissolved oxygen, conductivity, and temperature vibrating wire piezometers, in ground measuring probes, sampling wells

reb

Prese

BURIAL RITUAL

ical layer s

Burial Sequence of Tumuli at Colophon 5

vents Prothesis

o r ial flux - leagues - sympoliteia

Ekphora

w s - Relocation - Immig ration Burning of corpse in situ

o lo g ic al im pa cts - erosion - decay

Extinction of pyre by liquid PART III: (RE)BURIAL

ur al exc ha nges - war s - language Deposition of other ceramics above ash layer

lo g i cal inter vent io n s - excavation - of grave with stone-earth emplecton Filling

bur ial Sealing of grave by clay layer or small stone heap

er vation Erection of tumulus Burning of offering in nearby trench

on THE BODY AND LANDSCAPE

Not magnitude, not lavishness, But form, the site; Not innovating willfulness But reverence for the archetype. HERMAN MELVILLE, “Greek Architecture”. in The Complete Works 16

In his exposition of Greek architecture, historian and scholar Vincent Scully cited Herman Melville’s poem as the embodiment of Greek architecture. The Greeks viewed the relationship between man and nature as a tragic one - not one of indifference, but an attitude that nature was so sacred it could only be appreciated as was in full scale6. Architecture was therefore reverent of nature, just as the temple form stood in solemn permanence, worshipping the horizon swung around it in a single arc7. The earth therefore came before the architecture of the temples. The architecture of the city in ruins, once a balance between the man-made and the natural, and between the nature and the human will, have always been deeply embedded in the landscape. Today it is difficult to grasp this landscape-as-is relationship given the romantic aestheticization of landscape, and the ways humans perceive landscape through imagery defaults and changing ideologies.

Layers of Reburial

Ex c avati o n

Do c u m en t at i o n

Polypropylene biaxial geogrid Polyethylene sheeting protection Geogrid reinforcement Irrigation/ Drainage layer Fill: in situ soil, cleaned Geotextile infiltration layer

However, one thing remains and that is the reverence for the human body in the landscape. If the Greek temple were one with the landscape around it, yet measured and constructed according to the proportions of a human being, it only means that the human body is sited inherently in the landscape through architecture. And this, architects Gins and Arakawa, understood as the architectural body where “the body is sited”8. They wrote, “As that which initiates pointing, selecting, electing, determining, and considering, it may be said to originate (read co-originate) all sites. Organism-person-environment consists of sites and would-be sites. An organism person, a sited body, lives as one site that is composed of many sites.”9

PART III: (RE)BURIAL

What are these sites within the archaeological site? The surveying and excavations of the archaeological site makes it an intimate ritual site that constitutes an organism-person-environment. The archaeologist and the ground, the architect and the sky - these relationships produce a groundsky relationship, sited within a nest of sites. It celebrates the rituals of the archaeological process, it commemorates the death of things in the site. The contemporary human body is jolted back to the primitive geomorphological gesture of the tumulus where it partakes in the ritual of the reburial.

Tomb of the Altar

R ebu r i a l

Monitoring

A WALKSCAPE IN THE PALIMPSEST

I walk across, under and above. The lines of the landscape are many, They are intersecting //parallel// lines. I cast my eyes , scanning the terrain of the ancient Bouleuterion, I know not which path to take. I stride the perpendicular grid like a detective, Retrace ancient routes through the polis like a historian, Stroll the invisible contours of the land like a grazing spirit. Every line I walk is a million tiny points, Each a place of its own, a collection of things, Fleetingly gathering To it timescales aplenty. Harvesting weathers, topographies, people, histories, traditions, and identities.10 The sum of my embodied being is the sum of the walks I have taken11, the encounters with the million tiny things, the lines I carve into the land. I sink my feet into the layers of the land, The moments feel tingling to the skin, All collapsing, embodiments resonating. Every place gathers, my walk gathers.

PART III: (RE)BURIAL

TOP BOTTOM

Plan of the ruins of the Bouleuterion Plan of the Necropolis of the Bouleuterion

THE POST-ARCHAEOLOGICAL LANDSCAPE IS THE NECROPOLIS.

Now if things gather, and walking gathers too, does this not make a walk a thing? Then, the landscape is a thing of things. I walk the phenomenological walk12, gathering things that in turn gather. Alas, I have always been a thing in the landscape. This I realize in the moment when my sensation has become memory13, Leaving my present a particular vista of past and future14; but it is a vista that is available from this moment and no other Between the past devouring the future15, And the future relishing the past. I have always been in the reburied landscape.

