Interior of one of the townhouses looking toward the common backyard.

Running parallel to the back of each row of townhouses is a long subterranean corridor, cramped, artificially lit but still dark, with pipes and cables running through its length, moisture trickling down its unfinished concrete walls, it’s the mechanical and services spine of the block. Garbage cans are lined up at each door marking the otherwise inconspicuous switch to another home. At the end of the corridor is another door, this one leading to a series of hidden exterior steps running parallel to the blind exterior end wall of the townhouse row. If you are not looking for them, the steps, and those coming in and out, are indeed hard to see… Ni vu ni connu. Here the ideology of making a distinction between what is allowed to be seen and what should remain hidden is designed into a long corridor allowing for the covert movement of trash and extra-marital affairs.

We are in Lafayette Park (1961-5), Detroit, the residential complex designed by Mies Van der Rohe. Our tour guides, all long time residents, are immensely proud of where they live. Given the recent financial crisis and the decline with which Detroit has become infamous for (Detroit, mausoleum of high capitalism) it is remarkable (at least for the visitor) to see such a viable community so near downtown. According to one of our guides, the reason why the complex has withstood the crisis is obvious: good design and pride in its architecture. This, it could be added, has gone hand in hand with the tastes of a portion of the middle class on more stable incomes and mortgages. ‘We sometimes have issues with new residents putting up fences, but they are quickly brought down.’ He has a chuckle recalling how he once asked a fellow resident to remove her patio furniture because he was showing the place to visitors. Lafayette Park, he comments with a sigh of relief, is listed on the National Register of Historic Places so resident owners are not allowed any exterior modifications, including modifications to the planting scheme. Appropriation takes place within. And each townhouse visited reflected the personal tastes of the owners within the boundaries set up by the architect and the NRHP–ultimately left to cosmetic changes.

Lafayette Park with shopping plaza to the right, high rise residential slabs in the centre and townhouses to the left.

Lafayette townhouses with its NRHP-protected planting scheme in the foreground.

‘Architecture is too important to be left to architects.’ (Giancarlo de Carlo, 1967)

‘And what did the users add? Their needs.’ (Henri Lefebvre, in 1968, discussing the modifications to Le Corbusier’s Maison à Pessac)

When I visited Lafayette Park in April 2011 I was in the midst of a review of the theory and practice of participation in architecture from the 1950s onward. And so I wonder how heritage conservation, also translated into a distinction between things shown and things hidden, relates to the notions of appropriation and occupation for residential architecture as developed since the 1950s. If we follow this trend and see creative appropriation as a form of emancipation from the rigidity of Modern architecture then how should we balance the conservation of residential projects that have become Modernist icons? These are, after all, representatives of a culture’s heritage and a strong emphasis on the process of design over the aesthetics of the product, might indeed make us forget about the value of the object that frames this same process. Lafayette Park is turning out to be a successful product and process. And its resident-owners have bought into the particular lifestyle and ideology it represents as well as how it should be represented. While this is certainly true for those we met, others may not be so convinced (those putting up fences, for example), but certainly everyone appears to be toeing the line. At the moment, Modern residential projects are being re-visited and re-valued so that the tension between ‘user needs’ and design determinism may not, in particular instances, be such an issue after all.

Yet I still cannot help thinking that there is something inherently fraught with the balance between conservation and appropriation, especially when it comes to ‘living’ communities like Lafayette Park. Given that there is no clear boundary between private interests and public concerns, should the ethics governing the conservation of private residential architecture be different from those governing publicly owned architecture? To what extent should the original design and aesthetics of a home be protected against its current occupants? Perhaps more importantly, when should the agency of individual owners be trumped in order to preserve the state of a cultural artefact whose function may invite exactly that type of creative behaviour? But Lafayette Park is a ‘finalized’ masterpiece whose transformation is denied by those who have chosen to live within its well defined perimeter. Here the theories of process and appropriation with roots in the 1950s and 60s meet the reality of actual lived-in Modern architecture at the beginning of the 21^st century.

