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JULIAN BEINART: OK, we need to talk.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] sorry.
JULIAN BEINART: No, no, don't be sorry.
I'm sorry I have to talk.
[LAUGHTER]
We've been going for 20--
I think this is the 21st class.
We have 26 altogether.
I'm going to combine two classes today
simply, because I want to leave some more time at the end.
We run out of time at the end, and I'm
going to try to do this heroic task of combining
two classes into one.
OK, have you got this handout?
It deals with two topics.
First of all, let me set the framework.
I argued that modernism was an existential preoccupation
with the present, given that the present was sufficiently
rich and exploratory and creative, and absolutely devoid
of the past.
He didn't speculate much about the future,
arguing that if you take care of your existence at the moment,
particularly if you are on the verge of a new world,
prediction was not necessary.
Curiously enough, the past was not necessarily
intellectually either.
This is just not because of the absence of culture.
This is largely a European movement
to which people have been thinking and philosophizing
about architecture and urbanism for thousands of years.
So the hermetic phenomenon of modernism led me to explore,
in last week's lecture, in the postmodern version
of trying to use devices such as geometry
to enhance the future change, accepting
that the future implies change.
It's difficult to precisely be clear about to the extent
that stochastic methods enable one to know something
about the future.
Together with that was a preoccupation
with the immensely larger notion of the present,
much more interested in the complexity
of the understanding of the present
than modernism thought of.
For Corbusier, the relegation of the plane
of buildings in the city to greenspace
didn't ask a question about the institutional framework
for creating or maintaining such a system.
There were no questions about what security
would be like in a green plane of a city
with no local monitoring.
Modernism was [? pre-crime, ?] pre the maleability of social
institutions to allow people to take part in decisions
in a democracy.
It was apolitical, so Corbusier could shift his correct plan
from corporate capitalism to colonial Algiers
to syndicalist Moscow, making plans for each of these,
given the geometric formations would be absolute.
What I want to try to do today to deal with the past.
If we are now blessed with axes both forward and backwards,
we have a much richer and even more difficult to
deal with urban existence.
And we try to make the world of the past more complex.
It divides itself into two systems of knowledge--
history and memory.
I'll spend a bit of time with each,
and try to give you some accounting of the difference
between history and memory, and spend a lot more time on memory
than on history.
The first page of the handout deals
with the list of 10 different attitudes and practices
regarding the past.
You can add number 11, which I haven't, which
I've since added, which deals with remembering at a distance.
This phenomenon of remembering at a distance
has become much more available to us.
It was available to the Jews in 70 AD when
they left the last temple and went into the diaspora,
but remembered Jerusalem in their prayers every Passover,
even today, returning to Jerusalem
being part of the mantra.
Remembering at a distance is also
possible in the interpretation of Christianity, which I gave,
when Jesus in the forequarter of the second Jewish temple
says the temple will be destroyed in a number of years.
He says to his disciples, remember
that my body will be your temple, referring in some ways
to the canonical version of Christianity which
interprets Christ's body in the mass through blood and bread.
Still today, it's remembering at a distance [INAUDIBLE]..
So given that we have an increase
in the diasporas of the world through migration,
we just had an incident this month in Boston,
which deals with the phenomenologically difficult
notion of interpreting allegiance
through after migration.
This is a contemporary problem, and it
makes urbanism very much more difficult,
given conventional notions of allegiance
to city, to state, to nation.
I had a thesis two years ago, done by a Korean woman
from Los Angeles, who analyzed the-- do you know the thesis.
AUDIENCE: You told me about it.
JULIAN BEINART: Oh, did I?
I'm sorry.
We analyzed the status of immigrant groups
in Los Angeles, where I think one third of the population
are non-American, or in the process of becoming American.
For them, there was no city center
to give allegiance to as in the traditional spatial form
of the city.
So she took upon herself to utilize the emerging
underground public transportation
system as a dispersed form of identity
for a migrated population, who are generally poorer, anyway.
I don't want to get on to that.
Let me tell you the sequence of what we're going to do.
And we go briefly through this list,
give you some indications of examples,
and then going to go to number 6--
no, number 8 and 9 to analyze briefly
the ideas of two urban theorists of recent time, Aldo
Rossi, the Italian who won the Prtizker Prize stupidly.
He wasn't stupid, but the Pritzker committee was stupid.
He's a man who wrote a very good book called Architecture
of the City as a theorist who taught it in Switzerland,
but his buildings are sacrilegiously bad
and very few.
And seeing the Pritzker prizes still
reward people not for theory, but for practice, it's a shame.
This shows how misguided architectural criticism is.
And the other is Leon Krier, whom
I've chosen as an arch example of classicism
as a method of dealing with the present
through the lens of the past.
For the rest, I will choose examples and slide
which indicate examples from all of this list.
Let me just go through the list very briefly.
You can reshape as before.
The ghetto in Warsaw was built much
like the version of the ghetto which
the Jews revolted in at the end of the '39, '45 war.
So for parts of Bologna--
you can build anew.
One of the best examples is the rebuilding
of the center of Rotterdam, and I there's
an illustration of both in the text.
Number 3, make an open system to allow memory
to be achieved over time.
This is the example of the Free University in Berlin.
We don't do anything to mark the past.
We leave it open to the community who
lives there to create their own monuments, their own memories,
their own museums, their own patterns, their own geometries.
If of the past, good enough.
If not of the past, but existentially only
of the present, good enough.
There is a early electronic website.
[INAUDIBLE] was in my class, in an advanced version
of this class, when he was a student here
doing his doctorate.
He unearthed an electronic program
which people could join.
There was a site somewhere, nowhere, electronically,
and people could occupy space systematically
in this virtual space.
After a time, the historical society
grew up in this virtual space.
I imagine the need to program your life in sequence.
Freud said something-- well, I'll quote Freud in a minute.
Let's rather stick to my program.
So easy to jump from one to another.
And before, leave all your fragments,
but add a new program.
This plays on the duality of meaning between a remnant
of the past and the present.
Church Court is a good example.
Church Court has dual meaning, or at least
pertains to a dual meaning.
You know what Church Court is.
This is just the building just across the bridge
on Beacon Street.
The fragments of the church are maintained,
and a new apartment building is added to it.
Freud said something extraordinary.
I can't find the quotation here.
But Freud says that it is impossible to represent
the same content pictorially in the same image.
If you want to share how Rome has grown over time,
you have to juxtapose situations.
You cannot spatially have a unique meaning which has both
ingredients in it according to Freud.
Therefore, it says, to represent mental processes
through pictorially image is a waste of time,
for it is implying that in our mental mechanism
we are able to simultaneously think
of our mother and our girlfriend simultaneously.
But we cannot depict spatial contexts simultaneously.
Now, juxtaposing the two formal elements of Church Court
is a method.
A Freudian-- not Freudian, it's a pretty pedantic method
of getting meaning from the past and associating
with meaning with the present.
There was a church here.
That is a memory function.
There is now a building now.
This is modern.
There's no memory yet attached to it.
So in the space-time continuum, you're representing meanings
at different times.
You are also marking urbanisticlly the fact
that on that corner, there was a church,
and there was a community of people
who worshipped in the Back Bay prior to them
immigrating, and leaving the need for the Back Bay
to produce only fewer churches.