THE RITUAL OF THE WALK THROUGH THE NECROPOLIS

RICHARD LONG, A Line Made by Walking, 1967

The excavation, collection, and preservation of things in the site are made possible by the action of walking through the landscape - a body siting itself intimately within the vast expanses of the archaeological site. In the reburied landscape of the site, walking then becomes a ritual, a gathering of the layers of the land, a collapse of the culture between human and nature. The walk in the landscape then becomes the augmentation of the history of the archaeological site. The layered histories are spatialized and experienced in the dynamic act of walking through it, like thread weaving through a series of collapsed canvases with the bilateral forces of tension and compression soon to be faded and reset.

Chamber of the Altar Layers of Reburial Polypropylene biaxial geogrid Polyethylene sheeting protection Geogrid reinforcement Irrigation/ Drainage layer Fill: in situ soil, cleaned Geotextile infiltration layer

PART III: (RE)BURIAL

Field distribution of probes

vibrating wire moisture probe

The walk unites the walker and the landscape in a lived dialectic of being and becoming, acting and being acted upon...The phenomenological walk involves a gathering together of synaesthetic and material and social sensory experiences as they unfold in the sequence and duration of the walk. It shows what is there from the perspective of the flesh, from embodied experiences. litmus measure

pH/ Redox/ dissolved O2 probe electrolyte filled membrane

CHRISTOPHER TILLEY, Body and Image: Explorations inreflective Landscape Phenomenology metal reading registers

Necropolis of the Bouleterion

conductivity probe earth pressure embedment cell polypropylene geogrid

THE POST-ARCHAEOLOGICAL GROUND IS THE NEW TUMULUS.

The modern human sings an ode to Mound City, commemorates all the Necropoli of the ancient cultures. The tumulus is a new language, where past, present, and future become one temporality.

The human excavates, documents, reburies, and monitors. Hands fumble, record, preserve, and experiment in the ground.

PART III: (RE)BURIAL

The Post-archaeological ground is the new tumulus.

Adena mound at Mound City, Ross County, Ohio

THE RITUAL OF REBURIAL

The human wraps the structure in a geotextile, lays upon it a new ground and carefully seals the earth with tools.

PART III: (RE)BURIAL

An Archaeological Reburial Set Ceramic, white and red clay, hand-built, thrown and altered, shino glazed, high-fired; chun glazed, mid-fired. Archaeological brush, sand, expanded clay pellets, geotextile of woven canvas layers

Compacting sands of time, Irrigating soils of sedimentation, Sealing the collapse of histories, ...

The Probe on the New Ground

The Reburial is a fuzzy blooming landscape of living artifacts, of an architecture that once stood tall, memorialized in the new ground.

litmus measures chromatograph

PART III: (RE)BURIAL

vibrating wire moisture probe

metal reflective reading registers

â&#x2C6;&#x2020;p=Îłh

rotary plate

pH/ dissolved O2/ redox probe

+ R = pL/A

conductivity probe: electrolyte filled membrane 93 sampling well

Part III: (Re)construction The Speculative Histories of the Archaeological Site

relocation

The Acropolis Model of Temporality AD1000

early Christian and Byzantine periods

University of Michigan

0 AD/BC

C. Schuchhardt Th. Macridy R. Demangel and A. Laumonier M. Büyükkolancı E. Atalay

1000BC

1885 1897 1923 1985 1994 2014

188 Peace of Apamea - Notion freed

294 Captured by Alexander the Great Notion renamed Kolophon-by-the-Sea

part of population resettled to Ephesos

479 Kolophon freed by Greeks 430 Kolophon reconquered by Persians 427 pro-Persian faction expelled from Notion

some fled to Notion Sympoliteia with Kolophon

96 Delilan League

Aeolis

when applied to Notion Persian Empire

Lydian Kingdom

larger territories

Preservation

The Acropolis Model of Temporality

chronological, selective curation

AD2017

Archaeological research

New Acropolis Museum completed 2009

restoration by Acropolis Restoration Project team 1975

removal of sculptures by Lord Elgin 1801 War of Independence 1820 reconstruction by Nikolaos Balanos 1890

temple converted to ammunition store during Venetian attack 1687

Ottoman Empire captures Athens temple converted to Mosque 1458

Byzantines convert the temple into a church ~500s

Construction of Acropolis 447

THE DEATH OF HISTORIES

Actuality is when the lighthouse is dark between flashes: it is the instant between the ticks of the watch: it is a void interval slipping forever through time: the rupture between past and future: the gap at the poles of the revolving magnetic field, infinitesimally small but ultimately real. It is the interchronic pause when nothing is happening. It is the void between events. GEORGE KUBLER, The Shape of