Lafayette monochrome playground

The undivided backyard between two rows of townhouses is empty, no sign of either spilling out from living rooms or children playing (or having played). There is a common playground in the middle of the complex, with sparse metallic play equipment and painted, without much surprise and to everyone’s ironic delight, black. The only signs of inhabitation from the outside of the townhouses are the interior shading devices for the floor to ceiling windows (vertical blinds and low curtain rods cheekily omitting the original recess-concealed roller blinds) and the owners’ choice of art works for their vestibules. Architects are notorious for omitting the presence of people in the representation of their built projects. In this case people are wilfully removing themselves from the actual ‘living’ project, leaving very few visible traces, hiding most, and finding their agency, it seems, in the freezing of time and space.

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 ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything, vacuum packed.

Saturday 6th June 2011 saw the launch of the post-exhibition catalogue following up last December’s ‘Invisible Machines’ exhibition, held at Grand Parade in Brighton, which investigated the various relations between machines and architecture. Although the invocation of machines in architecture is well-trodden ground (dating back not just to modernism but to Book X of Vitruvius) the exhibition suggested that the many relations between architecture and machines have mostly been approached individually and proposed instead to attempt to discuss them in parallel.

To this end, curator Ben Sweeting assembled a group of exhibitors whose work relates to machines in quite different ways – from the physicality of Michael Wihart’s hydraulic devices and Tom Foulsham’s balancing installations to the abstract relationships of Tim Norman’s and Charlotte Raleigh’s drawings of the cosmos and bumblebees respectively.

The limited edition post-exhibition catalogue, which contained a selection of material from the exhibition, was assembled live at East London’s Redundant Architects Recreation Association and individually vacuum packed along with various small objects gleaned from the R.A.R.A. workshop. The event was accompanied by a BBQ as well as by the amplified sound of the vacuum packing machine. As R.A.R.A.’s Joe Swift points out, guests were left “with the conundrum of how to look at the fantastic images inside without disturbing the vacuum within this beautiful object”.

A pdf version of the catalogue will be made available next week, so be sure to check out http://invisiblemachines.wordpress.com/

Contributors: Michael Aling, Tom Foulsham, Ersi Ioannidou, Glenn Longden-Thurgood, Tim Norman, Charlotte Raleigh, Ben Sweeting, Michael Wihart

The RARA workshop in east London

Dalgety Bay suburban castle

Now for something a little lighter. A recent trip to Scotland and a wrong turn into a suburb of Edinburgh brought us to this suburban gem,  a heroic reminder that yes, a man’s home is indeed his castle. It reminded me I had once thought of posting photos of two similar meaningful roadside architectural attractions sharing an uncanny relationship. The above is pretty much the clearest go-ahead nudge one could get.

'WE SPEAK', Château Madrid, Rang du Moulin Rouge just off highway 20

Château Madrid (pictured above) is located at what is approximately the geographical centre (measured in highway kms) between Québec City and Montréal, Canada. The roadside attraction was built in the 1960s into a hotel slash restaurant slash service station slash dinosaur and bigfoot fantasy park. The familiar castle-like form of the building, which has now comfortably lodged itself into the collective memory of every motorist travelling that stretch of the Transcanadian Highway, would have originated from the owners’ fascination with castles seen during a trip to Spain. The blatantly symbolic name of the place, now referred to as ‘Le Madrid’ rather than my childhood memory of ‘Château Madrid’, seems to confirm the rather specious connection. This is especially given the reference in a place which otherwise offers a vacuum of hispano-anything. One would be entitled, though, to understand the decision on symbolic geographical terms; Madrid is, after all, the symbolic geographical centre of Spain. But (if we were to take this interpretation seriously) the connection may have more to do with the real relationship between Spain’s highways (especially the national ones radiating from Madrid) and its castles (authentic in this case). Indeed a towering castle is a common sight from the roads to and from the Spanish capital. And in this case (if you compare with similar sights in France, for example) Spanish castles do have a certain ‘castleness’ je ne sais quoi.

