The authors of the Frankfurt School maintained that a radical change in society was necessary; however, they always refused to suggest any practice. The role of the thinker, as famously argued by Adorno, was not to engage with society and politics in a direct fashion, because this would imply being caught in a stream of cause and effect relations. This compromise would eventually jeopardise their subjectivity and the ability to critically consider reality. Jürgen Habermas, the last author to be associated with the Frankfurt School, shifted his object of analysis from the immediate social reality to the level of language and communication, increasingly detaching the terms of the question from his immediate historical circumstances.

Habermas’s collaborative action theory takes communication as its main object of analysis following the author’s sustained interest in the public sphere as a dimension where democracy can happen through participation. The public sphere is fundamentally a linguistic construction, created and maintained by language. The study of communication is therefore crucial to the theory in order to recognise the obstacles and the constraints that prevent individuals from participating and contributing their ideas to the debate. The theory is based on two elementary concepts. The lifeworld is the ever-changing network of connections established between individuals, which can have a communicative or normative nature. The lifeworld is continuously colonised by abstract systems. These can be described as pre-emptive networks, structures that are constructed with the purpose of staying fix, of providing some frame to the human interaction, like the economic order with the market place or the political or administrative order with the bureaucracy. They are based on instrumental rationality, and are superimposed to the lifeworld to constrain its ever-changing nature.

The core of Habermas’s theory contribution to the debate on good practice in planning is in the distinction between lifeworld and system, between planning imposed because of functional rationality and planning that emerges from and through communicative rationality. To instrumental rationality, Habermas opposes communicative rationality. From this point of view, among the many sources from which the German social theorist borrowed, Sigmund Freud is an important one. Rather than in his formulations and terminology, Habermas is simply, selectively interested in psychoanalysis as a method based on language. Conversation is used in psychoanalysis both as a method to reveal and heal disorders. Psychoanalysis, if successful, provides the patient simultaneously with emancipation and rational understanding of their issues. Similarly, Habermas with his theory wanted to provide an intriguing tool to both explain the relation between language and repression and solve it. Unbalances of power affect social structures, which in turn affect individuals. For Habermas, language is both a way to reveal and to heal them, i.e. to change the understanding of the world and to augment control of the subjects on their reality.

Reality is formed through interaction between actors and actants, a collective process that combines objective and subjective knowledge: as Judith Innes put it, ‘Information that influences is information that is socially constructed in the community where it is used.’ Another important element of the theory from this point of view is the idea that ‘social illness’ emerges from the fragmentation of symbolic contents. Again, language allows for the re-symbolisation of isolated symbolic contents, by conveying them into the public sphere. Communicative action brings people together, because it allows to rescue isolated pieces of content (a spatial distortion) through acquisition into the public domain. Issues emerge and are understood by verbalisation: this is the hermeneutic value of communication. This part of the theory was particularly important in the formulation of the practice of placemaking in urban planning and design, i.e. the process of finding a rationale to new elements of the built environment by associating them to former desires, symbols and narratives of an existing or imagined community.

Also the built environment has a twofold nature and is both a text and a medium of communication. Its basic blocks are units of information and its structure is a syntax that connects them. Communication is constantly required because of the collective dimension of the human effort to colonise and inhabit the environment. Cities and neighbourhoods come into being at the point where all forces involved reach a balance, and the planner’s aspiration is to transcribe and inscribe these processes into the built environment.

Since the nineteen-sixties, planners and urban designers have created innovative, participative approaches and methodologies to encourage stakeholders to take part to the planning process and let communities emerge through consensus-building. The Team 10 left the International Congresses of Modern Architecture (CIAM) as early as in 1953 in disagreement with the then hegemonic model of Le Corbusier’s Radiant City. The architect and planner Giancarlo De Carlo founded the  International Laboratory of Architecture and Urban Design (ILAUD) in 1976 to make extensive use of methods as public consultation and open debates in most of his projects. Today the charrette methodology is particularly popular in land use and urban planning. It consists in short, intense periods of consultation and design, to which all stakeholders are invited. Communicative rationality is a crucial element to these approaches and Habermas is often quoted by planners and scholars who report and comment on similar projects. However, what Habermas’s theory should suggest to planners who adopt these approaches is not only to set aside emotion and ownership of ideas, and most importantly to avoid consensus thinking.

‘Open form’ is a term sometimes used for flexible or polyvalent forms of creative expression, where the arrangement of the parts or sections is indeterminate or left up to interpretation. Some open artworks can appear structurally incomplete, either because meant to be representing an unfinished activity or because hinting at spaces and concepts outside their own limits. Similarly, planners who want to act as facilitators and allow for the participation of all stakeholders must include in their work aleatory, extemporary elements. It is this very openness that creates opportunity and means of critical reflection through language and premises truly collective action on the basis of the validity of propositions and lines of argument rather than established power relations.