You can play around with this game as long as you want to.
I'll give you a number of examples
of the obscurity of this game.
And architects at times, like Peter Eisenman and others,
have played around.
In fact the Freudian quote comes from Peter Eisenman's
introduction to the Rossi's book.
Number 5, you can connect to past urban traces,
mostly invisible.
I will show you a couple of examples,
one of the Peter Eisenman studio at Harvard using memory
to obscure memory traces from the Midwestern town,
and also from the Bicocca Pirelli Competition in Milan
and number of years ago, which all the world's architects took
part in.
I will show you the second prize entry by the firm from Torino
called Gabetti and Isola, who tried
to use traces of agrarian Roman fields
in their ecologically advanced project.
The trouble with obscure traces is that they're not present.
Who in the hell can recount a past history without reference
to it?
We did a studio in Taipei looking at the city center.
The city center was based on an old Chinese plan.
The Japanese came along and changed the orientation
of the original plan.
Some of our students tried to show this fact.
But how do you show two geometries at the same time?
You can overlay one on another, but it's difficult to explain.
But it's not a common, but a real option.
Number 6, create new tectonics based on memory forms.
The explicit example of that is the Holocaust Museum
in Washington.
Anybody been to the Holocaust museum?
Four people.
I'll quote James Ingo Freed, the architect who designed it,
and his references to using forms borrowed from Auschwtiz--
Arbeit macht frei.
And we can judge the quality of the present experience,
whose aim is to teach us to remember
the events of the past.
We have a whole panoply of items, which we use spatially
to remember the past--
museums, memorials, monuments, amongst others.
I haven't got time in this class to go
into the theory of monuments, but we'll
talk a bit about them.
Number 7, build monuments, memorials, museums.
Here we have a conflict.
Robert Musil, the French philosopher,
said there is nothing as invisible as a monument, which
means that the monument is made psychologically
current or non-existent by time.
Which kid who goes to Washington,
and is not told that that's the Washington Monument,
knows that it's the Washington Monument?
Who even knows who Washington was?
Washington's a famous enough person to be remembered.
But there's is a town in Russia, a small town,
named after Engels, and one named after Marx.
And they just they are undistinguished and not even
on anybody's map.
It's not that Marx is not remembered,
but the physical manifestation of him in a monument to him
is neglected.
I'll look very briefly--
although I haven't got the slides
to show you because of time, of a new device
to take care of the lack of presence of monuments.
I advised the United States Air Force
on the selection of a site in Washington.
The United States Air Force wished to follow the Navy.
The Navy have-- do you know the Navy side?
It's opposite the-- it's a developer project in downtown,
which has a semicircular plain, piazza, on which stands a Navy
soldier and a map of the world.
But in order to go into the museum,
you have to go into a developer building.
And there's a computer program on which you
can show your grandchild a picture of yourself
in the Navy in 1927, or whatever it is.
Our clients, the United States Air Force,
wished to follow the same tradition of having
two items in a museum.
One is a symbolic fixed item, and secondly
an updatable present.
The first design by architect who
happened to be the same architect as the Holocaust
museum, Jim Freed, had a plane with the basement underneath.
And the basement had all of the updating mechanisms.
So you could go, but above it was a huge symbolic item.
In fact, the memorial was never built on that site,
because the Marines argued that we were too close to the Iwo
Jima Memorial, which is a literal evacuation of soldiers
fighting on an island in the Orient.
Anyway, I'm getting carried away.
Let's stick to this program.
Number 8 and number 9--
number 8 is what I would refer to in the work of Leon Krier.
That is the establishment of European classicism
as a universal past independent of time, economy,
and culture, and therefore the DNA of the past.
And therefore, when you work with the DNA of the past,
whether it be New Delhi or in Richmond Terrace in London
on the river, you are doing greater things.
And we'll examine Poundbury, the town that Leon Krier advised
Prince Charles on.
Prince Charles is very much involved
in the same classicism versus modernism argument,
arguing that London's been defaced by modernism.
And here, although I won't go into it in detail,
we can add the phenomenon of new urbanism to this category.
To use classical form is a choice.
It's a stupid choice, but it's a choice.
You can't blame people for disliking modernism when it
appeared, and for a long time.
And so include them in your client group
as active participants in your design.
To use nostalgia as reminiscent of a lost past is silly.
The new urbanism doesn't deal with contemporary issues--
social equity, overuse of automobile transportation,
et cetera, et cetera.
Diversity of population in the metropolitan areas
is a diverse new urban phenomenon.
It recreates nostalgic pasts which
satisfies one much like candy satisfies a child before he
grows up and nourishes himself to believe the candy is not
good for your body.
You need to eat decent food.
Number 9, we can use Aldo Rossi's argument
that the city has autonomous basic forms and places which
perpetuate themselves-- the idea the locus, which
I will discuss in a minute.
Number 10, let context make the proper associations.
This is a very appropriate form taught in architecture schools.
Rossi argues absolutely against it.
He says that buildings make places,
and places don't make buildings, and it's foolish for a building
to be made up of adaptations of what
people have done in the past.
It's a strange kind of notion, but there's a politics
associated with context.
For instance, the expanding Spaniards
destroyed Cusco to a plane and rebuilt it from scratch.
They didn't destroy the Alhambra in post-Islam Spain.
How is it that the Crusaders didn't destroy the Dome
of the Rock or the Al-Asqa mosque--
simply put a flag on it?
Historians have argued that [INAUDIBLE] be out of respect
for the quality of the architecture.
Now, this assumes a conquering program having
a DNA which includes respect.
AUDIENCE: It also assumes that [INAUDIBLE] culture
[INAUDIBLE].
JULIAN BEINART: Yeah, it regards colonial cultures,
as the British [INAUDIBLE] regarded Indian architecture as
pathetic, as childish, as still to be achieved.
It's a little remarkable, given the history of Islam
and the European center that they
would regard Islamic architecture quite
as automatically as they did.
Maybe they were worn out in the [INAUDIBLE]
They took a hell of a long time to get rid of Islam.
They spent all generations of resources,
and then remembering it at distance.
The other example of number 6, other than the Holocaust
Museum, which comes to mind is the building you might know.
In Verona is Carlos Scarpa's Castelvecchio, one
of the finest, if not the finest,
example of preservation architecture
I think in modern times or in recent times.
Castelvecchio, which I won't illustrate-- because I had
to choose the number of slide.
I'll try not to share more than 30 slides--
60 slides per class.
And it's very difficult at time.
Castelvecchio was the home of a royal family--
Scaligeri, I think they were.
In 1925, it was made into a museum.
In 1956, Carlos Scarpa was asked to integrate the two.
And he took the forms of the past
and introduced them to the new building
in a way which I think Jim Freed did in the Holocaust Museum.
But this is difficult work, and there are not many.
I'm sure you can think of examples as well.
But these are the two that come to mind
when I think of this category.
Let's go to Aldo Rossi briefly, and then to Leon Krier briefly.
Rossi uses the past as a tool for understanding
the present form of the city.
For Rossi, past is a continuum of which we are still a part.
The past is perpetuated almost fossilized in the city form,
even as that form and its use are constantly changing.
Primary elements of the city form
are perpetuated, through time creating an autonomous
system of basic absolute forms around
which the city has been, and continues to be, built.
