A really lovely issue about museums and archives, from so small they occupy a small room, to museums that try to contain whole cultures.
culture urbanism architecture landscape photography research on site
$12 display until may 2009
20 onsite 20: are archives, galleries and museums important?
will the vast collections on the web soon make such buildings obsolete? is the museum still the cabinet of curiosities, or is it the cultural equivalent of the seed bank?
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archives and museums
I have long thought that architecture is a material archive of the social, political and cultural conditions of its making. Reading the built environment as an archive of embarrassingly naive impulse to shockingly cynical thought clearly comes out of all that textual work we laboured over in the 1990s. It still stands us in good stead. However, the magical archives of my memory are quite different: 1959: the old Provincial Museum in Victoria when it was at one end of that Victorian pile of granite that is the Parliament Buildings, where a stuffed albatross hung in the main staircase. We took down a bird skull we’d found on the beach below our house on Portage Inlet. An old fellow patiently pulled tray after tray of bird skulls out of a long wall of thin flat drawers so that two little kids could learn how to identify their little grebe skull. 1967: the UBC Anthropology Museum when it was in the north end of that ugly pile of granite that was the Main Library. You got to it through the Fine Arts Gallery, through a narrow door and into a vast, dark, completely magical cavern of totems, statues, lumber, fetishes, cabinets stacked in front of cabinets, tight pathways winding through what felt like an auctioneer’s storeroom. Nothing then was ever interpreted , there was no textual space between you and the thing; there was just you, generally ignorant, and the thing, generally mute. Marvellous. A coup de foudre .
the Katsu Kaishu musseum in Tokyo: the obsessive side of archives. see Steve Chodoriwsky’s article on page 40
contents
Farid Noufaily Neeraj Bhatia Farid Noufaily and Gregory M Perkins Michael Summerton Dominique Hurth + Ciarán Walsh Tonkao Panin Jordan Ellis Miriam Jordan + Julian Haladyn Matt Williams Gerald Forseth Joseph Masco Steve Chodoriwsky Gregory Beck Rubin + Conrad Dueck Jaclyn H Jones Jennifer VanderBurgh Matthew Woodruff
House of Reconciliation, Beirut, Lebanon Symbolic Public Form and the Library
this issue is dedicated to D. O. D.
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The Metropolitan Inforgraphic Centre, Mexico City Kwame Nkrumah Memorial Park, Accra, Ghana Werkbundarchive Museum Der Dinge, Berlin Corrado Feroci’s Museum, Bangkok, Thailand Musée Rodin, Paris Theatre-Museu Dalí, Figueres, Spain The Fauves in Collioure, France Samarkand, Uzbekistan The Titan Missile Museum, Sahuarita, Arizona Katsu Kaishu Museum, Tokyo South Point Douglas, Winnipeg, Manitoba The Black World History Museum, St Louis Missouri Home Movies Measured Architecture, Vancouver Four Museums: New York, Kanazawa, Tokyo Speaking Surfaces: Dura-Europas, Florence, Foligno Glass Pavilion, Toledo Museum of Art, Ohio Ara Pacis Museum, Rome Museum Insel Hombroich, Neuss, Germany Museum Millenial Exhibition Strategies The Irving House, New Westminster, BC Fort Macleod, Alberta The Design Exchange, Toronto Anchor Archive Zine Library, Halifax, Nova Scotia Cinema Skarpa, Warsaw Real Jardim Botânico, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil Books Qana, Lebanon
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Dwayne Smyth Mark Baechler Dru McKeown Peter Osborne Aisling O’Connor Jana Macalik Tanya Southcott Michael Leeb Zahra Ebrahim Crystal Melville Ella Chmielewska Mariana Mogilevich Stephanie White Jamelie Hassan masthead
Nicole Dextras Jen VanderBurgh
Front Cover: Toronto Island, 2007 Back Cover: Home Movies
Canada Council Grant for Literary and Arts Magazines The University of Edinburgh Schools of Architecture, Cultural Studies and Scottish Studies Government of Canada Canadian Heritage program for Postal Assistance to Publications
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house of reconciliation the metamorphosis of beirut city centre building projects | beirut lebanon by farid noufaily war modernism reclamation representation truth
The signing of the Ta’if Agreement on 22 October 1989 marked the beginning of the end of the Lebanese Civil War that had raged since 1975. The war ended in March 1991, when the new Leba- nese Parliament enacted the General Amnesty Law, which stated that there were to be no victors and no victims in the war ( la ghalib le maghlub ). Unfortunately, this law allowed the Lebanese people to turn a blind eye to the ugly truths of the war and ushered in an era of uneasy silence in Lebanon, where no word is uttered, no acknowledgement nor responsibility is taken by anyone surrounding the desperate events of the past 33 years. Today, as Lebanon’s political battle for independence and a unified national identity continues, the government still hasn’t supported the public in breaking the silence. I believe that this legislated lack of collective/public self-expression has rendered both the local and the diaspora populations incapable of reconciling with their traumatic past. Though public confessions, art, film and novels have begun to facilitate some discourse, architecture’s role will be to gather, catalyse, and give voice to the countless victims of the war. The rehabilitation of Beirut City Centre Building (CCB) is an architectural proposal to breach the silence.