Of course, as long as planners are involved in the process, truly open planning remains an imagined ideal, because the very opportunity and means for stakeholder participation must be designed or designated and is subsequently implicitly limited and possibly susceptible to external influences. Nevertheless, at least from a conceptual point of view, stakeholder participation allows planners to soften the boundary between the output of the planning process and its context, subsequently creating a linguistically more homogeneous system.

The charrette methodology has been in recent years very often used by proponents of ‘New Urbanism’, an alternative to traditional low-density urban sprawl. Sophie Bond and Michelle Thompson-Fawcett in 2007 wrote a detailed examination of a charrette process in a small town in New Zealand and noted how the use to a single type of participatory tool can represent a constraint in itself. Another limit to participation is the fact that professional designers and planners openly and inevitably pursue a New Urbanism agenda, despite the fact that they present themselves as facilitators. Charrettes and similar processes are hardly truly neutral and inclusive and in the worst case scenario they can easily be ‘hijacked’ used by authorities or interest groups simply to provide an aura of legitimation for their agenda. Moreover, local administration or private sector actors can dilute the power of participatory planning by creating ‘artificial’ or ‘redundant’ stakeholders in the form of partnerships or local groups. Tore Sager, on the other hand, in 2005 pointed out that the role of dialogue in communicative planning does not necessary ensure the best outcome, because ‘results are generated not only by amalgamation of preferences but also by the amalgamation of argument’. When different externalities or incomparable preferences are involved, dialogue does not easily result in a balance of all interests through communicative rationality and in accordance with democratic criteria: ‘Usually, only some of the pro-and-con arguments about a plan refer to impacts measured on comparable scales, like a monetary scale’.

The model of the planning process based on the communicative action theory, with its emphasis on components of discourse and deliberation within a group, does not take into account how individual actions are affected by rules, community and the physical environment. From this point of view, planners interested in creating theoretical models to explain and present findings, should integrate elements of theories that deal with the social construction of knowledge and the Actor-Network Theory, which largely focuses on the interaction between human and non-human actors. However, a major contribution of communicative action theory has certainly been to stimulate debate about the nature of the planning profession, giving practitioners the opportunity to think of themselves as facilitators. Alternatively, planners can reclaim their role in researching and interpreting what solution grants the most positive externalities, by identifying with the user and defining what would be desirable, usable and useful. Also this approach adjusts the top-down strategy introduced by modernist planning and brings the user to the negotiation table from which the built environment emerges. As a task it includes addressing a range of desires, physical and emotional issues that go beyond the simple functional needs summarised by the notion of instrumental rationality. Such an approach requires a great effort of identification with the user/citizen, an effort perfectly symbolised by the image of the planner exploring the territory in person rather than analysing it through maps and models.

Eyal Weizman is head of Research Architecture at Goldsmiths College, University of London and author of books like Hollow Land and The Least of All Possible Evils, in which the same meticulous critical methods are used to scrutinise built environments and cultural constructs. He is also the co-founder of Decolonizing Architecture (DAAR), a Palestine-based collective that acts through its interventions on the architectural space and on the space described by international law. This is the transcription of a conversation between Gabriele Oropallo and Eyal Weizman about his current project on forensics. The conversation took place on June 18th, 2011 in the rural setting of the DAAR Architecture Rehab Camp organised by DAAR and Iaspis in the Stockholm Archipelago.

Gabriele Oropallo Eyal, I first encountered your work through Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation, which was published by Verso in the UK in 2007 and has since been translated into several languages. Hollow Land was a history of the process of transformation by which Palestinian space is constantly redesigned in order to be kept under control – underground, at ground level and in the air above the ground. I translated your book into Italian during the 2008-2009 Gaza crisis, the unilateral attack at the end of which about 15% of the buildings in the strip were left destroyed. This was in many respects an acceleration of the very processes described in the book, which provided me with a continuous memento of the urgency of the project. After taking stock of those events, in the new preface you wrote that in Palestine the spatial conflict “goes beyond a search for a stable and permanent ‛governable’ colonial form”. On the contrary, it is through this very “constant transformation of space that this process of colonisation has played out”. In the Territories, the transformation of space, therefore, rather than being a goal, is the very instrument through which control is articulated, and violence, far from being casual and being the result of a confrontational configuration of space, is actually the tool used to design it. I am now taking part with you in the Architectural Rehab Camp organised in the Stockholm Archipelago by Decolonizing Architecture, the collective you co-founded with Sandi Hilal and Alessandro Petti, and Iaspis, part of the Swedish Visual Art Fund. Today with Thomas Keenan of Bard College New York you have presented the new book project on which you are working together. The process of negotiation you talked about today does not refer to the construction of factual reality in the Territories, but to the construction of judicial truth. The space on which you are working now is not the contested space in which settlers, natives, international organisations and Israeli military along with a variety of other actors carve their ephemeral niches – it is a twofold space made of court rooms and legal texts. This shift of perspective initially threw me off balance; can you tell me more about the way your books are connected, and how your background as an architect relates to the new project?

