Future Pasts, Past Future

FUTURE PaSTS PaST FUTURE or material preservation in an increasingly digital world

by Eftychios Savvidis

Future Pasts / Past Future

Eftychios Savvidis. SN: 932432 BENVGHE 6. Supervisor: Hannah Corlett

Future Pasts / Past Future or

material preservation in an increasingly digital world

MA Architecture & Historic Urban Environments The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL

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Preface Chapter 1: Future Pasts Interlude Chapter 2: Past Future List of figures Bibliography

* Robin Hood Gardens (under demolition at the time of writing) is used as a site that sums up reoccurring issues concerning historic urban environments, and that places the narrative in a rather problematic present that appears to have little idea how to negotiate the coexistence of radical stasis and radical change that our future is calling. The narrative though, intentionally avoids returning back to the historic estate, as it opens up to greater and more general questions regarding cultural heritage. **Special thanks to: Hannah Cortlett for supervising, Dr Edward Denison for his full support, Mariza Daouti for sharing some creative thoughts and discussions throughout this attempt, Charalampos Ioannou for his precious assistance, Tasos Theodorakakis and Katelyn Troutman for their eagerness to help.

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The word past in the title of the essay acquires a double meaning: as a noun it indicates the totality of events gone by or occurred before a given point in time, while as a preposition it signifies the passage beyond a certain point in time. Combined twice with its antonym – future, used both as a noun and adjective – it accordingly forms the titles of the two extended chapters that the essay breaks down to. Both chapters using the dipole fragility – mandate for eternity, that motivates the phenomena of preservation, consider the renegotiation of heritage in the digital age, but also in the unforeseeable future. *

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[Ch.1]:

Future Pasts

Due to its proximity to the Canary Wharf and the relentless march of development across London’s East End outwards, Robin Hood Gardens “appears to be squatting both literally and figuratively below the glinting towers of Britain’s newest financial centre”1. Described more as a ‘dissonance’ on the neoliberal landscape, the debated modernist housing complex exemplifies one of the most polarising disputes in British contemporary architecture and urban planning, revealing also the generally paradoxical relationships between destruction, regeneration and preservation. Back in the early 70s, Alison and Peter Smithson responded to the London County Council’s requirements for a site zoning 136 persons per acre and a solution to an ‘open-air deficiency’ in the area2, by retaining the rubble from the 19th centuryblock of “model dwellings” that had previously stood on the site, and heaped it into a monumental pile which 1 Jessie Brennan, Robin Hood Gardens and The Politics of Regeneration, Apollo Magazine, August 2015. Web. 10 August 2017 2 Allan Powers, A Critical Narrative in Robin Hood Gardens: Re Visions, The Twentieth Century Society, 2010, p.28

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they covered with earth and grass,3 and assembled around it their sophisticated vocabulary of exposed concrete moulded into this now-historic-once-new architectural language. The two twin but non-identical concrete slab blocks housing 213 families, shaped to the east and west boundaries of the estate, were erected as if their only role was to contain a topographically-morphed green neopicturesque garden4, whose main feature and focal point was that rounded grass hill moulded from demolition spoil. The aerial colour photograph of Robin Hood Gardens published in Architectural Design in the year of its completion carried the text: “At the new city scale, making a garden should be like making a range of hills. Hills are a great formal idea, ever various, expressive of mood, expectant of weather […] fine silhouetted trees over undulating fields and inviting scenes of woodland. […] another dimension entering our lives”.5 That new, essential according to the Smithsons, urban space within the larger fabric of the British metropolis that had the ability to host a calm island in this restless corner of the capital6, quietly witnessed over subsequent decades, the radical changes occurring

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3 Quite unexpectedly, the Smithsons “rather than removing the image of debris from the city” – a tactic that their precursors and most of their contemporaries would have proceeded to following the mid-twentieth century’s aftermath of massive warfare and extended redevelopment demolitions that provided for their new national futures blank slates and sites obliterated of their pre modern histories -, they “located it [the rubble] as a central aspect of modern urbanization” David Gissen, Débris in Subnature: Architecture’s Other Environments, Princeton Architectural Press, 2009, pp.135-137 4 Simon Smithson, We Called it Robin Hood Lane in Robin Hood Gardens: Re Visions, The Twentieth Century Society, 2010, p.78 5 The Architectural Design, vol.42, September 1972, Robin Hood Gardens, London E14, 1972, pp.561-562 6 The Smithsons called that space a ‘stress-free zone’. “We have become in our bodies aware of the stress that urban noise and traffic movement induce, and realise that for the present our most important need is for quiet places”. Smithson A+P, Ordinariness and Light: Urban Theories 1952-60 and their application in a building project 1963-70, Faber & Faber, 1970, p.194

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in the site conditions surrounding it.7 Changes that since then, have gradually minimized its chances of survival until, ultimately, its fate was sealed by the new financial order and the newly applied politics of regeneration.

The recent approval of the planning application by the Tower Hamlets Council for the second phase of the Blackwall Reach Regeneration Project has consequently condemned the building complex to demolition (actually happening at the time of writing), marking the end of a failed campaign to save the historic estate. The decision for demolition gave a conclusion to a rather controversial conservation case8 that started in 2008 and turned the intellectual and physical terrain into a battlefield on which the opposing forces of ‘preservation’ and ‘progress’ – each viewing themselves as light fighting darkness – once again clashed. Sole arbiter of this battle and the only official regulator: the ‘Listing Process’. The official mechanism of heritage, susceptible to political correctness, often biased by popular prejudice and subject to official inertia, that whilst the ‘heritage boundary’ moves onwards in response to the passage of time9, emerges as the sole negotiator of fragile contemporary urban palimpsests; approving – often 7 “In 1980, eight years after the opening of Robin Hood Gardens, the British government began closing the docks in East London and adopted various policies to stimulate new development. By 1988, ground was broken on the first of many new towers [...], in what is now the highly vibrant and financially sound Canary Wharf. This has created radical change in the site conditions surrounding Robin Hood Gardens and its own potential property value on the private market. Canary Wharf has grown considerably over the past twenty years as a global financial hub and is planned for continued growth in the years to come. The view outside of the typical Robin Hood Gardens flat has developed from the disparity of the docks to monuments of capitalism very quickly”. James Petty, Housing at the Expense of an Idea, pettydesign.com, May 2013. Web. 10 August 2017 8 “The business of listing…” as Alan Powers, joint editor of the Twentieth Century Architecture journal, writes “…is often conducted with the exchange of few letters between conservationists and officials. Robin Hood Gardens was different, and no listing process has turned into such a media event.” Alan Powers, Introduction, in Robin Hood Gardens: Re-Visions, The Twentieth Century Society, 2010. p.16 9 Rem Koolhaas, Jorge Otero-Pailos, and Jordan Carver, Preservation is overtaking us. New York: CSAPP, 2016. pp.13-16

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erratically and arbitrarily - demolition and regeneration, or granting protection: the creator of monuments and gatekeeper to extinction or existence.

The rather emblematic – yet problematic Smithsonian ‘streets in the sky’, seems to have been proven insufficient, or better inefficient, in securing Robin Hood Gardens on the List10, joining the ever-growing inventory of English heritage assets11. Instead, the provocative and influential public housing scheme, designed and completed in 1972 by two of Britain’s most important architectural practitioners and theoreticians, as well as leading protagonists of New Brutalism, was paradoxically given the title of the ‘monument’ and offered a place in PastScape – a repository / link in Historic England’s online database for non-listed or non-designated sites. Although it never actually intended to be a photogenic exemplar of modern housing, the project that has since its realisation become evocative of what is now seen as a pivotal moment in British post-war architecture, signifying also “the progressive state of architectural design and public expectation at a time of change and social advance”12, as of August 10 Coining the phrase to describe their programmatic plan of the stacked apartments and this particular system of circulation and flat access at every third level, the Smithsons termed one of the most distinctive features of Robin Hood Gardens that would later be deemed by the listing authorities to have failed in its role of fostering a sense of community and its “malfunction” would ultimately mask the utopian ideals of social housing that the architects had originally set out to achieve. Park Hill in Sheffield (List entry number: 1246881), was upheld by Historic England as “a more significant example of deck access housing”, owing to its earlier date and greater extent, thus making the Robin Hood Gardens not considered as one of the best examples of its type, “not that innovative in its design” and certainly “not equivalent to the architectural achievement of other twentieth century estates which have been listed”.

11 According to Historic England nearly 400,000 historically important places are listed in England, up to this point.

12 Dickon Robinson, “Fit for Purpose” in Robin Hood Gardens: Re-Visions, The Twentieth Century Society, 2010, p.129

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2015, it was granted a second certificate of immunity13.