It's my abstraction.
Let's look at a couple of things that he argues.
He argues that there is a dialectic
between the city as stones and mortar,
the actual physical artifact, and the city of our minds--
an ideal city that embodies experiences,
meaning, and understanding that is autonomous of time and use.
Rossi doesn't discuss memory very much,
but what he's talking about are much more
the attributes of memory than the attributes of history.
He refers in his book to the work
of Maurice Halbwachs, the French sociologist who
wrote a book called The Collective Memory, which
I think is one of the great books of our time.
And I will refer to excerpts a bit later.
Rossi secondly divides the city timewise
into primary elements and dwellings.
When dwellings are expressions of ever-changing individual
will, they constitute the vernacular architecture
that is subject to changes in use, form, and meaning.
In contrast, primary elements are
expressions of collective will, especially
the subgroup of monuments.
So housing is temporary.
A neighborhood may be permanent as a primary element.
I quote from him.
"A monument's persistence or permanence
is a result of its capacity to constitute
the city, its history, and art, its being and memory."
I've given you a copy of his project in Padua,
the Palazzo della Ragione, which was,
he argues, an example of a monument--
these pages here.
He goes on to use the term locus to specify a particular space
or place in the city, which forms
a part of its permanent history.
And his argument is the city needs to be
built on these permanences.
All new permanences should be created at the same time
as maintaining fluidity in the dispensing of housing.
He makes the bold statement that permanence in form
precedes permanence in institutions.
I quote, "The permanence of a form or its value
as a reference is entirely independent on both
the specific functions for which it was designed,
and its [INAUDIBLE] with a continuity
of urban institutions.
For this reason I'm deliberately emphasizing
the form and the architecture of the city, rather than
its institutions."
I mean, primitively, he's saying that an old building can
take a different use without changing
its form significantly.
In fact, in the history-memory distinction,
he controverts the normal history-memory relationship
over time.
Normally, somebody like David Lowenthal in the book
The Past Is a Foreign Country-- one of the best
books on architecture preservation, by the way,
says that typically, memory is short-lived,
and it's replaced by the permanence of history.
Rossi reverts the two.
He says history occurs as long as a building maintains
its present use.
Memory occurs, is instituted once the use changes.
These are abstract ideas.
I don't know how much empirical evidence there is for this,
or how much Rossi has measured the permanence of institutions
as opposed to the permanence of monuments.
It doesn't matter.
Rossi is valuable because he attracts attention
to the distinction in value of certain forms of the city.
I had an argument with Kevin Lynch
about Aldo Rossi saying this, and I'll just
quote Lynch from his own writing about his antagonism to Rossi.
You can make up your own mind.
"For Rossi, architecture is an autonomous discipline, eternal,
outside of time, creating form typologies
which have an independent existence like Platonic cities.
The city is a permanent structure
through which it remembers its past, it realizes itself.
These attitudes unfold into monstrous, seductive flowers.
They are rooted in the same false idea
that man and his habitat are completely
separate entities, linked only, if at all,
by some mechanical one-directional causation."
It's true that Rossi says in his writing that form has meaning.
Form creates certain things.
I'm using [INAUDIBLE] remembers its past.
I think I have to give Rossi the benefit of not being so dumb as
to believe that bricks have a brain,
or stone remembers anything.
He's doing a syllogistic jump.
I think syllogistic is the right word.
He's assuming that you assume.
That it's the mental interpretation of what--
when Louis Kahn says, and as he often used to say,
something makes itself.
He's not referring to the mechanical system
which produces light.
He's referring to the human understanding
of the mechanical system which produces light.
He's compressing the idea.
So I think Kevin is wrong, and I told him so.
But he didn't agree with me.
Poor man, he's not alive any longer to fight.
I think you have to read Rossi now, and make
an independent decision of how much that book means.
I don't think you need to look at his other books
or to biography of an idea.
Certainly, don't look at any of his projects,
or go to one of them immediately and be
appalled by the stupidity of the thinking.
Leon Krier is a much more indomitable character.
He automatically classifies.
He makes absolute judgments.
For him, classical architecture is the only architecture
that one should contemplate independent of economy, time,
culture, et cetera--
technology.
He also assumes that equally stark judgments
can be made between public buildings
and private buildings.
For me, the genius of much of the complexity of urbanism
is the overlapping between public and private entities
in space.
If I drove down Memorial Drive and got to Mount Auburn
Hospital and looked at the school across the way,
which my children went to--
I had to pay an anomalous amount of money to that school.
So therefore, it must be a private school.
But it looks like any school down there.
If I go down Mount Auburn Street and come through Watertown,
there's a classical facade facing me which
happens to be a public school.
In England, a public is a private school.
In American, a public school is a public school.
What classifications-- I will deal
with the dichotomy or the dialectic
between public and private in city form in Thursday's class.
Krier can be criticized on many levels.
First of all, the universality of classicism
is a political assumption.
I don't know if Indians and Gandhi assume classicism
to be a universal form.
Certainly, I never grew up in South Africa regarding
classicism as the appropriate form
to satisfy Black ambitions in South Africa.
Classicism was always the form of superior buildings.
When I went to the low courts, it had a classical pediment.
When I went to visit a political friend of mine
in Johannesburg's prison, I entered
under a classical entablature.
Classicism for me growing up was associated
with values which were eternal and beyond my reality
as a young person.
I'm not sure I've ever outgrown those versions of classicism.
We have conflicts about this version of the past.
I said this before, but the Boston Symphony always--
they always used to play--
I mean, there's a concert I want to go
to New York in which Gustavo Dudamel, the young conductor
of the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra,
is conducting Bruckner's Number 8.
If it is a classical symphony, which
is all of the overtures of classicism,
it's Bruckner Number 8.
But he is playing preliminary to it a piece
by a composer called Corigliano, a contemporary composer.
The weight of the piece is in Bruckner.
So there is a part of us which establishes in our culture
certain values about the past as absolute,
and certain values about the present as OK.
We are constantly, in my view of the world,
balancing these two problematics,
coming to a satisfying conclusions,
even arguing that Mozart's piano concertos when he returned
to Vienna started accounting for the popular impulse in music.
And Number 26 is a wonderful, popular version
of his earlier piano concerto.
I don't know how to leave you with this Leon Krier position.
I'll show you some slides.
Look at Poundbury.
The image I've given you is from the 1976 La Villette
competition in which he won the second Prize.
I won't show that to you in the slides.
It's the last pages of--
In many respects, if you look at this project in detail--
particularly the drawings, he draws,
and his wife draws, beautifully.
In order to create enough identity in a 15,000-person,
place even at this density, he has to introduce a linear
system down the middle, full of large buildings, hotels,
convention centers.
No 15,000 part of a city can support economically
this kind of program.
One of the problems that the new urbanists have
is that in American densities, if you were not
willing to walk more than seven minutes,
you can drive to a 7-Eleven and a video store,
let alone to the diversity of shopping
or commercial opportunities that you have
if you increase the density.
Suburbia is fraught with the problem
of having too few people.
You can inflate it as much as you can.
The second problem with this clear preoccupation
with classicism is that it doesn't allow for diversity.
The piece I quoted from myself, in discussion
with Leon Krier at one meeting, argues that argument.
Let's go on, because I don't want to run out of time,
to discussion of memory.