A failed attempt at modernism... A sinister sniper point along the infamous Green Line... An impromptu brothel during the civil war... A failed retrofit by the Ministry of Finance in 1992... A venue for illegal raves in the mid 1990s... Slated for demolition in 2003... These are but a few of the many different incarnations of the former Beirut CCB which stands just south of Place des Martyrs
and is the only remaining ruin in the centre of Solidère’s newly- restored Beirut Central District. Referred to by locals as the bubble, the soap, the blob or, most often, the egg, the ovoid CCB was cursed by the misfortune of being at the exact geographic centre of the civil war, and has been blackened by neglect ever since the war ended. Even in ruins, the 6,000 m 2 building remains a remarkable surviving icon from Beirut’s golden age of Modernist architecture.
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opposite: north face of theatre shell and second floor this page clockwise from left: rendering of Centre Urbain by Joseph P. Karam, Al Mouhandess , no.11 April 1968 (courtesy of Bernard Khoury) Beirut City Centre Building taken during the second half of the war. The patina of the shell’s surface is due to weathering, direct exposure to fire and bullets.
Karam’s vision was never completed; only part of his original proposal had been built when the war broke out in 1975 — two floors of the base in Block 2, the cinema and one tower. The CCB’s adjacency to the Place des Martyrs, as well as its unique shape, made it a prime target for heavy shelling during the war. After 17 years and many failed renovation proposals, today’s CCB sits vacant, guarded and inaccessible.
Lebanese architect Joseph Philippe Karam designed the CCB in 1965. The urban complex was planned as three blocks: Block 1 would contain five underground floors (total 22,500 m 2 ) for car parking and a taxi service station; Block 2 would be three floors with 144 retail shops, a 1000 m 2 supermarket, a 900-seat cinema, a restaurant and a snack bar; and Block 3 was to be three mixed- use towers with eight, twelve, and 21 floors respectively — a wide range of commercial services under one roof.
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CCB promised, as did all modernist architecture, a rational future of increasing peace, prosperity and social justice. History betrayed this promise, and the CCB instead became a powerful symbol of the impotence of modernisation when confronted with unresolved social and ethnic conflicts from the past. The New CCB, proposed here, can be a symbol of national unity through the rebuilding and re-appropriation of what was once a potent symbol of a rational future. The surviving elements of the ruin
will be incorporated into the new building. The plan makes use of the remains of the original, housing the many program elements required to address new roles for the building: archive space, both digital and material, indoor and outdoor exhibition space as well as artist residences and state-of-the-art meeting and research spaces. All of these surround the most important space of all, the space of the voice , where citizens are invited to share their account, experiences and opinions of the civil war. The New CCB will stand
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opposite, top: north/south section of the new CCB middle: plans of the top, ground, first and sixth floors bottom: experiential section of the new CCB this page, top: aerial of Beirut City Centre along with a cropped rendered aerial of the new City Centre Build- ing on Place des Martyrs. above: view from the adjacent Mouhamad Ali Mosque looking back at the new CCB
as a beacon – a place for reconciliation of the past and discussions for the future. The new program begins at the datum of the city street (the present), descends through the strata of the city’s layers to the space of dialogue, memory, and recollection (the past) and finally rises to the commanding contemplative view of the city (the future).
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the present: the living monument By implementing a non monumental program that is part of the everyday life of the city, the New CCB will become a living monument that not only commemorates the history of the civil war, but also celebrates the present. Visitors are free to wander onto the premises of the New CCB directly from the redesigned Place des Martyrs. The various pavilions provide access to the restored theatre (the egg), a café, residential and commercial floors above, and a nightclub. A bus and taxi station south of the CCB will again centralise the transportation network that once ran so actively through Place des Martyrs. the past: the descent to reconciliation Below the level of the city lies the ruins and origins of Lebanon. Descending into this void brings one closer to not only the original level of the historic city, but to something sacred. The archives containing the collective memories and voices of the citizens, both patriot and expatriate, are located in the lowest levels, where they are protected from the current unstable and uncertain present. This imagery is not unlike our own escape to the chthonic origins of our hearts, depicted in our escape to the safety of the underground in times of war. Here, the archives frame the Space of the Voice. It is in this space, where whispers echo, that the voices of all Lebanese – regardless of nationality and sect – are heard. Here, the three shared languages – Arabic, French, and English – resonate in the space, and blend, as if one dialogue. the future: truth and reconciliation archive centre (TRAC) The archive itself, though effective at storing and encouraging dialogue, is only one step in mastering the past and imagining a bright future for the Lebanese people. The ascent from the sacred darkness is equally important. An elevator links the Space of the Voice (at the archive level) with the privileged Research Level. Perched high above the city, researchers, builders and planners of the future city can cast their gaze from the mountains to the horizon, and to the city in between. The New CCB will not only become the Space of the Voice amidst a landscape of silence, but a hub for conducting research and promoting art. By gathering, in a single place, a wide range of works and research dealing with the civil war in many media, Lebanon can begin to articulate a unified voice. Rebuilding the CCB will be more than simply revitalising part of Lebanon’s dark past. As its ruins reflect the mindset of a people long ago, its new form will allow for the re-imagination of a unified people and a unified Lebanon. ~ this page, top to bottom: sunken entrance to the supermarket just west of the theatre ‘egg’ view east into Space of the Voice . The entrance bridges to the sacred interview chambers can be seen below. view west into Space of the Voice . the CCB during a moment of celebration. The surface of the new tower serves as a backdrop to the projections of the events. opposite, top: view down Place des Martyrs towards the new CCB bottom: the new CCB as seen from above by an approaching helicopter
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symbolic public form and the library vers pluralisme
typologies | the library by neeraj bhatia
centricity democracy collectivity monuments symbolic form
Often referred to as a centric type, early libraries were modelled after the ideal human mind 1 , symbolically ordered by a circular plan and unified by a central dome. Christopher Wren’s alternate plan for Trinity College (1676) was the first documented centric library: the circular form was carved from the centre of a cube. An interior colonnade provided a second structural skin to house the books – synthesising information on the architectural container; a monumental reading room centred this ordered universe, indicating the importance of scholarship. Herman Korb’s Wolfenbuttel Library (1710) was the first realised centric type: an elliptical reading room was set within a golden section 2 ; collections were incorporated into the elliptical walls. The major elements of the library – books, readers and staff, co-existed under a uniting dome, in a single symbolic space of collective scholarship. This fixation on maintaining an unobstructed symbolic space, however, allowed little room for storage, administration or growth of the collection. This was both the beauty and failure of the centric type – it bestowed greater importance to the library’s symbolic role than to its functioning.