This meant it could not be considered for listing again until at least 2020. A first certificate was issued in 2009, after the first failed campaign to list the estate, with the then minister responsible, Margaret Hodge, arguing that a digital model of the estate would be sufficient for posterity. In 2008, Hodge, who alarmed heritage campaigners with her rather increasingly hostile attitude toward post-war concrete buildings, wrote in the March issue of Grand Designs magazine, she stated: “When some concrete monstrosity – sorry I mean modernist masterpiece – fails to make the cut despite having expert opinion behind it, let’s find a third way. This is the 21st century – a perfect digital image of the building, inside and out could be retained forever. New architects should have spaces to show what they can do, not always to have to compromise their vision to have to fit around preserved, existing buildings.”14

13 A first Certificate of Immunity from listing was issued for Robin Hood Gardens in 2009 by DCMS on the advice of Historic England (then English Heritage). When the certificate expired in 2014, the Borough of Tower Hamlets applied to Historic England for it to be renewed. A second campaign that tried to save the estate, was among others also supported by Richard Rogers who argued that “public appreciation and understanding of the value of modernist architecture has grown over the previous five years, making the case for listing stronger than ever”.

14 Margaret Hodge, Modern buildings must prove their worth, Building Design Magazine, 26 February 2008. Web 10 August 2017he statement was reproduced in many articles, among which also one in Building Design, the magazine that along with 20th Century Society were the leading campaigners to save the estate.

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Following the ‘suggestion’ that providing a digital replica of Robin Hood Gardens would be sufficient to legitimise its demolition, Smout Allen15 and ScanLAB Projects16, in 2016, proceeded with 3D scanning the soon-to-be-demolished and irreparably run-down masses, crumbling facades, vandalised corridors and associated remnants of domestic life within the concrete estate for their project ‘Infractus’. Robin Hood Gardens, in all of its dilapidated and weirdly pleasant wild state was fragmentarily captured using terrestrial 3D laser scanning.

Each fragment containing hundreds of individually measured points was recorded by the scanner as part of a

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15 Smout Allen based at the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL comprise of: Mark Smout, Professor of Architecture and Landscape Futures, and Laura Allen, Professor of Architecture and Augmented Landscapes.

16 ScanLAB Projects promotes itself as “a pioneering creative practice exploring the world through precise, beautiful digital replicas of buildings, landscapes, objects and events”

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360-degree sphere of survey information and then laseretched into crystal blocks. “The rough finished concrete of the Smithson’s design reflects the laser perfectly; however, broken glass blocks and the glossy surface of lift shafts, in the work give slightly mistaken measurements and noisy data”, stated Smout Allen who embraced this new reality shrouded in a cloud of mistaken measurements, confused surfaces and misplaced three dimensional reflections normally excluded by rigorous survey filters, but here which deliberately retained and embedded in their six glass blocks. “Like maker marks”, they continued, “they are tell-tale signs of a technology that on the one hand captures a meticulous and viable facsimile of the world whilst on the other expresses the inherent imperfection of digital precision”.17 With their mass-produced-like laser-etched “souvenirs”, challenging among other things the question of how much a digital version can really replace a building, Smout Allen and ScanLAB Projects, took part at the Victoria and Albert Museum’s (V&A) ‘A World of Fragile Parts’ exhibition at the Venice 2016 Architecture Biennale.

Curated by Brendan Cormier, this first joint collaboration between the V&A and the Venice Biennale for the Applied Arts Pavilion18 focused on the global issue of preservation through the phenomena of reproduction and by engaging the long curatorial history of casts and replicas explored how copies can be used to perpetuate material culture in an increasingly digital world. While 17 Smout Allen, Infractus: the taking of Robin Hood Gardens, smoutallen.com. Accessed 10 Aug .

18 The Applied Arts Pavilion was one of the three ‘Special Projects Pavilions’ running besides the 62 National Pavilions and the International Exhibition at the 15th Architecture Biennale.

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underlining the fragility of our global material heritage but also the immense opportunities that new cuttingedge technologies offer19, Cormier stated: “In a world of increased uncertainty, with cultural heritage at risk, new digital scanning and fabrication technologies have emerged, that challenge conventional notions of preservation. The skilful and creative production of copies might be the key to ensuring that our cultural links to the past are preserved well into the future.”20 Along with Smout Allen and ScanLAB Project, a handful of selected artists, architects, interdisciplinary collaborations, and institutions21 showcased a broad variety of projects that demonstrated the latest replication technologies, each opening up unique conversations that went far beyond the idea of preservation and the dissemination of cultural artefacts, towards an idea of perpetuation. Whilst clearly posing political questions about the power of the copy, its relationship with the original and also its value in a society that privileges authenticity, questions related to the legitimacy of the duplicate, and concerns about ownership and authorship were also raised. But even amongst the projects on show there was no clear consensus. The sprawling exhibition left these contemplations to the viewer by offering an eclectic 19 Cormier insists that the increasing accessibility to 3D scanning and printing couldn’t be timelier in the context of cultural preservation, as the threat of destruction and damage of our global material heritage rises.

20 Brendan Cormier, Danielle Thom, A World of Fragile Parts, V&A Publishers, 2016 21 Along with Smout Allen and ScanLAB Projects, the exhibition featured works from Morehshin Allahyari, Andreas Angelidakis, Factum Arte, Forensic Architecture, David Gissen, Institute of Digital Archaeology, Nora Al-Badri and Jan Nikolai Nelles, Project Mosul/Rekrei, Sam Jacob Studio, Scan the World, The Zamani Project, and #NewPalmyra.

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mix of copies that ranged from refugee camp shelters and solid rendered bomb clouds, to Nefertiti’s surreptitiously acquired bust, Warholian scaled reproductions of Canova’s Pauline Bonaparte as Venus Victrix (in glass, wax, and 3D printed resin), Palmyra’s recently destroyed triumphal arch, or flash drives embedded into transparent resin–printed reminders from Hatra (destroyed by ISIS in 2015). All approach the idea of the copy and then presenting a world of fragility that either relies on the collection of vast amounts of data and proceeds to the most perfect representations of an original, or begins to challenge the very idea of the monument. The outcomes in some cases emphasise the tenuousness not only of material objects and structures but also of human lives and experiences, in other turn out to an ethical art heist, while some demonstrate the power of material transformations to create new expression or comment on the nature of decay and even looks at the digital as a world of possible ruin.22 Appearing as architectural fragments, the curated objects were presented on plinths, tables and walls, alongside a number of plaster relics, electrotypes and photographs from the V&A’s nineteenth century Cast Courts, turning the Sale d’ Armi at the Arsenale in Venice into a potential twenty-first century equivalent,23 while simultaneously demonstrating at the same time how the focus and methods of replication have progressed over the last one hundred and fifty years.

22 Brendan Cormier, Against a Pile of Ashes in A World of Fragile Parts, V&A Publishers, 2016.

23 “For ‘A World of Fragile Parts’, we tried to imagine what a 21st century Cast Court might look like, given the new tools and technology available” Brendan Cormier, Against a Pile of Ashes in A World of Fragile Parts, V&A Publishers, 2016.

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Cormier, cheekily included in the exhibition a facsimile of The Conventions for Promoting Universally Reproductions of Works of Art (1867): an arrangement penned by the V&A’s founding director, Henry Cole, about a decade before the V&A opened its Cast Courts24 as an accord for producing and internationally exchanging copies. Brief in its phrasing and aiming at immediate action, this “concise” and “ludic” document “extolling the virtues of copies” signed by fifteen European princes at the Paris 1867 World Expo, would trigger a Europe-wide drive to create vast collections of copies of great works of art and notable architecture.25 The phenomenon of replicating and circulating material culture and presenting it for mass audiences started gathering pace from the mid-nineteenth century onwards, and sculptures, historical building fragments and architectural features were reproduced - often in a series from a single mould – by museums or by private fabricators on both sides of the Atlantic26, using at the time the most up-to-date 24 The V&A Cast Courts – initially called the Architectural Courts – opened in October 1873 and are still open to the public today. Cole theorised casts as an architectural medium, as rapidly developing reproductive technologies and new techniques allowed for the dissemination of architecture on an unprecedented scale. With architecture being generally immovable, Cole commissioned detailed copies of significant architectural fragments to be reassembled in South Kensington for the public to enjoy. It was his conviction that the only way to get British public to view the world’s great architectural treasures, was to bring those treasures to the people.