We know a lot more about memory than we used to.
Across the street, there are bunch of people.
One of the institutes is the institute
for memory, the Picower Institute.
What we know about memory is that it
operates through the existence of 10
to the power of 12 neurons.
And what is 10 to the power of 12?
That's the number of neurons in the human brain.
Each neuron is connected to plus-minus 5,000 other cells.
So you have a network of immense power.
50% of memory is created--
not memory, I'm sorry, on perception.
Vision commands almost one half of our brain's cortex.
To make sense of a picture that you see through your eyes
takes half the power.
This requires more computational power
than the MIT engineers can fathom, let alone produce.
Nancy Kanwisher, a professor across the street,
writes the following.
I'm quoting her because I don't want to make mistakes.
"Object recognition is no trivial task,
because the visual image doesn't enter our brains as a developed
photograph."
Imagine that most of architectural expression
that I'm talking about is processed by the visual brain.
"Rather, it is like a grid of pixels
on a digital camera, an array of millions of numbers
indicating light and color on our eyes' 10 million
or so photoreceptors.
As you walk down the street, billions
of bits of visual information strike your field of view.
That view refreshes itself continuously as objects move,
lighting changes, or you shift your eyes or your body.
Still, the briefest glance is often
enough to recognize even a never-before-seen objects.
In a fraction of a second, its visual input
runs from the retina through increasing the [INAUDIBLE]
of the visual stream until it reaches the cognitive regions
of the brain."
I'm amazed at this.
Processing of visual information is not automatic.
It is selective.
What you decide to send to the higher parts of your brain
is based on the selection you make in the image you see.
Memory is very difficult to deal with.
We know it exists because we have access
to the cells of the individual.
But what is collective memory?
I'm going to go through a bunch of theses.
Let's see if I can goes through those lists of distinctions.
Here, I'm giving you a list of five writers who've
tried to distinguish history and memory.
Number 1, "When history ends, memory begins," Aldo Rossi.
History precedes memory-- his argument
is that when a building changes its function,
it invokes memory and ends history, which is nonsense.
Maurice Halbwachs says, general history
only starts when tradition ends and the social memory
is folding or breaking up.
This is the conventional interpretation.
Memory, if it is as Halbwachs argues, the result
of social interaction.
Halbwachs is very outspoken.
He writes a chapter on musical memory, which is extraordinary.
He argues that it is impossible to maintain musical memory
without being part of a group.
I am often amazed that a pianist like Mauricio Pollini
will walk onto a stage and play for three hours
without looking at a note.
He'll play from Beethoven, he'll play from Chopin,
he'll play from--
well, whoever he plays from.
We still don't know, because we can't penetrate the brain
medically.
You can do it only if you operate on tumors,
but you cannot--
most of disease is understood through symptoms
or through blood measurements.
You can get neither very directly from the brain.
So the brain is the last part of the human body that
is subject to research in medicine,
and the distance it has to go particularly
for the neurodegenerative diseases--
Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, autism, schizophrenia,
is long, long away, although they are doing
good work across the street.
So these assumptions about memory are approximations.
The only person who has a very strong view on this
is Pierre Nora the French philosopher,
who says, "Memory is life born by living societies founded
in its name.
History, on the other hand, is the reconstruction,
always problematic and incomplete,
of what is no longer.
History is perpetually suspicious of memory,
and its true mission is to suppress and destroy it."
This is very antagonistic view of history's claim
to coincide with memory, time separating the two.
He argues that colonization is based
on destroying the memory component
of native civilizations.
He also says that postmodernism, with false history,
fake history, sound bites, virtual history,
compounds the problem.
Let's look at some of this material a little more
carefully.
History has a long association--
sorry, architecture has a long association with memory.
The mnemonic device for remembering
is absolutely present in the earliest histories.
Memory is quoted in by Cicero and others
as occurring when the Greek Simonedes is at a meeting,
and leaves the meeting because he's cold outside.
While he's outside, the building's roof
collapses and kills everybody in the room.
He has a capacity of memory, which reconstructs everybody,
although the bodies are disfigured.
The notion that if that act of memory
was an important phenomenon [INAUDIBLE]
classical societies is made evident
by the role that mnemonics played in Greek education.
Young men would walk--
not women, young men would walk around the pyramid,
and they're concentrating on the [INAUDIBLE]
the architectural elements of the system.
They'd walk round and round and roun
until it imprinted their minds.
They were open to question about the constructions
of the orders.
Young men were taught to debate using architecture
as a mnemonic.
You make an argument.
You enter into the foyer of the building.
You make your argument.
You turn right into a room.
That's your sub-argument.
You return to the main argument.
You go to the left.
You make another second sub-argument.
You return to the center.
You go up a staircase.
You go to the third of the left.
You return to the main argument.
You go to the fourth, and so on.
This is a very classical form of learning.
But when memory was not available through television
or through radio or through telephones and so on,
it was a very precious commodity.
And architecture as a space is an important mnemonic.
Architecture serves as a memory system
for ideas about human origins, a means for recording
understanding of order and relationship in the world,
and an attempt to grasp the concept of the internal cosmos,
which has no fixed dimensions with neither beginning nor end.
There are endless references to the use of mnemonics.
Frances Yates' book on memory and culture
refers to medieval systems of theater
writing as mnemonics-- as devices
for learning about memory.
John Ruskin, the 19th century British art historian
and philosopher, writes, "We may remember
without [INAUDIBLE] memory.
We may live without memory and worship without memory.
But we--" sorry.
Ruskin wrote a book called Seven Lamps of Architecture,
which none of you know about, I'm sure.
It's a book.
Good. how do you know about it?
AUDIENCE: I took a class on the history
of conservation [INAUDIBLE].
JULIAN BEINART: Seven Lamps of Architecture-- sacrifice,
truth, power, beauty, life, memory, obedience.
Why would a 19th century British art historian
include memory as one of the lamps of architecture?
We cannot remember without her.
These are obsessive arguments.
But the whole apparatus of the built world is a mnemonic.
It's way of us maintaining our daily life.
This is Halbwachs' big point.
I'll come to it in one minute.
I'm trying to go through the others as quickly as I can.
The arguments about-- in Jacques [INAUDIBLE] book about--
and in Yale professor Kirsten Harris'
writing about the phenomenon of paradise.
Paradise Lost is explicit in its mission to us
that we have been trying to recreate paradise.
[INAUDIBLE] paradise refers to that.
[INAUDIBLE] philosophers have written
about the loss of paradise.
Paradise Lost Who wrote the epic poem Paradise Lost?
Milton, Yeah.
I was confusing with somebody else.
Harris also argues that we are the only animal species that
knows that we're going to die.
Therefore, our capacity to be beholden to time
is greater, this phenomenon of the building of ruins.
The single appearance of artificial--
how do you explain the building of artificial ruins
in the 18th century, given my argument about memory?
What is a sophisticated society?
What is the wealthy and the sophisticated society
in [INAUDIBLE] building ruins on the property?
We go to Louis Kahn, whom I quote in my writing on memory.
In the Hurva synagogue, which was number 3, which is probably
Louis Kahn's half dozen best creations,
although it wasn't built, he was asked
to replace the traditional Jewish synagogue
in the old city of Jerusalem.
