Thesis Book Chapter 1 - Intro

DELAMINATING THE REAL

UNPACKING THE PHYSICAL EXPRESSION OF IDEOLOGY IN GOVERNMENT BUILDINGS

LAWRY BOYER

Delaminating the Real

Author:

© Lawrence Boyer 2022

All rights reserved.

B. Arch Undergraduate Thesis, 2017-2022

Syracuse University School of Architecture

Renee Crown Honors Program

Syracuse, New York

Contact:

lmboyer04@gmail.com +1 (703)407-8735 LawryBoyer.com

Thesis Advisors:

Lawrence Chua

Susan Henderson

Lawrence Davis

Timur Hammond

General Advisors:

Ognen Marina

Mitesh Dixit

Special Thanks:

Michael Giannattasio

Robert Weaver

John Bryant

Ethan Levine

Jesse Wetzel

Blagoja Bajkovski

Borjan Menkinoski

Filip Velkoski

Production Assistants:

Benjamin Wang

Yida Li

A.J. Laucks

Max Walewski

Typeface:

Amiri

Gotham

Printer:

Printivity

Print run: 10 copies

DELAMINATING THE REAL

Unpacking the physical expression of political ideology in government buildings

Syracuse University School of Architecture

LAWRY BOYER

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This research work would be impossible without generous support, guidance, and encouragement from several advisors, mentors, and resources at Syracuse University and beyond.

I would also like to thank my primary thesis advisors from the School of Architecture, Prof. Lawrence Chua, Prof. Lawrence Davis, and Prof. Susan Henderson for their generous feedback throughout the development of my research work and their continual support and encouragement. All contributed greatly with critical discussion of my work and were very generous with their time and resources and for that I am incredibly grateful.

Many thanks to my honors reader, Prof. Timur Hammond from the Department of Geography, who served as the primary advisor for my written work. His interdisciplinary and rigorous approach enabled me to examine my project in greater detail and encouraged a greater degree of precision in my thoughts and the presentation of my project.

I’d also like to thank the Renee Crown Honors Program for their support of my research and providing me with funding which enabled me to travel for my research. Visiting the cities of Washington DC and Skopje was an incredible experience that helped me understand the subject and background of my research as well as develop my methodology with improved clarity and depth, as well as my own personal independence.

Finally, a great deal of gratitude towards my parents and family who supported me throughout school and have always been encouraging of my projects and interests. I surely wouldn’t be here without them.

Skopje Old Fortress

Washington Monument, Washington, DC

Photo by Benjamin Wang

Statue of Alexander the Great, Skopje

Right: Statue of Christopher Columbus in front of Union Station, Washington, DC

Left: US Capitol Building, Washington, DC

Delaminating the Real is an investigation of the ways in which national governments use architecture as a tool of national narrative, identity, and dissemination of ideology. Using the case studies of Washington, DC, and Skopje, North Macedonia, I will reveal a genealogy of classicism and the ways in which ornament has been adapted and appropriated throughout history to different ends.

PROJECT BACKGROUND

Societies have long recognized the importance of beautiful public architecture. Architects and politicians alike have had the beauty of architecture at the forefront of their planning and construction efforts for its purported ability to inspire civic pride, honor, wealth, and impart an impression to visitors from foreign cities or countries. But who decides what makes architecture beautiful and how?

After studying in the Balkan peninsula through a summer SU Abroad research course in 2019, I became interested in the city of Skopje, the capital of North Macedonia, for its rich architectural history and bilingual architectural language of Brutalist and Classicist buildings in the city center. I then saw a unique connection between Skopje and the U.S. capital, Washington, DC, in terms of their architectural styles that might otherwise be overlooked given the many differences between the countries and the size of North Macedonia. This interest started the process of my research into the histories of these two cities and their architecture.