Time: Remarks on the History of Things

In contrast, in the case of the Acropolis where most of the history of the site has been discovered, archaeologists have turned to the Classical as the only past, preserving the monuments to its former Hellenistic glory. In selecting and isolating one period in history over a patchwork of known and unknown histories of political and religious power struggles, the preservation of the Acropolis becomes a flattening of the complexity of the archaeological site to an artifically demarcated temporality.

PART IV: (RE)CONSTRUCTION

The archaeological reconstruction of histories is often based on extensive deduction and speculation. Notion is no exception given the lack of historical records of the city, especially during the early Christian and Byzantine periods. Reading the history of the archaeological site can thus be perceived as a timeline interspersed with darkness, syncopated voids between the rhythm of chronological periods, and a messy distribution of records of events. For example, archaeologists believe that there must have been a relocation of the city due to the discrepancy between the dating of artifacts found in the site and the dating of the earliest records. Such scenarios remain a mystery, and the histories might remain unknown even after excavation. Since the number of unknown histories far exceed that of the known histories, the question of which histories to be preserved then becomes a question of how to preserve. The language and the systems of the architectural preservation are foregrounded in a backdrop of histories both known and unknown.

24 ARCHAETECTURES AND CONCENTRIC TEMPORALITY

Concentric temporalities. One of the things we need to rethink weirdly is time...it might be best to see history as a nested series of catastrophes that are still playing out rather than as a sequence of events based on a conception of time as a succession of atomic instants...These temporality loops all happen in a nowness I cannot reduce to an atomic point of whatever size. TIMOTHY MORTON, Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence

reburiacl avation d x e e i r u b ecay d

material de cay

arc h

nts eve

ic al

o p e r ati o n

living the artifact

tation imen sed

territorial flu x

PART IV: (RE)CONSTRUCTION

sur

The Topokairos Model of Temporality concentric and fuzzy

THE TERRITORIAL TEMPORALITY OF NOTION

140

280 Kilometers 180 Miles

the rise and fall of empires and kingdoms

100

10 5

20 10

PART IV: (RE)CONSTRUCTION

0 0

40 Kilometers 20 Miles

hydrological connections

101

5 Kilometers

5 Miles

poleis, sympoliteia, sedimentation of migratories

102

PART IV: (RE)CONSTRUCTION

the international alliance of excavation

103

26 THE POST-ARCHAEOLOGICAL MONUMENT IS THE CENOTAPH.

The Cenotaph for Notion is a monument to lost histories. The great Ephesus and the great Athens stand apart in the Aegean sea, their histories memorialized in preservation. Their narratives powerful and compelling, Their monuments still real and telling. But Notion, Is a humble abode, Subservient to the greater powers. It shines darkness, its histories eroded and washed into the sea, Silted in the harbors, buried deep.

One Tower Still looking to its sympolity with Colophon. The form of the history of Notion is held by a singular known momentthe Battle of Notium1. It saw the splitting downfall and victory, Led to the establishment of a Spartan stronghold. This moment lurches the territorial fluxes of antiquity, Spirals the land into changes in power At the junctions of conquest and freedom.

104

105

PART IV: (RE)CONSTRUCTION

l to K aros hy

hypoth

he pot

etical

tic

gates

Hales Valley

photogrammetry path ath

p etry iom grad riv

uth

The ambition of the history of Notion Remains glazed with mystery. Till today the tomb scans the terrain, For hints of its past in the Hales Valley. Marking the possibilities through the fortifications of its citadel. Carved by the voids of archaeological memories, its walls are scribed by silence. A proud structure gathers the forces of its landscape. Commemorates the flickering temporality of the region. Cyclical, entropic, but ever-presencing, ever-absencing.