Whether individual or communal, an archive exists to protect information and entrust it to our successors. Not only does this make the archive inherently public, it places an unassailable faith in knowledge as a precursor to progress. It is no wonder that the free-standing library – an architectural type that archives knowledge – emerged during the Age of the Enlightenment. Over the past three centuries, two variations of the original typology emerged that offer clues for how to address the contemporary library – an institution that is losing its spatial information while existing as a rare vestige of collective space in the liberal pluralist city. Centric Unity during the Enlightenment The age of the Enlightenment was characterised by countless scientific discoveries inspiring (and inspired by) a belief in fixed, objective patterns that are discoverable through reason. Glorification of reason promoted new forms of equality under the pretence that all humans have an identical capacity for reason. With freedom and democracy emerging as primary values in society, the library was liberated from hegemonic control and became a freestanding symbol for knowledge and reason.
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onto its symbolic form, the typology eventually segregated books from reading 7 – books were housed in below-grade storage or in structures adjacent to the domed reading room. 8 The library was now an accumulation of parts rather than a singular monumental space. More precisely, the library needed to be an accumulation of parts to maintain the single monumental space. Segregated Flexibility and the Loss of the Symbol Diverse and extensive library collections in the early twentieth century created rigid subject boundaries that tended towards specialisation. The notion of a single library that contained the universality of knowledge was replaced with subject-specific rooms, 9 the final loss of the symbolic monument within the library — ‘the sequential arrangement of books led to subject partitioning which undermined the symbolic value of the library as social signifier, whilst, admittedly, improving its usefulness. It was a victory of functionalism over meaning’. 10 opposite 1: Radcliffe Camera Library (Oxford): an example of a cen- trically planned library. (Creative Commons. Uploaded by Fabbio on August 17, 2006. www.flickr.com/photos/fabiovenni/217723216/ accessed: August 10, 2008) opposite 2: Asplund’s Stockholm Library (1928), a late example of a segregated centric type. (Altered by N.Bhatia. Original Image: Creative Commons. Uploaded by Toggan. http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Stockholms_stadsbibli- oteks_entré_mot_Sveavägen.JPG. Accessed: September 25, 2008). below: Comparison of architecture, information and scholarship in the centrically planned library, the segregated library and the trading floor typology. (drawn by Neeraj Bhatia)
Romanticism and Collapsing Unity The counter-Enlightenment, Romanticism, embraced
irreconcilability and subjectivity, signalling an emergent pluralism. Instead of being universally grounded, new ‘truths’ were believed to emerge from a debate of personal viewpoints. 3 Concurrently with the rise of pluralism were technological improvements to the production of information that crippled the centric library. Between 1800 and 1820 the foot-operated cylinder, mechanical steam and metal press came into operation, 4 resulting in vast increases to the number of volumes available to libraries. Most importantly, information contained within these volumes now allowed for competing ideas. The novel, often focussed on an individualised sense of selfhood, was surfacing in literature. 5 Authorship, for the first time, was liberated through individual identity, reaffirming the rise of pluralism. 6 As books proliferated, they colonised the open reading room like spokes on a wheel. The circular form contains a finite amount of wall space that was not easily extended without the addition of new forms. Incapacitated by expansion and desperate to hold
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below: Comparison of the trading floor and centric type in terms of expansion. The flexibility attained in modern libraries comes from disconnecting information from the architectural container. (drawn by Neeraj Bhatia)
Symbolic Public Form
Continued segregation created a labyrinthine library hidden from public view; expandability became a primary design criterion. As the classical orders that often accompanied centric libraries were now considered static, thus librarians and modernists ran with the belief that a new flexibility of subject must be accompanied by a diversification of style. What resulted was a library with a generic floor plate that allowed change. Library programs were then ‘zoned’ into this neutral backdrop and wrapped by diverse containers that were free from the burden of storing information. Zoning the floor-plate reduced the hierarchy between library elements, creating a more egalitarian space, corresponding to an eventual emphasis placed on libraries as ‘democratic agents’ during the Cold War. However, the flexible ‘trading-floor’ library first appeared during the 1920s and 30s: Alvar Aalto’s library at Viipuri of 1927 was one of the first modern movement libraries. 11 This library was organised through interconnecting spaces contained within a single volume. Casual reading rooms could be transformed into other programs while remaining both secluded and linked. While no one space was grand, smaller rooms were synthesised into a larger gesture. Although growth and flexibility were possible once information was liberated from the architectural container, this came at the cost of a reduced symbolic presence of the library in the city. Ultimately, the modern library has lost its ability to “speak” as a unified civic monument as its function requires plurality: Increasing specialisation and a rejection of the imperial narrative led to a more fragmented and organic architecture. The domed, circular reading room implies a knowable world, centered, finite and complete, viewed from a single privileged point. With Modernism and Post-Modernism that confidence broke down. Hans Scharoun’s free-flowing Berlin library, begun in 1967, was a reaction to Prussian and Nazi stolidity, and to the symmetrical perfection of earlier libraries; his is a new world view of books as liberating, not containing, of text opening up new perspectives. 12 As information becomes increasingly non-spatially bound, perhaps the primary role of the contemporary library is no longer archival, but rather a return to a symbolic space of our dwindling collective values.