25 Brendan Cormier, Against a Pile of Ashes in A World of Fragile Parts, V&A Publishers, 2016. p.

26 Mari Lending, in her essay ‘Proust and Plaster’ (2013) refers to the example of the Metropolitan Museum in New York setting up its own moulding department based on the Louvre’s Atelier de Moulage. She also mentions that casts could be even purchased from mail order catalogues and shipped long distances. [p.48]

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technology available; mainly plaster casting technology and to a lesser extent the process of electrotyping. Most of the circulating casts, representing ruins of antiquity as well as buildings designated historical monuments by the nascent institutions that promoted the preservation of national heritage across Europe, were often used to restore the wholeness of buildings that in reality stood in ruins or to isolate specific features of these monuments to illustrate typical characteristics, styles, or eras, as Mari Lending argues in her book Plaster Monuments: Architecture and the Power of Reproduction.27 Arranged in galleries and published in exhibition catalogues, these ageless and spotless, often enormous, portable versions of immovable originals were staged to suggest the grand sweep of history.

Decontextualized monuments from vastly different regions and time periods were incorporated into unitary conceptions of linear timelines and coherent narratives with casts becoming the means to present an emerging condensed and convenient global history of monuments that could be for the first time “experienced spatially, synoptically, simultaneously and preferably chronologically”28.

Yet, almost overnight, cast collections – curated often as surreal mash-ups of mostly Western culture29 - had 27 Mari Lending Plaster Monuments: Architecture and the Power of Reproduction, Princeton University Press, 2017 28 Mari Lending, Plaster Monuments: Architecture and the Power of Reproduction, Princeton University School of Architecture, Betts Auditorium, 20 May 2017. Lecture.

Lending also mentions that most collections were regularly updated “at the pace of archeological excavations and the canonization of national monuments codifying local variation on a global scale” and the casts were shuffled again and again in the museum galleries, causing sometimes confusion.

29 Casts from India were at some point brought to the V&A Cast Courts expanding the “canon” geographically in a way that prompted synchronizing of Western and non-Western Histories.

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become “a source of embarrassment”30. Proudly displayed in leading museum galleries and favoured in the nineteenth century for their ability to educate visitors who did not have the option of travelling to see the originals, casts fell out of vogue and became maligned objects in the early twentieth century, castoff as mere imitations and insolent usurpers. A change in taste prompted by newly imposed aesthetics of authenticity and profound theoretical concerns on genuineness and the devaluation of the ‘aura’ of the original as described in Walter Benjamin’s much too famous 1935 essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,31 resulted in the cast’s plummeting status.

Associated with negative values such as fakery and vulgarity and deemed morally and aesthetically suspect with their disembodied, patina-resistant surface that anchored the monument in time, and their anti-auratic materiality that extinguished all life from the original, casts were ejected from major museums, and most of the collections that proliferated in the previous century throughout Europe and North America were discarded.

Going against the convention that the aweinspiring quality of a work of art was guaranteed by its irreproducibility, Marcel Proust insinuated a diametrically opposite way of thinking about the complicated relationship between materiality, context and significance 30 Mari Lending, Proust and Plaster in AA Files No. 67 (2013), Architectural Association School of Architecture, 2013 p. 48 31 Benjamin’s well –known discussion of the “loss of aura” as a result of mechanical reproduction was focused not only on the repetition of the artistic object itself through techniques of mass production –with the attendant loss of singularity and authenticity – but also the reproduction of that object through other media, namely photography. Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Penguin Books, 2008.

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– “a relationship demonstrated nowhere more richly than in the nineteenth-century plaster cast collections” as Lending suggests32. Not sharing the contemporary distaste for plaster, Proust wrote ‘À la recherché du temps perdu’ (‘In Search of Lost Time’ or previously ‘Remembrance of Things Past’) just as the tide was turning against the grand nineteenth century cast collections. In his fictional autobiographical novel, young Proust, after visiting the Trocadéro museum (probably referring to the Musée de Sculpture Comparée, planned by Viollet-le-Duc and opened in 1882 in the Palais du Trocadéro later forming the musée des Monuments français) becomes obsessed with travelling to the fictitious Norman town Balbec to see the church from which the beautiful plaster casted portal he saw in Paris was made. On seeing the original, his obsession becomes disappointment. Where he expected the Persian church of Balbec in its totality to be more imposing than the cast fragment in Paris, he finds it to be “something less”, trivialized by the uncurated urban disorder around it and victimized by the work of time and reality. As Proust poetically frames it, the original is reduced to “its own semblance in stone”, while the copy in Viollet-le-Duc’s Parisian plaster heaven appears universal and immortal, perfectly preserved and forever belonging to imagination. The plaster cast in the Trocadéro had allowed Proust to imagine a totality unobtainable in real life. The moment he sees the original he finds that it can all too easily be replaced by its own copy and the

32 Mari Lending, Proust and Plaster in AA Files No. 67 (2013), Architectural Association School of Architecture, 2013, p. 47

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version that he first experienced in the museum becomes a new original, distanced from its historical source. For Proust, authenticity is replaced by the first impression. It is the plaster cast that evokes the original impression of the building’s grandeur – an impression fostered by the church’s “equivalent spectacle” and not guaranteed by reality. The eternal significance is not impregnated in the primordial stone carved from the cliffs of Normandy and “stained” by the passage of time, but it rather originates from this unalterable, material and physical relocation.

Translated from stone to plaster, the copy for Proust not only survived its decontextualization, but also offered aesthetic and architectural insights that the original could not grant.

Ironically, for the few cast collections that managed to survive destruction, a new value slowly emerged in the turn of the last century: preservation. While these works were primarily commissioned out of a pragmatic question about serving an audience, through decades of careful museum conservation they have outlasted and often out-performed many of their originals, which have been either destroyed or degraded through circumstance.

As the only remaining record or in other cases almost more of a true representation of what their original used to be, these casts have again acquired a perceived value of transmitters of knowledge and culture. While not having the reputed historical credentials of their originals, their form and surface still offers a precious insight into the past, elevating them as instruments for preservation. Plaster 18

casts in the V&A Cast Courts are now widely regarded as treasures, eliciting a different response than that which actually brought them to existence. Unique, fragile and vulnerable, attaining a new importance because of their longevity, they designate architectural totalities imbued with a distinct aura of their own. “Today, their age value represents the passage of time and as such they stand before us as monuments – in themselves, and also to an abandoned paradigm”, says Lending before adding “More than a longing for the primordial stone, they invoke an experience of undeniable and animated materiality – a sentiment so beautifully described by Proust.”33 Copies are contentious, and it might be alarming to cultural institutions and heritage bodies if Benjamin was mistaken. However, obsessions about pinpointing originality,34 debating authenticity over symbolism, questioning the legitimacy of the substitution of the original by a perfect immutable replica, or challenging the stubborn persistence of the profound Benjaminian ‘aura’ this mysterious and mystical quality that no second-hand version will ever attain – would totally miss the point that A World of Fragile Parts sets out to illustrate. Omitting the significance of such grand and persistently unsolved disputes might be arrogant enough, but equally disparaging 33 Mari Lending, Proust and Plaster in AA Files No. 67 (2013), Architectural Association School of Architecture, 2013 p. 48 34 Bruno Latour and Adam Lowe note that, paradoxically these kind of obsessions “increase proportionally with the availability and accessibility of more and more copies of better and better quality […] no copies, no original. In order to stamp a piece with the mark of originality, you need to apply to its surface the huge pressure that only a great number of reproductions can provide” in The Migration of the Aura, or how to explore the original through the facsimile in T. Bartscherer, R. Coover (ed) Switching Codes. Thinking Through Digital Technology in the Humanities and the Arts, University of Chicago Press, 2011, p. 280.

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or a bit prosaic would be to not follow the exhibition’s ambitions to move further this subverted relationship between copy and original and set the discussion on this certain power that the copy can attain in archiving, preserving and perpetuating material culture. Far from plaster casts and the early days of museum reproductions, the nineteenth century tradition of replica-making seems to be taking on a new meaning in the twenty first century, as new digital means and reproduction technologies are shifting paradigms, changing the agenda in fundamental ways and promising alternative paths forward.