He refused the rabbi's implication and said,
I'm going to build it on the site next to it.
I'm going to maintain the ruins.
Why did he argue for maintaining the ruins?
First rule, Kahn says ruins maintain memory.
What is not built is not really lost.
Second, a ruin free of the obligation
to perform active functions any longer
is able to fully express its spirit or formations,
often more so than whole buildings.
A third aspect of Kahn's thought is
his linking of ruins with the idea of silence.
And then the fourth, his concept of the fact that contemporary
built forms could be given metaphoric implications
of ruins.
The creation of a perfect paradise
lies at the center of architecture.
Paradise on Earth is a kind of waiting
room-- an anticipatory suburb of kingdom come.
Maurice Halbwachs remarks that [INAUDIBLE]
is first and foremost due to the fact
that physical objects of our daily contact
change little or not at all, providing us
with an image of permanence and stability.
If I had to find my mirror to shave in the morning,
in a different place every day, I'd go mad.
I wouldn't shave.
If Memorial Drive changed its function overnight,
and I had to find a new road to come to MIT every morning,
I'd go mad.
Guy de Maupassant tells a horrible story
of a mother and daughter who come to Paris
during the plague epidemic.
The mother doesn't know that the daughter has plague.
She hasn't-- they check into a hotel where they reserved room.
The manager of the hotel recognizes
the plague in the daughter.
The mother and daughter check in,
go out to see doctors for the rest of the day.
The manager of the hotel has their room
changed while they're gone--
redecorated.
Their belongings are dispatched.
They return that night, and the manager tells them
that they made a mistake.
They didn't check into the hotel.
Guy de Maupassant writes the story
to intrigue us about the need for permanence [INAUDIBLE]
about the everyday fact of checking into a hotel providing
us with reasonable expectations or nourishment.
Halbwachs is very full of this.
I'll just quote him in one place.
"Thus every collective memory unfolds
within the spatial framework.
Space is a reality that endures.
Since our impressions rush by one after another
and leave nothing behind in the mind,
we can understand how we recapture the past,
but only by understanding how it is in effect preserved
by our physical surrounding.
It is to space, the space we occupy, traverse,
have continual access to, or can at any time
reconstruct in thought or imagination
that we must turn our attention.
Our thought must focus on it if this or that category
of remembrance is to reappear."
OK, running out of time as always.
Jesus Christ.
Can't do two lectures in one.
[INAUDIBLE] I just had a few important things to say.
Not important things to say, but a few things,
and it's quarter till 2:00.
There are 30 slides in each tray,
so we're not going to make it.
What I suggest is that I'll give you enough stuff
to ponder about and read about.
We'll take a break, look at the slides in the first half
of Thursday's class, and I'll just
shorten Thursday's class a bit.
This always happens at the end of the semester.
We'll now look at one of the categories of transference
of tectonic forms literally to a new building.
James Ingo Freed writes about the Holocaust museum.
"I prefer memory to history because I prefer the authentic
to the reconstructed."
History is reconstructed.
Critics of history are always assuming
that it's reconstructed.
That it's based upon somebody else's measurements
and thought, not the intuitive impressions that you
create in your own brain.
Althouth, as Halbwachs points out, relying on society.
"History erases detail at a painful cost.
It gains consistency through abstraction and [INAUDIBLE]
the loss of the richness of life.
As a physical artifact of a given time,
place, and culture, architectures
an undistorted, unchanged thread of memory woven
into the tapestry of history."
What he says he's trying to do--
and we'll see in the images.
"I discovered that the only way for me into the Holocaust
was through both the tectonics of the Holocaust
and an invented tectonics of my own.
There was an architecture of the Holocaust
with its own tectonics that surround the surface."
What he's saying is that the source
of what he wishes to memorialize has a tectonic form.
He can abstract some of those tectonics
and reproduce them in the current version
of the building.
What are those forms?
Steel, bricks, the use of space, the clustering
of the sequence in which you go through the museum.
You know that you go up before you go down.
Certain artifacts, such as the little town which was destroyed
and all the images plastered on the ceiling, little devices
which--
the elevated passageways which have
diagonal structural reinforcement.
All of these are tectonic items which
are meant to meld the present and the past,
meant to inflict themselves on your memory in a way
that you are [INAUDIBLE] with what you're
seeing as an actual event.
It's very difficult to know about when this is crap
or whether this is fundamentally powerful stuff.
We are in an age where distortions are so absolute
and borrowing is so absolute through virtual media that
[INAUDIBLE] is a genuine article--
a genuine borrowing is difficult to evaluate.
But I've experienced the museum a couple
of times partly as an architect, partly as just as a citizen.
The remarkable thing is that you go
through the disposition of evidence, very clinically,
almost historically accurate evidence.
The dates of every single item are.
Included the mechanical railroad car that took Jews to Auschwitz
is actually there, or when America turned down
the boat of immigrants, that's there.
Then you go down and you leave the building through a room.
And the room is just based on the voices
of people who were in Auschwitz talking
about things like, my mother said to me,
don't worry about the food.
You eat the food.
I have had enough already.
I knew my mother they had nothing to eat,
but she was wanting me to survive.
The poignancy of that material touches your memory.
It evokes your own experience with your mother
in Freudian terms.
So in the piece of writing I've given to you,
Stan Anderson writes a piece at a conference which
I ran in 1994 about memory.
And Freed and the French philosopher
whom I quoted about memory seemed
to indicate that we have this bifocal impression, knowledge
of the past--
history which is categorical and empirical and selected
by other people, an apparently objective rendition of my past,
and my own rendition of my past, which is lively,
irregular, full of obstacles, full of juxtapositions.
Like Freud says, I can't externalize what
I remember visually very well.
I could draw my mother next to my daughter and my grandmother
and the woman I see in my dreams,
but I can't put them all together as I
can in my psychic experience.
There's a politics of memory, the Jews maintaining memory
through the book, through the remembrance of Jerusalem
on an annual ritual, and so on and so on.
I gave you this piece from The Boston Globe,
which is interesting, because it's a selective memory
situation.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]
JULIAN BEINART: Oh, yeah.
Sorry, I'll give you the references.
Mass xeroxing often cuts out the top.
It's a critique of Rossi's book written by, I think,
Francesco [INAUDIBLE] And I'll give you the reference.
At this time of these textile mills in Lowell, one of us
here thought how wonderful it would
be if we could put the new University of Massachusetts
branch.
Where's Lowell?
Lowell's in Massachusetts, isn't it?
AUDIENCE: Yeah.
JULIAN BEINART: Into these old buildings.
And we were all doing sketches in studios
showing how wonderful it would be to do this.
Here's a man who says those memories were awful.
What are you memorizing things of the past that we find awful?
It's a memory, again, selectively experienced.
How you, as a professional, condition your own memory with
the memory [INAUDIBLE] people, presumably such a lively
function that the only thing you can do is--
in this memory world, there's some strange things.
There's an MCP thesis done in which the student was a trained
philosopher--
a phenomenologist.
And he wrote about his parents' apartment
in New York and growing up, and his reactions when
they changed the room when he left to go to college
and rented the room.
His whole thesis was based upon his dreams.
Fact is, it was a lie.
He never had those dreams.
He reinvented the dreams for his thesis.
So it was a complex mixture of data.
He should have been failed, but nobody knew the reality
until he told us afterwards.
