And
M E M O R Y Ar c hi t ec t ur e 7X700-Phi l os ophya nda r c hi t ec t ur e T ut or : J a c obVoor t hui s
Aut or : Ma r j a nMoha mma dz a dehS a r a b-S 105199 5/ 9/ 2011
Introduction: Charles-Edouard Jeanneret-Gris was an unknown Swiss Architect working in Paris, making a living mostly by selling commercial advertisements in his journal “L’Esprit Nouveant”. He wrote and published whatever he wanted in it, and later collected these articles into his books. Later on he adopted the pseudonym “Le Corbusier” and people began to pay more attention to his architectural and urban ideas. He came along at the precise moment when the western world hungered desperately for a utopian “New World”. Le Corbusier’s Plan Vision (labeled A City of Towers in his book) shows the center of Paris destroyed and replaced with enormous high-rise buildings. The impression of a simple, powerful, almost authoritarian abstract idea; (towers, ostensibly to remove one from noise, smells and dust). It serves the urban relationships of interconnections webs that weaves the urban fabric of a city and make it part of human life. 1
The Swiss architectural anthropologist Nold Egenter said, “Imagine Paris today with Le Corbusier’s plan realized! A deadly desert. No tourists come to Paris anymore”. Coincidently, Hitler, 1
Le Corbusier (1927) , Towards a New Architecture
1
also a master propagandist with architectural pretensions, wished to destroy Paris in 1944.2 This is a good time to mention “Futurists” who desired to destroy Venice. Not long ago there was a curious scene in Venice; a little company of artists (or at any rate young men who regarded themselves as artists) went to the top of the splendid ancient Clock Tower in the Piazza of St. Mark and threw down to the crowd in the square thousands of leaflets. These leaflets contained the confession of strange cult called “Futurists”. They would’ve liked to pull down its palaces and replace them with modern factories. They believed the future of civilization lied with industrialism and militarism. Factories, great steamships, electricity, motors, airplanes, big guns, everything that ordinary poet and artist dislike.3
Alexanderplatz (1928-1945-2000) As Terrain Vaque
In compare to what has been said, Ignasi de sola-Morales Rubio believes that the representation of the metropolis and modern architect is strictly attached with photography that it has became impossible in recent years to separate them. The manipulations of the objects captured by camera (framing, composition and detail) have decisively influenced our perception of the works of photographed architecture. However, photography operates in semiological terms not as an Icon but as an Index. Photography has no immediate referenced relation, as figure, to the forms produced by photography. When we look at photographs, we don’t see the cities. We see only images, static framed prints. Yet by way of the photographic image we receive signals, physical impulses that steer in a particular direction the construction of an imagination that we establish as that of a specific place or city. Because we have already seen or going to see some of these places, we consume this semiological mechanism of communication, and the memories that we accumulate through direct experience, through
2
Mehaffy , Micheal , Nikos , Salingaros (2006) A Theory of Architecture
3
http://query.nytimes.com/
2
narratives or through the simple accumulation of new signals producing our imagination of the cities. Later on Ignasio defines the empty, abandoned spaces at the peripheries of our cities as “Terrains Vague”; landscapes that are “indeterminate, imprecise, blurred and uncertain”. The same French term “vague”, meaning waves, also implies the sensation of “movement, fluctuation, instability”. These undefined spaces can carry both negative and positive connotation in our collective subconscious. The absence of use and activity in these post industrial landscapes, the state of deterioration and abandonment, sets them apart from the order, growth and vitality of the city. At the same time, these spaces offer the opportunity to experience the city in a different way. Our culture detests the monument when the monument represents the public memory of power, the presence of the one and the same. Only in architecture of dualism we can find the differences of discontinuity installed within the continuity of time, which can stand up against “the anguished aggression of technological reason, telemetric universalism, cybernetic totalitarianism, and egalitarian and homogenizing terror” as Ignasio would say).4
“Remembering is a malady for which forgetting is the cure”. Georges Perec – Think/Classify
In fact Ignasi de sola Morales monuments (Eiffel Tower, a historical center, an empty abandoned space or even a location that carries some kind of memory) should stay untouched, because there is no way to keep the memory alive unless the place actually exist. Also, Adolf Loos has limited architecture strictly speaking, to monuments and the tombs, considering all other structures constrained, sullied, even defined by use. Of course he was pulling the rug out from under architecture as much as he was dignifying tombs. The memorial function isn’t really central in what buildings do; at least if one means their ability to record an effect, after the event of which building preserves the memory has disappeared.5 4 5
http://www.scribd.com/ Harbison, Robert(1997) Thirteen Ways
3
The conscious striving for the permanence is the main subject here, as well as some cases of permanence unsought, where accident makes a particular structure the last or nearly the last of its type. When its proper use is discontinued and half forgotten, the building remains to remind the serious student, who learns to read the signs it preserves, of vanished customs or ways of life.