As a nineteenth-century mass medium, the ephemeral architectural plaster cast challenged and unsettled the presupposed permanence of architectural structures (which until then appeared immovable and inexorably subject to gravity and their own materiality) in much more efficient ways than photography could ever do35, since it was capable of representing at full scale and in three dimensions what the scaleless medium of photography could only capture and disseminate in two. The relocation in terms of materiality of significant architectural structures through their reincarnation in plaster, allowed for their decontextualisation, their 35 Photography in another way fundamentally changed the way a wider audience was able to experience buildings. Through photographic imprints, distant buildings were suddenly brought closer providing a visual knowledge of architecture that had previously been the reserve of the traveller. Even Ruskin recognised photography as “the most marvellous invention in the century”, identifying the important role that the daguerreotype would play in visually “saving” endangered architectural masterpieces. For Ruskin the very speed of photography suggested that it was possible to hold on to what was in the process of being lost and along with casts and drawing gave him an expedient way of documenting buildings and attaining facts for his study of Gothic architecture. (Thordis Arrhenius, The Fragile Monument: On Conservation and Modernity, Artifice Books, 2012, pp.48-70)

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extraction from the historical flux, their entry into museums, their consequent dissemination, and apparently their preservation in an alternative way. This new way did not follow established traditions of preservation through careful conservation, restoration, reuse or adaptation to suit changing needs and contemporary cultural and social contexts, but through replication. At any rate, in the field of historic preservation, replicas were mostly seen as a last resort, after efforts to save the original failed.

“The deliberate fabrication of facsimiles and reproductions of historic artefacts has never been part of preservationists’ program. To the contrary, their battle has always been to save the original, the authentic, the proto typical so that future generations would be able to see what the past was really like” 36 writes James Marston Fitch while he further categorises replication as “the most radical and hazardous” of all forms of interventions in historic preservation.

However, in the twenty-first century’s digitally mighty and materially brittle age, the levels of damage and destruction of cultural heritage, caused by the ravages of time, imperfect restorations, natural disasters, human conflict, iconoclastic acts, mass tourism, societal pressures, commercial imperatives or market-driven regeneration projects, has led to a re-evaluation of the importance of high resolution facsimiles, and a renewed interest in the potential of copies. As a complement to ‘traditional’ preservation, the value to culture of being able to create, store and protect accurate records of objects and structures 36 James Marston Fitch, Historic Preservation, University Press of Virginia, 2007, p.187

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that might one day no longer exist or become inaccessible, is clear. In the face of an increasingly unpredictable material culture fragility, copies seem to emerge as a potential answer to our past’s preservation in perpetuity.

The Victorian obsession with plaster casting has assumed a new meaning and vigour, and the problem that Henry Cole had in physically overcoming architecture’s immovability has now literally dematerialised. Over the last decade, through the exponential development of new digital technologies engaged with the production of copies that have become sculptural tools of forensic accuracy-, it is possible to three dimensionally record and archive literally the whole built world - including our present or even our lost past. Advances in 3D recording, composite photography, an assortment of multi-spectral imaging techniques and image processing have become a part of a coherent and non-contact approach to the documentation of cultural heritage and its long term preservation, turning culturally significant buildings, structures, landscapes and objects into quilts of ones and zeroes, datasets with no expiry date stitched together on computer screens into clouds of coloured points and then textured meshes in three dimensional spaces of hundredsof-microns of resolution.

The digital 3D scanned monument is the new plaster cast; the mould and the cast at once: equally important and yet much more meticulous and accurate in its ability to record and capture reality; much more powerful in its ability to be disseminated and shared; fully 22

able to exploit the “lightness” of its immateriality and the interactive functionality of computer networks and the Web; much more efficient, vibrant and enriched by an extensive array of constantly accumulated metadata and dynamics created by exchanges and ephemeral or enduring online relationships; and much more capable of transcending material circumstances, permitting the physical monument to be lifted out of this slowly failing material world and to be stored and secured in the database or ‘the cloud’, endlessly duplicatable, multipliable and downloadable, conquering forever eternity. After all, endurance in perpetuity, is and always was preservation’s guiding aim, as David Lowenthal confirms37 while also arguing that “nothing lasts forever, and however faithfully protected, everything always departs more and more from its original state”38. For Lowenthal material preservation, this action that “the threat of loss to a supposed rival, spurred heritage consciousness into”39, is ultimately an illusion.

37 David Lowenthal, Material Preservation and Its Alternatives, Perspecta Vol.25, The MIT Press, 1989. pp.66-77 38 ibid. p.68 39 ibid. p.69

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Illusionary or not though, things seem to continue on forever once they are dematerialized, multiplied, dispersed and made visible and available on the Web. “Even in the absence of an original”, as Paul Soulelis mentions while prefacing Morehshin Allahyari’s work Material Speculation, “copies of texts and images swarm around and form the missing thing as an imaginary concept in itself. These digital representations might conjure the lost object in archaeological terms, acquiring location, weight, and presence, but they resist fixity.”40 Allahyari is an artist and activist who employs these bits moving in and out of search engines and digital archives, and vehemently takes advantage of what the digital world and new technologies have to offer to “respond to the violence of cultural terrorism by resurrecting lost objects with stereolithography CAD files for 3D printing”41. Created from dozens of still photographs found on the Web using photogrammetry, Allahyari’s remodelled destroyed-byISIS figures from Iraq, are given back to the collective in the form of openly published .stl and .obj files, the author surrendering ownership over them. The dispersion of the 3D digital replicas of figures that were once thought lost forever, evoke the originals in a placeless version without material conditions, guarantees their continued existence, stored on hard drives, “owned” and 3D printed by anyone, anywhere, for any purpose, at any time, without limit. As the files are posted, downloaded, and printed, different each time, the nature of the object remains unsettled and 40 Paul Soulellis, The Distributed Monument, The Rhizome, February 2016. Web. 10 August 17 41 ibid.

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its ‘aura’ – less relevant in the digital copy’s persistence42 - is exchanged for immortality, guaranteed as long as the digital reproductions multiply and move. The CAD model, in its hybrid state of being and non-being “bridges an ontological gap between presence and disappearance” and, as Soulellis concludes, it is “actively repairing cultural memory while denying us a conclusion”. In fact, Allahyari’s “distributed” items can be seen as starting points made to be used and to be experienced, and unlike the originals they are based on, they are beginnings as opposed to finalities without an end.

42 As Mario Carpo notes: “…as copyright lawyers and computer hackers know, the electronic distributions of work of art and their digital copies is already blurring the traditional distinction between original and reproductions: digital technologies are mostly indifferent to Benjamin’s auratic requirements.” Mario Carpo, “The Postmodern Cult of Monuments”, Future Anterior, Vol. IV, Number 2, Winter 2007, pp.50-60.

25

26

fig.1.10

O

If through translations in materiality that allowed for further appreciation, 19th century’s portable monuments managed to open a new way of relating with present pasts, then 21st century’s distributed monuments – transcending and at the same time rejecting materiality - are opening new ways to look into future pasts. Fully exploiting special opportunities and dynamic potentials afforded by an increasingly immaterial world and the capabilities offered by the new dominant media and their supportive advanced technological frameworks, recontextualised through 3D scanned replicas or even recovered and “resurrected” through reality based 3D modelling, the distributed monument conquers eternity in ways that could have never been imagined before; secured in the embalming fluid of intangible and frictionless

fig.1.10

28

digital environments, with its universal, liquescent, interchangeable, ‘immaterial materiality’ overcoming fragility, deceiving time, and promising immortality.

Along with immortality, the freely circulating multiple opens up an immensely satisfying and unsettling new timeless space: a metaphysical trade zone that does not just facilitate dissemination but research as well. A new exciting territory where infra-thin information and data, flow non-stop in and out, democratising access to heritage for all, presenting new ways to value, ‘collect’, display, look at and appreciate cultural heritage and new ways to engage with or relate to the monument. This creates novel and radical terms by which attachments and relations are made and sustained within the material world, initiating at the same time new norms, breaking the canons, changing, transforming, or relocating forever the very idea of preservation, its framework, its methods, its applied range or even its object. Is it the case that if anything needed to be preserved anymore is simply the database? : an assumption that Mark Wigley writing at the very end of the twentieth century already came to, kind of ‘effortlessly’, after realizing that memorializing function is being slowly displaced by images, that digital archives have taken over the role of storing memory from solid structures and that collective memory is exponentially diffused across an invisible electronic landscape rather than concentrated in singular monumental objects.43 43 Mark Wigley, The Architectural Cult of Synchronization, in October vol.94, The Independent Group, MIT Press, 2000. p.31 ** This paper was presented in the session ‘The Petrified Memory: Architecture, Monument, and Legitimization’ of the ‘(Re)Constructing the Past’ colloquium, Royal Museum for Art and History, Brussels, February 26, 1999.