The capital city of Washington, DC was planned in 1791 by French architect Pierre L’Enfant and many of its first buildings were constructed under the supervision of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. Over time, the city has seen many plans for development and new construction as it was visually transformed into the capital of a large country with significant international political influence. Its civic buildings

have ranged in style from Classical to Brutalist among others depending on the era of construction and the popular styles at the time. Meanwhile in Eastern Europe, in 1963, a magnitude 6.1 earthquake destroyed more than 80% of the city of Skopje (in what is now North Macedonia). In the following years, the city was rebuilt under a masterplan by the Japanese architect Kenzo Tange in a humanitarian effort sponsored by the United Nations. It quickly became known as the city of international solidarity. Fifty years later, the city began a project of its own: the Skopje 2014 Project, which reclad many of the concrete buildings built in the 1960s with white, classically styled facades, and constructed many new buildings of a similar style including the Macedonian Government Building, the Museum of Archaeology, and a National Theatre. The project was also responsible for the construction of hundreds of fountains and monuments scattered throughout the city with the goal of retroactively creating a narrative of national identity in methods used by other capital cities. However, some of the original concrete buildings remain, leaving behind a visually dialectical identity of the city which contrasts the newer Classical with an older Brutalism.

While Washington and Skopje may not seem to share much in common at first, they share many aspects in common with regards to their architecture. Both cities were planned by foreign architects (French and Japanese respectively) which played a

heavy role in the appearances of the cities while they were at the center of international politics.1 The cities also share their use of primarily two internationally used architectural styles: Brutalism and Classicism. While these styles are used in a way to claim national identity, the styles are used and recognized across the globe and don’t carry the heritage of any one country. The shared interest of these governments in the appearance of the city, results in the privileging of a certain aesthetic sensibility to express national identity to an international audience; these choices create architectural tension between universal recognition and regional idiom.

In 2020, President Donald Trump signed executive order 13967: “Promoting Beautiful Federal Civic Architecture”, which criticized Modernist and Brutalist federal buildings in Washington, pointing to “traditional architecture”2 as the desired architectural style of the federal government. The order would not only restrict new construction to be within these styles but required that an evaluation of recladding any federal building be made when renovation work was to be performed. While President Joseph Biden overturned the order before any significant changes were made, there are strong parallels with the Skopje 2014 project in the

way that classical styling is preferred aesthetically, and likely the city would have seen similar effects if the order had not been revoked. The executive order also asserts the current visual state of the District as “a discordant mixture of Classical and modernist designs” – similar to the current state of Skopje.

Architecture has an abundant and precise language to describe space, the technical, and the formal functions of its elements, but lacks such language to describe ideological functions. Building is fundamentally linked with politics and therefore with ideology. One can understand one through examining the other. The scope of this project will compare the unbuilt and invisible aspects of ideology with the built and visible: architecture. It will document and create a grammar of extant architectural elements in the Brutalist and Classical styles and will reveal the way ideas and authority are transmitted by buildings, resulting in the construction of the identity of a nation created by the architecture of its capital city.

1 Skopje was at the forefront of international attention after the 1963 earthquake whereas Washington was in a similar position after the revolutionary war. Both cities took the opportunity to (re)design their capital cities in a manner that would be internationally recognized with the aid of international designers.

2 “Traditional architecture includes classical architecture, as defined herein, and also includes the historic humanistic architecture such as Gothic, Romanesque, Pueblo Revival, Spanish Colonial, and other Mediterranean styles of architecture historically rooted in various regions of America.” –Quoted from Executive Order 13967.

Eastern Europe has recently received much attention in architectural discourse with the 2018 exhibition, Toward a Concrete Utopia: Architecture in Yugoslavia, 1948–1980 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. While this discussion examines the Yugoslav era concrete Brutalism prevalent across the region, much of the academic focus on Balkan architecture has not exceeded the 1970s or 80s.

My interests in Skopje relate to the larger discourse over national identity for the country of North Macedonia, including the recent Skopje 2014 Project in which the Macedonian nationalist populist political party VMRO-DPMNE reclad many of the older concrete buildings with classically inspired facades, often hybridizing the two styles in an eclectic hodgepodge of the two to redesign the city to look consistent with the western European image of a modern capital with deep

cultural and historic heritage. The new construction is cheaply executed, utilizing hollow plaster formwork on steel substructure, which alludes to the visual and narrative importance of architectural style, color, and ornament in the construction of a national image.