106

to Ko

lopho

tow

ers

107

PART IV: (RE)CONSTRUCTION

108

109

PART IV: (RE)CONSTRUCTION

110

POSTSCRIPT: THE SPACE OF TOPOKAIROS

Architecture, like any artistic discipline, thrives in double-edged positions, between one historical moment and another; between one theoretical project and another; between opposing political or economic systems; between advancements in technology and modes of production. MATT ROMAN, “The King’s Gambit”, Log. 31, 2014.

The space of Topokairos is to be explored as a discordant assemblage. It attempts to reconcile opposing practices within the discipline of architecture. The table is the curation of an archaeological framework where interventions on the ancient site are digitally crafted with both contemporary precision and crude hand crafted means of production. Museological vitrines become sites of theoretical collisions between scientific, cultural, and architectural methods. The architectural project is sited within a field of artifacts, theories, vessels, monuments, and rituals. As a result, the table is the site that gathers, the wall is the site that emerges, the floor contextualizes. The vertical merging to the horizontal produces a site of immersion and rumination.

111

Poetry meets artifact, drawing meets quotation, edge meets drape, material meets surface.

112

The space of Topokairos invites the human to engage with light and shadow,

113

excavate layers of background information,

examine artifacts,

uncover concepts,

114

read possible spaces...

The book in the table is, consequently, the site that produces the architecture...

115

NOTES

INTRODUCTION

1 2 3 4 5

Reiser and Umemoto, Atlas of novel tectonics. (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2006), 20. Ibid. Ratté and Rojas, Archaeological Research at Notion 2014-2015, LSA College of Humanities and the Arts, University of Michigan, https://sites.lsa.umich.edu/notionsurvey/publications/. Ibid. Shadowtime is a word coined by The Bureau of Linguistical Reality, a public participatory artwork by Heidi Quante and Alicia Escott focused on creating new language as an innovative way to better understand our rapidly changing world due to manmade climate change and other Anthropocenic events. see Escott and Quante, “Bureau of Linguistical Reality.”, https://bureauoflinguisticalreality.com/ Michael Jakob, “On Mountains: Scaleable and Unscaleable” in Landform building: architecture’s new terrain, ed. Stan Allen and Marc McQuade. (Baden, Switzerland: Lars Müller Publishers, 2011), 153.

PART I: EXCAVATION

1 2 3 4

116

Jane Bennett speaks of the intrinsic vitality of matter and how this awareness could create a landscape of affect through which the ecological thought can be lived out. See Jane Bennett, Vibrant matter: a political ecology of things. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), xi. Martin Heidegger, “The Thing” in Poetry, Language, Thought. (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), 165-182. Martin Heidegger, “Building Dwelling Thinking” in Poetry, Language, Thought. (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), 145-161. Timothy Morton argues for a critical mode of inquiry called ecological thinking, based on the interconnectedness of man with “Nature”, the environment, the world. It is a resistance against the ecocentrism that envrionmentalism has engendered, and a call for Ecology as a renewed culture of consciousness to navigate contemporary ecological problems like the appearance of hyperobjects - - phenomena so massively distributed in time and space to the extent that their totality cannot be realized in any particular local manifestation. See Timothy Morton, The Ecological Thought. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010). In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari draw from dynamical systems theory, which explores the way material systems self-organize, and extends the system to include that of the social, linguistic, and philosophical in order to create assemblage theory. In assemblage theory, assemblages are formed through the processes of coding, stratification, and territorialization. See Deleuze and Guattari, A thousand plateaus: capitalism and schizophrenia. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 411.

6 7 8 9 10

11 12

13 14 15

Elli Angelopoulou and John R. Wright Jr., “Laser Scanner Technology”, . June 1999. University of Pennsylvania Department of Computer and Information Science Technical Report No. MS-CIS-99-16. Eileen Ernenwein and Michael Hargrave. Archaeological Geophysics for DoD Field Use: a Guide for New and Novice Users. Environmental Security Technology Certification Program, 2009. Hexagon Geospatial Documentation Portal. Principles of Photogrammetry, accessed 18 February, 2017. https://hexagongeospatial.fluidtopics.net/ Madeline Gins and Shusaku Arakawa, Architectural body (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2002). In The Order of Things, Michel Foucault establishes that there are four similitudes in how things resemble each other. They take the forms of adjacencies, links, concentric circles, and free states.See Michel Foucault, “The Prose of the World”, in The Order of Things: an Archeology of the Human Sciences (Karlsruhe: Mark Pezinger Verlag, 2012), 20-49. Timothy Morton. “The Second Thread”, in Dark ecology: for a logic of future coexistence. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), 61-110. Ibid. Timothy Morton searches for what he defines as arche-lithic as a primordial relatedness of humans and nonhumans that has never evaporated. The arche-lithic has always resided prior and between the human demarcation of Neolithic and Paleolithic. He argues that our awareness of this artificial demarcation is further repressed by the agrilogistic structures we live within. Timothy Morton defines Hyperobject as a thing so massively distributed we cannot directly grasp them empirically. The whole is weirdly less than the sum of its parts. Think concepts like climate change, pollution, and the like. Robert Smithson and Jack Flam. “Entropy and the New Monuments” in The collected writings. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 10-23. Robert Smithson and Jack Flam. “Some Void Thoughts on Museums” in The collected writings. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 41-42.

