fables of the reconstruction

At the end of his brilliant essay on the Barcelona Pavilion – Mies Van De Rohe’s Paradoxical Symmetries – Robin Evans added a short post-script dismissing concerns about the buildings authenticity. The original Pavilion was built for the 1929 International Exposition in Barcelona and demolished shortly after. The building that Robin Evans visited was a reconstruction, completed in the 1980's.

Architecture differs significantly from other art forms in that the final product - the building - is made by people other than the architect. Architects - along with the other members of the design team - really only produce a very complex description of the building, not the thing itself. Although there are questions of authenticity that reside in the manner of a building's construction - that is, in the way that it has been made - artistic authenticity is part of a wider set of issues to do with the buildings relationship to time and place.





















The  concept of the zeitgeist is central to the rhetoric of modern architecture. The belief  that buildings should embody the 'spirit of the age' assumes that they can be the logical outcome of the contemporary forces that bring them into being. Such a belief in modernity and in the duty of art and architecture to express the unique conditions of its own period is clearly antithetical to reconstruction. To be authentically modern, one can't recreate the past.

In recent decades a small number of highly significant 'lost' buildings - including the Frauenkirche in Dresden and the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in Moscow - have been reconstructed. Unlike the Barcelona Pavilion, the return of these buildings is clearly more a political issue than an aesthetic one. Their re-appearance is an attempt to heal the scars of war or a way of rejecting the political ideology that removed them in the first place.




















There can't be a site that better represents the vicissitudes of the twentieth century than Christ the Saviour. It lies in the centre of Moscow, close to the Kremlin and on the banks of the Moskva river. The original cathedral was constructed on this site in the mid-19th century. It was demolished in 1931 in order to make way for the enormous Palace of the Soviets. Only the foundations for this building were completed though and, after lying dormant for years, the site was turned into an open-air swimming pool. Then, in the last decade of the 20th century the cathedral was re-built, an immaculate copy of the original that was consecrated in August, 2000. To complete the return to a pre-revolutionary condition, the cathedral was the venue for the glorification of the last Russian Tsar as a saint.

In a sense, this story is almost too perfect an encapsulation of the retrogressive nature of reconstruction, far too neat a fable. The cathedral hasn't been rebuilt for any architectural qualities it might have had, although, like all cathedrals, it is impressive and awe inspiring when inside. It's reconstruction is a matter of attempting to erase the political events of the 20th century from the site, which from an architectural point of view seems a massive shame. The vast, circular Moksva swimming pool looked like a fabulous constructivist object, a gigantic circle from a Malevich painting spinning through the thixotropic space of the city.

Unlike books, or films, or paintings, a new building usually means the destruction of a previous one. Buildings replace each other, sometimes wrongly, and their conservation is a highly problematic issue because they always mean something to someone. In a sense, reconstructions compound the insult by demolishing the buildings that result from previous demolition. They attempt to rectify the violent erasure of the distant past by erasing the  recent past.
























The reconstruction of Christ the Saviour is an attempt to erase the crimes of Stalin, quite specifically as it was he who ordered the cathedrals destruction. Yet, re-writing history is a cliche of Stalinism. The re-built cathedral assumes that nothing of worth existed on the site and that nothing was lost in its reconstruction. The missing swimming pool has become like the people removed from official photographs and history books.

All of which assumes that buildings only exist in their physical form, rather than as a memory, or a photograph or a story. The Barcelona Pavlion only existed as such fragments for many years. It's canonic status within architectural history rested on a handful of black and white pictures and a few drawings. Arguably it's importance was, at least in part, a result of its inaccessibility. Buildings are sometimes more powerful in their absence. Certainly, its easier for a clear narrative to be developed when there is nothing left to contradict it. The perfection of the Barcelona Pavilion was preserved because, for fifty years, it never grew old. It's reconstruction allowed Robin Evans and others to reassess its qualities and contradictions, sometimes radically so.




