Eyal Weizman The work on forensics started with problems that I encountered in the same field of study of Hollow Land. It started with problems posed by international law as it is interpreted by those opposing the Israeli occupation. And it also addresses the question of what it means to oppose the occupation with the language and with the terminology of international law.
I started to be interested in the law, investigating its origin and the way in which it constructs its claims. Then, after the Gaza attacks of winter 2008-2009, I was looking at the Goldstone report, from what I thought was a logical point of view. You know the story of the Goldstone report that has been written by many authors and has been extremely often featured in the news. But then, as I was reading it time and time again, it occurred to me that there was something worth investigating in the methodological section of the report. You know that every human rights report has a methodology section, just like a PhD. One could feel a certain shift occurring when the commission was constructing its report on the basis of testimony and witnesses in order to find evidence. In that section emerged a sort of understanding on the side of the commission that the testimony provided by Palestinian survivors of the attack in Gaza would not be easily, so to say, legally accepted. The international community suspects Palestinians of having a confused, a skewed political subjectivity in favour of Hamas.
So there you can see a shift from relying on living witnesses to relying on dead bodies through autopsy reports. Autopsy reports enter this human rights document and finally claim that Israel has committed crimes against humanity. These autopsies are used to corroborate suspicions of alleged crimes against humanity. But it is not only corpses, the epistemological resource for this report actually also include architecture.
Think about it. Between 15 and 20 % of the buildings in the Gaza strip were destroyed during this attack. About 20,000 buildings were either damaged or destroyed. Most of the people died inside of the buildings because most of the people died inside of their homes. So architecture in this report is not only a reference to the incidental destruction that the attack brought about. Architecture is the means of killing. People are killed by bits of walls flying around, falling or crushing them. People are crushed in their own homes. And then, after the dust settled over the war, architecture turns into evidence. The task of reading the rubble in relation to the given frame of analysis – that of international law – was given to some people that in lack of a better name should be called forensic architects. I was interested in one person in particular, called Marc Garlasco. He used to be an expert for Human Rights Watch in battle damage assessment. He was in fact a world expert in looking at ruins and reconstructing from the way the ruins fell a narrative or the reason for the ruins being that particular way. A strange story occurred that saw this person as a protagonist. The Goldstone report was published on 15 September 2009. On this very same day, Human Rights Watch announced the suspension of Marc Garlasco from the organisation. Why? The reason was that he was discovered to be a collector of World War Two memorabilia. He was accused of being a Nazi fetishist, and the Israeli were saying that a Nazi fetishist cannot speak on behalf of the rubble. Then I started to think about these issues very seriously. Regardless of whether Garlasco is actually a fetishist or not, is fetishism really an inhibition to speak on behalf of the object? Or is the fetishist in fact the best person to interpret the object and see some excess qualities to it? Therefore, I decided to take his side – and this was a very unlikely coalition. I travelled to New York to speak to him and we discussed the issue of this investigation.
And again, in answer to your question, my interest starts with the legal problem of narrating, with the epistemic problem of uncovering violence as it is registered on architecture.
There are other works that I have done on architecture as evidence in court. Think about this relation: the more violence enters the city, the more architecture will get affected by this violence, and eventually the more architecture will function as evidence. Yet, the whole question of how to interpret architecture in these cases has not yet been written about.

Gabriele Oropallo Have you ever been yourself summoned by a court to act as a forensic expert?

Eyal Weizman Yes, in fact, that was for me one the main entries to this issue and as an experience it also has some other implications. A you know from Hollow Land, the maps that I have produced have been used as forensic evidence in The Hague process against the wall and also in the High Court of Justice in Jerusalem. Working as an expert often involves becoming complicit in the process a judicial or even a historical truth is constructed.