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Undeniably, the unprecedented abilities of today’s innovative digital technologies are not just providing and allowing for a new efficient way to preserve and perpetuate heritage, but also starting to redefine the canon. Furthermore, they may not be just redefining the canon, but inevitably changing rooted traditions from the physical world, disrupting once and for all, every established relationship with every cultural link to the historical past, and even the future of our past itself. The potential offered for cultural heritage’s perpetuation is without doubt exciting, fascinating, and perhaps even upsetting, concurrently calling into question and interrogating traditional or linear terms and notions, concepts or ideas and their respective meanings and perceptions. As everything slowly migrates from real to the image, from the material to the immaterial and ultimately into the digitized computer bank or the ‘cloud’, monumentality (defined as the relationship that is negotiated between the monument and society and between the monument and the surrounding constellation of values and symbols in a culture), monumentalizing processes and even the very idea of the monument, are rapidly (about to be if not already) altered. Altered, shifted, relocated or transformed by the ‘invasion and imposition’ of this new set of digital technologies. Technologies that bring along their own dialectics of objectivity and subjectivity, authenticity and forgery, signal and noise, integrity and decay, remembrance and repression. Dialectics not quite known and certainly not yet fully determined.

30

31

fig.2.1

[interlude]:

Aloïs Riegl, the first challenged the ontological implication of the term, after concretising the idea of the monument in its oldest and most original sense - as “a human creation, erected for a specific purpose of keeping single human deeds or events alive in the minds of future generations”1- noting that this definition was “too reductive” he coined the concept of the unintentional monument, brutally expanding the term to an incorporation of every artefact without regards to its original significance and purpose, as long as it reveals a considerable period of time2 or as long as it holds a value for its beholder3.

In his seminal 1903 analysis Der modern Denkmalkultus / The Modern Cult of Monuments, after expressing the shift from the cult of the intentional monument to that of the unintentional monument (whose history and origin he traced back to the Italian Renaissance with the first official measures for the preservation of certain buildings of the past, even though they had not been conceived as monuments when they were first built4) Riegl abandons the classification of monuments themselves to instead thoroughly identify and distinguish between different values attributed to them in modern society and then speculates how these values determine the preservation of the monument.

1 Aloïs Riegl, Der moderne Denkmalkultus, sein Wesen, Seine Entstehung (1903), translated by Kurt W. Forster and Diane Ghirado as The Modern Cult of Monuments: Its Character and Its Origin, Oppositions 25, 1982, p.21 2 ibid p.24 3 ibid p.23 While the value of the intentional monument is always conditioned by its makers, the value of the unintentional monument is relative and as Riegl points out “left to us to define”.

4 ibid pp.24-31 Riegl argues that while the intentional monument appears as some trans-historical almost ubiquitous phenomena, the unintentional monument is a dateable invention of the West.

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Going beyond the nineteenth century’s conflicts between John Ruskin and his nemesis Eugène Viollet-leDuc, and the classic debate on how monuments should be restored5 to the very question of why we care for monuments in Western culture, in a highly visually oriented analysis that prioritised the gaze of the beholder, Riegl marks three forms of memory-values or Erinnerungswerte as he names them; intentional commemorative-value, historical-value, and age-value. The last two relating to the cult of the unintentional monument. These values defining the monument, were almost exclusively based on the visual effect they generated upon the subject and in turn affect the care of the monument. As age-value, Riegl termed the emotional evocation of a general sense of the passage of time and the appreciation of the process of evolution. A quality for which monuments would be most venerated. A value that would challenge and replace at the end the historical-value that resided on historicity and the specific relation of the monument to a historical period, radicalising, as Thordis Arrhenius points out, the notion of the monument as narrative: “Where, Viollet-leDuc and Ruskin, despite their contrasting ideas, both position the monument as a historical document; in Riegl, art history is replaced with a corporal identification that suggests an altogether different relation between man and objects. While nineteenth century restorations were carried out under the aegis of completing or preserving the archive of buildings

5 Restoration as it appeared in the nineteenth century, threatened the integrity of the monument as a historical document on one hand and on the other the absence of restoration threatened its very being as a historical object. Main ideas expressed on each side of this debate were extensively supported by John Ruskin and Eugène Viollet-le-Duc respectively.

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that together formed a national inventory and history of architecture, Riegl’s monument appears as a melancholic object, revealing the constant ruination of the archive per se.”6 By suggesting a novel reading of the role of the monument in modern society, Riegl identified a function for the monument that went beyond its documentary value as history to the emotional force of ‘the old’ itself, a force that as Arrhenius repeatedly suggests was the clue to the emerging popularisation of heritage in Western culture7. In Riegl’s words: “Age-value manifests itself immediately through visual perception and appeals directly to our emotions. To be sure, the scientific basis of historical value gave rise to age-value but in the end agevalue conveys the achievements of scholarship to everyone… ”8 The notion of the unintentional monument and the identification of age-value, gradually transformed ‘monuments’ from objects that originally communicated permanence to objects that were about fragility, loss and in need of protection, detached from present for reasons of sentiment and history and romantically seen as compressions or extensions of the experience of time and as totemic catalysts and activators of memory. Riegl,

6 Thordis Arrhenius, The Fragile Monument: On Conservation and Modernity, Artifice Books, 2012, p.100 7 ibid p.97 Despite its formulation within a particular and bounded historical context, Riegl’s analysis, held sway throughout most of the twentieth century and contributed to deepen the understanding of phenomena of preservation, and the role of its objects in contemporary societies.

8 Aloïs Riegl, Der moderne Denkmalkultus, sein Wesen, Seine Entstehung (1903), trans Kurt W. Forster and Diane Ghirado as The Modern Cult of Monuments: Its Character and Its Origin, Oppositions 25, 1982, p.34

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at the brink of modernism, predicted the forthcoming emergence of a ubiquitous admiration for ‘the old’ and its evocative power to conjure up meaningful narratives of the past, later proving crucial to the explosive expansion of heritage and its final development into a mass cult in the later twentieth and the twenty first century.

Trying to understand the reasons and causes of this recent expansion of heritage, specifically in relation to the built environment and architecture, Arrhenius focuses on “the object that the discourse on heritage constructs” – the monument. She strongly argues that today it is not the permanence or the persistence of an object that identifies it as a monument – as Aldo Rossi in ‘L’ archittetura della città’ insinuated9 -, but rather its fragility, its vulnerability and its possible disintegration by any means that singles it out. This popularisation and expansion of the old in contemporary societies appears to be closely bound to these notions of fragility, of loss and danger that Riegl described a century ago: “Not until the object is threatened, homeless, or at the edge of demise, does it qualify itself for protection and gains its status as a monument”. Arrhenius would add: “since its invention the monument has been inscribed into a narrative of danger”10. This narrative of danger and the threat of loss is precisely what actually motivates a whole series of actions – legal, physical or spatial – that set out to name it, establish it, save it and 9 Aldo Rossi, L’ architettura della città (1966), trans Diane Ghirardo and Joan Ockman as The Architecture of the City, MIT Press, 1989, p.60 10 Thordis Arrhenius, The Fragile Monument: On Conservation and Modernity, Artifice Books, 2012, p.6

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to preserve it. Actions that can somehow render it futureproof by lifting it away from the realm of the present and relocating it into the realm of cultural history, placing it into a plane of cultural significance that changes its context, probably its content, codifies public perception and initiates new systems of interaction with ‘receivers’.

Preservation is then often understood as a matter of “changing context” but also it can be read as a curatorial intervention that participates in the formation of cultural objects by exposing their “generosity” and “openness to tenses and tenors”11 whilst bringing them into collective consciousness. By definition, heritage objects represent collective cultural choices, or more abstractly, objects that societies have chosen to latch onto or take along as they transient through different historical phases.

But these choices are always answerable to preservation acts, mainly - if not absolutely - determined by national heritage legislation, bureaucratic listing processes, heritage movements’ intentions, legal bodies, conventions and international charters.12 ‘The monument’ then appears to be ‘constructed’ and incessantly redefined and mutated by preservation, but also ultimately reliant to those legal bodies responsible for its existence and its protection for future generations.

11 Aron Vinegar & Jorge Otero-Pailos, On Preserving the Openness of the Monument in Future Anterior, Vol. IX, No 2, University of Minnesota Press, 2012, p. iv 12 Jorge Otero-Pailos comments on the ‘selection’ of objects to be preserved – “choosing heritage” as he sets it - by referencing Eric Hobsbawm & Terence Regner’s The Invention of Tradition (1983) “which initiated a new critical genre in which the history of preservation was depicted as a deceitful manipulation of the past, an artifice posing as truthfulness, cunningly or naively in the service of sinister interests, from corporate profiteering to authoritarian governments”. Experimental Preservation: The Potential of Not-Me Creations in Experimental Preservation, ed. Jorge OteroPailos, Erik Langdalen, Thordis Arrhenius, Lars Müller Publishers, 2016, p.25

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However, whatever the incentives and the ‘interests’ behind monumentalising processes, one thing is certain: preservation always implies a future audience, discriminatively or not supplying valued objects and associated qualities that cannot be imagined further generations would be living without. Commenting on this future-oriented character of preservation Jorge Otero-Pailos and Aron Vinegar, while recognising the fundamental relationship between preservation acts and a vision of what is ‘to come’ rather than solely with what ‘has been’, they describe such acts as “ongoing events that upset basic spatio-temporal coordinates, such as before and after, here and there, then and now”13. Additionally, OteroPailos, investigating further this capacity to facilitate spatio-temporal complexities within material things he suggests that the question “what will have been?” is the foundation of preservation, describing preservation as a practice with which societies relate to time through spaces of the built environment. “By confronting us with this question” – what will have been? – “…preservation places a real responsibility on us to answer it now, in the present with an action, so that something will or will not have been.