“Remembering is possible only on that of forgetting, and not vice versa.” Martin Heidegger Being and Time
Now, for a few moments let us put our beliefs a side and think about this contradiction. What should be kept and what should be destroyed? Either way, when is enough enough? When do we stop? When should we continue?
The problem: Russian psychologist Alexander Luria described the case of a man with an exceptional ability to remember everything and anything he wanted. With his capacity to remember everything, his greatest difficulty became the chaotic congestion of his mind with unwanted memories: he had to learn to forget what he no longer needed to remember.6 In our case we deal with monuments and buildings that carry “collective memory” as Durkheim indentified. Just like the story told above, a city can be the same as that man’s mind, it’s loaded with memories that maybe it is too much or needs more place for new memories. Let us compare Rotterdam and Amsterdam. Walking in the streets of Amsterdam is just like walking in a museum; narrow streets that do not meet the needs of twenty first century, many monuments and old buildings. On the other hand walking in the streets of Rotterdam, seeing modern life and technology with a few monuments brings one question in mind: Of course both have high quality of life in them but the question is which one can offer more?
6
"Modern life demands, and is waiting for, a new kind of plan, both for the house and the city." Le Corbusier
Forty, Adrian (1999 – 2001) The Art of Forgetting
4
Monuments and Professions -Relation of Memory and Object: Monuments are mortal. In fact, a monument often becomes so symbolically powerful that someone acquires a vested interest in destroying it. This potential for destruction may be the most meaningful aspect of the monument’s existence as an object. Consequently, when monumental discourse turns iconoclastic, it engages the object hood of the monument at its core. In one sense, however, traditional historical art is highly relevant to iconoclasm. As we shall see, iconoclastic discourse engages directly the professions (art history, criticism, museum curatorship and archaeology) which are involved its preservation. Jas Elsner discusses on forms of iconoclasm to speak in deconstructive terms: “under erasure”. That is, their former meanings are erased, yet the signs of erasure are visible, becoming themselves a form of communication. When these signs of destruction are present, obliteration is an act of preservation and demoralization. Further, Elsner expands the notion of iconoclasm to include “instead ritual desecration”, such as rearranging of seating when catholic churches become Protestant, so that the congregation no longer faces east. All of these changes are visible reminders of the forgotten, or repressed, showing its greatness and consequently the even greater power of that which has obliterated it.7 There was a controversy between Hindus and Muslims in Ayodya, which culminated in the destruction of a sixteenth century mosque and the ongoing construction of a Hindu temple to replace it, similarly engages a destruction that preserves the memory of what it has destroyed. The mosque itself had come to stand as a sign for a destroyed Hindu temple that it replaces. The invention of previous act of iconoclasm against the temple justified the perpetration of a new one, the destruction of the mosque.8
7
Nelson, Robert, Olin, Margaret(2003)Monuments and Memory-Made and Unmade 8
Same as above
5
Archaeology, however, has its own interest at stake. In fact professions see themselves as owners of the site. When threatened by demolition, a work can acquire new monument significance as a national archaeological treasure, a distinction on which the professional disciplines about such monuments; including the communities surrounding the site. The locals are destructive, whether they pilfer the stones, destroy relics, or seek restorations without benefit of the professional. The profession is the only preservationist. Yet scientific archaeology destroys the integrity of the monument as well, by dispersing in into “strata”. As opposed to a “keeping place”, the archaeological community is commitment to a pedagogically controlled approach to memory that is not always successful in keeping the monument in existence. There is a little room for iconoclasm within the realm of the modern museum, at least for recognized monuments. Museums are ware houses of memories or intellectual graveyards. There, iconoclasm itself is mostly symbolic, taking the form of installation and photography that comment on existing monument and seem to alter their nature. Emptiness in museums is known all along to be perverse and delusive, a way of keeping memories in check. The extreme example of such denial is Robert Venturi’s skeletal mock-up of Benjamin Franklin’s house, executed in steel of the structure which could not have used then, as if to say history is all made up and we don’t really know what the past looked like.9 Having the professions on mind; a variety of reasons make us to doubt the general assumption that martial objects can replace of the mental form of memory. Among these reasons, we might consider three of them. The first reason is ephemeral monuments. There are artifacts with apparently memorial purposes, but are made only to be abandoned immediately to decay. For Freud, physical artifact could no longer be regarded as keeping the memory, because “mental martial was not subject to 9
Harbison, Robert(1997) Thirteen Ways
6
the same processes of decay as objects in the phenomenal world”. While Freud’s concept refers to individuals rather than societies, it helps to prove the relation between memory and object.10 The second reason to doubt the relation between object and memory has been brought about by difficulties of the remembrances of the Holocaust; and the realization that conventional memorial practices were in adequate and inappropriate to the task. The natural reaction to its unbearable memory was to forget, which is exactly what many of the survivors themselves did or attempted to do. The third reason is within the Aristotelian tradition, if objects are made to stand for memory, their decay or destruction (as in the act of iconoclasm) is taken to imply forgetting. But sometimes an object becomes a monument only when it is destroyed or altered. The example is the effect of removing fifty of sixty monuments of Lenin in the streets and squares of Moscow which made the voids impossible to ignore. The empty places, far from erasing the memory of the communist regime, became memorable in a way that they never had been when they were full of statues.
“If one were to make such a memorial, one would have to remark it every day.” Chrisrian Boltanski (About Holocaust)
Memory and Architecture: Of course the destruction of buildings and monuments must be the harshest way of hoping achieves forgetting. But are the results always what is indented? There have been various attempts to create a conscious collective memory through architecture and urbanism, or in another word to fill the emptiness that comes from having no memories, in the history of man. What is remarkable is the unquestioned assumption that the objects created would become a memory. Architecture most perfectly reproduces the old assumption to transfer memories to objects will preserve capacity of objects to 10
Forty, Adrian (1999 – 2001) The Art of Forgetting
7
take place of memory. Building and memory seems to have been treated as exchangeable currencies. The impression the works themselves give of confidence in the transferability of memory to things and not reverse is confirmed by the architectural writing about memory. Aldo Rossi, in his book the Architecture of the City, suggested that new urban and architectural developments were accomplished by studying those already existing. Not only do the buildings of every existing city reveal a pattern of permanence to it, but at a deeper level, these characterized its “collective memory”. The city itself is a collective memory of its people, and like memory, it is associated with objects and places. The city is the “locus” of the collective memory. What can be concluded from his book is to build in the city not merely a physical transformation, but a transformation of the collective mental life of its habitants. Rossi and many architects had trust in this concept that for them the notion of the building is in the memory that they stand for.