The last function of architecture will be to create symbolic spaces responding to the persistent envy of the collectivity. –Rem Koolhaas 13 Adolf Loos’ attack on subjective ornament expressed in Ornament und Verbrechen (1908) questioned the nature of a ‘public’ building. For Loos, buildings needed to have an expressionless, neutral exterior to cater to all individuals. Within these neutral public façades, he designed expressive private interiors for each client. This separation of expression and neutrality could be the key to a new library typology. The centric and trading-floor typologies are the clearest in their motives; while the centric creates a strong symbol, the trading-floor acknowledges growth by disconnecting architecture and information. By hybridising these two types, one is left with a container that protects and contains symbolic form. While the architecture of the container must take a neutral (public) stance, within this neutrality, informational elements (i.e. book stacks, data servers, etc.) of strong symbolic form are placed. By separating, without compromising, symbolic form from architecture, architecture is able to stand as the neutral container of collective values while the symbolic form(s) proudly speak for our distinction. This duality is in fact the basic definition of human plurality. ~
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below: montage of symbolic spiral forms storing information set within a expressionless container.
Notes:
eighteenth century, and in a highly limited manner, that the author became legally recognized as the originator of his or her works (in England 1710; in France 1793; in Prussia 1794)’. (Hesse, Carla. ‘Books in Time’ in Geoffrey Nunberg, ed., The Future of the Book . Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. pp 21-36 (21).) 7 Examples include: Library of Congress (1897), Prussian State Library (1914), Stockholm Library (1928). Segregation in plan: British Museum, Bibliotheque Nationale. Segregation in section: Labrouste’s Bibliotheque St. Genevieve (1843-1851). 8 Despite this symbolic rupture, there were also many practical advantages to having books below grade; deliveries could be made with ease at road level and both temperature and humidity could be controlled with more accuracy than at higher levels. 9 Leopoldo Della Santa’s book Costruzion e del Regolamento di una Pubblica Uni- versal Biblioteca , published in 1816, was seminal in marking this separation between readers, books and staff. In his concept sketch for the new library, Della Santa excludes the large circular reading room as a prophecy of the modern library. 10 Edwards, Brian with Biddy Fisher. Libraries and Learning Resource Centres . Boston: Architectural Press, 2002. p14 11 Other examples include Sheffield Library (1958) and more recently Phoe- nix Central Library (1995) 12 Heathcote, Edwin. (2005). ‘A turn-up for the books’. Financial Times . (3) (June 10). 13 from Vidler, Anthony. ‘Books in Space: Tradition and Transparency in the Bibliothèque de France’ in Representations, No. 42, Special Issue: Future Libraries (Spring, 1993), University of California Press. pp 115-134
1 Edwards and Fisher state: ‘The text of the building and the text of the books within, shared a common ideal. The formal organization of architectural space and the space in the mind liberated by the power of the written word became symbolically united. It is this symbiosis which led to the domed reading room – itself a metaphor for the human brain’. (Edwards, Brian with Biddy Fisher. Libraries and Learning Resource Centres . Boston: Architectural Press, 2002. p9) 2 Examples of centrically planned libraries include Hawksmoor’s Radcliffe Camera Library at Oxford and William Chambers’ Buckingham House (1766-68). 3 It is for this reason that Isaiah Berlin affirms the legacy of the Enlighten- ment as monism and of Romanticism as pluralism. 4 Brawne, Michael. Libraries: Architecture and Equipment . New York: Praeger Publishers, 1970. 5 For instance, novels such as Richardson’s Pamela , Rousseau’s La Nouvelle Heloise and Goethe’s Werther’s Leiden , reflected a growing trend towards individuality. See: Goode, Luke. Jurgen Habermas: Democracy and the Public Sphere. Ann Arbor: Pluto Press, 2005. Habermas also acknowledged this shift towards subjectivity. See: Habermas, Jurgen. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989 [1962]. p49-50. 6 As stated by library scholar Carla Hesse: ‘Indeed, while the Renaissance elaborated a new discourse celebrating man as creator, a discourse, which contributed to the social elevation of the artist and the intellectual, it was not until the eighteenth century that the author was recognized in Western Europe as a legal entity. And even then s/he was not seen as the proper creator of his or her ideas, but rather as a handmaiden chosen by God for the revelation of divine truth. It was only slowly, over the course of the
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the metropolitan infographic centre Bridging Strata Mexico’s Arquine magazine launched their ninth annual interna- tional competition (2007) for the design of a Metropolitan Info- graphics Centre in the Plaza de las Tres Culturas in the Tlatelolco district of the Mexico City. The Infographics Centre will house both temporary exhibits and permanent collections ranging from pre-Columbian codices, to colonial and revolutionary cartograph- ic documents, to modern and contemporary infrastructural maps.
projects | collections tlateloco mexico by farid j noufaily + gregory mckay perkins
topography memorials markets plazas technology
This project was attractive to our team due to opportunities afforded by the rich historic and geographic context of the site. As it stands today, the ruins of an Aztec temple occupy the westernmost and lowest level of the site, the church of Santiago Tlatelolco and its adjoining monastery are to the south, adjacent and coplanar to the plaza, and surrounding the site to the north and east are the remnants of Mexico’s Modernist period with housing projects by, among others, the prominent Mexican architect Mario Pani, a student of Le Corbusier, and the former Foreign Ministry Tower by Pedro Ramirez Vazquez. Finally, the plaza proper is also the site of the 1968 Mexican Olympics student massacre. Research into the Aztec foundations of Mexico City with its infrastructure of canals, chinampas (floating farms) and markets revealed that Tlatelolco was the central marketplace of the Aztec empire. Tlatelolco was also the birthplace of modern day Mexico; it was here that the Aztecs made their last stand against Cortez and the Spanish conquistadors. The violent transformations of Spanish colonisation are architecturally embodied on the site by the destruction of the Aztec temples and the incorporation of their ruins into the colonial cathedral of Santiago Tlatelolco — it is a fascinating metamorphosis, akin to the Byzantine re-use of Greek and Roman ruins. On October 2nd, 1968 the Plaza de las Tres Culturas was the final destination of a student demonstration against a dictatorial Mexican régime. The demonstrators had been diverted from their intended staging grounds at the National Autonomous University by a strong military presence. Having paraded through the streets during the day, the student demonstrators gathered in the Plaza de las Tres Culturas, when they were surrounded by armoured cars and tanks. The police and military fired into the crowd, killing both student demonstrators and bystanders. Disputed accounts report between 200 and 3000 casualties (the range due to official and unofficial accounts and the removal of bodies in garbage trucks by the Mexican military to unknown burial sites). In 1993 a stele was erected in the plaza, memorialising the twenty officially-acknowledged victims of the massacre.
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opposite: site layers below: the plaza as an active urban space is a setpiece in the theatre of its surroundings.
This research presented several design strategies to support and amplify the immediate urban area of Tlatelolco: impromptu markets in the plaza can be formalised, the three levels of the site can be physically linked, and the historical and social significance of the plaza itself can be respected – any intervention should subsume itself into the infrastructure of the plaza. Instead of beginning the design process by establishing the location of the building program, the team first clarified the entrance to the plaza. The steps found along the south-east end of the plaza were extended across the entire east edge, increasing the accessibility of the plaza and more closely matching its scale of importance. Meanwhile, on the other side of the plaza we addressed the ambiguous access to the Aztec ruins. Though there is a well-lit circuitous pathway through the ruins there was no prominent entrance. Instead, tucked behind the cathedral along the east edge of the site was a small plaque and makeshift temporary stairs. Here was an opportunity for the museum to play an infrastructural role in providing a clear entrance to the ruins from the plaza. In addressing the significance of the plaza proper, both in the historical context and its day-to-day contribution to the city, we wrapped the perimeter of the plaza with a continuous and permeable canopy that both defines and activates its edge. This encourages the growth of the weekly local market that occurs in the plaza as well as seasonal festivals put on by the local community. Additionally, through its embedded photovoltaics, the canopy generates energy to drive the various digital and
hydrological systems envisioned for the Infographics Centre. At the centre of the plaza we expressed the Infographics Centre’s triple-height exhibition space as a monumental onyx clad extrusion surrounded by a reflecting pool which helps regulate the temperature of the plaza. This is both a means of acknowledging the memorial nature of the site as well as a means of diffusing that very solemnity by providing a cool, civic amenity during the day and a beacon at night, as the activities within the Infographic centre below illuminate the square above. Finally, we addressed the program of the Infographics Centre itself, located beneath the plaza. At the western edge of the reflecting pool, visitors descend from the plaza into a sunken forecourt immersed in vegetation and the sound of falling water. This offers a moment of quiet reprieve from the city above and provides a small oasis for gatherings and for staging events. Visitors enter the Infographics Centre through a passage defined by a wall of luminous niches that house digital displays and artefacts. The entrance to the ruins from the plaza is always open; the archive portion of the Infographics Centre can be closed without severing access to the Aztec level. Towards the end, on the right, the passage expands into expands into a triple height exhibition space. During the day, the translucent Mexican- onyx-clad gallery will be filled with a warm, diffused light. Here reproductions of codices and examples of early cartography hang suspended within the tall, light-filled volume. The large hall easily accommodates both rotating exhibits of public projects and artefacts on permanent display.
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Concealed behind the display wall is the scholars’ archive of precious original artefacts and documents. In contrast to the brightly lit exhibition space and active display wall, the archive is a serene space of reflection. The archive drawer-wall of this rich cavernous space derives its pattern from the traditional textile loom techniques of the Aztecs. The back of the display wall is divided into seven coves which serve as areas of quiet research. The archive is lit from above through the surface of the reflecting pool by seven light-wells representing the seven founding tribes of the Aztecs, creating a contemplative chamber characterised by a rippling soft light in which to study the treasures of the museum. Our strategy for the Metropolitan Infographics Center drew its inspiration not only from the day-to-day activity and experiential qualities of the architecture of the site, but also by culturally historic, geographic and contextual research. The design physically ties the different levels of the site, allowing the plaza to not only become a gathering place for the community, but also
a gateway to the ruins below. The Infographics Centre becomes a permanent piece of public infrastructure as well as drawing temporal connections through spatial relationships to recast the cultural perceptions of the plaza, and to form a distinctive urban centre in which to commemorate the past and celebrate the dreams of Mexico City’s collective future. Contemporary museum and archive projects favour the design of a showpiece building which dominates its surroundings, bringing prominence to its context not by its collection, but by its architectural mastery. Though such projects do bring prominence to the cities in which they are situated, this approach might not be appropriate to every site. The Infographics Centre project offers an alternative approach to the issues of contemporary museum design by addressing the urban design agenda as a primary motivation. Privileging the urban context can impact not only the touristic qualities of the urban surrounding, but also its daily life. ~
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opposite top: the dramatic and contemplative archive provides a protective environment for the study of original documents bottom: the exhibit hall is bathed in soft light from the onyx volume above and supports a range of curatorial possibilities. above top: the sunken forecourt entrance provides an inviting event space within the Plaza bottom: the perimeter canopy supports a range of active and passive programmes on the Plaza
Competition Team: Pooya Baktash, Farid Noufaily, Gregory Perkins, Geoff Thün, Kathy Velikov
At the 2007 Ciudad/City Conference, the jury awarded our project Third Prize amongst hundreds of international entries. The design was also featured along with the other winning schemes in a touring exhibition titled ‘Maps of the City: Locations’, curated by the publishers of Arquine , at the Architectural College at Abuascalientes, Monterrey, and UNAM during the month of February 2008.
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landscape | accra ghana by mike summerton
decolonisation memorials monuments ghana optimism
when I am President Kwame Nkrumah Memorial Park
In central Accra, in the same stately quarter as the grandiose and always empty Independence Square, past the road to Osu Castle where the president lives, and opposite the new national stadium, you should turn towards the Atlantic off 28th February Road before it becomes High Street and the city centre’s de facto main car park. There is a green garden with some strange shapes in it. Outside top Accra hotels a tranquil, maintained green space with flowering palms, firs and mahogany is a big deal. The Ghanaian capital is aggressively welcoming, and chock-full of mothers and children, animals, footballers, boxers, businessmen, preachers, and taxis and minivans full of them all. Even the cemeteries are full of dancing, singing mourners or folks sleeping off work or malaria. Here, though, birds swoop and wheel on the winds coming off the unseen ocean. Senegal coucals and pied crows. Somewhere in the trees there are peacocks – you can hear them. This garden, empty of people in the late afternoon, must be somewhere special.
Rather than bowl straight in, I shout “Hello! How are you?” to wake up the big woman in the small ticket hut. These encounters are usually fun. We compare the books we are reading. Mine an existentialist novella about a crime of passion, hers a get- rich-quick-through-prayer manual published by a pastor in Richmond, Virginia. We enjoy acting nonplussed at one another until eventually she sells me a ticket and photo-pass for the Kwame Nkrumah Memorial Park . At midnight on 6th March 1957, Kwame Nkrumah announced Ghana’s independence from colonial power, the first state in Africa to do so, and also created the country’s first public park. He chose the Old Polo Club in Accra, previously capital of the Gold Coast, to make his declaration that Ghana would ‘manage its own affairs’. The club had been the preserve of British colonials and closed to black people. The choice of location could not have had more resonance. My guide for the next hour or so was the museum’s manager, Stephen, whose commentary was nothing
if not rigorous. He immediately challenged my capacity for the interesting facts that he would share until he felt assured that I could take it all in. ‘I can tell your brain is not a paw-paw’ he said.
*
In 1972 the young Ghanaian architect Don Arthur was in London, having travelled from Moscow where he was pursuing his doctorate degree. Nkrumah, in exile since a coup in 1966, died in hospital in Bucharest, Romania where he was receiving cancer treatment. His body was then buried in Guinea where, in sympathy for the Pan-Africanism he espoused, he had been appointed co-president. Meanwhile, in London, African students gathered to mourn. Many of them had been educated abroad as a direct result of Nkrumah’s education reforms. Together, the African Students Union in London, amongst them Don Arthur, wrote and sent a memo to Guinea asking that the body of the late president be brought to Ghana at such time that the military
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opposite: Kwame Nkrumah bronze statue below: Stephen
government would denounce the coup. Thus the project for the Kwame Nkrumah Memorial Park was born, but it would be twenty years (1992) and two more coups before President Jerry Rawlings decided to commit to honouring the country’s first leader with a permanent memorial. Nkrumah’s coffin was exhumed (it had since been moved from Guinea to his hometown in rural Ghana) and Don Arthur, himself now a Minister was appointed as lead architect and landscape designer. Arthur re-read Nkrumah’s autobiography and focussed on four key facts: Nkrumah admired Gandhi and his non-violent philosophy; he was inspired by the French Revolution; and by the October Revolution in Russia; as an African he took pride in Egyptian civilisation, going so far as to marry an Egyptian, Fathia. Arthur then looked to prominent architecture in these diverse cultures and realised that with the exception of the Great Wall of China they contained the ‘seven wonders of the world’. He developed design principles based on the Taj Mahal in India,
the Eiffel Tower in France, the Pyramids of Egypt, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, the Alexander Tower and the Mausoleum for Lenin in Moscow. As events in his lifetime and surrounding his death had proved, Nkrumah, in the minds of his adherents at least, was a global figure deserving of a globally significant monument. The challenge was how to express this sense of monument in an architectural vocabulary that was fundamentally African. * On entering the park from the main gate, two reflective pools (a concept lifted from the Taj) lead you to a bronze statue of Nkrumah. These pools are fed by 2 rows of statues of kneeling pipers. These fountains were never actually on during any of the three visits I made researching this article: ‘Cutbacks’ said Stephen. ‘Broken’ said the ticket woman. Because the sound of the (hypothetical) water is carried by the south-west trade winds coming off the Atlantic, at the point at which you pass the last fountain the sound supposedly recedes and you are left in silence,
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archives and museums: On Site review 20
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On Site review 20: archives and museums
opposite, top: Kwame and Fathia Nkrumah Mausoleum bottom: Kwame Nkrumah Museum right: ‘Dr Kwame Nkrumah tabling the motion of destiny for independence at the Legislative Assembly (1953)’
intimate with Nkrumah’s statue in bronze. Some Ghanaians claim that he was so progressive in outlook that he lived 100 years ahead of his time. The distance from the main gate in to the grounds to Nkrumah’s statue, which is sited on the exact point that he made the announcement of independence, is measured at a hundred steps. Moving beyond the statue, the strangest shape of all is a truncated swoop in grey marble that reaches up about five storeys. This is the mausoleum and its design, like everything here, is significant. It is designed to evoke a tree stump. The tree has roots and needs water. These are important and perennial concepts in Africa. The trunk is solid but the branches have been chopped down in their prime. Nkrumah’s project was unfulfilled, cut short by the coup d’etat in 1966. One passes through the mausoleum, finished in kitsch Italian marble, containing the caskets of Nkrumah and Fathia, Nkrumah’s beloved wife. She was buried here just last year. ‘Chop. Chop. Chop’ Says Stephen (‘Eat. Eat. Eat’). ‘What can be said? Our women love to chop and they grow fat. Alas she died’. Beyond, across a dainty drawbridge, the museum itself is a semi- subterranean single-storey room, faced with a stunning white Modernist-Egyptian frieze dedicated to Fathia. The frieze, my favourite thing in the whole park, has a weird, timeless quality as it appears Soviet on first glance, but depicts traditional Ashanti symbols such as ‘Sanko Fa’ (returning to one’s roots) and circumspection (an elderly woman holding an egg representing the fragility of political power in a cleft stick), all in rigid hieroglyphic elevation. Inside the museum is a limited but stunning collection of black and white photos. They have the allure of snaps kept in a tin at the in-laws’, brought out to reminisce on family occasions. But these photos show Nkrumah with the pantheon of post-war political icons: standing stern-faced in a VW convertible on his release from Fort James prison in 1951; resplendent centre-frame in a white suit tabling the motion for independence in 1953; in the back of Kennedy’s limousine; at the UN with Krushchev; in tuxedo, quick-stepping with Queen Elizabeth; on a sofa with Fidel Castro; in three-piece tweed with Harold MacMillan; in Mao’s garden in traditional kente cloth; on the tarmac at Addis Ababa
airport with the tiny, doll-like Selassie; sharing a joke with Nasser, who handpicked Fathia as Nkrumah’s wife. However, Nkrumah is not one of those icons himself. I didn’t learn about him at secondary school. He wasn’t assassinated or killed in battle. He succumbed to prostate cancer in exile in 1972. However, he would hands down win the best supporting actor Oscar for post-war leaders. Nkrumah was the engine in developing a Pan-African consciousness and forging links between the developing world and the soviet bloc. I cannot think of any one other figure of the cold-war, post-colonial moment who achieved dialogue with such a range of world leaders. His moment in the sun, when highlife music set the tempo for an ambitious programme of public works and nation-building, couldn’t last. Ghana stoutly refused to capitulate to the neo- colonial pressure of the US – he steered the country towards communism. This led to a populist coup in 1966 and Nkrumah’s flight to Guinea. These days, a year on from the fiftieth anniversary celebrations of independence, there is in Ghana a warm nostalgia for Nkrumah, and I feel, having visited the museum, that he represents a lost era when politicians were creating a global consciousness based on alternative ideas and values and debate – things that technology now somehow flattens and stands in for. But what does the place mean for Ghanaians? Stephen tells me ‘this country’s reliance on aid and tourism is not what Nkrumah would have wanted. He wanted self-reliance for this country. He should be resting here after his hard life, but I think that he is not’. I’m sure that Stephen, an active member of the opposition NDC, is only half joking when he says ‘When I am President I will continue Nkrumah’s work – so that the branches can grow to their highest height’. ~
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archives | berlin by dominique hurth + ciarán walsh THE CHORUS OF THINGS werkbundarchiv museum der dinge
everyday life good design bad taste bauhaus werkbund