But it was such a brilliant set of occasions,
of being two foot tall and seeing the refrigerator
and what it meant.
Seeing the large bed that his mother and father slept in,
and wondering why they needed such a large bed,
and dreaming of interpolations of that
as remembered by an adult and what that would mean
for architecture understanding.
Anyway.
I won't be able to deal with some
of the examples from Washington as
well as I would showing the history of monuments
in Washington.
The amazing thing is that none of the classical features
of monuments were maintained since the Vietnam Memorial.
A couple of things have happened.
Number one, the World War II Memorial,
there's a neoclassical construction--
a Leon Krier construction with absolutely no
merit at all, other than in the merit of nostalgia.
Maya Lin's Vietnam Memorial is an extraordinary adventure.
It takes the idea of connecting a monument
to individual experience by putting
the names of the people.
Your grandson will be able to go to that name in 25 years time
or 100 years time.
Ross Perot's objection and the need
to add a soldier a figure at the entrance
is a stupid attempt to add nostalgia to the abstraction.
The power of monuments often lies in its abstraction,
in its being of cleansed of irrelevance.
The obelisk of Washington, I will show you
a slide that in the 19th century, people in Washington--
certain people wanted to garnish the obelisk memorial
with evidence of the inner decoration.
What has happened in recent times
is that we've lost the capacity, it seems in architecture,
to memorialize through objects, through forms themselves.
AUDIENCE: Is that because we're lacking the capacity
to see beyond the evidence?
JULIAN BEINART: I don't know.
I wish I could answer that.
The version of the Roosevelt Memorial, which is a garden,
dispenses with the need of architecture.
The three versions of the Roosevelt Memorial,
which I will have shown you, are large slabs of stone.
From stone to garden is one of the ways in which
American culture dispenses with things it can't deal with,
or has inadequate solutions for.
Nature's always there to accommodate.
If you lose in man-made construction,
nature is always there.
That's why I have my doubts about the constant evocation
of nature.
Nature's too friendly a partner when examined superficially.
We'll look at some of these images on Thursday
and see if we can remember the arguments we made.
The left diagram is from Rossi's book.
In fact, both diagrams are from Rossi's book.
You will recall, Rossi argues a number of themes--
one about the relationship between the city
of the mind and the built city; number two, between permanences
and temporary parts of cities; thirdly,
be the relationship between institutions and forms,
and so on and so on.
Essentially, his argument is that the ideas and examples
fossilized in the city which are worth excavating and using
is a template for future growth.
The Palazzo [INAUDIBLE] on the left,
destroyed by a hurricane in 1956 and rebuilt with different
uses, but maintaining its place in the city.
The example on the right is Carlo Fontana's attempt
to make the Colosseum into a church, the argument,
again, that the framework of the form
is significant in realizing an institutional change
from the killing of Christians to the celebrating
of the life of Jesus.
It doesn't seem to matter.
Next.
OK.
This is [INAUDIBLE] in France.
The influence of the permanence of the surrounding wall
in Lucca, the Roman Forum, as an antecedent
to the most important public place in the city.
Next.
Spalato in the former Yugoslavia.
An example of the slow--
this is Hadrian's palace, which is slowly and over time taken
up by other people and invaded.
And the invasion and the subsequent disjunction
between what is there in the past and what is now built
is of interest to Rossi.
This slide on the right is from the Architettura Razionale
exhibition in Rome.
I don't know the date.
It's an important image.
It's public housing or social housing
on Karl-Marx-Allee in at that time East Berlin.
The argument is that locus is significant,
even if the architectural form isn't.
As the argument would go, this is the equivalent
of putting social housing on Fifth Avenue in New York.
By manifesting locus, or the importance of location,
you send important messages not only
about the form of the city, but the meaning of its retention.
Next.
The project in Gallaratesse, a housing project in Milano,
designed by Aymonino and Aldo Rossi
has this extraordinary empty set of spaces
underneath the housing on the right.
The idea is that people who are migrating
to live in this housing in the north used to live above shops.
This is a theme which, if you're ever interested,
you should look at [INAUDIBLE] and look
at Giancarlo De Carlo's project in Matera, which I showed you
very briefly, where he makes a point of maintaining
the shopping underneath the housing.
Here, Rossi does an abstraction of it.
There is no need for shopping in this project.
So he relies on people's memory, and gives them
enough clues apparently to situate virtual shopping
in this space, which is--
it's a crazy idea, but he does crazy things.
It's also in line with his own architecture,
which has reduced alphabet of forms as the basis
for making new things.
Next.
I was going to show you two projects
in San Francisco, which have relied on the idea of locus
in redeveloping.
On the left is the plan of the Berkeley cooperative society,
which owns the land on the right of the [INAUDIBLE] Building,
and it wishes to engage in building
public housing on the property.
The architects, Marvin Buchanan and Donlyn Lyndon,
argue that replacing all the buildings
would delete the important elements of the existing
context.
The second thing is that, unlike public housing where people
are moved from where they are to somewhere else,
this maintains the possibility of maintaining
the place of where these people are in relation to the Berkeley
campus just down the road.
Next.
By choosing to build public housing in such
a contorted site, it demands the introduction
of more diverse forms of housing than normal.
This slide on the left shows the attempt to maintain a tree
and build around it.
On the right is the community celebration
for the opening of the housing.
The point here is that the locus is
the relationship in space between a place
and its surroundings.
Building on that, or creating a new version of that idea,
is essentially what this place has done.
Next.
This is a project on the edge of Chinatown
in San Francisco at the corner of Stockton and Sacramento
Street.
It's a very steeply sloping site, which
went through three versions.
The first version had told two tall towers.
And the basement and the elevation
on Stockton Street, which is the main street through Chinatown,
was given over to parking and to shops.
This was during Richard Nixon's time.
Richard Nixon needed votes in California, rather than
San Francisco, rather badly, and the federal government
allowed this project to go through two stages.
So helped by the local community churches,
the project ultimately resulted in two lower towers,
both for the Chinese social housing,
and the ground floor turned over to a community
center and a daycare center, and the parking
limited to Chinese groups.
Just further up the hill is Nob Hill,
which is some of the most expensive housing in San
Francisco.
This is the opening of the housing.
Halfway up the hill, the project has
a plane, which is only a horizontal plane available.
And that is made into a public space
at the center of the housing.
Next.
You can see the slope looking downwards and the diagram
on the right.
This is all published in Society & Space for those of you
interested in researching this any further.
Next.
Another contemporary version of the issue of locus
is through the highly publicized invention of the marketplace.
Michael Sorkin is rather nasty about most things,
calls it a happy festival place, implying
that you have to be happy to enjoy the world of this
[INAUDIBLE] In both projects, which maintain the site,
the notion of the program is maintained as well.
Food becomes the basis of the new site.
And although the food is highly selective and priced
to a market of a singular kind, there's
is not much diversity of population or places
in this environment.
Next.
This is South Street Seaport done
by the same architects as Faneuil
[INAUDIBLE] Marketplace.
Here again, it's building on the locus, if you want,
of the existing fish market.
Next.
A third version of this comparatively
is Pike Place in Seattle.
Pike Place in Seattle has been memorialized by the painter
Mark Tobey on the right and the existing market on the left.
This was a market where farmers would bring produce
into the town, and people would buy directly
from the market here.
There would be no middleman, no second order clientele.
In Faneuil Marketplace, we have British tea sold,
which is a commodity so removed from any direct relationship
between consumer and producer.
Here, the tradition is established in these images.
Next.
Threatened by urban renewal, the project on the left
determines to remove the vestiges of the market
altogether.
And public opposition, organized by some of the university
faculty, maintain the idea of keeping the quality
of a public market as a place.
Next.
We'll go through a number of diverse examples.
Here is the apparatus for achieving dual meaning.
On the left is Church Court at the intersection
of Mass Avenue and Beacon Street,
where you can, in one image next to each other,
see the contemporary housing and the old church.
Remember my quotation from Freud, that in spatial terms,
you have to separate out images.
You cannot have the same content in one image.
Here, they are separated out.
The example on the right is also from Boston.
It's in Newton, where a restaurant
has taken over church.
Churches are seen to be benign institutions for accommodating
new communal uses.
We had a student here tried to do the thesis in Toronto
on taking a meat abattoir building
and turning it into a housing, and trying
to deal with the stigma of making
housing [INAUDIBLE] which was considered unattractive.
Next.
An example of a significant environmental Rouge plant
in Detroit memorialized in a number
of ways by Sheeler's photographs on the right--
next-- by being the home of the Model T, the first automobile.
Also, the first workers strike and the formation of a trade
union, and an amplitude of notions which
should be memorialized.
But the absence of any Rouge plant
is so large, that there's nothing to be done.
There's no use for the Rouge plant in contemporary Detroit.
So this is an example where what should be memorialized
is lost in the absence of a new program.
Next.
This is the Bicocca competition in Milano
on the site of the large Pirelli tire factory,
which has moved out, leaving a lot of infrastructure
and a [INAUDIBLE] which is subject to competition
where almost all the leading architects the world were
invited to submit entries.
I'm going to select two entries to compare them.
On the right is Giancarlo De Carlo's On
the left is the site plan.
On the right is Giancarlo De Carlo version.
Using a large number of the existing buildings,
the whole idea is that programmatically this
would become, in Italian, a new technological pole--
P-O-L-E. It's only something Italians can understand.
What it's meant to be is some kind of new electronic product
management enterprise.
Giancarlo uses a large number of the existing streets
and buildings, and introduces new elements where needed.
Next.
Gabetti and Isola, a firm of architects from Torino,
came second in the competition, do
something which is interesting.
They go back to find that the Romans plow the land--
organize the land in a diagonal set of forms.
And they start working on this hidden geometry,
and develop a plan based upon the hidden geometry
of the Roman land.
Next.
If they then transfer their design
into the world of ecology, it's a green set of buildings.
All of the notions of other buildings
should be environmentally controlled and rationed
and so on is part of the design.
The issue that is interesting here
is, how do you connect hidden references
to existing conditions?
Who would know the connection between the Roman fields
and the new buildings?
How would you know that?
How as an architect do you make--
you can put up a poster or a bronze plaque
telling the story?
But you can't have the two contents
simultaneously available.
We are encumbered, unlike Freud.
According to Freud, we as architects,
who are spatialists, are encumbered
by not being able to simultaneously produce
an experience as presumably you can in the human brain.
Next.
A similar stupid proposition.
Not stupid proposition, but more stupid than Gabetti
and Isola's work.
They actually are very good architects.
And I think in the Bicocca competition,
this is the most interesting projection.
This is from a studio at the Harvard GSD.
The site is Columbus.
Where's Columbus, Ohio?
Yes.
This is where Eisenman is going to build an art museum.
He digs deep down under the ground
to find that this was an Indian burial ground originally
on which the Americans built Camp Sherman, an army
camp, on which the town of Chillicothe was built.
And now it's become Columbus.
So there are four layers of geometry, one above the other.
So by the use of the term scaling,
he devises a method of slowly retrieving the traces
from underneath upwards.
Next.
Through a series of geometrical moves to ultimately induce
a solution for the museum.
The problem again is the same one as the Bicocca competition
problem.
What is the record of your invention made public?
How available is the relationship
between your final product and your work?
Who in heaven's name would know the relationship
as an outside experience?
In any case, what is the point of digging for inspiration
under the ground when you have [INAUDIBLE]
atrophy of conventional geometries
to use for architecture?
What is the advantage?
It's a problematic question.
Nobody at the GSD asked the question.
This became a wonderful game.
There is no virgin territory in this sense.
Everything has an underneath evocation of some use.
It's landscape urbanism penetrating
beneath the skin of the landscape
into some territory, which is enough to gestate new forms.
Next.
This [INAUDIBLE] work on the grid of Chicago,
producing this through a series of exercises, scaling
and transmission, is equally stupid.
Mixed.
Not stupid-- intellectually interesting, but so what.
This is not a painting class.
Do you need to know-- when you look at a painting of Van
Gogh's painted when he was in asylum in the south of France,
and he painted through a particular window looking
across the landscape, you don't know this background.
You just look at the painting.
The painting has to have enough in itself
that the history is redundant.
Who goes to an art exhibition and demands
that they understand the history of each painting?
How much of the history is part of the experience of the art?
I'm asking you a question.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE].
You cannot really appreciate a Japanese sword katana done
by [INAUDIBLE] without knowing the context in which it was
made.
JULIAN BEINART: No, I understand.
That's what we have museums for.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]
JULIAN BEINART: An art production--
sorry, an art production should be able to stand on its own,
independent of the knowledge of the culture and so on.
That's my own sense of the capacity
that we all have to abstract from form ideas.
AUDIENCE: Can you explain different layers
of meaning [INAUDIBLE]
JULIAN BEINART: You might-- now, as I
said before, in looking at a Van Gogh painting,
you may well want to go back to his drawings.
You want to read his letters to his brother.
You want to understand his epilepsy, and so on and so on.
But essentially, given the canvas in front of you,
it should have enough content.
You can increase the content, but it cannot be totally
dependent on your ability to connect backwards.
These examples we just looked at,
from Eisenman and Gabetti and Isola,
depend on your ability to--
there's no evidence.
Well, the new building may be a consummate work
of art, in which case reference backward is immaterial.
But as a device for creating urbanism,
it's a difficult argument.
I'll concede the difficulty of the argument.
When Haydn uses the data of his wife's birthday
as the beginning of some music, does
the music quality depend on you knowing
that it was the trivialization which
caused him to write the music--
a trivial beginning?
I tend to argue in favor of what you
see being able to be explained by what you see.
AUDIENCE: Julian, we had in in Politecnico di Milano an entire
class for one year that was about retracing the [INAUDIBLE]
and then doing a project [INAUDIBLE] But I would say,
all my education in Italy was-- like,
urban design education was strongly based on retracing
former traces or ruins of whatever was previously,
and then integrating them into the [INAUDIBLE] It was the word
[INAUDIBLE] was oriented towards--
JULIAN BEINART: So it means you can't build in America.
AUDIENCE: It means that I felt really lost when I came here,
and then there was [INAUDIBLE].
JULIAN BEINART: But I'm just showing you
that Eisenman found four layers in Columbus, Ohio.
AUDIENCE: Yeah.
But it's-- yes, [INAUDIBLE] like that.