But this is all in jest, after all, so why should the appropriation, commodification and consumption of someone else’s culture be one sided? Which brings us to the second attraction, this one from Spain (pictured below), where a genuine piece of architectural heritage has been crossed with the North American motel typology. The tower, which I am told is auténtica, is visible from the highway, and behind it stretches a series of ‘modern stables’: long arcades with generous arches wide enough to park an upgraded rental. To think of authenticity in both these cases (the Scottish example is instrumental, really, and so does not count) is a nice enough way to ponder over dead ends. The question might be: which achieves best what it claims to be, the hotel/motel wanting to be a castle or the castle wanting to be a hotel/motel?

The genuine, albeit lightly modified...

...and its backside car-ports.

A lot has been already said about the slums of Mumbai and their role within the city’s memory and identity. Dharavi, which is supposedly the largest of Mumbai’s slums, figures very prominently in most of these discourses. Dharavi has developed and expanded over the last few decades largely due to its central location within an otherwise very dense and expensive city, making it the preferred locus for migrant workers who relocate from all over the country to Mumbai, who either come to Dharavi and later move out of it, or alternatively live there permanently. Dharavi is thus defined by this constant state of displacement and flux, in the number of people, their living and working conditions and in its continuously altering edges with the city.

Within this organic and fluid urban condition, any attempts at mapping and documentation seems static and inert against an intrinsic transience. This has been evident since the announcement of the Dharavi Redevelopment Project by the State Government, which has led to an urgent demand for surveys, maps, recorded statistics and future projections, that are constantly being verified, revised and updated, making architecture’s engagement in Dharavi seem more like a tryst with numbers and their accuracy, operating outside of a larger design narrative.

Times of India, Mumbai Friday June 12th 2009

My interests in Dharavi are multilayered, but at this point I have been largely focussed on one particular predicament; any kind of intervention into its many complex and heterogeneous realities leads to an eventual confrontation with what I refer to as its ‘temporariness’. In reaction, the collection and organisation of information generates a grid of datums and constants that offer a fixity or permanence, connecting the disparities and more importantly, ultimately controlling the resultant responses.

For example, when faced with the enormous challenge of counting the exact number of households in Dharavi, the government had to deal with the problem of trying to figure out who exactly qualifies as a ‘permanent’ citizen of Dharavi, permanent enough to warrant a newly reallocated flats in the redevelopment. To resolve this issue, the year 1995 was considered as the datum point; wherein if you lived in Dharavi anytime before the year 1995 you are considered a bonafide resident of Dharavi. 1995 since has became a much debated datum, that in its arbitrariness has become an issue of dispute. Similarly, the size of the reallocated flat was decided to be an area of 300 sqft, a number that stems from area codes set up by the Slum Redevelopment Authority of Mumbai. 300 sqft is the size of every new flat irrespective of existing occupied areas, which has again been disputed given the organic nature of the current live-work areas.

These are but two examples, but hopefully they make the point. My interest in these abstract numbers and the ‘expert systems’ i.e organisations that control these numbers and their dissemination, comes as much from their ability to offer a finality within an otherwise constantly mutating situation, but also from their enormous ability to define the future directions for Dharavi, wherein the design narrative is essentially governed and constrained by these numbers and what they imply. The numbers are collated often with the use of self created normative standards, to then themselves become the normative in the future.

To come back to the original question, how does architecture begin to approach conditions of extreme organicity and informality?  Maps and statistics as tools are unavoidable, but how do you deal with a situations like Dharavi where one needs to reflect the organicism and ‘temporariness’ of a place without falling into the constant trap of data, their verification and amendment?

I understand these questions as just one aspect within the incredible complexity of working in Dharavi, but nevertheless significant.

Contributor’s bio: Deepa is an architect from Mumbai, currently based in Chicago. She recently completed her MA in Histories and Theories from the Architectural Association in London. Her current interests stem from examining architecture’s modes of production and representation, especially when they are determined by processes that organize and classify statistics to shape the perception and comprehension of the city. Deepa has a Masters in Architecture from the US and a Bachelors in Architecture from India.

Architect Paul Thomas (Jean-Louis Trintignant) seduces Frédérique (Stéphane Audran) in Les Biches (dir. Claude Chabrol, 1968).

