http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/22/arts/design/22pogr.html?ref=design

Hi friends,

Again with the New York Times. I am becoming somebody's boring dad. Anyway, this article is about something Daniel Libeskind said about not designing buildings for tyrants. It's an interesting idea even though Daniel Libeskind's design for the Freedom Tower in New York is a little fascistic or . . . insensitive. This means that maybe it's inappropriate to build a vaguely militaristic 1776 foot phallus with what (for security reasons) is a 200 foot bunker inhabited primarily by the federal government over what is essentially (maybe not essentially) a place of mourning. Still his Holocaust museums (don't even get me started) are supposed to be very beautiful (I've never seen them). All of that said, I commend his ethical sensitivity is saying he wouldn't build in China because “[He] won’t work for totalitarian regimes.” This has apparently caused something of a sensation.

Holocaust Museum, Berlin

This might be a nice time to talk about what I mean when I talk about monumentality. Personal aside: I keep hearing sniggering about my talking about monumentality by people who study things like riziculture. And pardon my language but, bitch, please: you study rice. Moving on--what is monumentality? And what does it have to do with Mr. Libeskind?

Briefly, monumentality can be thought of as a building practice, it is a method of expressing ideology, belief, or memory (which is to say, truth) through building. Monuments and memorials in the most traditional sense are of course monumental. Monumentality is however a dimension of other building so that the Capitol, for example, is monumental although its primary function is not monumental per se. The relationship between monumentality and function (or functionless-ness, or functional aestheticism, or whatever) is complicated. Monumentality has to do with scale: it's about theatricality, a monument always imagines a viewer. The nature of this relationship between the viewer and the monument may shift but an important aspect of monumentality is that the monument always tries to captivate and in fact dominate.




I see monumentality as a kind of religious phenomenon, it is about embodying meaning through the construction of a symbol. It is meaning-making. Without a system of meaning, without imagining a particular viewer, and a specific message, a monument fails, at least in its most specific task. A monument however, an object possessing grandeur, may still captivate, may still dominate, even if its most specific message is lost. I understand this mysterious relationship between viewer and monument as being related the systems of meaning we call religion.

Andreas Huyssen is a professor at Columbia and he is also the bomb. He brings genuine insight to the field and expands the category of the monumental is some really interesting ways. I believe his field is Germanic studies and it was the historical phenomenon of Fascist and Nazi monumentality which really brought these questions to the fore. After the Holocaust all monumentality, all nationalisms, all totalitarian pronouncements become suspect. But engaging in a simple anti-monumentality that means, effectively, not building things that look like the Arc de Triomphe is really not sufficient. The monument reinserts itself. The skyscraper, the massive public housing work, the supermarket all persist and all dominate. Modernism is perhaps the true underlying ideology of the death camp and the office tower, the Freedom Tower too. (Too French, but still.) It both monumentalizes endlessly and brings into question the monument. The question then is why monuments? Why do we need them, why do we build them, can we or should be get away from them? Is this merely the death instinct, the will to be dominated? Is this the will to be remembered or the will to remember?

I bet French people wouldn't be so smug if they lived inside a circuit board. Le Corusier's design for Paris.

Huyssen suggests that the monumental need not be avoided and that perhaps it cannot be. Even a secular age seems to require them. What must happen however is that we not lose our sensitivity to these problems, to our own propensity to wish domination. Huyssen suggests a kind of structural tension in which to hold monumentality.

I've been writing about this very theoretically but keep in mind that this phenomenon has has a tremendous history (and its own relationship with History that we don't need to get into). And so I think it is important, very important in fact, to talk about public housing and supermarkets as ideological buildings apart from their "pure function" but in fact one needn't go so far to study monumentality. In fact, there are sufficient self-proclaimed monuments which are almost embarrassing in their blatant nationalist, near fascist tendencies. History is ripe with these. What's key with the most obvious monuments is that they are points of intersection of art, politics (meaning the stated activity of the state), and ideology. They are clear statements, maybe even objects whole sole purpose is to be clear in a vague world. Monuments monumentalize themselves (too French, again). They are hopeful, if ignorant.