During a trial, the court may be looking at the same pile of rubble after a strike has taken place and be confronted by different accounts for what happened, constructed by different observers. Resorting to scientific methods to establish the judicial truth may involve the development of models to ascertain what happened with a precise degree of probability. This kind of controversies and the questions asked of the forensic experts reveal the role played by data in the way a truth is constructed. When a court examines scientific data, 84% is not good enough to establish a point, the threshold of truth starts with 85%. Was the building destroyed by an international coalition or by local forces, was it an unavoidable military operation or a war crime? All the answers to these questions may reside in a 1% difference. Also, in the end, the problem how to read the rubble and how to deal with it sometimes has more to do with how history is constructed than with legal matters. When a site finds itself at the border between different narratives, there are sometimes different monuments or memorials that coexist and mutually challenge themselves. In this way, they represent an aesthetic embodiment of a fluid tension between competing narratives.

Gabriele Oropallo Today Thomas Keenan and you showed how “scientific” evidence has increasingly become crucial in determining the judicial truth, even before the use of DNA samples was introduced as an everyday investigative tool. This material turn, based on the assumption that objects are more trustworthy than humans, and that the evidence they can convey is more reliable than human contributions (such as informed deduction and testimony) has placed a great deal of influence in the hands of scientists and specialists – including architects who draw maps and interpret GIS data. However, you also said that scientific truth is more about probability than yes/no answers. It seems to me that empirical science is paradoxically reliable exactly because anyone in principle can criticise, review and change its truth by using experimental methods and is therefore subject to continuous rephrasing. Nevertheless, trials have to end with a definitive answer, this is what human justice is about. Even if the defendant is innocent, this is a clear answer. So, what are the forces that work within that fifteen or twenty per cent of probability left open by forensic experts and that eventually establish the judicial truth? It seems to me that in a way scientific or technical expertise is simply being exploited to bestow a new aura of correctness to truths that are established in other ways – culturally, socially or politically – and that improbability is functional to other hegemonic forces that are subsequently keen to emphasise it.

Eyal Weizman On the contrary – you will see that in fact it is science that insists on probability here. In fact, all other forms of historical processing, commemorations and actions actually tend to flatten that possibility and are oriented towards certainty of response. If you really look at what empirical science says, you will notice this aspect in great clarity. Every empirical scientific article, from astrophysics to biology typically ends with a kind of balance of probability, in which the reported experiments are processed to reach an order of probability, plus or minus 3%, plus or minus 0.003%, and so on.
The question is: how do we account, in practice, in politics, for probabilistic models? I believe this is a fascinating cultural problem. Our past is not absolutely transparent, it resists staying still and being dependant on us. We cannot just simply put stones on top of it and seal it in some way. How should we aesthetically deal with it in the face of the complicated interaction between deniers of all sorts, revisionists, negationists, deniers of global warming, deniers of Holocaust, deniers of Serb massacres and genocides in Srebrenica and so on? And all the while we should also be keeping the idea of the truth open as a construct.
So, this is why it is interesting to look at different kinds of rupture techniques in international law, such as those we discussed yesterday when we studied the case of Jacques Vergès. [Vergès is a lawyer who dedicated himself to the Algerian anti-colonialist struggle at the very beginning of his career, and who later went on to defend both leftwing and rightwing militants and terrorists, post-colonial dictators and war criminals – including Holocaust denier Roger Garaudy and SS officer Klaus Barbie, also known as the Butcher of Lyon. Vergès was famous for his counter-accusing rupture strategy, which saw him use the trials to show that prosecutors were guilty of the same offences as the defendants.] Vergès was treading a very thin line. On the one hand, he was opening up historical records of massacres, gross violations, murders that were done in colonial times to bring these histories into European history, insisting that all that this kind of denied past enter into the court. On the other hand, you know, he was also quite close to rather gross characters, not only counter-terrorists but also Holocaust deniers and Nazis, like François Genoud, the principal benefactor of the post-war Nazi Diaspora. There is a danger in treading that line, in navigating these kinds of issues while moving between probability and political action, between insisting on the “constructedness” of truth and avoiding political negation.

Gabriele Oropallo In Hollow Land there is a chapter that as a historian I found particularly useful as a case study because it is based on consistent research on a great variety of sources: political briefs, legal documents, architecture, even land surveys and construction materials. It is the chapter in which you look at the Jerusalem stone and at the genealogy of its compulsory use as covering material for all buildings erected within the areas that throughout history were at some point or another officially identified as Jerusalem. I found that chapter particularly compelling because it shows how a fairly recent development in law – the stone decree that was originally enforced during the British Mandate on Palestine and then confirmed by all other powers that ruled the city – was used to visually stretch the concept of what Jerusalem is, and along with its concept, its territorial extension. We know that often spatial and material realities are created by language, maybe because language is the only tool we have to interpret a chaotic environment. In fact, the raw material of lawmaking is language, and maybe the only way to escape the frozen hermeneutic space created by law is by establishing the philology of the written word of the law itself. What is the operative purpose of genealogy as a method today? Do you think there are ways to use the knowledge generated by a study such as yours on the Jerusalem stone to have an impact on policy or law making, and if yes, what are they?

