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?