palimpsest the scars of war
city form | damage by ruth alejandra mora izturriaga
traces bombs st pauls precision bombs
The Romans used to write on wax-coated tablets, or palimpsests ( παλίν (again) + ψαω (scrape), which were written upon, scraped, cleaned and used again. As a result, some palimpsests contain the traces of hundreds of texts written in them. Cities are palimpsests of memories, collecting the records of innumerable lives and events built over time. Like poems where each word carries multiple meanings, cities contain the complex history of events past: victory, invasion, imperialist domination, communist regime, rise of an empire, decadence, evangelisation, bombing The fragility of civilisation is written, scraped and re-written in their walls, monuments, structures, and through this density, meaning is captured. ‘ Each particular manifestation on a building is just one moment in a long history of possible forms it might take.’ 1 Wars, battles, redevelopment and natural disasters, act as voluntary and involuntarily erasers of the palimpsest. Bombs, for example, can flatten entire areas of a particular city or create regular patterns of destruction where only a keen eye can read and recognise the signs, marks and traces left behind. Walking on the streets of London, in a residential neighbourhood, I noticed that once every so often a new house was inserted into the traditional urban pattern of old row houses; this seemed quite natural until I realized that the insertions occurred rhythmically and precisely every ten houses. I started wondering why and discovered, with some discomfort, that these newer houses are scabs, new tissue that had healed over the wounds inflicted by an aerial bombing attack during the Second World War. ‘War levels the cities in much more than the physical sense; it reduces its multilayered complexity of meaning to one-layered tableaux.’ 2 Beyond the limits of its intricate physical reality, the city fragments become reference points, symbols that define the identity of the place and give it its character but also, and most importantly, create a symbolic link with the inhabitants, the citizens of the place. It is this symbolic connection that evokes a feeling of belonging, of ownership, of understanding that corresponds to our vision of what is real and as such represents the city itself. During the Second World War, Winston Churchill realised that St Paul’s Cathedral, whose silhouette dominated London’s skyline at the time, symbolically represented London itself and through it the spirit and pride of Britain. Surveillance crews were on 24-hour watch to put out any fire that started on or near it, and although severely damaged, St Paul’s Cathedral survived the German bombings. While the whole city was rubble and dust, St. Paul’s dome could be seen from the distance standing in the smoke, and Londoners felt that in spite of all the damage the city was still standing. War is a cultural entity, a universal phenomenon whose form and scope varies but never the less repeats. Destruction has been a constant element in human history as if it was just an unavoidable component of human nature. In 1920 Sigmund Freud described ‘death instinct’ as a compulsion, a ‘compelling aspiration’, a need (concious or unconcious) leading towards death, destruction and forgetfulness. It is the product of the constant human struggle between two opposites, Eros and Thanatos : the former looking for creativity, harmony, sexual connection, self preservation – life; the latter looking for aggression, repetition, disruption, self-destruction – death. He felt that the ‘compulsive repetition’ of certain patterns of human behaviour was, in a way, inevitable. Although the instinctive nature of this concept is questionable, its repetitiveness can be taken for certain as human history can be described by an infinite cycle of destruction and renewal. As human nature balances life and death, inevitably cities will be destroyed and rebuilt, scars and scabs will appear and the question of reconstruction will always be faced by the double necessity of remembering and the struggle to forget; governments will be replaced, boundaries will move, countries will change names but the cities will remain as the true palimpsests of history. C
1 Phelan, Peggy. ‘Building the Life Drive: Architecture as Repetition’. Herzog and De Meuron: Natural History . Philip Ursprung, editor. Baden: Lars Müller Publishers, 1999 2 Woods, Lebbeus. Architecture and War. Pamphlet Architecture 15 . Princeton Architectural Press, 1993.
Ruth Alejandra Mora Izturriaga is a Venezuelan architect who came to Canada to do an MArch at University of Toronto. She founded Sumo Project in 2006 as a private multidisciplinary design/ research practice, and currently works for Stantec Architecture Toronto.
58 On Site review 22: WAR
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