Eyal Weizman In the context of our conversation, I think it is useful to look at the treatment I did of the Jerusalem stone as a way to analyse the relation between an architectural detail, some small types of repetitive generic objects and a larger geopolitical transformation.
There is something similar between my study of reality as in the Jerusalem stone chapter and the work of a forensic expert. There is some sort of larger meaning that becomes fossilised, that collapses into all sorts of architectural facts like red roofs, or antennas, or the Jerusalem stone, or holes in walls, or underground smuggling tunnels. This really is the forensic moment. Forensics reads those things as elements of a large scale process in which they are a part, it kind of collapses scales, because the normal kind of urban analysis would take the details, the building, the neighbourhood for what they are. Here you have a direct connection between a type of architectural element and new politics, new legal structures and a new cultural aesthetic perception that are wrapped around it. You can see here that an object is both a source of legal, aesthetic and political debate and a reification of these processes. All is captured and emerges from that material, in that type of stone. The question I always ask myself is how can you actually tease out of those things the politics and history that are saturated in them. Reading it by ferociously investigating the materiality itself is not always sufficient. You have to look at the networks of relations and power relations in which objects are circulating and existing.
You ask a very interesting question, that is: “If this is your mode of analysis, what is your politics? If this is your mode of analysis, do we need now to discuss of geopolitics on a geopolitical scale?” I will reply with another question: “Can we intervene exactly on the level of material things in order to affect politics in a different way? Can we actually intervene on the level of technology, on the level of architecture?” And I think, in fact, that a lot of the work that we do in Decolonizing Architecture is exactly about this. Our projects use micro-scale interventions that work through cracks and fissures in the system and kind of short-circuit the relation between the different scales of action.

Gabriele Oropallo When you introduced the title of your current project, you usefully reminded us of the etymology of the word “forensic”. In the ancient Roman city, the forum was the part of the city used for secular activities. Neutral in Latin often referred to categories rather than objects and the word ‘forum’ indeed literally meant “anything that is outdoors”, because it was a space that belonged neither to the private homes nor to the consecrated spaces of the temple. Markets would take place there, candidates wishing to be elected would rally for voter support there. The fora were also the places were public debates and trials would take place, like the Greek agoras. In this, one can see a polarity in those cities between the forum and the temple, the former being the place where truth was constructed or negotiated and the latter the place where truth was received. In other words, there were institutions – and buildings – associated to each kind of truth, and each had its competencies. The word forum eventually became associated with justice and in some languages today it still means court room. Hence, our adjective forensic. The images and the quotations of the forensic anthropologists all intent on reading the truth in human bones you showed us were exhilarating. I especially remember a quotation by Clyde Snow, the forensic anthropologist who talked about human bones as always telling the truth, and of his work as simply giving voice to them. This ideal ventriloquism immediately made me think of the priests who would read sacrificial remains – often human remains – and interpret them only to make divine will apparent. Also, divine will, as scientific truth, was almost unquestionable. Do you think this “objectual turn” in forensics is somehow an attempt to use the same strategy? Do you think we can actually still see these two forms of truth represented or staged by different institutions today – if yes, which ones?

Eyal Weizman You put it very right. In fact, there are all sorts of truth used in the production and structuring of the polity and the polis. These truths constantly govern our understanding of how to conduct ourselves day by day – and also into the future. In rhetoric, for instance, there is also the deliberative mode – a kind of forensic mode – which is the modality through which decisions regarding the future are developed and notified, made public. It seems to me that the production of truth as it happens in the forum, that form of negotiation of truth, is in fact a negotiation of the future. I think that what needs to be shed light upon is the deliberative element in the forensic mode. We need to look at how that sort of discourse is conducted, in which objects are allowed to speak and participate in all forms of political arrangements.
Then you ask, where is truth received and not deliberated upon today? To answer that I would say that the forums of today are much more diffuse. They do not exist as buildings in acoustic resonating chambers but as network media, assemblages of cultural institutions, where the two modes of truth production are constantly in conflict. This negotiated truth equals science, at least from a certain empiricist perspective. The natural, given, objective truth, on the other hand, is typically separated from anything that has to do with humans: it is subjective, constructive, interest-bound – ultimately political. Bruno Latour makes a point of bringing those two modes together. But I think that, in any given moment and in any given institution today, you simultaneously have the temple and the forum. In the way in which science is discussed, you have the temple and the forum. And sometimes, the temple aspect of a discourse, that kind of received, given, incontestable, transcendent truth seems to come to trump the constructedness of truth. There may be people who insist on scientific truth and say that something is beyond negotiation, that science itself is beyond deliberation. Latour, on the contrary, brings science itself into the field of deliberation. But these two modes of truth are always in tension with each other, not divided into institutions.