Preservation, in other words, is thus a provocation to redesign our use of space from the perspective of a counterfactual temporality: it asks us to bear witness to our actions and to take responsibility for them.”14 13 Aron Vinegar & Jorge Otero-Pailos, On Preserving the Openness of the Monument in Future Anterior, Vol. IX, No 2, University of Minnesota Press, 2012, p. iii 14 Jorge Otero-Pailos, Historic Provocation: Thinking Past Architecture and Preservation in Future Anterior, Vol. II, No 2, University of Minnesota Press, 2005, p. iv

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This “counterfactual temporality” that OteroPailos often refers to in his writings, is registered in the form of verbs known as the Future Perfect - or in French Futur Antérieur 15 - a combination formed through the conjugation of the future tense of one of the auxiliary verbs ‘to be’ or ‘to have’ with the past participle of the contingent verb – a grammatical aspect that views events as prior and completed (i.e she will have seen). The tense of the ‘Future Anterior’ opens up a time and space that is not limited to a past that is already completed, neither to a foreseeable future and definitely not to a fleeting present. It is an impossible location in time and space, both posterior and anterior, that according to OteroPailos gives the chance to “critically reflect on the future of the built environment, to see past its present”16 – or even past its future. A zone that “engages the monument less as an idea, project or concept and more as an act of mobilizing the possibilities inherent in the rhythms, echoes, resonances and staging of its complexity”17, presenting at the same time a fascinating way of addressing ‘what a monument can do’.

15 Jorge Otero-Pailos is the editor of ‘Future Anterior’, a journal that approaches the issue of preservation from a position of critical inquiry, rigorous scholarship, and theoretical analysis while also featuring provocative theoretical reflections on historic preservation from the point of view of art, philosophy, law, geography, archaeology, planning, materials science, cultural anthropology, and conservation.

16 Jorge Otero-Pailos, Historic Provocation: Thinking Past Architecture and Preservation in Future Anterior, Vol. II, No 2, University of Minnesota Press, 2005, p. iv 17 Aron Vinegar & Jorge Otero-Pailos, What a Monument Can Do in Future Anterior, Vol. VIII, No 2, University of Minnesota Press, 2011, p. vii

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fig.3.1

[Ch.2]:

Past Future

In a fragmented present, characterised by what Juhanni Pallasmaa describes as “the dizzying acceleration of the velocity of time and the constant speeding up of our existential reality seriously threatened by a general cultural amnesia”,1 different objects, structures and sites rise as monuments and are equally heralded under the banner of heritage. Way into a century “obsessed with memory in a way that no other ever has”,2 under the fear of forgetting, everything is poetically seen as a potential memory device3 ready to materialise the course of time and make it visible, able to concretise remembrance by containing and projecting narratives inspiring reminiscence and imagination. ‘Everything’ is monumentalized, everything

1 Juhanni Pallasmaa, Space, Place, Memory and Imagination: the temporal dimension of existential space (2007) in M. Treib, Spatial Recall: Memory in Architecture and Landscape, NY Routledge, 2009, p.197 2 Adrian Forty, Introduction in The Art of Forgetting, ed. Adrian Forty & Susanne Küchler, Berg Publications, 1999, p.7 Forty suggests that although forgetting has been the main problem of the twentieth century, in the twenty first century forgetting is being one of the greatest difficulties. Forty observes that in architecture and urbanism exists an almost wholly uncritical attachment to the traditional Western belief that material objects – in this case buildings – provide a complete and satisfactory analogue for the mental world of memory. The western tradition of memory since the Renaissance has been founded upon the assumption, that material objects whether natural or artificial can act as analogues of human memory. It has been generally taken for granted that memories, formed in the mind, can be transferred to solid material objects which can come to stand for memories and, by virtue of their durability, either prolong or preserve them indefinitely beyond their purely mental existence. (pp. 7, 13-15) 3 Juhani Pallasmaa, Space, Place, Memory and Imagination: the temporal dimension of existential space (2007) in M. Treib, Spatial Recall: Memory in Architecture and Landscape”, NY Routledge, New York, 2009, p.190

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is potentially susceptible to preservation, everything appears fragile, worth protecting and in need to be rendered future-proof. The monumental is found to be in the diminutive and ‘unimportant’ at the same time as the generous notion of the monument shrinks the large.

Whole cities and rural or industrial landscapes are framed in the name of memory and turned into heritage objects, compromising an even-greater proportion of the physical environment. “Preservation is overtaking us” Koolhaas warns,4 while the present already appears as a palimpsestic terrain of fluctuating thicknesses and resiliences, or as a world of entangled near and remote pasts (curated by weak or complicated mainly market or politic driven heritage policies and discriminative or indiscriminative listing processes) that have little idea how to negotiate the coexistence of radical stasis and radical change that our future is calling; but neither can handle the fragility and the unprecedented rise of threats against materially failing, aged, functionally inferior or endangered culture elements.

Yet, as various threats for destruction or irreparable damage of our global material heritage rise, and the natural tensions and antithetical relationships characterised by the struggle between ‘malfunctioning’ 4 Rem Koolhaass, Jorge Otero-Pailos, and Jordan Carver, Preservation is overtaking us. New York: CSAPP, 2016.

Koolhaas while observing that intervals between present and a preserved structure’s origin date have been steadily shirking over the last years, he provocatively warns that: “We are living in an incredibly exciting and slightly absurd moment, namely that preservation is overtaking us. Maybe we can be the first to actually experience the moment that preservation is no longer a retroactive activity but becomes a prospective activity. [...] Therefore, we will have to decide in advance what we are going to build for posterity sooner or later.” (pp.15-16)

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traces of golden pasts or potential monuments and future regeneration projects escalate (as maybe in the case of Robin Hood Gardens), Brendan Cormier by curating ‘A World of Fragile Parts’ insists that the emergence of innovative digital technologies promising alternative ways of preservation and perpetuation, could not be more timely. The value to culture of being able to create, store and protect accurate records and copies of objects, structures, or landscapes (urban or rural) that one day for different reasons may no longer exist or become inaccessible, is more than clear. Three-dimensional digital replication, turning culturally significant artefacts, buildings, or even whole fragments of cities or nature into immortal bits of information that could be accessed, retrieved or experienced virtually at any time and any place, offers fascinating and dynamic alternative paths and tools of preservation and perpetuation of our material culture well into the future, in ways that could have never been imagined before. Or at least not under the same circumstances could they have ever been imagined before.

Mario Carpo argues that Alberti already in the Renaissance realised that “the perpetuity of a monument could be guaranteed by a sequence of numbers better than by the original monument itself ” 5. Using early digitising – in the etymological sense – processes, on a quest for unlimited identical reproducibility, Alberti converted maps, city monuments and sculptures into lists of numbers, convinced that 2D or 3D information would 5 Mario Carpo, The Alphabet and the Algorithm, The MIT Press, 2011, p.57

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travel better in space and time while being encapsulated in a ‘digital’ file that could be retrieved at any time anew, based exclusively on the numerical data and a set of computational instructions or algorithms.6 In ‘De Statua’, his treatise on sculpture, Alberti, thoroughly described the key piece of ‘hardware’ that was meant to scan human bodies and 3D objects and translate them into lists of three-dimensional coordinates.7 According to his instructions, as soon as sufficient points of a surface were recorded and digitized, the subsequent list of numbers would enable the original item to be recreated identically or proportionally identically, in distant places and at future times ad infinitum, even in the absence of the archetype itself.8 But as Carpo notes, the early Albertian digital experiments and the way of thinking, for the time being, might have been “the wrong technical answer to a general cultural need” – the need for exact copies of text, images, objects of art, industry and nature that was raising at that point in the new culture of the Renaissance - “a need […] that soon another technology would emerge that delivered most of what Alberti was looking for, but better, faster and cheaper.”9 However, regardless of what Alberti was really up to, it did not happen for quite some time. Not until 6 ibid. pp. 54-57.