JULIAN BEINART: There are no doubt
instances where retrieving ideas from the past
is significant in connecting you to something
interesting about the future.
This comes up very often.
AUDIENCE: There shouldn't be a restriction,
because if you just need to anchor it to the past,
that means that there is no room for a fully
original idea from scratch.
So it needn't be--
[INAUDIBLE] to be exclusive in nature.
JULIAN BEINART: Well, I wonder how many people
have original ideas from scratch, anyway.
We all beleaguered by knowledge.
Some is explicit, so is not.
I don't know exactly why I draw my hand,
and draw in a particular way.
Neither did Picasso.
I mean, he drew in 70,000 ways.
Sometimes, it's clear [INAUDIBLE]
art historians to show what he was trying to do.
Sometimes, he just draws with a hidden vocabulary of knowledge.
It's a contentious issue.
All I'm trying to argue is that these examples all
try to connect you to previous knowledge.
AUDIENCE: Because of the preservation that they want--
it's all about preservation, your view and your perspective
on that, I guess.
And I don't think during our education in the US,
we don't have so much focus on that.
JULIAN BEINART: No.
Understandably, if you grew up in Italy,
it's a little difficult to bypass the extraordinary things
that have been done.
If you grew up in Greece, of course--
Georgeas is not here today.
He grew up in Greece.
I wonder what you would make of reconstructing
the Agora as an item worth generating a new vocabulary.
Have you been to the Agora in Athens?
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]
JULIAN BEINART: Yeah.
No, I'm thinking of the Agora particularly,
because it's such an extraordinary difficult
phenomenon--
37 acres of land to invoke.
The Romans-- [INAUDIBLE] was a much easier literal formulation
to seek adaptations from.
The Greeks didn't believe in the cardinal.
There is no cardinality in the Agora in Athens There
no organization based upon a simple precept, such
as you need a horizontal line and a vertical line to cross.
This is complex territory, and I'm
not enough of an art historian to take this further.
Let's move to Leon Krier.
First of all, there is stupid distinction between res privata
and res publica.
In the next class, which we'll do
in this start in the second half after these pictures,
I'll try to show you how inappropriate this distinction
is.
For him, a good city is one in which the public domain is
evidenced through a series of architectural forms
which deviate really from classical form,
or deviate, which are determined by their allegiance
to classical form.
Next.
The world of the private are really rectangular boxes.
A good city is one which combines
the two, in which the public is signally differentiated
from the private.
What happens if you are wealthy and you
want to put a classical arch in the front of your house,
I don't know.
But let's leave that example.
Next.
The use of classicism in this project of his for an island
resort off the coast of Africa.
It aims to recreate a context borrowed
from a significant past.
It may be exotic enough to attract people
looking for another experience in life, even
if it's quixotic and veneer and lacking in originality.
But then, who cares what the original consequence
of classical architecture was?
Next.
When it's taken seriously, such as by Prince Charles
and his confreres in England, you
see a political argument made in favor
of Canaletto's version of London and what London has become.
According to Prince Charles, London
has been brutalized by modern architecture.
Next.
So Richmond Terrace on the left on the Thames
is an office complex designed by Quinlan Terry, who
works with classical architecture, as opposed
to these ugly buildings, which the Prince assigns
to modern architecture.
So here is the attempt to use an architectural form, derived
from classicism quite freely, to maintain
a certain civility of form and a certain expression,
which is universally admired and understood,
instead of the arbitrary selections
of form under modernism.
Next.
In the Holocaust Museum in Washington,
the architect says that he wishes to excavate
memory instead of history.
So he makes the intellectual leap, or the artistic leap,
by taking forms which emanate from Auschwitz,
and introducing them into the vocabulary of forms
that he uses in the Holocause--
bricks, steel, triangular metal sections.
Next.
In keeping with Washingtonian urbanism,
the interior of the building is exotic.
The performance of the building as it faces the public
is quiet.
Next.
Similarly, on the left is a plan by a Dutch landscape architect
of, up above, field patterns.
Below is a housing project based on the field patterns
of the previous agriculture.
And on the right is a house in Switzerland
by Mario Botta, who says, "I'm obliged to build
a building in suburbia and isolate the building, which
I don't like.
I'm going to do it, but at the same time,
I'm going to deviate its form so significantly that it's
a different product altogether."
So here is the argument on the left
that there's enough trace again for you to impose on it
an argument of consonance.
On the right is an acceptance of a certain spatial vocabulary,
but then in particular denying the vocabulary by making it
round.
Next.
Here is a simple example.
In Groningen, in Holland, a library
is extended by building it as exactly--
building two new arms of it parallel
to the existing building.
There's no question but that they should look like.
Next.
And lastly, a few ideas from Washington.
Washington's plan made selecting site for monument
and the maintenance of memory through monument quite easy.
Next.
Let's jump to the contemporary problem.
These are two.
On the left is the first attempt to design the FDR Memorial.
These panels of stone are taller than the Washington Monument.
The family objects.
Another architect is brought in to reduce
the height of the panels down to a smaller level.
Next.
The last outcome was the attempt to leave architecture alone
and to use a garden as the appropriate memorial.
Now, this is either because contemporary architecture
has no way of doing memorials.
Do you know Frank Geary's proposition
for the Eisenhower Memorial?
Has anybody seen it?
It's under grave discussion at the moment
as to whether it's acceptable or not.
It has none of Geary's formal language of architecture
as embedded in the project.
This is a case where nature is seen as invariably benign.
If you can't do a man-made manifestation of something,
you rely on nature to do it for you.
Next.
This is a late 19th century attempt
to cover the existing obelisk with an armature which renders
it more publicly acceptable.
It's probably the finiteness of a monument.
The obelisk is, after all, a very elementary geometry,
which needs to be denied by those who need to give
it more appropriate meaning.
The same thing on the right.
This is Ross Perot's addition to the Vietnam Memorial.
Maya Lin's memorial is absently abstract.
It has only vertical planes with names on it.
In order to render it more acceptable,
we get the addition of this example of human soldiers.
No women, of course.
The abstraction allows almost everybody
to take part in it, whereas once you express particularities,
you have the problem of what particularities to choose.
An obelisk is universal.
A decorated obelisk means that somebody
had to make decisions about what is the appropriate decoration.
Next.
And two last examples of a contemporary monument
are expressions of the need to retain memory about something.
On the left is the Navy Memorial in Washington.
It's a developer project which has left a space in front,
a circular space with a single figure of a soldier that
is the Navy sailor.
It's a male again-- white male, on top of the world.
But at the same time, you enter a door to the right,
and you go inside this interior space,
where you can see a movie about the wonder of the United States
Navy.
And there's also a computer which
will show your grandchild how wonderful you were
when you were a young sailor.
Next.
The Air Force Memorial tried to do the same thing.
Here is the first project for the Air Force Memorial.
It sits on a plinth, which is the updated
version of the world on top of a symbolic representation, which
is fixed.
Here, you have a combination of the idea
that the memorial, which is only fixed and not updatable,
needs to have an updating system as a part of a binary system--
one perpetual one updated contemporary.
I think these two are examples of a kind of move
to democratize or bring architectural form
into everyday existence.
I don't know how successful these will be.
Next.
It's the [INAUDIBLE] OK, we've gone through a whole series
of examples of issues.