The text of this dialogue is going to be featured in an upcoming publication that takes stock of the 2010 edition of the Eternal Tour art festival, curated by Donatella Bernardi and Noémie Etienne. Additional transcription and proofreading of the dialogue by Fanny Benichou and Patrick Morency.

The separation barrier sneaking by Abu Dis from the al-Quds University campus, on 8 December 2010. These Palestinian landscapes are naturally very contrasted and defined, and with their sparse vegetation they often resemble the backdrops of some Italian early Renaissance paintings.

The wall in its context is a text-book example of low entropy structure. Like an ice-cube, its structure is really orderly, but it requires a great deal of work to bring it into that state and its entropy is naturally ever increasing. Low entropy means highly organised but also highly dishomogeneous. An ice-cube at room temperature will inevitably melt and the state of matter and the temperature eventually reach a balance. Balance is homogeneous temperature and texture. This process can only be delayed by continually applying work, which in the case of the ice-cube means keeping the fridge switched on, and in the case of the wall spending energies and human lives to keep the separation neat and strict.

The university campus was barely saved when in 2003 the wall was threatening to cut right through it. The barrier in this picture hardly seems capable to withhold the urban buildup above it. The houses populate the slopes of the hills, and as they thrive and proliferate they seem on the point of overwhelming the concrete fence underneath like a wave.

Al Bayyadah is a town in Cyrenaica that was founded in 1938 and originally called D’Annunzio, after the famous Italian poet Gabriele D’Annunzio. These agricultural settlements were built around an architectural core formed by a church, an administrative building, and a section of the Fascist party, which functioned as space for events and public gatherings: “God, Fatherland and Family”. The image is taken from a publication called “The Twenty Thousand. Photographic Documentary of the First Mass Colonial Migration in the frame of the Intensive Demographic Colonisation Plan”: I Ventimila. Documentario fotografico della 1. Migrazione in massa di coloni in Libia per il piano di colonizzazione demografica intensiva (Tripoli: Maggi, 1938).

Art historian Elisabetta Longari on Domus decries the damage that the Italian colonial architecture in Libya suffered through the Allied bombings in the Second World War and the erratic post-colonialist fury of the dictator. I had once the chance of viewing the videos Lorenzo Pezzani shot during the first stages of his research in the after-lives of colonial buildings in Libya. It is surprising how much has been left behind, most interestingly the colonial settlements, which in their structure are surprisingly similar to the West Bank settlements of today. It is true, as Longari says, that what is still standing survived “simply because there was no will to destroy it”. She adds that true conservation of the built heritage also means “renovate, reinterpretate, rehabilitate” and calls on the Italian government and other Italian institutions to intervene to save this wealth of heritage. This is a delicate task, not only because of the risk to reiterate colonial attitudes to space, but especially because to this day an atlas of the afterlives of this as other colonial architecture is still lacking.

Alessandro Petti of Decolonizing Architecture proposed that three general approaches can be discerned in dealing with evacuated colonial architecture: destruction, re-occupation, and subversion. Destruction is often based on the desire to turn time backwards, reverse development into virgin nature, or into a tabula rasa on which all potential forms of development and land use would be possible. This is a very appealing approach, particularly given the abhorrence aroused by colonial development, although demolitions or even the forced ruralization of built-up areas may sometimes create further planning problems or environmental damage. Another strong temptation present throughout the histories of decolonization was re-occupation of colonial buildings and infrastructure and reuse them in the very same way they were used under colonial regimes. Such repossessions tended to reproduce some of the colonial power relations in space: colonial villas were inhabited by new financial elites and palaces by political ones, while the evacuated military and police installations of colonial armies, as well as their prisons, were often used by the governments that replaced them, recreating similar spatial hierarchies. Subversion, finally, aims at profanation of structures that are both symbol and instruments of spacial control, in order to restore the common use of spaces. The first stage when looking at colonial architecture in Libya should be investigating how and whether these strategies have been used and – in perspective – how they could be used on buildings and urban centres on which intervention is still possible.

The word I like in Longari’s article is “reinterpretation”. In fact, we also have to reckon with the fact that no building should be allowed the privilege to last forever. In a way, sometimes the energy spent in harnessing the space must be released to be vital again – and this is a form of reinterpretation. Sometimes monuments that crumble down are not “lost”, but “regained”.