7 Alberti’s human body ‘scanner’ was a revolving instrument inconveniently nailed to the head of the body to be scanned. ibid. p.55 8 Leon Batista Alberti, On Painting and On Sculpture: the Latin Texts of De Pictura and De Statua, ed. and trans. Cecil Grayson, Phaidon, 1972, pp.128-130.

9 Mario Carpo, The Alphabet and the Algorithm, The MIT Press, 2011, p.69 “Mechanical technologies would soon mass-produce what neither hand-making nor digital technologies in Alberti’s time could deliver – identical reproductions.”

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the moment the digitised artefact’s distinctly ‘immaterial’ file or code was assumed to be the most stable entity. In an increasingly digital world characterised as exponentially becoming more and more immaterial in nature, material itself appeared to be the element that is most unstable.10 As Jean-François Blanchette writes while exploring themes of immateriality in terms of the rise of digitisation: “immateriality, fundamental to the ability of the digital to upend the analogue world, is the reason why any media that can be digitized or produced digitally will eventually succumb to the logics of digital information and its circulation through electronic networks”11. What in the Renaissance might have sounded odd and absurd, in the twenty first century now marked by overwhelming disintegration and uncertainty, seemed like a logical thinking schema or the next thing to do. In a fragile world where everyday facts keep reaffirming that material preservation gets to be more of a Sisyphean struggle than anything else, by rejecting materiality – the only matter that supposedly keeps things away from ‘forever’ - the monument seems to be conquering eternity, fulfilling at the same time preservation’s guiding aim: perpetuity. Is it then indeed the case that the only thing needed to be really preserved is the database, the hard drive and the cloud?

10 Victor Buchli, An archaeology of the immaterial. London: Routledge, 2016.

11 Jean-François Blanchette, A Material History of Bits, Journal of American Society for Information Science and Technology 62 (6), 2011, pp.1042-1057, p.1042

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46

fig.3.2

Yet, the painful truth though is that nothing lasts forever. Not even the digital. Andreas Angelidakis, participating also at A World of Fragile Parts in Venice is probably the only one that flipped a bit the script of the exhibition by going a bit further and looking at the digital world as also a world doomed to decay.12 Interested in digital spaces and the possibility of these spaces to also become ruins, while challenging the purported immortality, the noiselessness of digital media and its imperviousness to decay, or the presupposed idea that by storing everything in a digital form we are keeping it secure forever, he proceeds with creating physical material back ups of digitally designed buildings found on the web.13 With his work ‘Soft Ruin’, Angelidakis somehow provocatively secures longevity to digital structures by transferring them as matter in the physical world. The transcendental properties of the digital and its seemingly mysterious ability to both exist within the physical plane and yet escape its most fundamental law – decay – is

* fig.3.3

12 Brendan Cormier, Against a Pile of Ashes in A World of Fragile Parts, V&A Publishers, 2016. p 13 Pointing to social media sites like Second Life, which have already become obsolete, for Soft Ruin, Angelidakis reconstructs a model he created on the platform into an assemblage of parts.

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slowly starting to be questioned and challenged.14 It is somehow starting to get clear that not even digitization can guarantee eternal survival. The digital world appears also to be a world filled with uncertainties and experiencing fragility in its own discrete and special way.

From John Perry Barlow’s revolutionary ‘There is no matter here’15 to Nicolas Negreponte’s apocalyptic ‘From Atom to Bits’16, as Jean-François Blanchette observes, the material dimension of the digital “gets consistently short thrift”. Neither of them in his texts clearly denies that digital information is dependent on physical hardware for its existence, yet this material dimension of mechanical components is largely understood as simply providing a support system for computing, processing, exchanging and storing immaterial bits. “Yet as the looming digital preservation crisis signals, the messy materiality of computing will become increasingly harder to ignore”, states Blanchette17.

But even so, preserving carriers of information as physical objects and hoping that these would remain stable and readable, seems not enough. Even if the supporting 14 UNESCO already since 2003, realizing that the digital is also a fragile world set out to save digital heritage focusing mainly on digital born information. During its 32nd General Conference in 2003 in Vancouver, UNESCO adopted the Charter on the Preservation of the Digital Heritage.

Digital heritage according to UNESCO consists of digitally created or digitized resources of human knowledge or expression with lasting value and significance. The Charter draws attention to the risk of loss which digital heritage is exposed to due to the rapid obsolescence of the hard ware and software which brings it to life. Worth mentioning titles of the Charter Articles: A3. The threat of loss / A4. Need for Action / A5. Digital continuity. [Charter on the preservation of digital heritage, portal.unesco.org. Oct. 20013. Accessed 10 Aug 2017] 15 John Perry Barlow, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace. Electronic Frontier Foundation, Feb 1996. Accessed 20 Aug 2017 16 Nicholas Negroponte, Being digital, New York: Vintage Books, 2000 17 Jean François Blanchette, The Noise in the Archive: Oblivion in the Age of Total Recall in ed.

Serge Gutwirth and Yves Poullet. Computers, Privacy and Data Protection: An Element of Choice.

Springer Netherlands, 2011. p.32

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medium remains intact, degradation and vulnerability of data seems to be arising from various incompatibilities exhibited by file formats, hardware platforms and software applications, as they interminably morph into their next incarnations. At some point it may become impossible to access or read data, given that software and hardware are constantly replaced by more powerful new generations which ultimately become incompatible with their predecessors, but also it may become impossible to decode data given the considerable instability in encoding standards and formats when a digital document is firstly created.

Jeff Rothenberg already in the late 90s quite properly called attention to a serious need for “a long term strategy to ensure that digital information will be readable in the future”18, opening an early stage discussion for digital preservation. However, the expansion of the traditional task of preservation in the digital world was since then obvious that would require new knowledge and expertise, and of course some ‘new rules’, as emerging media forms were falling outside of familiar limits and ‘cultural habits’. Being “readable in the future” though as David Bearman would point out while commenting on Rothernberg’s paper that included ‘instructions’ on how to avoid “technological quicksand” - could not be the sole, or at least not a sufficient functional requirement for

18 Jeff Rothenberg, Avoiding technological quicksand, Council on Library and Information Resources, 1999.

Rothenberg’s paper was published as “the first in a series” of papers on preserving digital information.

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digital preservation.19 While underlining that preserving electronic records does not only require preserving the informational systems by which they are generated (as Rothenberg some time earlier had suggested) Bearman insisted that what would mainly be needed is a strategy of migrating electronic records systematically before they become inaccessible, so that they are always available to every current generation of software.20 Although having completed already half a century in the digital era, but still being in an early stage of dealing with digital preservation and despite limited experience it appears inevitable that “in order to stave off obsolescence, data will require some kind of continuous process of re-instantiation into newer formats” confirms Blanchette, adding also that each new format will be dictating in effect new formal conditions of production, expression and interpretation.21 Format migrations indeed involve re-presentations of the original bitstreams, and digital preservation appears to be aiming in ‘copies’ that potentially could be retaining as many of the essential characteristics of the original as possible.

Making “preservation copies” though, as David Bearman states, wouldn’t be like making copies at all, but more 19 David Bearman, Reality and Chimeras in the Preservation of Electronic Records, D-Lib Magazine Vol.5 No.4, Apr 1999. Accessed 20 Aug 2017 20 ibid.

Bearman comments that Rothenberg’s “failure to examine in detail what makes an electronic record evidence over time” was what led him to assume that all was needed was preserving system functionality, while also denouncing Rothenberg’s abstract argument that migration always involves loss of information by characterizing it “plausible, but not, as he imagines, very relevant”.

21 Jean François Blanchette, The Noise in the Archive: Oblivion in the Age of Total Recall in ed.

Serge Gutwirth and Yves Poullet. Computers, Privacy and Data Protection: An Element of Choice.

Springer Netherlands, 2011. p.32

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like producing new representations that capture what is thought to be the essential element of the digital representation that is being migrated or emulated,22 noting also that more than one representation of a digital object would needed to be created and maintained in the preservation transformations over time in order to capture and satisfy different aspects of it. Yet, once again, the issue of the ‘preservability’ of the representation is brought to the table, and the assumption that certain representations will fare better or worse than other over time is at the heart of digital preservation discussions today.23 However, selecting representations with greater ‘preservability’ seems again highly problematic and as Bearman states: “…despite our widely held belief that we can distinguish fragile and robust representations, we had little success in correctly identifying either state in the past. And the future of computing beyond a decade or so is completely unknowable.”24 It rather seems that in a transient large-scale digital moment a new preservation paradigm is born.25 Rather than giving highest priority to preservation of carriers, in the digital “it is the wine that is to be saved, not the bottle”26.