‘You have a sense of real comfort,’ she says, standing on the quayside, as he pours two glasses of whisky.

Paul Thomas is an architect from Paris completing work on a housing development on the edge of a harbour near St Tropez. On that winter’s afternoon, he attempts to seduce Frédérique, an acquaintance from the area who he met the previous evening. The whisky and Thomas’s brooding charm prove intoxicating. The architect soon embraces his beautiful neighbour. Within an hour, the two are inseparable and embark on an intense relationship.

This scenario offers a rather glamorous picture of the everyday life of a successful architect. But once we realise this episode is taken from Claude Chabrol’s film Les Biches (1968), the situation is bound to take a darker turn.

Architect Paul Thomas is a manipulative playboy. The previous evening, Thomas didn’t seem to be interested in his dinner host Frédérique, but was instead intrigued by Frédérique’s protégée, a young woman named Why. At the end of the party, Why begged Thomas to take her home with him and he obliged without hesitation. The following morning, Why revealed to Frédérique that she loved Thomas. Jealous, Frédérique decides to confront the architect at his waterside development. At first, Thomas denied he spent the night with Why, before admitting he did, but that he didn’t even know the girl’s name. He forgets to meet Why for the date they had arranged for that afternoon and instead seduces Frédérique. Why is devastated to learn about Thomas and Frédérique, but suffers in silence until she finally decides to plot her revenge.

I don’t want to spoil the plot of the film, but, following Patricia Simoes-Aelbrecht’s blog post in October 2010, I am intrigued by Chabrol’s representation of the architect.

Until the upheavals in the French education system in the late 1960s, all architects trained in the prestigious Ecole des Beaux Arts. The French press and television once paid almost reverential respect to architects, and ordinary citizens would address an architect with the formal title ‘Monsieur l’architecte.’ In Chabrol’s film, cracks begin to emerge in the elite status of the architect. Thomas is not a venerable figure, or the winner of the Prix de Rome, but a manipulative character, driven by his desire for women and work.

The stature the architect in France began to crumble during the 1960s as a number of architects became implicated in property development scandals. If Paul Thomas were a real architect, he would perhaps have been a sympathetic colleague of Fernand Pouillon (1912-1986), another playboy and prolific architect of modernist housing in France, Algeria and Iran. During the late 1950s, tempted by a boom in construction and cheap government loans, Pouillon turned his efforts to property speculation and became embroiled in the infamous ‘Point du Jour’ scandal. In order to finance his lavish lifestyle, Pouillon embezzled deposits made by individual buyers for a luxury housing development on the banks of the Seine. Construction had to be abandoned as Pouillon defaulted on loan payments. He also owed 20 million francs in tax payments. In 1961, Pouillon was arrested and detained to await trial. During a stay in hospital, Pouillon escaped to Italy and was allegedly protected by the Algerian liberation front.

Around the same time, the popular press also began to express dissatisfaction with the architects designing large modernist housing blocks in the suburbs of French cities and harshly criticised the high-rise architecture emerging around Paris. Architects were no longer untouchable.

Even children were discouraged from wanting to become an architect. An illustrated children’s book from 1964 portrays an architect as a man fuelled by ambition, but cut off from the realities of ordinary life. It tells a story that would put off even the most gifted young scribbler from designing buildings:

Once upon a time (however it’s true), there was an architect who built houses and a family who was looking for a house. The architect consisted of a graduated ruler, a set square and a bottle of Indian Ink. The family consisted of a father, a mother and two “so-where-are-those-dreadful-kids?”. The architect, of course, did not know the family. He built houses to show that, with a graduated ruler, a set square and a bottle of Indian ink, he was the smartest architect of all. […] But the architect hadn’t thought about the people, and the people were bored in all this cement, all this glass and all this wind, in these large apartments that were all the same, which looked like cages piled up into the sky.

[Extract from Claude Roy and Alain Le Foll, C’est le Bouquet (Paris: Delpire, 1964). My translation.]

Representations of the architect in France during the 1960s put pressure on the image of a talented and sophisticated creator. The architect might still be glamorous, but he was becoming a villain. It was time for a new generation of architects, but the profession would remain for some time the domain of wealthy, white men.