It's hard to make a case against reconstruction on the grounds of being true to the zeitgeist. Such a position assumes a reductive relationship between technology and form. What happens for instance if the spirit of the age is nostalgic, or inherently reactionary? Ultimately, the argument against reconstruction might be same one as for any building. What does it replace and is it worth it? The Barcelona Pavilion replaced nothing but itself. The site had remained empty and the rotting foundations found in the ground were that of the original. It's tempting to suggest that these should have been retained as a ruin, a genuine preservation of the original. But this is simply another kind of sentimentality, an aestheticisation of the past that merely speaks to a melancholic rather than optimistic frame of mind. It's not so much the ersatz, or inauthentic nature of reconstruction that is the problem, more the futility of the gesture.

A restoration debate has been rumbling away in London these past few years. The Euston Arch was demolished in 1961 and, ever since, there has been a consistent campaign to have it rebuilt. Positions are polarised, and over rehearsed to the point of meaninglessness. But there's always been one detail I've found intriguing about the story which is that the stones from the original arch lie at the bottom of the River Lea. Parts of these remarkably well preserved columns and classical details have already been raised from the river. The proposal now is to literally rebuild using the salvaged material. No doubt if the plans go ahead the stones will be cleaned and repaired and the missing parts remade to complete the whole. As all reconstructions are representations of history though, maybe a more truthful picture would be to only use what can genuinely be reclaimed. The result, with its holes and gaps and stains might be a more compelling, and more genuine, record of the building's history.

Drowned Worlds

Only a few feet from the surface, they drew closer, emerging from the depths like an immense intact Atlantis. First a dozen, then a score of buildings appeared to view, their cornices and fire-escapes clearly visible through the thinning refracting glass of the water. Most of them were only four or five storeys high, part of a district of small shops and offices enclosed by the taller buildings that had formed the perimeter of the lagoon.

J G Ballard, Drowned World, 962 (quote via)

There is a beautiful and brilliant post at That Sticks and Stones Should Fall about the fascination of drowned villages as a metaphor for the presence of past lives in the present. In particular the post refers to the villages of Ashopton and Derwent that were flooded to make way for Ladybower reservoir in the Penines, a subject I have posted about before and which the author generously links to.


(Image of Ladybower Reservoir via. The church Spier of Derwent is visible in the distance)

A number of disturbing but compelling ideas are touched on in the Sticks and Stones post including the murky fascination of dark bodies of water generally (and for anyone who shares such things you should read Joyce Carol Oates' Black Water about the mysterious incident of Teddy Kennedy driving his car into Lake Chappaquiddick in the US) and submerged wrecks and ruins.

The stories of Derwent and Ashopton - and other lost villages like Graun Curon in Italy - are ghost stores, pieces of folklore that have lodged themselves firmly in the popular imagination. Google Drowned Villages and hundreds of sites and related stories come up including this film of the flooded church yard of the Welsh village Lanwddyn. Although they lend themselves to supernatural speculation these are also stories of the awesome power of technology. And in that sense the submerged spires of Derwent and Gouron have an apocalyptic quality that speaks of the capacity of technology to destroy us.


The submerged steeple Graun-Curon.

The extraordinary spectacle of Derwent's neighbour Ashopton lying below the reservoir viaduct while it is constructed - the future water level clearly some way above the rooftops of the houses - is described vividly by Sticks and Stones and illustrated in the contemporary photo below. The image summoned up here is literally apocalyptic, technology dwarfing the houses below as it strides across the valley before ultimately destroying them.


(Image of Ashopton viaduct under construction via)

Ladybower, and other reservoirs like it, were huge infrastructure projects built to feed the ever growing water consumption of city inhabitants. The expansion of homes currently projected for the south east of England together with the effects of climate change will mean more reservoirs will need to be built as well as extreme measures taken to protect us from rising sea levels. Plans for the largest new reservoir to be built in the UK were announced last year for instance, although the physical consequences are not quite as drastic as Ladybower. Meanwhile the Environment Office charts the possibility of villages disappearing into the sea.

These pragmatic reactions to climate change go hand in hand with more apocalyptic visions such as J G Ballard's eerily prescient 1962 novel Drowned Worlds or Squint Opera's recent speculative Flooded London project. Both of these imagine London destroyed by rising sea levels. Drowned worlds could either be deliberate acts of erasement in the case of Derwent or the result of unplanned devastation. Either way they are seen as the result of our unchecked desire and a paranoid sense that our faith in technology will ultimately destroy us.