The right the local population indeed has to be granted now is exactly the right to reinterpretate. These attacks launched today with the Odissey Dawn operation will surely claim more lives, may they be Libyans or mercenaries. The Europeans could not afford losing access to Libya’s oil, the Arab League is happy to do away with the Libyan dictator’s antics and the international public opinion could not take the news of the brave rebels being crushed any longer. A tricky alliance of intentions, most certainly. We cannot anticipate where this will lead, but in the short term anything seemed better than just seeing mercenaries slaughtering freedom fighters. In the medium term all depends on the right leadership emerging from the rebels, a leadership that is able to twist this mismatched alliance of intentions and reinterpretate it toward the best outcome for the Libyan people.

Art historian Giulio Carlo Argan formulated his famous sentence in the nineteen-seventies, when then the modernist grand narrative of “good design” had already long disintegrated, leaving something of a semantic vacuum in the designed object, an empty space that had been promptly occupied by a micro-narrative of immediate satisfaction by indiscriminate consumption. Looking at the ease with which designed objects can be used to carry extremely different meanings and values forces us to reflect on the communicative power of design and its information value. Forms generated by design represent a presence in space that doesn’t end in the fulfillment of its function, but continues in force of their mere existence, in their relationship with the rest of the environment.

“Critical minds: critical spaces” is a one-day symposium organized by a group of UCL research students gravitating around this blog, as Gabriele Oropallo and Wesley Albrecht. The event is conceived of as an occasion to look at the work of architects, planners and designers and its social and cultural relevance in stimulating awareness and criticism of the contemporary. Very often, at the heart of cultural production, there is a practice shaped by a rational or existential response to material, technical or cultural constraints. This practice generates products that are designed as tools to enable the rest of the community to critically understand and question messages, objects and environments, rather than taking them for granted. The colloquium will feature some presentations on current research in design theory and history and on recent design projects. A final panel discussion will follow, with Justin McGuirk, editor of the Icon magazine, and Mark Cousins (Architectural Association, London Consortium). The event also marks the closing of CitiesMethodologies, an interdisciplinary event on innovative methodologies across the arts and humanities at the Slade Research Centre (Woburn Square, 5-7 May 2010). Speakers include Mark Cousins (Architectural Association), Annelys de Vet (Sandberg Institute, Amsterdam), James Auger (Royal College of Art), Jimmy Loizeau (Goldsmiths), Teresa Stoppani (University of Greenwich), Eyal Weizman (Goldsmiths), Jonathan Hill (Bartlett School of Architecture).

The colloquium will be followed by a wine reception in the Wilkins Building Haldane Room. Participation is free and open to all (for information email: g.oropallo@ucl.ac.uk, wesleyaelbrecht@gmail.com). Critical minds: critical spaces is supported by the UCL Grand Challenge of Intercultural Interaction, the Graduate School Research Project Fund and the Department of Italian Studies.

But, wait a moment. “Problem-solving is the driving force”. Actually, this sounds quite similar to the old “form follows function”. So, what’s the difference?

According to Patrick Schumacher of Zaha Hadid Architects, author of the above quotation the difference is in the direction of the design intervention. So far we’ve juxtaposed Eucledian structures in order to create space or harness portions of it into environments. The rationale of the design is in the concept that links these solids. The reader may be familiar with the house Ludwig Wittgenstein designed in Vienna in 1927 for his sister, today seat of the Bulgarian cultural institute. There is maybe this concept expressed at its best, mind you, by a non professional architect. Volumes in Wittgenstein House develop from each other in an orderly albeit ambitious manner, as in a logical deduction. It’s like shedding light in the dark and acknowledge space.

A variation to this deductive way to building was dubbed “deconstructionism,” and consisted in disassembling  these configuration of solids before they were even erected, to show their relations in a more honest way.

Parametric design, on the contrary, is nothing about deduction. It is an attempt to let structures grow systematically, according to their relation with the environment, as a living organism would do in order to survive. Everything is interconnected, and to take into account everything, sophisticated softwares are necessary and do much of the work. Instead of “spaces,” Schumacher actually speaks of “fields,” which fluidly articulate themselves to accomodate the complexity of contemporary life.

Parametric design therefore bears a striking resemblance to organic forms. Curiously, it’s visually very close also to surrealist decoration patterns. Both styles share an oblique, decadent appeal. This is because organic structures are economical: organisms – as also computers if they are so programmed – always try to find the shortest way between A and B. This is why living forms are usually curvilinear and not square, Cartesian or Euclidean. A parametric city would resemble a circulatory system, rather than a modernist grid. Every element would be interconnected and the complexity of functions would lead the growth of the system.

Transition and fluidity are greatly praised by Schumacher. This makes one remember of the “natura non facit saltus” (nature does not make sudden jumps) motto by Lucretius. Also Gaudì’s architectures were supposed to imitate nature – and in the process praise divinity. The Sagrada Familia designed today would look a lot like a building by Zaha Hadid.