They are also points of intersection in time, they are present actors making sense of the past in order to communicate with and create a future. This is their purpose. Again though, I am not merely talking about monuments and memorials only but about the nature of monumentality.

It is because they occupy this fraught territory, about control of space, the past and future, value itself, that monuments become such points of contention. Or not. There are places (I can think of one) where public discourse is absent, where a totalitarian governing style is present and where building becomes fascist. Someone once said that fascism is characterized by a forced unity of aesthetics, religion, and politics and where this condition reigns, the monument is of course the expression of this unity. I would argue that where this condition exists, the monument is everywhere.

Let's return to the Libeskind case now. Rem Koolhaas is into this very fatalistic view that global capitalism is the real condition now and that all building now essentially expresses its values. There are no alternatives, though some architecture may do a better job of creating the kind of dynamic mixing he so values in older cities. In that first post I wrote about his saying that it remains to be seen what the relationship is between the postmodernism of today and those same totalizing modernisms of the last century. In ethical terms this vision of our present condition means that Koolhaas can essentially design anywhere, because the globalized world is so homogenized that it is senseless to distinguish. Liebeskind disagrees and may be less willing to see the past as being so contiguous with the present precisely because his Holocaust museums are all about questioning (though neither valorizing or discrediting) that contiguity. It's an interesting question. First, does such a thing as purely functional, a-ideological, architecture exist? Second, is the artist's work always embedded within its socio-historical ethical context? Third, and really first, does architecture need to be subject to ethical and aesthetic criticism?

Consider this picture of the Medical University is contrast to this picture of a public housing work nearby. They are nearly identical in form, but where some force does not act to preserve the original state of the building, a layer of accretions and additions forms on the same matrix. These accretions characterize the “tiger cages” of Hanoi, where privitization has caused each individual household to expand as much as possible: porches, or something like them are made by knocking down walls and building outwards. The tiger cages are a sign of the way social mass housing has failed to keep pace with explosive population growth. Why then is an identical structure within the confines of the university ossified in its original form?




First, from a more theoretical perspective I want to suggest that within the confines of the university an alternative set of values is at work. This may seem obvious, but what I want to suggest a la Mary Douglas is that we shouldn’t be too quick to assume that things simply “are” different in the university. It is a whole system of meaning which demands uniformity within the walls and allows profusion without.




Second, I don’t want to move away from historicism too much here. In fact, a dormitory room can never grow the way a personal household can because the student is not an owner. There was a time in fact before privitization when the distinction between a dormitory and a household was not as clear: this is the nature of the public housing built in the latter half of the 20th century in Hanoi.



Let’s imagine the story this way then: both of these buildings were built at approximately the same time both ostensibly to house masses of people. Under privitization, the family re-inscribed its central role: “the masses of people” fragmented along familial lines, suggesting that the family as a social unit was in fact incompatible with a purely communalistic worldview. This phenomenon manifests itself through the tiger cages, where the homogeneity of the housing is disrupted by the actions of individual families. Families grow, earn more money and need more space. Heterogeneity reigns.



While this is happening students continue to enter the dormitories. They are fairly homogenous in terms of age, social position, and educational background. They do not have ownership of their rooms but are rather vassals of the university. I mean to suggest that this homogeneity is a result of an underlying condition of homogeneity among the students, the role of the university as a socializing (and therefore homogenizing) agent, and the unquestioned role of the university as sole proprietor. This manifests itself in the homogeneity of the built form.

It might be helpful then to consider to exceptions which prove the rule. First, consider examples of modern communal housing where families opt-in to homogenous living. Modern religious communes demonstrate this well, and note that their housing is also homogenized. There, the “prior unit” of the family is willfully subsumed by the society. Also consider instances in the US and Europe where a notion of “student rights” emerges. There are colleges, Reed comes to mind, where students legally own some of the buildings on campus. They are thoroughly marked as having been appropriated.

From a practical point of view this suggests that inasmuch as the family is understood as that prior unit of society mass, homogenized housing does not reflect the reality of the lives housed. It’s tempting to talk about exogamy and endogamy and utopianism and socialism and totems, but all in time.

SO, I'm in the midst of this Fulbright research mishagas. I came with the intention of studying monuments and memorials in Vietnam, then I came across this line:

"In fact, by universal standards, Hanoi does not have any great individual monuments."

I feel like it should be the tagline of this blog. Anyway, I've shifted my focus (for both conscientious and arbitrary reasons) to the architecture of Hanoi's national universities. Many of them date from the 1960's and 1970's, in a critical period of national identity formation. None of those words have too much meaning, and I'm weary that a great cloud of vagueness and
consequent boringness will descend on this my baby-blog. That is why I am using this innovative and tedious format to work and think small. Still, introductions were in order.

Today's topic:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/08/magazine/08shenzhen-t.html?ref=design



This is an article by Nicolai Ouroussoff, the architecture critic of the New York Times. He's very smart. Ideologically I think he is more committed to his strain of modernist utopianism than I am. He's always raving about the importance of new building and reifying a progressive spirit for New York, which I support, but sometimes I think he forgets about things like dislocation and poor people. He quotes Steven Holl, who said, "[Americans have] become too backward-looking. In China, they want to make everything look new. This is their moment in time. They want to make the 21st century their century. For some reason, our society wants to make everything old. I think we somehow lost our nerve.” Sounds like someone we know . . .

This article is about the building boom in Shenzhen, China. Basically in Shenzhen as in many fast growing cities in the developing world there is a scale of expansion which is totally without precedent. The great challenge is to build on this monumental scale while preserving something of the "fine grain" that older cities possess. This "fine grain" occurs organically on a smaller scale, where more actors over more time build more slowly. The opposite of this "fine grain" is something like a Modernist skyscraper: perfect, geometric, inhuman, and endlessly and speedily (or not) replicable. Ouroussoff is questioning the possibilities of some way of building massively without building inhumanly.

Right now I'm interested in how a similar tension between a kind of modernist, a-particular, utopianism and a nationalist, indigenous, Vietnamese-ness were realized in the massive building projects of the 1960's and 1970's.


Again, thinking small: some choice thoughts on modernism in Asia:

"Some of the modern typologies work in Asia even though they are totally dysfunctional in America. Typologies we’ve rejected turn out to be viable in other contexts"

-Rem Koolhaas and a possible explanation from Steven Holl:

"But what makes it possible is the density. The Modernist idea of the street in the air that became a place of social interaction never worked in Europe. Beijing is so dense that I can keep all of the shops functioning on the street, and there’s still enough energy to activate the bridges as well."

The ideal here is maybe best expressed by Zaha Hadid:

"We wanted to create a complex order rather than either the monotony of Modernism or the chaos you find in contemporary cities."

I'm not an architect or a self-styled expert and my main concern is really about the ideology and historical memory expressed in built spaces so I'll limit myself to a few observations.

1. The idea that a locality and particular culture (here, Asian) might itself be more amenable to some Modernist built form itself challenges that troublesome form of modernism whose origin lies in an Enlightenment idea of "Man."

I mean the strain of thought which suggests that Man and his life can be measured objectively, his perfect life apprehended, and his perfect space realized. The idea of "Man-s" moves away from this idea. This suggests another modernism which is not incongruous with "Asian" culture (always more problems, am I right?, but one step at a time).

2. The observation that city life can be extended upwards or manipulated differently in Vietnam strikes me as true. That density is real. Also, the way public and private space are so different really does allow city life (vague, I know) to extend to spaces that I imagine being empty, creepy, and dangerous in America.

3. The question of precedent and scale is interesting, but I'll blog on that later.