(Image by Squint Opera)

This fear is most clearly articulated through science fiction and its endless speculations on how we will ultimately be the architects of our own demise. Perhaps the most pertinent image in science fiction, and one that echoes both the cover of Ballard's book illustrated above and the vanished villages of Derwent and Graun Curon is the half buried, half submerged Statue of Liberty leering out of the sand at the end of Planet of the Apes.



Postscript

Strangely, I can also recall an experience of the inverse of this scenario on holiday in Mexico some years ago. On the trip I visited a small village resort with some friends that sat on the edge of Lake Chapala. Like a beach resort everything about the town orientated itself to the lake. The main drag ran down straight onto a stone pier, cafes fringed the lakeside and photographs of people swimming and playing volley ball hung in the reception of the hotel we stayed in. When we walked down to the lakeside though we discovered that the water had completely dried up, its exposed bed was filled with grazing cows and the stone pier stretched out into a grassy field. A combination of industrial pollution and water consumption had drained what had been one of the largest natural lakes in Mexico.



UPDATE: I'm grateful to anonymous (see comments below) for the following link to an article on the Three Gorges dam in China which has involved the moving of 1.3 million people and the destruction of a 2000 year old town, just in case this all seemed a little parochial.

Back to the Futurism

A little while ago I wrote a post exploring connections between the Futurist art movement, a pre-war British racetrack and the phenomenon of the World Land Speed Record. This is a kind of postscript to that. It concerns another fatal world record attempt, another wreck and another strange conflation of futurism and the picturesque.

John Ruskin, proto-Socialist, inspiration for the arts and craft movement, patron of Joseph Turner and opponent of all things industrial lived in a house called Brantwood overlooking Coniston Water in the Lake District. The Lakes are a quintessentially English landscape, seemingly natural and wild but actually carefully managed and designed. Ruskin loved them and spent his last years living at Brantwood. He rebuilt and extended the original house constantly, adding turrets and deliberately ad hoc elements of a slightly wilful ungainliness. The house was both a reaction to industrialisation and to the purity of neo-classicism.

Ruskin would also spend hours walking the landscape, painting rocks and waterfalls and passing clouds. He was a keen rower and would take his rowing boat, the Jumping Jenny, out on to Coniston Water from the jetty he constructed at the end of Brantwood's gardens. Ruskin's veneration and aestheticisation of the Lake District was intrumental, however inadvertently, in the construction of a mythical English pastoralism.


(Waterfall, near Brantwood, by John Ruskin)

There is a Ruskin Museum in Coniston which contains a collection of his writing and drawings. Alongside Ruskin's work though there is another exhibition devoted to Donald Cambell who died attempting the World Water Speed Record on Coniston Water in 1967. Donald was the son of Sir Malcolm Cambell, an aristocratic racing driver and several times holder of the World Landspeed Record. Sir Malcolm had constructed a series of cars, all of which were called Bluebird, that began as eccentrically primitive vehicles and evolved into outlandishly shaped machines devoted to pure speed.



Donald Cambell also achieved the WLSR in 1964 at Lake Eyre in the ultimate derivation of Bluebird. This was a car of astonishing beauty, a continuous wave like form, a piece of rolling landscape in itself. It can be seen in contemporary photographs as a tiny dot travelling at 400 mph across the vast salt flats of the dried up lake bed. In a previous attempt the year before, rain had fallen on the lake for the first time in 20 years and the car had to be rescued to avoid it being submerged.



Donald Cambell devoted his life to an obsessional desire to be the fastest person on earth. Not content with the WLSR he attempted the same feat on water and built a hydroplane boat called Bluebird K7. In 1966 he took the boat to Coniston Water, the long linear shape of the lake lending itself to speed, like a natural drag strip. The following year during a record breaking run the boat flipped over and ploughed back down into the water and Cambell was killed.