Skopje and Macedonia as a whole has a complex and diverse background in the region. The ethnic composition of the country is very diverse, and in recent decades after the fall of Yugoslavia, the country was the most pacifistic of the region, becoming a place of peace and inclusion. Following the worldwide effort to reconstruct the city of Skopje after the earthquake in 1963, the city was also known as the city of International Solidarity. These notions of identity come into direct conflict with recent nationalistic narratives which seek to reestablish the Macedonian identity by othering and by opposition to outsiders.

Lawrence Boyer

TRANSFORMATION OF MACEDONIA

North Macedonia today is situated in the complex geopolitical climate of the Balkan region. Historically, Macedonia was an ancient kingdom on the periphery of Greece, and at one point was the dominant state of Hellenistic Greece. It also was a province of the early Roman Empire, a late Roman administrative unit, a province of the Byzantine Empire, and many others, giving it a complex historic and cultural identity entangled with others. Recent conflicts of identity with Greece have led to the Prespa Agreement in 2018 that renamed the country to North Macedonia after Greece disputed ownership of the cultural name which arguably might be considered under the umbrella of Greek cultural history. However, regions of Greek land extending to Thessaloniki on the Aegian Sea were historically Macedonian, making ownership over both the land and name a complex issue.

As part of my method, I studied and compared the cities of both Washington, DC, and Skopje, North Macedonia.

COMPARING CAPITAL CORE FOOTPRINTS

COMPARING CAPITAL CORE BUILDINGS

WEALTH OF MIDDLE CLASS

1790: Residence act establishes DC at the confluence of Potomac and Anacostia rivers

1814: Burning of Washington in War of 1812. Whitehouse rebuilt

1821: Greek Declaration of Independence in Macedonia by Emmanuel Pappas

1791: L’enfant plan to create magnificent city free of colonial origins

US CIVIL WAR

RUSH VACCINES

1873: Completion of Üsküb—Selanik (now Skopje—Thessaloniki) railway

1903: Hellenic Macedonian Committee formed to resist Bulgarian and Ottoman forces 1908: Young Turk Revolution establishes a constitutional government, modernizing the Ottoman Empire 1913: Balkan end to

1903: Ilinden Uprising threatens Ottoman control of Skopje

1846: Retrocession of Virginia’s land

1848: National Mall Development

1893: Permanent system of highways designed by Frederick Olmstead Sr.

1900 1890 1880 1870 1860 1850

1933: Mall Development Plan

Permanent system of designed by Olmstead Sr.

1910: Commission of Fine Arts created to review designs for federal buildings

1910: Height of Buildings Act

1924: National capital park commission established

1926: Public Buildings Act: Federal triangle, IRS building, Archives, etc

1938: National Airport

1945: DC Redevelopment act clears SW DC to develop housing and offices

1898 Potomac river dredging

1950: First Comprehensive plan listing land use, capital beltway

1950: Population Peak, Migration from South many black Americans

1950 1940 1930 1920 1910 1900

1902: McMillan Plan establishes federal core & National mall 1960

Macedonian formed to resist and Ottoman forces

Ilinden Uprising Ottoman control of Skopje

1908: Young Turk Revolution establishes a constitutional government, modernizing the Ottoman Empire

1913: Balkan wars brings an end to Ottoman control of Macedonia

1918: Kingdom of Serbs, croats and Slovenes formed

1941: Germany and Bulgaria occupy Macedonia during World War 2

1943: Entire Jewish population of Skopje deported to Nazi gas chambers at Treblinka

1944: Red army liberates Balkans from Nazi occupation 1944 Yugoslav Socialist Republic of Macedonia formed and became part of Yugoslavia

1962: Flooding of Vardar

1963: A magnitude earthquake destroys Skopje’s buildings 200,000

1965: Kenzo competition redevelopment

Vardar river

magnitude 6.1 destroys 80% of buildings and leaves 200,000 homeless

Kenzo Tange wins UN competition for the redevelopment of Skopje

1968: Assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.