Further reading:

Danièle Voldman, Fernand Pouillon: Architecte (Paris: Payot, 2006).

Today we conceive urban space to have a substance of itself. Architectural proposals take part in it, and produce it to a certain extent, but I wonder if there are still areas beyond the discipline’s reach.  In this text I will use a few samples across time, starting by a comparison between two contemporary 17^th century paintings, as to exemplify the process that at the same time has shaped urban and public space, and articulated the understanding we have of them. It is my intention to show that far from being obvious, this issue has undergone a complex evolution throughout western modern history.

The first painting is Vermeer’s The Little Street, one of his two paintings – the other being View of Delft - having reached us that deals with the outdoors. In this work, Vermeer combines different elements of Delft’s cityscape – there is consensus in considering this composition an abstraction rather than an actual location – in order to describe the streets of Delft. Split almost in half, the composition juxtaposes a planar façade and a deep cityscape. Representative and functional relations between the house and the street are also shown together, on each side of the canvas’s symmetry axe. This shift between the symmetries of the objects within the painting and the painting itself, underscored by the painting’s crop, induces in the viewer an understanding of the greater order of the city’s fabric.

As the painter leans on his usual compositional schemes, he also continues his typical motifs, and thus the domestic scale is used to symbolically report the idea of the street. Vermeer’s everyday-life scenes of Dutch bourgeoisie are reflected in three instances around the painting: a maid at house-keeping chores, a couple of children playing and a woman sewing on the doorstep, so arrayed that all three of them appear somehow confined to the façade’s plane, and though having “one foot” on the street, absolutely belonging to the house.

The other painting is Martínez del Mazo’s depiction of the Alameda de Hércules, the main urban space arranged in Seville during the 16^th century. One characteristic establishes the main difference with Vermeer’s piece: the Alameda, the way it was conceived, had no formalized edges. Designed as something between a garden and an urban stroll in what used to be a floodable area hosting seasonal leisure activities, its rationale was the inception of an intrinsic order rather than an external one. This was to be granted by a combination of a perspective array, landmarks and a strong conceptual content.

Thence the pictorial representation –the first of a series of copies that repeated the same scheme- of its spatial quality is based on this kind of backbone, but it does also rely strongly on the depiction of characters hovering over space, loosely bound to this built structure. Their attires, attitude and characterization are stressed so that they can both be recognizable in themselves and qualify the space they are occupying. Urban space is revealed in simultaneity; in the coexistence of the water boy, the strolling gentlemen, the dueling ruffians… in an incoherence that Vermeer avoids in his painting. Witness of the awakening of a new social order, Vermeer’s analytical eye feels comfortable within the boundaries of the domestic realm, in which bourgeoisie first expressed itself spatially. But the streets remained a backward, hostile world, still to be apprehended by a middle class on its way to the Enlightenment, and which for the moment merely leaned out and dared to inhabit a thin border fringe. The features of the public space at reach of Vermeer’s pictorial discourse are those around it. There is no description of the street as such, but rather of how it is approached from its edges.

Proposal for a Cenotaph for Newton by E. Boullée (1784) and E.G. Asplund’s Stockholm’s City Library (1928). Two key moments in the Enlightenment’s project of the “indoor public space”.

At the beginning of the consolidation of the modern city, the actual streets took place in spaces in between edges that set boundaries and bodies than enacted similitude or difference. Then the developing urban ideal gradually conquered the space that had belonged to the indistinct crowd. If classicism had spawned an awareness regarding a necessary negotiation of those in-betweens, it was especially at the turn of the 19^th century that spaces begun to be conceived as to extend social order over the outdoors, and in turn to overlap social and private space.

Today, urban space is perceived as substantial in itself, even though its quality remains elusive to architecture. In between the signs that fill the streets of overlaying codes there is still room for deviance, and simultaneity brings about the unexpected. Can it be planned or is it only possible to grasp it by occupying it? The modern city has been able to incorporate those moments in which we just want to switch on the mirror ball and let its shine dissolve the edges and merge the bodies.