There is something compellingly odd and alien about this blue jet streaking across the waters of Coniston. It is the same conflation of the futuristic and the antiquarian that occurs in science fiction.  In 2001, the wreck of Bluebird was salvaged from the bottom of the lake and is now being rebuilt. The photographs of the salvage boat show Ruskin's former home of Brantwood looking on in the background. 

It would be easy to see the absolute modernity of Cambell's boat as the antithesis of Ruskin's beliefs.  Or its wreck as a monument to modern hubris. The Lake District is a product of modernity too though, a cultivated wilderness designed to feed a growing consumption of the countryside as leisure pursuit. The countryside itself is an inversion of the city as much as the other way around.  The two are mutually supportive concepts. The wreck of Bluebird, dragged from the bottom of the lake seems to come from an alien world, although it as ingenious and natural as the lakes themselves. 

 

A Very British Futurism

Fillipo Marinetti published his Futurist Manifesto in 1908, in which he declared:

"We will glorify war - the world's only hygiene - militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of freedom-bringers, beautiful ideas worth dying for."

The Futurists' celebration of speed, machinery and death is one of the odder trajectories of early Modernism. Curiously, the now derelict motor racing circuit of Brooklands in Surrey echoed in a peculiarly British way the same obsessions.



Brooklands was an obscure piece of early Modernism, or more precisely Futurism, a cousin to the equally dramatic testing track on the roof of the Fiat Lingotta factory in Turin. It was built in 1907 and comprised a huge concrete bowl, a banked oval around which cars – themselves monstrous early 20th century inventions with aeroplane engines and proto stream-lined bodies – would hurtle in a Marinetti like celebration of the violence of technology. It being England and the early 20th century, Brooklands combined this pointless bravery with minute social snobbery, coining the term “The right crowd and no crowding”.



One of the most famous drivers to race at Brooklands was John Parry Thomas, a part time inventor and engineer who became a professional racing driver. Thomas lived in a cottage within the perimeter of the track, the still centre of the kind of perpetual motion machine he might have attempted inventing. Parry became obsessed with achieving the World Land Speed Record and he built himself a car called Babs in which to achieve it. Babs in fact started life as the Highham Special, built by Count Zborowski, an absurd Marinetti like figure responsible for the original Chitty Chitty Ban Bang.



Babs was a bizarre looking creation with a long stretched tail that looked like the exaggerated suggestion of speed of a child’s drawing made manifest. Or a futurist sculpture. The car was a literal embodiment of speed and a machine dedicated to the task of achieving the World Land Speed Record. The WLSR was a kind of Futurist happening, a celebration of power, speed, macho glory and, frequently, death. Parry achieved his ambition of being the fastest man on dry land but died on the Pendine Sands in Wales during an attempt to regain the WLSR. The vast chain that drove his car flew off and partially decapitated him as he drove at over 120 mph. The car was buried where it stopped, in the sand, only to be dug up in the 1970’s and reconstructed, an eerie relic of sorts.



Brooklands was also an airbase and home to aeroplane manufacturers Vickers and Hawker. It was requisitioned during the second world war and badly damaged, mainly by the MOD as they sought to camouflage its highly distinctive oval form from German bombers. Since then, it has remained a partial ruin, its broken up and overgrown concrete hidden by a circle of trees within the Surrey stockbroker belt. It is now owned by DaimlerChrysler Ltd, its outline interrupted by new housing, light industrial developments and the Mercedes Benz heritage centre. Sections of the banking survive, a strange Ballardian ruin lurking in its suburban setting.

The 1:43 Scale Atrocity Exhibition

"The toy", writes Susan Stewart in On Longing, "is the physical embodiment of fiction: it is a device for fantasy, a point of beginning for narrative". What fantasies are involved in this toy, a replica of the Lincoln Continental Presidential Parade Vehicle in which John F Kennedy was shot? It sits on my mantelpiece, a present from a friend who found it on ebay. They're all there: JFK himself, albeit minus half an arm in my less than pristine version, Jackie O in her pink Chanel, Governor Connelly waving, all forever captured minutes, or maybe just seconds, before the first shot.