1970: SOM masterplans for Park Service, constitution gardens, etc.

1985: New comprehensive plan extends concerns to a regional level

2001: Memorials and Museums masterplan

1973: DC given its own mayor and ownership over land; NCPC over federal land

1976: First phase of Metrorail system opens to public

BERLIN WALL

2001: 9/11 lead to installation of security measures

2009: CapitalSpace masterplan outlining parks

2014: Height act amendment allowing rooftop occupation

2010 2000 1990 1980 1970

THE MOON CHERNOBYL

1991 Yugoslavia dissolved; Republic of Macedonia declares independence and names Skopje its capital

1993: Macedonia joins the UN

2014: Skopje 2014 project financed to give the city a more classical appeal

2018: Prespa Agreement renames country to the Republic of North Macedonia

In this chapter, I lay out the tools that I use in my analysis of ideology in the built environment. Many of these come from different academic fields including philosophy, anthropology, art history, literature, and of course architecture among others.

“Ideology represents the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence. Ideology has a material existence because ideology always exists in an apparatus, and its practice, or practices (such as architecture).”1

IDEOLOGY

BUILT

UNBUILT

VISIBLE

INVISIBLE

BUILDINGS, FACADES, INFRASTRUCTURE

STRUCTURE, INSULATION, MEP

POLITICS, CULTURE

PROGRAM, FUNCTION, SPACE PLANNING

1 Althusser, Louis. Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays. Trans. Ben Brewster. New York: Monthly Review P, 2001.

Right: Surveillance camera mounted on the Lincoln Memorial, Washington, DC

Photo by Benjamin Wang

TITLE THE PIZZA EFFECT

The way in which a community’s self-understanding is influenced by or imported from foreign sources.

- Coined by Agehananda Bharati (Syracuse University, 1970)

Pizza was not always the way we know it today; prior to World War 1, it was a plain flatbread which was modified and reimported into Italy by Americans traveling abroad after the war. Now, pizza is considered an innately Italian thing, and the culture is in some ways defined by this alien cultural artifact.

The same can occur with architecture, especially in government buildings in capital cities and the role that these buildings play in national identity and narrative building. With the example of Skopje, importing classicism and monumentality helps to legitimize the culture and government in a western European tradition, however it is cliche and void of true meaning to Macedonia, in a similar way to how Macedonian Fried Chicken copied Kentucky Fried Chicken in the United States.

Using Jean Baudrillard’s framework from Simulacra and Simulation, I outline the process under which revivals of classical architectural styles have adapted, misinterpreted, and changed an original classicism into something totally different that we see today. Remarkably however, the sign value for classically inspired aesthetics

1. The Faithful Original: Colored Roman Building made from structural stone

2. The Copy:

Idealized with white coloration and renaissance era space arrangement.

Palladio’s Villa Rotunda

clearly remains for most who do not see these subtler shifts without the training and schooling of an architect. This begs the question, are we the ones who are wrong? Tastes are subjective and transient, but if the public approves of a certain aesthetic sensibility, should we follow that?

3. The Lie: Columns become part of the facade, but are no longer used for purely structural purposes. San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane

4. The Simulation: False structural cladding is put up to create the illusion of a classical stone column. MEPSO Building.

DESIRE FOR “PURE”

White

Structural Expression

Gridded Regular Composition

Ornament Expresses Structure

Orthogonal Form

Directionally Oriented forms

Lincoln Memorial, Washington DC, Henry Bacon, 1911

Villa Savoye, Poissy, Le Corbusier, 1931

Architects have long sought to distill form and expression of ornament to an ideal of what is formally or ideologically pure. Different expressions of this purity such as Classicism and Modernism initially look very different; however, the things which make them “pure” are shared between the two, revealing the disparate styles in fact share much in common.

Additionally, history has shown that our ideas of white, monochrome pure architecture were in fact not what the original architects of antiquity designed at all. Rather, classical architecture was colorful. What would our world look like if this was reflected in our buildings today?