Frequent use and widespread circulation provide and enhance a chance for survival whilst preservation seems 22 David Bearman, Addressing selection and digital preservation as systemic problems in Yola de Lusenet & Vincent Wintermans (ed), Preserving the Digital Heritage. Netherlands National Commission for UNESCO, 2007. p.30 23 ibid. p.30.

24 ibid. p.31 25 Abdelaziz Abid, Safeguarding our Digital Heritage: a new preservation paradigm in Yola de Lusenet & Vincent Wintermans (ed), Preserving the Digital Heritage. Netherlands National Commission for UNESCO, 2007. pp.7-14 26 ibid. p.10

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no longer dependent on the lifespan of the carrier, but on the ability to transfer the information to new media.27 In a post-digital era, the concept of media conversion and migration on an ongoing basis over time rises as important and necessary, and the ability to allow digital information to circulate rapidly on new carriers, to migrate form one carrier to another as often as possible, appears as the ultimate guarantee for its permanent existence. Records and files that are not ‘translated’ or moved out of obsolete hardware and software environments are very likely to die with them28, and unlike matter, digital information is not subject to gradual decay, neither slowly disappears, dissolves, disintegrates or yellows; it either exists or it does not. A new preservation model is evolving where traditional strategies as we know them in the analogue domain, seem no longer relevant – or at least are no longer sufficient to guarantee perpetuity or secure eternity.

27 Annamieke de Jong & Vincent Wintermans, Introduction in Yola de Lusenet & Vincent Wintermans (ed), Preserving the Digital Heritage. Netherlands National Commission for UNESCO, 2007. pp.1-6 28 David Bearman, Reality and Chimeras in the Preservation of Electronic Records, D-Lib Magazine Vol.5 No.4, Apr 1999. Accessed 20 Aug 2017

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54

fig.3.4

In an increasingly digital world of immateriality, objectlessness and transcendence, heritage objects take on new unexpected dimensions. The monument released from its static material state, stripped away of the only thing that kept it bounded to Reigl’s narrative of danger and fragility, is now re-conceived as a digital script, as a condenser of information, data and immortal bits ready to conquer eternity. Digitization is promised as a tool of overcoming brittleness or as an antidote to the uncertainties and threats that trouble our century. Threedimensional digital replication is becoming a preservation phenomenon of our age, rapidly transforming attitudes towards decay but also attitudes towards material preservation itself. The distributed monument through the binary form that it acquires through its digitization, allows for backing up historically significant structures facing threats of loss in war and conflict zones, keeping intact 3D snapshots of whole cities sinking into tourist throngs, or even 3D-virtually saving decaying Zoras29 while building 29 Zora, in Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, is the city that is “forced to remain motionless and always the same, in order to be more easily remembered” [Italo Calvino, Cities & Memory 4 in Invisible Cities (1972), trans. by William Weaver, Secker & Warburg, 1974. p.13]

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on top our pristine Generic Cities30 (as Margaret Hodge’s statement on digitally preserving Robin Hood Gardens while freeing up space for new architectural expression, could be provocatively expanded). ICOMOS in alliance with CyArk31 have already set out to ‘save’ as much of the world as they can by 3D documenting cultural heritage sites before they are lost to natural disasters,32 destroyed by human aggression or ravaged by the passage of time, while at the same time ‘Scan the World’,33 is setting its own online digital “Cast Courts” collecting 3D printable scanned cultural objects from all over the world.

The profound impact of digital technologies in cultural heritage is universally acknowledged but still poorly understood, while the rapid pace of change coupled with the urgent need for immediate response to the fragility that our material world suffers from, makes it increasingly difficult to establish common ground and to promote thoughtful discussion. To predict or try to interpret new developments in the field of digital engagement with heritage on the basis of its recent history

30 In S, M, L, XL the Generic City appears as the model of the city that “abandons what doesn’t work - what has outlived its use.”

[Rem Koolhaas and Bruce Mau, The Generic City in S, M, L, XL, New York: Monacelli Press, 1998. pp.1248 – 1264] 31 CyArk was founded in 2003 to ensure heritage sites are available to future generations. As a non-profit organization, it operates internationally with the mission of using new technologies to create a free, 3D online library of the world’s cultural heritage sites.

32 Elizabeth Lee, CyArk and ICOMOS Announce Joint Initiative for Emergency Recording and Archiving, cyark.org, June 2015. Accessed 10 Aug 2017 33 Scan the World is an ambitious initiative that gives people the chance to experience 3D printed representations of artefacts in a remarkably tangible way, enabling the public to obtain content that they may never had physical access to otherwise. At the moment Scan the World has at “its possession” 8649 3D printable scanned sculptures, available to be downloaded, owned and printed by anyone.

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is risky, as one needs to “extrapolate from a curve that is too short and build on evidence that has not been shifted by time”, whereas projecting to a more distant vantage point to see past future “entails a loss of detail, but may reveal the outlines of more general trends”.34 However, as we move further into the new millennium, into a more mature digital era (or a post-digital era), we further realise that entropy is unavoidable. All things are doomed to decay – even the most seemingly stable ones. The dipole of fragility and the need for perpetuity appears also in the digital world - as in the physical one – revealing interesting new ways of responding to the mandate for conquering eternity.

Longevity in the digital domain though, is understood in different terms and the fragility of digital information initiates new procedures and establishes a new preservation paradigm. A paradigm that guarantees survival based on processes of constant migration, translation and renewal – everything that material preservation is not.

The digitisation of heritage simultaneously affects the process of creating content, the way in which content is disseminated and the ways that it can be preserved over time. Although preservation mainly associated with a sort of deference to the past, and often equated with keeping things the same, the current transition to a new dominant media opens up the way for interrogating, evaluating and challenging preservation conventions and offers special opportunities for analysis and critique. The digital obliges us to consider all our certainties about the 34 Mario Carpo, The Alphabet and the Algorithm, The MIT Press, 2011, p.xi

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very meaning of the word “preserve” and the ways we hold on to heritage objects but also to rethink cultural processes in dramatically new ways. Digital technology has already thrown heritage into a new reality where scanning and possible reprinting, dematerialisation and rematerialisation, endless dissemination and perpetuation, are starting to blur the boundary between the physical and the virtual and challenge the primacy granted to presence and materiality in preservation. Furthermore, heritage seems that can no longer be thought of just in terms of unique immutable objects and preservation appears to be framed in different ways which may or may not rely exclusively on maintaining objects materially but more on allowing memories, meanings, and information to be endlessly transformed, migrate and incarnated into every possible form and materiality. By sacrificing the preservation of preservation as we know it until now, new fertile territories open up that allow us to question again “how do we keep things”, while at the same time our post-digital relationship to monuments suggests a new conception of the monument itself. A conception that liberates us from the primal importance of intense objects demanding our attention, obedience and reverence, and provides us with promising avenues to move toward more existential questions like: “why do we keep things in the first place”.

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60

fig.1.3

62

fig.1.4

64

fig.1.5

66

fig.1.6

68

fig.1.7

70

fig.1.8

72

fig.3.3

74

1.1

Robin Hood Gardens, London

1.2

Infractus / Remnants of domestic life

1.3

Infractus / Laser-etched crystal blocks

1.4

Dar Abu Said / shelter at the refugee camp in Calais - Sam Jacob

1.5

Bomb Cloud - Forensic Architecture

1.6

The Other Nefertiti / Nefertiti Hack - N. Al-Badri and J. Nikolai Nelles

1.7

Canova’s Pauline Bonaparte as Venus Victrix – Factum Arte

1.8

Material Speculation: Gorgon, 2016 – Morehshin Allahyari

1.9

The Victoria & Albert Museum Cast Courts

1.10

The 3D Additivist Manifesto, 2015 (video still) – Morehshin Allahyari

2.1

Dilemmas & Paradoxes / Malaga 2012

3.1

The Mound: 1,636658 points. 20,367 vertices. 36,369 faces - Eftychios Savvidis

3.2

Memory of Clouds, 2016 (detail) – Petros Moris

3.3

Soft Ruin, 2016 – Andreas Angelidakis

3.4

The Mound: 1,636658 points. 20,367 vertices. 36,369 faces (2) - Eftychios Savvidis

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by Princeton University School of Architecture, 20 May 2017.

Illustration Credits fig: 1.1, 1.9, 2.1, 3.1, 3.4 - Eftychios Savvidis fig: 1.2, 1.3 – Smout Allen / www.smoutallen.com fig: 1.4, 1.5, 1.7 - www.vam.ac.uk/blog fig: 1.8, 1.10 – Moreshin Allahyari / www.morehshin.com fig: 3.2 – Petros Moris / www.petrosmoris.com fig: 3.3 – The Breeder Gallery / www.thebreedersystem.com

London, September 2017

MA Architecture & Historic Urban Environments The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL