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contributors Tammy Allison Heather Betz Katherine Bourke Aleta Fowler Rafael Gomez Moriana Julian Haladyn Cynthia Hammond Peter Hargraves Armando Hashimoto

Thane Magelky Francesco Martire Roger Mullin Myron Nebozuk Tonkao Panin Markku Rainer Peltonen Greg Piccini

Darrel Ronald Surella Ségu Steve Smyth Tom Strickland Paul Whelan Stephanie White

Abdallah Jamal Miriam Jordan Florian Jungen Michael Leeb

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on| site issue 14 fall 2005

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temporary landing 2005 Katherine Bourke

L A N D Locating

Locating

Landing

3 an update...

1 Two citywalkers located in berlin, germany and yeong- ju, south korea walk the land - with questions, with an urgency to notice or per- haps create palimpsests of understanding and pleasure in the uncertain land between the inner urban core and its periphery. No, the thing that keeps com- ing back to me is TO LAND mostly in relation to arriving at an idea though walking. To land at an understanding of the the organically grown city via walking. To land in the outskirts of a city and land at another opinion of it... land and movement.

2 Land – Landlines – Upon landing

The thing that locates landing, the thing that I keep coming back to with this word is arriving at an idea, place and image through movement. Land... could we think of it as an idea, place or image arrived at via movement. The body moves, the mind thinks. Landing as with sensing - it isn’t fixed. It’s in between. Perhaps thinking of it as in between walk- ing and arriving and departing, thinking and speaking and writing, and seeing and imaging is helpful. What is left? A trace, a landline. Lines that reach outward. Lines that keep moving – The thing is we’ll always be landing. To see clearly and land for an instant – breathe – then back to the uncertainty.

a walker glances towards the building...

blue with sound, peach with light, green with breath, and rust with motion.

the mind rests upon and idea - landing - for a moment or two, before finding another temporary landing, colour and idea.

katherine bourke is a writer, photog- rapher and english teacher currently based in yeoung-ju south korea.

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tammy allison

tonkao panin

abdallah jamal

peter hargraves

aleta fowler

surella segú and armando hashimoto

cynthia hammond

julian haladyn | miriam jordan

greg piccini

francesco martire

stephanie white

paul whelan

katherine bourke

rafael gomez moriana

rainer markku peltonen

florian jungen

michael leeb

tom strickland

darrel ronald

thane magelky

contents : On Site 14 | architecture + land | fall 2005

1 2 3 4 7

10 12 16 20 22 25 29 32 35 36 40 42 46 48 50 53 56 57

Thane Magelky | northern site issues | Juneau, Alaska Tammy Allison | sculpture studio | Cape Dorset, Nunavut

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O n the morning of December 26, 2004, Tsunami waves struck a large number of coasts surrounding the Indian Ocean, affect- ing many countries, destroying both the built and the natural environments. Nearly a year has past, wounds have been healed, shelters have been rebuilt and communities have been reborn. Yet, the memories remain. The num- ber of places affected by this natural disaster is countless: rebuilding projects everywhere, no matter how different in the methods and the outcomes, have helped us understand our delicate relationship with the natural environ- ment as well as the way we see the world. Along the southern seaboard of Thailand, the provinces most affected are Phuket, Pang-Nga and Krabi, whose white-sanded coasts have a blend of beach resorts and local villages. The land around most beach resorts has been domesticated — resorts are located ‘without’ the natural environment. In the de- stroyed local villages where people depended upon oceanic natural resources, their shelters and communities were sited ‘within’ natural surroundings, united with the land and the sea in such a way that the villagers never saw themselves as capable of living elsewhere, nor do they desire to be anywhere else. Since the Tsunamis, this relationship with the natural environment has changed. Some, like the Morgans, the sea gypsies with no national- ity, cannot imagine themselves living inland. Others are not so sure that they want to go back to the same locations they once called home, nevertheless, most of the villagers were relocated. In rebuilding the land we belong Tonkao Panin

Finding a place Being relocated simply means that most villag- ers did not have a chance to choose loca- tions for their communities. Under Thai law, people can apply for legal title to a plot of land after 10 years of continuous use. In practice, very few succeed and millions of Thais live on what is technically public land. After those lands became inhabitable because of the Tsunamis, they were assigned to new places which mostly belong to the local Bud- dhist temples, schools, or were donated by both private and governmental sectors. In finding new homes for the villagers, two conflicting ideas emerged. On one hand, some authorities strongly urged that the locals needed to be returned to their previ- ous locations to make them feel at home, replicating what they once had, but now with additional Tsunami protection built around their communities. On the other hand, some authorities vehemently advocated completely new strategic locations, new types of commu- nities, new types of shelters and new kinds of environment: the planning of the community and the design of the houses would be done for the villagers. In other words, the solutions were to be either the immediate return to previous lives, or the invention of completely new ones. Perhaps neither the first nor the second will suffice. What is missing from the lives of the villagers is not only physical shelter, but also a sense of belonging.

Tsunami problems Most of the strategies were developed by local authorities with countless local and foreign organizations involved in the planning, designing and rebuilding. In some cases, the sense of urgency in the preparation of new lands to accommodate a whole village meant the bulldozing of woods and forests to create flat empty sites. In some other cases,exigency rebuilding of a whole community was trans- lated into a uniform layout where hundreds of houses are neatly lined along thoroughfares. This has destroyed the sense of cooperative community among the villagers. As for the design of the house itself, the urgent need for both temporary and permanent shelters as well as a very limited budget is sometimes transformed into a prototypical house with- out windows. So, despite the gracious aiding efforts and the great amount of resources, many of the rebuilding projects have become the constant reminder of what the locals have lost. Many projects succeeded in relocating and rebuilding communities within a very short period of time by dealing mainly with the provision of a large number of ‘individual’ houses. Authorities believed that as long as people have roofs over their heads, they will be satisfied. But the problems are far more sensitive than the provision of physical shel- ter. In similar houses all lined up in rows, the villagers’ already diminishing sense of identity was now lost. They are forced to ask: Where are we? Where are our families and neigh- bours? Who are next to us? How do we live? What will we do? And perhaps the most daunting question without any answers: Who are we?

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Kuraburi

When neither reinforcement nor cooperation really worked, many organizations began to shift their strategies. Emergency shelters were already installed; it was now time to build both the temporary and the perma- nent ones. Temporary in this sense means something that will sustain the lives of the villagers until they find their own ways, which may take months or years. Thus, the needs of each particular group of villagers must be taken into account. Close observation and sensitive interpretation of their needs became primary, to create both the necessary shelters and a sense of belonging. In villages such as Kuraburi, Pang-Nga, where 30 families needed to be relocated, temporary shelters were built within the existing woods. The new site was further from the previous one, but with familiar environment. The planning of the village was focused on the relationship between houses and communal spaces as well the natural surroundings — existing trees were the major factor in planning the com- munity so that the village seems as if it grew with the trees. Full of uncertainty and fear, simple activities such as meeting and talk- ing among themselves have become a great necessity for the villagers. Rather than lining them up in rows, the houses are clustered into small groups, with communal spaces as a fundamental element of the community. This simply allows each family to both own a house and belong to a community. With a sense of reassurance after their great loss, the community quickly adapts to the new village. Some people even begin to individualize their typical houses with humorous paintings.

Many aid organizations recognised this issue as soon as they arrived in the area and looked for solutions other than rows upon rows of similar houses on empty land. But the crucial question was: what do the villagers want? Looking for solutions How do we know what the locals want? So we simply ask them? In reality, it was not that simple for although the locals tradition- ally knew what was best for them, after the disaster everything changed. They were not so sure if they wanted to go back to the exact same lives or what would be best for them. Ways to solve this issue by local authorities were also divided into two opposite ap- proaches. Some believed that the best way to deal with the problem was to decide for the villagers. Both communities and houses were pre-designed and promptly built without knowing who were to live there. Others strongly urged that the people had to partici- pate and build their own communities, but because of uncertainty among the villagers, idealistic process of rebuilding communities did not yield satisfactory outcomes. During the early stages, the process of people par- ticipation failed because people did not want to participate; it was too early for them to do so. The reason was simple, they had just lost everything.

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Paktriam

Conclusion All rebuilding projects after the Tsunami disaster, no matter how different in the meth- ods and the outcomes, have confirmed that there exist factors by which the spatial and formal configurations of human shelters are determined. Human settlements were never determined by anyone’s will. But as much as the formations of places are shaped by rituals and habits, the nature of places could also condition human activities. Perhaps the re- lationship between rituals and the formation of places are reciprocal. With the problems that occurred, one learned that architectural creation is not a contingent marked by cause and effect for while architectural spaces and forms are shaped by pre-existing activities, it also conditions actions that follow. In the cases of the post-Tsunami reconstruction, the forms of both the shelters and the villages also prompt human social action and ritual within the places. Architectural forms could not respond to only physical requirements, but has to follow psychological factors as well. The role of the “architect,” in this sense, is very limited. Although a house or a village could be artistically composed, but in the end it remains a setting formed by specific needs and patterns of inhabitation. Human shelters cannot be considered as a void space and form that can be repeated after a certain type or model, but refers instead to the production of artifacts that reciprocates life and action according to different criteria and conditions. g Note: Both Paktriam and Kuraburi villages mentioned in this article are collaborative ef- forts between CARE and CASE Thailand.

In other villages such as Paktriam, Pang- Nga, prototypical houses gave rise to various alternate offspring that could be adjusted according to particular needs of each family. Basic modules of the house were introduced, but only to welcome subsequent adaptations. Only the basic architectural framework was given in order to allow multiple modifica- tions. As for the planning of the village, the layout was neither organic nor rigidly geometric. Houses would revolve around small communal spaces so the inhabitants feel the presence of others around them. Each of these communal spaces would in turn be woven into an intricate network of the whole village. In regard to existing natural elements of the place, both the sizes of com- munal spaces and the distances between each house must allow variations in the growth of the community. In this way, the village is neither a product of chance nor a product of imposing design. For almost a year now, various organizations have been working with great efforts to find possible solutions for the villagers. While those organizations would not stay in the area for long, the villagers will, thus everything done must allow the locals to live sustainable lives after the aids are gone.

Tonkao Panin: practicing architect, Bangkok and a member of the Faculty of Architecture, Silpakorn University, Bangkok.

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Land and Community Benny Farm Housing | Green Energy Utility, Montréal L’OEUF — Pearl, Poddubiuk Architectes

Florian Jungen

t he original development at Benny Farm was conceived in the ideal of providing modern, comfortable housing for veterans to reinte- grate into civic life. Its serpentine arrange- ment of three story brick buildings resulted in a uniform, loosely grained and small scale residential fabric surrounded by generous, if poorly defined, green spaces. The veterans successfully appropriated these spaces and developed a vibrant community over many decades until the original buildings, with their lack of elevators, could no longer sup- port the needs of the aging population. In 1992, partners at L’OEUF, Daniel Pearl and Mark Poddubiuk, countered CMHC’s plans to demolish much of the site with a proposal for extensive renovations and infill to be occupied by various neighbourhood housing co-ops. When the condo market in Montreal crashed after the sovereignty referendum in 1995, Canada Lands (the new owner of the property) was persuaded to re-examine its plans through a competition for the rede- velopment of the site. Though L’OEUF’s proposal was ultimately unsuccessful, their work was influential in promoting a mixture of new and renovated housing. L’OEUF today is realizing the construction and renovation of 187 new affordable apartments for some of the same neighbourhood co-ops which had supported their original proposal. A coopera- tive housing tradition where autonomously formed groups are assisted in representing their own needs directly to an architect, has been carefully fostered in Montreal over the past several decades.

Built in 1946/47 to house veterans return- ing from the Second World War, the 18 acre development at Benny Farm, in the west end of Montreal, remains one of the largest government housing projects to be undertaken in the history of the Canadian welfare state. By the early 1990’s, at a time when governments were engrossed with cutbacks, privatisation and economic liber- alisation, CMHC was ready to sell off the majority of the property for private condo development. Nearly 15 years later, Benny Farm is about to emerge revitalised, with 445 new and renovated units of sustainably built, afford- able housing being unveiled with buildings on different properties linked by a coopera- tive green energy infrastructure project.

Greening the Infrastruc- ture at Benny Farm has been given a Gold Holcim award (2005) for North America. These awards are con- ducted in partnership with the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology ETH Zurich, MIT, Tongji University, Shanghai, the University of São Paulo, Brazil; and the University of the Witwatersrand, Johan- nesburg. The universities define the evaluation criteria and lead the inde- pendent juries in five regions of the world. See the entire awards program at www.holci- mfoundation.org

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Renovating existing buildings at the site has interconnected ecological and social purpos- es for the designers. While re-use exploits existing material value and rediverts waste headed to landfill, it also promotes a sense of community continuity and takes value in the established social patterns of a neighbour- hood. The original bricks from demolished buildings are being reused in new construc- tion to help maintain the historical identity of Benny Farm as a large, continuous ensemble. The renovation of apartments originally built with vertically framed, solid, 2 1/4” thick plank walls and no additional insulation, in- volves temporary removal of the brick veneer and the application of an environmentally friendly foam insulation to the exterior of the wall. This strategy emphasises detailing for air tightness rather than high insulative value as the former is a more significant contribu- tor to heat loss in a building. All the new and renovated buildings are being outfitted with an array of sustainable environ- mental systems including geothermal heat exchange, hybrid glycol/electric solar power, air- and water-based heat recovery, grey-wa- ter and storm-water reuse, wetland treatment and sub-grade water-table recharge. These systems are conceived of in an integrated manner that addresses simultaneous ecologi- cal and social concerns. Geothermal heat exchange uses renewable energy to provide heating, cooling and domestic hot water and will drastically reduce production of green house gasses over the entire lifetime of the buildings, affecting a realm much greater than Benny Farm. The communal geother-

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The NDP’s amendment to the federal budget in the spring of 2005 will result in a $1.6 billion investment in affordable housing con- struction (with a dedicated fund for Aborigi- nal housing) across Canada over the next two years. Even in the short term however, this significant injection of cash leaves us with no vision for the sustained development and investment in housing. We can state with some optimism that as one of the many high quality projects to be completed in Montreal as part of a recent municipal initiative to provide 5000 new units of social housing, the redevelopment of Benny Farm sets a precedent for what may result from the convergence of a cultural and political commitment to the social and envi- ronmental welfare of the city. g

mal system at Benny Farm will transfer heat expelled from buildings or collected from thermal solar panels in the summer to soil 100m below the surface to be stored for use in heating during winter. As a direct benefit to the co-op residents, the system will also provide substantial savings in energy costs which can be directed to other needs. Link- ing buildings on four properties to the same geothermal borefield reduces the capital investment costs for individual co-ops and promotes community decision making in a neighbourhood with an established tradition of communal living. The non-profit green energy utility will be self-run by members of the coops themselves, with long term energy savings being reinvested back into the com- munity infrastructure systems. From the urban scale of the neighbourhood through to development of minute details of envelope construction, L’OEUF’s (L’Office de

l’Eclectisme Urbain et Fonctionnel) projects at Benny Farm link interrelate concerns for social, urban and environmental welfare. The underlying values carried through the proj- ects take sustainable building and sustainable community development as inseparable and complementary collective imperatives. While the overall redevelopment at Benny Farm demonstrates developments in social, urban and environmental concepts in Canadi- an architecture since the Second World War, it also reveals a lost commitment to social welfare by governments over the same period. Mark and Danny’s admirable tenacity in pursuing their convictions through thirteen years of thwarted plans, ignored proposals and unpaid efforts (acting as lobbyists and organisers as often as architects), also has to be seen as another reminder of the unsustain- able mode of providing affordable housing in this country.

Florian Jungen worked on Benny Farm projects as an intern at L’OEUF. He is currently involved in design and construction at Habitat Design in Calgary.

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g reektown in Toronto is an area that is often referred to in Canada and elsewhere as an ethnic ghetto. Ghettos, Little Italys, and Chinatowns are terms used to describe groups deemed to be different. These terms transform complex so- cial landscapes into simplistic, often polarized, divisions. They do not reflect the diverse ethnicities within a city and instead define political boundaries. In Greektown, street signs are in English and Greek, and blue and white Greek flags line the avenue. The ‘Taste of the Danforth’, a street festival hosting a ‘Greek Stage’ spon- sored by Government of Greece, draws from the animated fruit and vegetable stands and excellent Greek restaurants. Recently, non-Greek shops and restaurant have begun to open in the area. The architectural presence of one group, the Muslim community, appeared at first as store fronts on Danforth Avenue. The emergence of the Madina Masjid mosque, diagonally across the Donlands/Danforth inter- section from the historic Greek Orthodox Church, began as small architectural interventions in an existing building. The mosque has become the nexus of the Muslim commu- nity and its store fronts, securing their engagement with the festival and their migration west along Danforth be- yond Donlands. What can architecture, renovations and store fronts teach us the about the past and present relations between these two groups that terminology can not? Greektown no lon- ger seems to describe the complex organization of this civic landscape, perhaps it never did. c The Problem With Littletowns. Tom Strickland

top: Madina Masjid mosque bottom: Metamorfosis Tou Sotiros Greek Orthodox church

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top and bottom: simultaneously Danforth

Tom Strickland practiced architecture for 8 years in Toronto and Calgary. He is currently a graduate student at the School of Architecture, McGill University, where he is pursuing an M.Arch II degree in the Domestic Environments option. His research focuses on relations between contemporary hospital architecture, the body and social definitions. He received his BEDS and MArch from Dalhousie School of Architecture.

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Informal Implants | el cielo armando hashimoto · surella segú project realized with the sponsorship of FONCA

Chimalhuacán is a city on the east end of the metropolitan area of Mexico City that has been under demographic pressure due to a high immigra- tion rate. The mechanisms of informal urbanization are fully at play mak- ing clearly visible the stages from consolidation closer to the hill to initial settlements at the limit of the open sewage canal. Chimalhuacán is now and undifferentiated territory in continuous refor- mulation where scarcity of services, economic activity, public spaces and green open areas, render a dormitory city that, according to projections, will still grow 80% by the year 2020. The project here offers strategies that recognize the mechanisms of informal urbanisation and use them to operate effectively within the pre- existing conditions aforementioned. The interventions are never thought of as finite. The implants adapt to the existing structures and a symbiosis gets established between the possibility of housing growth and the need for more services. These points of departure have an influence on the ensuing development of the city, but they do not impose it. The decisions are more local than global.

There is no visualization of a final state other than an urbanism more catalytic and less regulatory.

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urban strategy: densification

Vertical densification would make the relationships between housing, transport and services more efficient. The array of activities possible within the pedestrian and bicycle range become more varied. It is the intention of the project to change the direction of growth from horizontal to vertical. vertical and horizontal mixed use The proposal introduces a series of programmed ‘multi-purpose implants’ on the third floor level. The implants provide services, public green areas and recreation facilities that are so much in need, achieving an overlap of social, economic and private activities that help build a sense of community. At the same time, densifica- tion is stimulated and its direction and rate of growth can be influenced.

initial positioning three variables were taken in account to determine the initial seeding points: distance between programs, distance from the streets considering their range of importance, and program compatibility. size size and number of implants are given by the number of people within the range of impact of each program.

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the multipurpose implant the attributes The implants have the following attributes: public space generator, services provider, independent entrance for upper floors, infra- structural node for upper levels, green open space provider.

untouchables The untouchables are the areas within the existing block that will be left open so that sun exposure is still possible for the lower floors. Nothing can be built on top of these selected open spaces. situation The multipurpose implants position themselves locally surrounding an untouchable. This will as- sure them to have direct sunlight for an adequate fulfillment of activities. The position also coincides with a possible entrance from street level.

structure The structure is a dual system. The primary structure takes advantage of the present condition by constructing a web of possibilities based on the existing structure of the houses. Only the portionthat is necessary for the specific posi- tion of the implant gets actually built. While it gets served by the existing, the primary structure also contributes by making the whole system more stable. The secondary structure is the ‘flexible’ adaptation device system that allows the implant to accommodate the variable ‘topographical’ situations on the block. green The provision of green space has two modalities: one makes the green part of the urban landscape by using the secondary structure as a trellis for climber species and the other generates green public space in close proximity to other service programs within the block.

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growth The dual structure system allows the implant to grow in any direc- tion and increment. starting points The implants are thought as start- ing points. They may transform, grow and/or mutate in the future according to pressures given by densification.

Armando Hashimoto, B.Arch from Instituto Tecnologico de Monterrey (ITESM), M.S. in Advanced Architectural Design at Columbia Univer- sity; Surella Segú, B.Arch (ITESM) and M.S. in Archi- tecture and Urban Design at Columbia University. Both are adjunct professors at Universidad Iberoameri- cana and Centro in design, film and television. Armando also teaches at Universidad Anahuac. They founded el cielo , an architecture, design and urban design practice in 2004, and are recipients of various fellowships such as Fulbright (NY) and the National Endowment for the Arts (Mexico).

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The pursuit of pleasure by the most efficient available means | the urbanism of Benidorm, Spain Rafael Gomez-Moriana

b enidorm is a city in southeastern Spain with an urban morphol- ogy that is highly unusual for Europe: it is a city of point towers. From a distance, it resembles an American downtown or a new Asian city, with hundreds of tall, slender buildings wedged between arid, semi- desert hills and sparkling sea. From the A-7 highway, which runs the entire length of the highly built-up Mediterranean coast of Spain from the French border to the southernmost tip of the Iberian peninsula, the apparition of Benidorm manages to produce surprise and confu- sion even after passing through much larger cities such as Barcelona and Valencia. Benidorm began to develop its urbanism of point towers in the 1960s, when it was transformed from a small fishing village into a major holiday destination for northern Europeans, and, significantly, when

the modernist high-rise apartment ‘slab’ was still de rigueur world- wide among architects, planners and mayors. Seen in this historical context, Benidorm prognosticates the demise of the modernist slab and the current growth of the point tower as the preferred form of high-rise residential construction. In the North American city—the very birthplace of the skyscrap- er—towers have generally contained office space; high-rise residential buildings more typically assume the form of slabs. It is only relatively recently that the residential point tower has become a commonplace in cities such as Toronto or Vancouver. But the emergence of point-tower housing has been even slower in Europe, where high-rise construction is culturally abhorred and where towers have historically been privi- leged, singular urban landmarks such as church steeples, defensive

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ramparts or noble families’ symbols of wealth and power—an idea to which an entire city of towers is an antithesis. So why, then, did Benidorm develop in the way that it did? In the context of the twentieth century, the slab and the tower can be seen to form dialectical opposites. The slab, ideally sited in a park, is representative of European academic modernism and CIAM urban- ism—Le Corbusier, in short—while the tower is associated with ‘vulgar’ commercial real-estate development–the stuff of Manhattan or Hong Kong. The slab speaks of welfare-state housing and utopian planning; the point tower of private-sector pragmatism.

Spain—especially agrarian, small-town provincial Spain—was cultur- ally isolated from the rest of the world during almost four decades of military dictatorship that lasted from 1939 to 1975. Could it be that Benidorm’s architects were perhaps more inspired by popular post- card images of American cities than by the teachings of the architec- tural modern movement? The construction of modern Benidorm was, for one thing, never a state-sponsored social housing project but rather a private-sector speculative venture. The point-tower became an established building type in Benidorm due to its high commercial viability and the views that this building type permits, even in a normative situation. Views matter especially in a tourism destination, and a city of slender towers permits more glimpses through the city and toward the surrounding

Interestingly, a lack of architectural pretension and a fascination for America are probably the reason for Benidorm’s aberrant urban form.

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landscape than a city of wall-like slabs. The modernist slab may exploit land efficiently, but not landscape —unless of course the slab is a relatively isolated occurrence in the manner of Le Corbusier’s stand- alone unités . Architecture is, of course, premised from the very outset on excep- tionality. Its values are resistant to the massification of ideas. As every architecture student learns, one must always ‘go against the grain’ and never design the very grain itself. As a mark of cultural distinction, architecture privileges the unique, isolated object; figure over ground. In Benidorm, there is no architecture: there is “the tallest building in Spain” which is also “the tallest hotel in Europe” (the Hotel Bali), but there are no buildings that stand out architecturally. Architectural guidebooks to Spain do not list any of its buildings, making Benidorm an exceptional city without exceptional buildings.

This generic quality permeates Benidorm’s urban fabric with per- fect consistency. The point towers contain mostly hotel rooms and vacation apartments inhabited by middle-class Britons, Germans, Scandinavians and Spaniards, such that the city effectively comprises a sort of modern Euro-space . In fact, Benidorm can be seen as a represen- tation in built form of one of the core values underpinning modern Europe: the right of every citizen to free time and leisure (Europeans are entitled by law to an average of six weeks per year of paid vacation time). Leisure is democratised and made affordable by the efficiency of the point tower type. It is no coincidence that Benidorm’s occupancy rates consistently outperform other holiday destinations in Spain whose tourist sector faces growing competition from cheaper eastern European destinations served by discount airlines.

Benidorm’s beach is the main public space, principal organising de- vice and raison d’être of the city. Streets are laid out in a quasi-gridiron

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pattern of small, compact urban blocks, providing walkable access to the beach as well as ground-level services, mainly in the form of small, family-owned shops, bars and restaurants. The point towers punctuate the air space above this densely built up, contiguous service ground- plane. Like most homes in Spain, Benidorm’s vacation apartments are relatively small, with bedrooms just barely large enough for a bed, side table and wardrobe. Spanish life is lived mostly outside the home in cafés, on streets and in plazas, and the Euro-space of Benidorm is no exception. In fact, the ‘Spanish’ and ‘urban’ lifestyle of Benidorm has been found to be one of its most important attractions, notwithstand- ing the prevalence of Irish pubs and lunch menus featuring steak and kidney pie. The evening paseo is an institution in Benidorm as much as it is in more traditional Spanish towns. In fact, with the exception of the point tower building type, the transformation of Benidorm from fishing village to tourist metropolis parallels Spanish tourism development in general, which has con-

sistently taken on the form of relatively compact urban extensions to historical towns or villages. The isolated, protected and all-inclusive resort complex is rare in Spain, which has always promoted its culture and lifestyle as part of the beach-tourism experience with slogans such as “Spain is different”. This blending of tourism with local culture has made tourism construction relatively indistinguishable from normal urbanisation. It is in fact often difficult to distinguish hotels from apartment buildings in Spain, were it not for signage. In the final analysis, and despite its unusual overall appearance, Benidorm is really not so different, then. Its density, the fine-grain of its ground plane, its public spaces and its walkability make it as much of a Mediterranean city as the traditional, more ‘charming’ fishing villages of postcards. Perhaps too much is made of high-rise versus low-rise development; of urban form as a determinant of urban life. If anything, Benidorm is more of a testament to the perseverance of culture in spite of the forms in which it is placed. g

Rafael Gómez-Moriana is the coordinating instructor of Carleton University’s Barcelona Studio, a thesis tutor in the UPC’s Metropolis Master’s Program, and a studio instructor with the Barcelona Architecture Center. He lives, together with his partner and daughter, in an eighteenth-century flat on a dark, narrow street in Barcelona’s Gothic quarter.

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Markku Rainer Peltonen Berlin Holocaust Memorial

i n May this year, almost exactly sixty years since the end of both the Second World War and the murderous Nazi regime, Berlin’s new Holocaust memorial was unveiled. It was attended by the German political elite and by guests from all over the world who gathered in the centre of the capital near to where Hitler committed suicide. During the event, many touching speeches were made on the great importance of the memorial, both for Germany and for Europe. Discussion of the Holocaust memorial has lasted for seventeen years. Lea Rosh, the main initiator of the project, says that this memorial to the six million murdered Jews in Europe is from the people in whose country the Holocaust was conceived. The memorial is a private project (i.e. not state driven) that remembers the incomprehensible tragedy and crime in the history of mankind which took place in most parts of twentieth century Europe. As this crime was organised in Berlin, it was regarded as appropriate that the memorial should be placed there, even though there had been a fierce debate within the German Parliament about this memorial, and the mayor of Berlin Diepgen was against it.

In 1994 the first open competition for the memorial was advertised. But after a public discussion and opposition from the then chancellor Helmut Kohl (despite his initial support) regarding the project’s monu- mentality, the competition was advertised a second time, this time for invited artists and architects only. The sculptor Richard Serra and the architect Peter Eisenman won first place. Soon after, Serra withdrew from the project, leaving Eisenman to continue with its realisation on his own. The memorial area — 19,000 square me- tres in all — is covered by 2,711 mutually combined stelae of different heights. Some trees have also been planted. As one can walk through this field of concrete stelae from all directions, it is left to each visitor to find their own way in and out of this vast complex. At first glance this reminds one of an old Jewish cemetery, and with its labyrinthine layout one could easily get lost. Under the stelae area is an information centre where, for example, one can learn about the particular fates of fifteen families of the Shoa.

After the inauguration ceremony the memo- rial was opened to the public, turning into a new tourist attraction in the centre of Berlin. It seems that many visitors were not worried about how to behave appropriately when looking at the field of stelae , including chil- dren playing and jumping from one pillar to the next. For Peter Eisenman this is no cause for concern, since, he says, the memorial has not been degined as a cemetery. The Holocaust memorial in Berlin manifests an important point in the discussion of the German past and it can be important in the fight against present day antisemitism in Ger- many and in Europe. The memorial does not mean an end of the discussion of this period of German history. It is Peter Eisenman’s firm conviction that this memorial to the missing Jews of Europe represents a new approach to memorials in that it should produce more questions about why and how the Shoah was able to happen. g

Rainer Markku Peltonen was born in Finland and has a Dipl.-Ing (architecture) from the Technical University of Berlin and an M.A. (americanistic) Free University of Berlin. He has worked in architectural planning offices in Peru, Germany, Finland, Greece, United Kingdom, as well as pursuing his own architectural planning activities. He lives in Berlin

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Current practices at the World Trade Centre site – official and informal – deploy conflicting conceptions of public memory and grieving. The destruction and recon- struction of the WTC is a topic that has been the subject of a wide array of often- contradictory perspectives in the popular, architectural and critical press, while the proposals for the site have stirred heated controversy over what and how architec- tural and artistic memorial practices should commemorate. Recent ad hoc memorial activity and material culture suggest a critique of that which is officially sanctioned at the contested palimpsest of ground zero. Palimpsest: The World Trade Centre and Informal Memorial Practice Cynthia Hammond

O n 10 September 2002, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey opened a viewing wall, around the site of the former World Trade Centre, for visitors to watch the reconstruction process. This fence replaced a much smaller viewing platform on Fulton Street, opened in December 2001. That simple wood construction incorpo- rated a ramp and plywood wall, on which visitors could write or leave notes, which they did in profusion. The Fulton Street platform was an inadequate, but empathetic buttress for the outpouring of response that otherwise had not had a home at the WTC since the days im- mediately following the event. Candlelight vigils, flowers, miniature shrines, twenty-four-hour sit-ins and thousands of photographs cre- ated an unprecedented atmosphere described by Peter Lucas as “social intimacy”. Just ten days after this collective and cumulative process began, authorities removed all the memorial materials at the WTC, purportedly because of heavy rains. With that divestment, clearance became the engine that has driven official activity at the site since. For Diana Balmori, one of the design collaborators for the new view- ing wall, actually a fence, visibility is part of New York’s construction traditions — a means by which the transformation of a site can claim democratic values through its viewability. Here, and crucially, the fence substitutes a scopophilia for democracy, and what is supplanted is the inevitably messy and fraught nature of grieving and self-examination.

Two kinds of signage are fixed to the fence. Large text and image panels, set well above eye level, engage the rhetoric of freedom, mar- tyrdom and resurrection to shape an ‘appropriate’ visitor response. Small didactic panels every few feet remind tourists and mourners not to write messages, climb, leave notes, objects, flowers, and so forth, on or near the fence. “Please understand all articles left behind must be removed”, says one, showing a generic human figure littering. “Trespassers will be prosecuted”, states another. Given the symbolic, political and international import of this location, and the remarkable flowering of informal memorial practices in the months following the fall of the towers, the number and banality of both types of panel underscore what visitors are actually being asked to rehearse onsite: compliant, patriotic citizenry. While it looks like a chain link fence, the Port Authority is correct in their naming: it is indeed a wall. Despite the prohibitions, visitors continue to act upon the site in ways that offer a different calibre of memory than that presented by official practice. On a trip to New York in May of this year, I walked around the perimeter of the new wall, noticing a palapable absence — not of the Twin Towers, but of the emotionally and politically rich detritus of photographs, flowers, wreaths, signs, and mementos that one might expect in such a location. I was struck by the sterility of presentation in the official panels and the constant exhortation to tourists and mourn- ers to behave themselves. One might take a picture, but not leave one.

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Detail from the same memorial, incorporating keychains, stickers with slogans, Manhattan skyline postcards and plastic flowers in plexiglass bubbles. Nearby, poems were written on a black-paint- ed hoarding wall, despite promises that they would be removed. The overwhelming theme was self-examination and a search for meaning. One was signed ‘by a New York Policeman’.

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Informal memo- rial incorporating an architectural drawing of the former World Trade Centre’s Twin Towers, at the intersection of hoarding wall and a pedestrian over- pass at Liberty and West Streets, May 2005.

But, the desire to mark the space, to communicate by leaving a subjec- tive trace upon it, cannot be entirely contained. There is a threshold where the WTC site meets the World Financial Centre, where a small corner of hoarding wall is visible and accessible to visitors making their way around the chain link. Despite its insignificant size, this corner, when I saw it, was replete with memorabilia. An architectural drawing of the Twin Towers was at the centre of this informal memo- rial corner. Passersby stopped to study the image, using it to discuss the structure, where people had worked, where the planes had made contact — the image served heuristically, as a means of helping people make sense of this place in relation to themselves, and to history. The informality of the location, and the arguably clichéd nature of the sentiments expressed (“ amplify love, dissipate hate” ) might explain what appears to be official response to such expressions: to excise and dis- pose of them. But for me, this corner was the only respository within the whole site that even began to express the complexity of 9/11 and its impact. A most telling detail: tucked almost out of sight between the plywood and the metal tubing of the scaffold, was a bottle of spray cleaner: someone maintains this very vulnerable collecting point of shared, but not homogeneous, memory. These actions and objects can be understood as a small interruption in the marshalling of triumphal sentiments at ground zero, suggesting that the site – despite concerted efforts to the contrary – is a palimp- sest, and the land it occupies is contested. The richness, contradiction and polyvalency of informal memorial practices at the WTC site reflect the emotional reason that ordinary people have exercised in this place since September 11, 2001. Could these practices have been a constitu- tive element in the conception and design process of both the new Freedom Tower and Reflecting Absence , the official memorial? These final designs lack both the compassionate invitation of the plywood at the Fulton Street platform and the longing, collectivity and spontaneity of the walls of memory that errupted onto and nearby the site immedi- ately after the disaster. The ‘official’ public has been given a frustratingly foreshortened role in the reconceptualization of the World Trade Centre site. But the other public, in attendance at and contributing to the site, has not. If the players involved in future memorial projects were to take Herbert Muschamp’s plea in 2001 that WTC site planners “not overlook the meaning of events as they unfold”, then they could do no better than to visit those informal sites of mourning and remembrance, and learn from the unfolding of complexity, contradiction and nuance that they offer. c Peter Lucas, ‘The Missing Person Photos’, in Public Sentiments: The Scholar and Feminist Online 2 , 1 (2003) The Barnard Centre for Research on Women <http://www.barnard.edu/sfonline/ps/printplu.htm>. Accessed June 12, 2005. Lower Manhattan Info, ‘New Viewing Wall Opens at WTC Site’ 10 Sept. 2002. <http://www.lowermanhattan.info/news/new_viewing_wall_opens_25086.asp>. Accessed July 10, 2005.

The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey’s “viewing wall” (designed in collaboration with the Lower Manhattan Develop- ment Corporation and a pro bono consultation group called New York New Visions), is made of chain link, is 1800 feet long and borders Church and Liberty Streets. It replaced the Fulton Street viewing platform, designed by by Diller + Scofido, Kevin Kennon, and the Rockwell Group.

Cynthia Hammond holds a SSHRC postdoctoral fellowship at the School of Architecture, McGill University. In addition to teaching art and architec- tural history, she maintains a visual art practice, through which she engages with questions of the built environ - ment and public inclusivity.

Herbert Muschamp uses this term in ‘The Commemorative Beauty of Tragic Wreckage’. New York Times 11 November 2001: AR37.

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