It's a strangely macabre object: a miniature that might be used in a Hornby scale re-enactment of the assassination. As the seller on ebay put it, the model has a “…full set of figures recreating the final moments of JFK’s presidency”. Where are the other figures though? I can’t find any corresponding 1:43 scale versions of Lee Harvey Oswald or the book depository or bitter CIA Bay of Pigs veterans lurking mysteriously by the underpass.

For the avid conspiracy theorist, more figures are needed to try out new scenarious, speculate on alternative plots. Maybe it is part of a set along with Diana’s Mercedes (one of a pair with the mysterious 'white Renault'), Princess Grace’s Rover P6 and Pope John Paul 11’s 1981 Popemobile. As Stewart goes on to say: "To toy with something is to manipulate it, to try it out within sets of contexts".

Or perhaps, it’s for a miniature version of J G Ballard’s blackly hilarious short story The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered as a Downhill Motor Race. But Ballard's story differs from conspiracy theory in an important respect. Although, like them, it uses collage and displacement - the sliding in one of one scenario for another, storylines and characters cut and pasted from alternative worlds* - it works through absurdity, highlighting the seam between the accepted reality and the absurd version he posits in its place. Ballard's story uses collage as an avant garde device of radical disjunction and violent displacement. It is never meant to be true. Unlike this theory, for instance, which links the positions of the various protagonists to the sign of Orion.

Conspiracy theory strives for truth, but one that always slips away. By casting doubt on truth in the first place it inherently unbalances itself. Despite its controversy at the time of writing, Ballard's story is as much a satire on conspiracy theory as it is a tasteless deflation of the importance of the event itself.

Conspiracy theory aims to be closer to the seamless falsehoods of the picturesque, so that you can no longer see the gaps between truth and conjecture. Here, landscape is shifted around to tell a story and reinforce a predetermined narrative. The endless pixellated diagrams of the JFK killing shift the scenery and protagonists around according to specific points of view. The doctored photographs which in turn accuse others of some previous manipulation induce a queasily liquid sense of space, geography and time.

The toy version of JFK's limousine and Ballard's story also differ from the fascination of the 'genuine' relics and souvenirs discussed by Geoff Manaugh in an old BldgBlog post here. The relics, as dubious as some of their claims may be, are all about authenticity. They strive to reinforce or back up the truth, because it in turn validates them. Toys and souvenirs though are all about representation. They are absolutely not the thing they represent, merely a version of it. They have an inherently volatile relationship to the truth. Miniaturisation automatically removes objects from their context. As Stewart says; "There are no miniatures in nature".

Strangely, the real JFK limousine was rebuilt, given a bullet proof roof and repainted from Midnight Blue to black. It was used by subsequent US presidents until its formal retirement in 1977. Today it is in the Henry Ford Musuem where it sits alongside, amongst other things, Rosa Park’s bus, in its own 20th century atrocity exhibition.

* This technique reaches an extreme in the appendix section of The Atrocity Exhibition with Prince's Margaret's Facelift, a 'story' which is actually a genuine doctor's account of a facelift but with Princess Margaret's name substituted throughout for the anonymous Patient X of the original report.

** These manipulations have an odd echo in an intruiging post Archigram project by Mike Webb called Temple Island. In it Webb looked at a stretch of the River Thames near Henley as a conspiracy theorist might, editing photographs and lines of sight according to different points of view to alter the landscape. The project focused on a picturesque folly on Temple Island which sits in the middle of the Thames.

The Village That Died For Derbyshire

This photograph is taken from a BBC film about Ladybower reservoir made in the 1960's and on show here. The reservoir was formed in 1943 by flooding the Derwent Valley in Derbyshire, including the two villages of Derwent and Ashopton. The church spire of Derwent could be seen when the water level was low. Unfortunately it was later demolished destroying the fabulous surreality of it looming out of the water.

It's a disquieting picture, an eerie combination of utilitarian infrastructure and apocalyptic imagery. It has the absurd quality of a fake, like those photographs of fairies and ghosts beloved of the Victorians. Perhaps it even is a fake, although the church tower was genuinely there.

A number of villages were flooded as a result of the need for water supply in cities likes Derby and Sheffield and Ladybower is one of three in the Derwent Valley alone. As a child I remember a story of one near the village where my parents lived when they were first married which had subsequently been drained leaving the remains of the village once more visible.

This process was like a 20th century version of emparking, the removal of unsightly villages by 18th century landowners as they sought to sculpt the countryside around their houses into three dimensional versions of classical paintings. The remains of these abandoned villages were co-opted into this vision as romantic grottos and ruined cottages.

At Ladybower though the reason behind these dramatic spatial transformations of landscape was ostensibly benevolent although its results were no less violent. Indeed, in a strange reversal of this history the stately home of Derwent Hall was also flooded. Its remains are still visible during low water levels so that it has become its own romantic ruin.



The resulting reservoirs are a hybrid of nature and machine, hugely impressive feats of engineering disguised as natural lakes, their water towers and viaducts rendered as medieval castles and Palladian bridges. The same surreal mix of futurism and picturesque fantasy that occurred in Victorian structures like Tower Bridge and in the science fiction fantasies of Jules Verne.

Looking at early photographs of the reservoir infrastructure, the elegant gates and stone balustrades are like the entrance to the landscaped garden of a stately home. But the home itself is no longer there and lies in fact in ruins on the water bed. The landscape and its villages has been dramatically reconfugured not as a result of the aesthetics of 18th century painting but the abstract dynamics of 20th water supply.

Picture above taken from the Francis Frith archive

The work of architecture in the age of reproduction.

The degree to which reconstructions of buildings is seen as either sentimental kitsch or authentic rebuilding depends largely on the perceived value of the original structure.

Last week I heard Jamie Foubert make an interesting presentation (at this event) regarding resurrected buildings. I was reminded of it in connection with the current, rather odd, campaign to reconstruct the Festival of Britain Skylon.

Resurrections of buildings can take a number of different forms. Sometimes they are the realisation of something that was never actually completed to start with, like Charles Rennie Macintosh’s House for an Art Lover, built some 90 years after he designed it.

Sometimes they are actually the original article but displaced from its original context, such as the reconstruction of London Bridge in Lake Havasu City, Arizona.

Sometimes they are precise reconstructions of a building that was demolished such as Mies van der Rohe’s German Pavilion in Barcelona.

All these re-buildings raise interesting questions about authenticity. Are they all, to some extent, fakes? In art authenticity historically lies within the mark made by the author. Can a building, which is never the product of a single author and can take years, even decades, to construct ever be simply a fake?

For Modernism reconstruction is always a problematic act. Architecture, it assumes, should be an immutable product of its time. It derives its authenticity through its very newness. In his talk Foubert attempted to re-categorise his examples into authentic and in-authentic examples of reconstruction based on familiar modernist tropes: honesty of construction, appropriateness to function, proximity to original site etc.

So, the architects of the Barcelona Pavilion reconstruction would no doubt claim authenticity of detail and location to justify their recreation although, technically, Arizona’s London Bridge could make an equally legitimate claim. In this instance, dislocation in space is assumed to be more inauthentic than dislocation in time.

This dislocation in time has another effect, which is to enshrine the buildings perceived meaning within that of a particular era. The Skylon, for instance, is still synonymous with the Festival of Britain and the post war Labour government that sponsored it. Reconstructing the Skylon, it is suggested here, is inappropriate because its absence is a more eloquent testament to the reasons it was removed. It's political meaning would be effaced through reconstruction.

Reconstructions are also interesting then because it is in their absence, rather than their presence, that buildings seem to gain a purity of meaning. Jonathon Hill has argued that the Barcelona Pavilion achieved its iconic status precisely because it was dismantled. This is not simply because it became more poignant but because it could only be experienced through the rarified medium of photographs and architectural history. It was never sullied through (mis)use. To connect back to the bastardised Walter Benjamin title of this post, it retained its aura. Buildings that disappear are like rock stars that die young: they leave a beautiful corpse. They never grow fat or old or lose their edge.

Free from contamination by the present, the Skylon still represents the possibilities of British Modernism and post war socialism. Whether you want to recreate it - re-released and digitally re-mastered – or celebrate its absence, Skylon’s meaning seems clearer than if it were still here today.