Madonna, exercising her citizen’s right to let loose, location unknown. This is the climax of the “Hung up” single’s clip (Dir. Johan Renck), which updates contents from the 70’s, especially Abba’s theme “Gimme gimme” and the movie “Saturday night fever”, into a celebration of urban life.

Contributor’s bio: Miguel Torres-Garcia is an architect based in Seville, Spain, and performs technical assistance in the fields of planning, heritage management and international aid. Following his architecture studies he worked as a specialist in development aid, obtained an MSc in Spatial Planning and is now furthering his interest in public space research.

Besides the usual travel brochures highlighting the many tropical beach paradises or Rio’s yearly carnival festive, we hardly come to see other visions on the city and its slums. And they do exist! There have been projects made from different disciplines, such as architecture (whether you believe it or not), graphic design, documentary filmmakers and photographers. And I am not referring to Mike Davis’ book The Planet of Slums, by which I mean that we have to think of representations that go beyond the hopelessness of these situations. We have to think about representations that can counter and critique existing and forthcoming slum spectacles.

High Rise, a film I saw some weeks ago in a screening made by TINAG (This Is Not a Gateway), fits well in this discussion. Although the title is not well translated from Portuguese to English, since Um Lugar ao Sol translates as A Place in the Sun, it does link the film interestingly to one of Ballard’s well-known books High-Rise from 1972. However, this time we are not confronted with a dystopian vision of high-rise living; a kind of favelization of the high rise building. Instead, we are siting in luxury penthouses lined up along the beautiful white beaches of Rio de Janeiro. In these luxury paradises the discourses on poverty, violence and the right to the city appear at first sight far removed. However the contrary is perhaps more true. By focusing on how poverty is framed from above, through the penthouse windows, we can reflect on the mindset of the rich people and the middle class people (see interview with Mascro in Festival Visions du reel – Nyon 2009).

The young Brazilian documentary maker Gabriel Mascaro produced High Rise in 2009. And just as his first documentary, The Beetle KFZ-1348 and forthcoming, Defiant Brasilia (2010), Mascaro searches to capture the interplay between objects, architecture, the built environment and people. Here, he deals with the popular rise of the penthouse in the city of Rio De Janeiro, owned mostly by Brazil’s new and fast emerging rich middle class or better said Brazil’s nouveaux riches. These luxury flats – with their own garden, often with swimming pool overlooking a flat horizon, complete privacy and lack of any curious neighbours – are Brazil’s gated communities.

The film works as a extended montage whereby nine proud penthouse owners are juxtaposed with shots from their building on to the beach and Atlantic Ocean; glimpses from their house; views from the window on to the informal settlements of Rio concierges; images of the buildings themselves with strange names such as Akropolis, Versaille, Cannes and many other epic names; and sometimes with interview excerpts with the concierge of one of the buildings. The selection of the nine penthouse owners was simple and easy. They were the only once of 125 whom Mascaro found in a recent publication of penthouse owners that reacted on his call to be interviewed for his film. While often such modes of production fail -interviews that are extensively cut up, spread out over the whole length of the film and juxtaposed with other images or interviews – here it seems to work very well. For me one of the explanations why in High Rise it does work very well is because of the content of the interviews. In their responses, practically all interviewee’s frame there life in opposition to the informal settlements close to their own house. Images of luxurious penthouses are thus overlaid with images of poverty and violence through language and words. We no longer see slums, instead, in our perception images of wealth collides with images of poverty. So while these penthouse owners are constantly defending their position and attitude high above, we can no longer identify with them. We can only feel empathy for the Other, the one that lives in those informal settlements! Several episodes could be recounted here, but there is one that always stayed with me: “fireworks”. In that particular episode one female penthouse owner describes, by using many gestures, the shooting between gangs in the nights as a kind of celebratory fireworks. She explained how much she enjoyed those spectacles from her windows!

By the way if anybody wants to experience life or views from a penthouse window during their visit to Rio de Janeiro, don’t despair, the following platform can bring you a step closer: Rio Brazil Penthouses.com.

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.