“Memory… is the consciousness of the city.” Aldo Rossi
8
Conclusion: In Le Corbusier Idea while the intention of cleaning up dark and unhealthy alleys was good, these radical changes were totally untested. Let us boldly go forward, Le Corbusier says, into this program of imposing these simple abstractions on the world on a massive scale. His proposal for Paris shows no mercy for the rich nuances and complexities of human life; only contempt. According to him, cities should be bulldozed and rebuilt; this time with enlarged children’s block on a huge, totalitarian scale. Le Corbusier was a master at providing totally crude abstractions that ignored deeper and subtler relationships. Obsessed and seduced by himself grand abstraction, he either misses or deliberately ignores the richness of traditional buildings, the kind of subtle organic relationships that his crystalline mechanical architecture could never create. The French philosopher Gaston Bachelard in his book The Poetic of Space argued that while memory might be described in terms of buildings, he warned memory did not lend itself to physical description and construction.11 Also Marcel Proust in his novel A La Recherche Du Temps Perdu , was writing to recall what lay just beyond memory, with what cannot quite be recalled. Actually Proust was first person among modernist writers to be interested in the power of objects to trigger memory. In his idea objects could never be relied upon to deliver memories to consciousness.12 Architecture is and always has been above all arts of reminding people of memories. Architects recognized that whatever mnemonic potential building might have, memory only becomes interesting through its struggle with forgetfulness, then the representation of collective memory becomes more meaningful.
11
Forty, Adrian (1999 – 2001) The Art of Forgetting
12
Forty, Adrian (1999 – 2001) The Art of Forgetting
9
A rare example is the Jewish museum extension in the Berlin museum by Daniel Libeskind. The building as the architect implies “It not a metaphor. It doesn’t stand for memory but to explore a single name which remains forgotten… a single piece of music that remains unwritten”. The reason of the example of architecture is that any art practices aspiring to deal with memory can only do so by taking into account what the memory struggles in vain to resist. An art cannot deal with memory without confronting it being forgotten. There is a reason that the ancient Greek located the spring of Lethe (forgetfulness) and of Mnemosyne (memory) nearby and make those who came to consult the oracle at Trophonios drink the waters of forgetfulness and then memory. So In a world that everything is mortal, can making something to become completely immortal seem ridiculously futile? Maybe it is. Sometimes it’s good to have an option in mind that destruction is not a negative word but opportunity of forgetting, letting go and make a new memory. Every generation has different values for certain objects and memories. Maybe it’s possible to make place for every generation to choose what they desire to remember and forget. Make place by demolition some building with not so high memorial value. Also nobody can deny we need something every now and then to make us feel the oppressive weight and nearness of the past:
"It is a question of building which is at the root of the social unrest of today: architecture or revolution. Le Corbusier
“You only need to be turned loose in the streets of a city like Krakow, to feel the oppressive weight and nearness of the past, vomiting debris into the present, most powerful when decrepit and tottering towards its fall, when vulnerable and not especially beautiful. There’s a whole other subject here of memories not programmatically preserved but elusive and densely overliad, of many lives which surface momentarily in old paint, obsolete wiring, and forgotten cupboards but are mainly lost.”13 Robert Harbison
13
Harbison, Robert(1997) Thirteen Ways
10
References: 1. Forty, Adrian , Kuchler , Susanne (1999 – 2001) The Art of Forgetting , Oxford International Publishers 2. Harbison , Robert (1997) Thirteen Ways , Massachusetts Institute of Technology 3. Le Corbusier (1927) , Towards a New Architecture , Architectural Press , London (Orginal title: Vers Une Architecture , Editions Cres , Paris , 1923 ) 4. Mehaffy , Micheal , Nikos , Salingaros (2006) A Theory of Architecture 5. Nelson , Robert , Olin , Margaret (2003) Monuments and Memory - Made and Unmade , The University of Chicago Press , 6. http://www.scribd.com/doc/48643515/de-Sola-Morales-I-Terrain-Vague 7. http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archivefree/pdf?res=9E00E5DB1239E433A25757C2A9619C946196D6CF
11