I like the idea of an architecture whose form develops according to fractal geometry (the geometry of leaves, plants, clouds and all natural structures) instead of being constrained by platonic solids. And yet, all this organic matter makes me feel like a virus, a parasite, as though I shouldn’t be walking along these circulatory systems. Or, in the best case scenario, I feel like a part of the system, inextricably linked to it and forced to give away some individuality.

I’ve taken some time to reflect upon this, and now I think the underlying reason for this awkward feeling is that this ideal biomimicry in architecture eventually eschews one crucial aspect of design I am otherwise used to. This is: confrontation between built space and human being, borne exactly of the artificiality of the constructed space.

This is a structural confrontation in which one usually develop a critical, informed understanding of things. It may just be premature to say, but parametric architecture to me feels like being sucked back in an ideal utero, in which the spatial sense that characterizes human beings as a species is dimmed and left unripe. No wonder it is actually the favourite style for international airports, the most iconic non-spaces around these days.

Visiting the David Chipperfield exhbition at the Design Museum (”Form Matters”, 21 October – 31 January 2010) and navigating with the camera the many maquettes made and used to research the urban areas on which he was commissioned interventions. The second picture refers to a museum under construction in Naga, Sudan. His forms are solid, euclidean, yet they seem to give way or to adjust to the surroundings, instead of making space around them and offer glossy shooting opportunities for photographers. Others prefer to concentrate on fantastically fascinating roof structures, while Chipperfield is actually concerned with creating space. After all, it’s architecture, but it’s easy to forget what it’s all about.

A site-specific intervention on the building by a local resident

"3 Km Europe" reads a writing on a house between the Peace centre and the new, gentrified side of Jaffa

The Peace House, whose building began in 2005, is now almost completed

The idea of the Peace House was originally launched by the late Yasser Arafat and Shimon Peres. Named after the latter, it’s part of the seafront redevelopment of the mixed city of Jaffa and was designed by Massimiliano Fuksas as a dramatic spacial progression of pale green concrete slabs interspersed by glass panes, which offer an unconstrained view on the open sea – in the words of the Italian architect “a symbol of the state of emergency”.

Text and photography © Gabriele Oropallo, 2009.

The week I spent in Vienna last September was warm and brilliant. One day I was having lunch outdoors at the Kunsthalle on Karlsplatz, a coffeeshop and exhibition space carved in a piece of no planner’s land in the very centre of Vienna, where once the medieval walls stood and I was attracted by the soft-spoken colour texture of the tent cloth as this was hit by the bright sun. It reminded me of the return of figurative painting in the nineteen-twenties, after the war;  painters were then trying to provide some depth to their shapes without relying on perspective, the representation technique they had managed to escape from the decade before. They would superimpose layer upon layer of paint, with a beautiful waxy effect of translucence.

A man scrambles up the wall of a derelict watchtower in the middle of a military camp wearing a wading waistcoat and carrying a tripod. He’s a ornithologist, and he goes to the abandoned Israeli military base of Oush Grab (Beit Sahour, Bethlehem region) to study birds migrating from Turkey to Egypt through Palestine. Since the military left the base, the birds have started using the base as a stopover point, temporarily inhabiting the structures left behind season after season. The military camp was established by the British during the Mandate on Palestine, after the First World War, and has since been used, in turn, by the Jordanians and the Israelis. The space had been congealed for decades into the shape of a walled up instrument of control, that had a crucial influence of the life of people who lived next to it, however off-limits it was for them. Today, the site is the theatre for a chess game between the settlers, who want to found a new town there, the army that supports them, the international activists and the NGO’s that try to stop them and the Beit Sahour municipality that tries to make it into a public park.
Alessandro Petti and Sandi Hilal were inspired by the work of the ornithologist and the spontaneous practice of the birds. The artists/architects founded a few years ago in Bethlehem an architectural collective aimed at investigating security/control devices and engaging with the spatial realities of the Israeli-Palestinian in a propositional manner. The collective came up with a proposal that doesn’t aim at re-articulating and thus doing reiterating the function of the site, but at profaning it. The goal of their proposal is to release the energies harnessed when establishing and maintaining the site of control, and at the same time encourage both the birds in their seasonal return and nature in its slow process of dismantling of the man-made structures. This threefold programme is behind the idea of piercing all the walls of the buildings to provide a myriad inlets for the birds and let the buildings happily crumble down – not to be “lost”, but to be “regained”.

Text © Gabriele Oropallo, 2009. Photos © Nina Kolowratnik, Alessandro Petti, 2009.