PART II: (RE)PRODUCTION

1 2 3

Ines Weizman. “Architectural Doppelgängers,” AA Files, no. 65 (2012): 19-24. David Gissen, “The Rights of Monuments.” Lecture, Fitch Colloquium: Preservation and War, from Columbia University, New York, NY, September 30, 2016. Robert Smithson and Jack Flam. “A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey” in The collected writings. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 72.

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4 5 6 7

8 9 10 11

Ibid. Robert Smithson and Jack Flam. “Entropy and the New Monuments” in The collected writings. (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 2000), 10-23. Brendan Cormier and Danielle Thom. A World of Fragile Parts. (London: Victoria and Albert Museum, 2016.) In the postwar novel Slaughterhouse Five, Kurt Vonnegut writes about protagonist Billy Pilgrim who gets kidnapped to Trafalmadore, home planet of a fictional alien race called Trafalmadorian who exist in all times simultaneously. Having met the Trafalmadorians, Billy Pilgrim becomes “unstuck in time” and understands the world beyond linear temporality. See: Kurt Vonnegut. Slaughterhouse-five, or, The children’s crusade: a duty-dance with death. (New York: Dial Press, 2015) 23. Lucia Allais, “Integrities: The Salvage of Abu Simbel,” Grey Room 50 (2013): 6-45. Op. cit. David Gissen, in A World of Fragile Parts curated by Brendan Cormier and Danielle Thom, V&A Museum. 2016. Ines Weizman. “Architectural Doppelgängers,” AA Files, no. 65 (2012): 19-24.

PART III: (RE)BURIAL

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4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11

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Angel Ari Perez Mejia, “An Engineering Approach for the Design of Archaeological Reburial Systems” (PhD diss., University of South California - Columbia, 2014). 31. John Ashurst, Conservation of ruins. Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2007), 175. Angel Ari Perez Mejia, “An Engineering Approach for the Design of Archaeological Reburial Systems” (PhD diss., University of South California - Columbia, 2014). Oliver Mariaud, “The Geometric Graves Of Colophon And The Burial Customs Of Early Iron Age Ionia” in The ‘Dark Ages’ Revisited: Acts of an International Symposium in Memory of William D.E. Coulson, edited by A. Mazarakis Ainan. (Volos: University of Thessaly Press, 2010), 687-703. Vincent Scully, The earth, the temple, and the gods: Greek sacred architecture (San Antonio, TX: Trinity University Press, 2013), 24. Ibid. Madeline Gins and Shusaku Arakawa, Architectural body (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2002), 5. Ibid. Christopher Tilley and Wayne Bennett, “Conclusions: The Empowerment of Imagery and the Phenomenological Walk”, in Body and Image Explorations in Landscape Phenomenology 2 (Walnut Creek: Taylor and Francis, 2016), 268. Ibid. Tim Ingold, “Footprints through the Weather-World: Walking, Breathing, Knowing,” Making Knowledge, 2011. Christopher Tilley and Wayne Bennett, “Conclusions: The Empowerment of Imagery and the Phenomenological Walk”, in Body and Image Explorations in Landscape Phenomenology 2 (Walnut Creek: Taylor and Francis, 2016).

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Ibid. Henri Bergson, Nancy Margaret Paul, and Mary E. Dowson, Matter and memory (Kent: Solis Press, 2014). Alfred Gell. The Anthropology of Time: Cultural Constructions of Temporal\Maps and Images. (Oxford: Bloomsbury Academic, 1992), 269. Op. cit.

PART IV: (RE)CONSTRUCTION

Xenophon. Xenophonâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Hellenica: Selections. Edited by Carleton L. Browson, 1.5.7 (American Book Company, 1968), 86.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY Abraham, Raimund Johann., and Brigitte Groihofer. Raimund Abraham (un)built. Wien: SpringerVerlag, 1996. Allais, Lucia. “Integrities: The Salvage of Abu Simbel.” Grey Room 50 (2013): 6-45. Allen, Stan, and Marc McQuade. Landform building: architecture’s new terrain. Baden, Switzerland: Lars Müller Publishers, 2011. Ashurst, John. Conservation of ruins. Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2007 Bennett, Jane. Vibrant matter: a political ecology of things. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010. Benjamin, Walter. “Ibizan Sequence” in Walter Benjamin: selected writings. Edited by Edmund Jephcott, Howard Eiland, and Michael William. Jennings. Cambridge, Mass: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2006, 576. Bunschoten, Raoul, Hélène Binet, and Takuro Hoshino. Urban flotsam: stirring the city: Chora. Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 2001. Cormier, Brendan, and Danielle Thom. A World of Fragile Parts. London: Victoria and Albert Museum, 2016. DeLanda, Manuel. A thousand years of nonlinear history. New York: Zone Books, 2014. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987. Foucault, Michel. The order of things: an archeology of the human sciences. Karlsruhe: Mark Pezinger Verlag, 2012. Gell, Alfred. The Anthropology of Time: Cultural Constructions of Temporal Maps and Images. Oxford: Bloomsbury Academic, 1992. Gins, Madeline, and Shusaku Arakawa. Architectural body. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2002. Heidegger, Martin. Poetry, Language, Thought. New York: Harper & Row, 1971.

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Ingold, Tim. “The Temporality of the Landscape.” World Archaeology 25, no. 2 (1993): 152-74. http://www.jstor.org/stable/124811. Ingold, Tim. “Footprints through the Weather-World: Walking, Breathing, Knowing.” Making Knowledge, 2011, 115-32. Kubler, George. The shape of time: remarks on the history of things. New Haven:Yale University Press, 1962. Mariaud, Oliver. “The Geometric Graves Of Colophon And The Burial Customs Of Early Iron Age Ionia” in The ‘Dark Ages’ Revisited: Acts of an International Symposium in Memory of William D.E. Coulson, edited by A. Mazarakis Ainan. Volos: University of Thessaly Press, 2010. Melville, Herman. “Greek Architecture”, in Published Poems: The Writings of Herman Melville. Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 2009. 305. Morris, Ian. Burial and ancient society: the rise of the Greek city-state. New York, NY: ACLS History-E-Book, 2008. Morton, Timothy. The Ecological Thought. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010. Morton, Timothy. Dark ecology: for a logic of future coexistence. New York: Columbia University Press, 2016. Otero-Pailos, Jorge, Erik Langdalen, and Thordis Arrhenius. Experimental preservation. Zürich. Switzerland: Lars Müller Publishers, 2016. Parkinson, G. H. R. Spinoza: Ethics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Perez Mejia, A. A. “An Engineering Approach for the Design of Archaeological Reburial Systems.” PhD diss., University of South California - Columbia, 2014. Reiser, Jesse, and Nanako Umemoto. Atlas of novel tectonics. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2006. Roman, Matt. “The King’s Gambit.” Log, no. 31 (2014): 172-83. http://www.jstor.org.proxy.lib.umich.edu/stable/43630904. 121

Scully, Vincent. The earth, the temple, and the gods: Greek sacred architecture. San Antonio, TX: Trinity University Press, 2013. Smithson, Robert, and Jack Flam. The collected writings. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 2000. Tilley, Christopher, and Wayne Bennett. Body and Image Explorations in Landscape Phenomenology 2. Walnut Creek: Taylor and Francis, 2016. Turner, Frederick. “The Invented Landscape” in Beyond preservation: restoring and inventing landscapes. Edited by A. Dwight Baldwin Jr., Judith De Luce, and Carl Pletsch. Minneapolis u.a.: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1994. Weizman, Ines. “Architectural Doppelgängers.” AA Files, no. 65 (2012): 19-24. http://www.jstor. org/stable/41762321. Xenophon. Xenophon’s Hellenica: Selections. Edited by Carleton L. Browson, 1.5.7. American Book Company, 1968.

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