The Werkbundarchiv – Museum Der Dinge (Museum of Things) is on Oranienstrasse in the heart of Kreuzberg, Berlin. In a former factory building, it is spread over two floors – one floor for library and offices, the other a public museum. In its former home, under the cupola of the Martin-Gropius-Bau Museum , the Museum der Dinge existed only through its name, temporary installations and occasional off-site temporary events, ranging from ambulating persons with sandwich-boards advertising the museum, to a picnic session on artificial turf using the original Werkbund picnic boxes,
public things explained by Dingerklärer (thing explicators 1 ) or the sale of things through the so-called Wundertüten (wonder bags 2 ) in former sandwich-dispensers dispersed in the city. The Werkbundarchiv was created in 1973 to preserve the ideas and products of the German Werkbund , established in 1907 by several craftsmen and artists following the Arts and Crafts movement in England. The Werkbund merged crafts and mass- produced industrial design, supporting German industry through German qualities. It developed mass-produced modernist daily-
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life objects, and also values such as the appreciation of quality, materiality, good proportion, functionality and longevity. The aesthetic understanding of good taste and good design, for the Werkbund , was as much about being confronted by bad design and bad taste. The Werkbund was dissolved 1934 by the National-Socialists, along with its institutional product, the Bauhaus . Reinstated in 1950, again assembling architecture, urbanism, design and crafts, the Werkbund introduced the aesthetic of ‘good’ design to education: Werkbundkisten ( Werkbund boxes), given to pupils, showed thematised household products that were supposed to be held and arranged by the pupils themselves. The names of the designers and the production dates were absent. Such tools civilised good behaviour in the developing consumer society by favouring good design and good form as an ideal taste of post-war Germany. Today the Werkbundarchiv – Museum der Dinge has about 35,000 documents and 20,000 objects. It has collected high-quality designs from Werkbund or Bauhaus personalities and products from companies that joined the organisation, reflecting on the developed quality of mass-produced objects. It also examines the Werkbund in daily-life, contrasting elements of good ( Werkbund ) design alongside no-name or anonymous objects, hand-made objects, kitsch or trash products. Finally, it defines itself as ‘the museum of mass-produced objects from the twentieth century’. The Museum der Dinge demonstrated ingenious installations in previous exhibitions at the Martin-Gropius-Bau , situating a distinguished branding within Berlin’s museum tradition. Far from art-historical museums that proffer creator and date of
production tracing the product within a particular art-historical period, the Museum der Dinge follows thematic relations that are often disconcerting, focussing on the accumulation of objects instead of on the admiration of a single one. It plays with objects from an industrial context with everyday functions in the museum context, pushing unspectacular products into aesthetic displays, and realised installations. The chosen displays in the new museum location, representing only a small portion of the entire collection, separate themselves from usual curatorial strategies and focus on the accumulation of things, displayed in an un-aesthetic manner in huge wooden cabinets. * Displays in the narrow and lengthy space of the Museum der Dinge divide into several thematic parts: related methods or organisations, relations or correlations; objects connected directly with the history of the Werkbund and the status of commodities and produced goods in twentieth century German society; those which densely group assorted objects together based on a loose thematic typologies such as body-forms, nature, etc.); and temporary exhibitions and installations. For the first time visitor, it is often difficult to grasp the distinctions between different display zones, although after a slow wander amongst the museum’s claustrophobic arrangement of tall wood and glass cases, you do start to detect shifts in curatorial styles as deliberate rather than accidental. Objects representative of the historical discourses in Germany surrounding materiality and design, of which the Werkbund was a major contributor, range from crockery to furniture
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archives and museums: On Site review 20
from the early twentieth century when Werkbund was founded, through the second World War period, on to the technical and design innovations of the latter part of the post-War period and ending with the post-modern design styles of the 1980s. Nevertheless, many of the displays break from this vaguely chronological structure to contrast specific Werkbund products with mass-produced lambda goods; handcraft with industrial manufacture; high-designer names with no-name products: it shifts from specific German Werkbund products, to products that took influence from the Werkbund , to products that rejected modernist ideas: aesthetic commodities produced by company- members of the Werkbund . Werkbund -developed taste and aesthetics are challenged by kitsch and the modern use of the German old- tradition that also embraces Nazi products. Another curatorial section has such a sense of apparent material chaos that you can only assume the curators of the museum simply ran out of time after their methodical work on the first part of the museum – simply stashing all the remaining objects haphazardly onto the shelves the evening before the Museum’s opening. Or, you may suspect that a curatorial play is in operation, one which seeks to speak confidently because of, rather than in spite of, the looseness of display methodology. In fact methodology is not absent, but the viewer needs some theoretical help to decode the curatorial objectives as the accumulation of random objects introduce product culture unusual in the context of a museum space. This section includes objects from daily life reminding one of the inventory of an auction house, a laboratory, a folk history museum, antique shops or flea market boxes, sales from the back of trucks, attics, cabinet of curiosities or even some Pennyland (bargain-bin/discount) shops.
These presentations challenge the characteristic of things and thing-ness 3 . For example, there are collected artefacts based on the quality of the products, or because they all imitate another material; or they are based on aesthetic codes (for instance, a famous 1950s yellow-black pattern) or on the common material of some hand-made objects; there are those made for emergency situations (often related to historical or military contexts); those resembling body parts, made for the body or suggestive of the body from dolls, to corsets, to prostheses; those imitating reality but without functionality; souvenirs or physical media for memory-based culture; those based on specific functional categories such as leisure or religion; those based on popular culture images – Dürer’s praying hands, or Star Wars, or which are politically- and historically-representative. GDR (East German) products are also presented, either as mass-produced objects based on West-German products (copying, imitating or confrontationally mirroring products from capitalism) or with educational and often propaganda purposes.
*
In all exhibition displays, much like the Werkbundkisten sets, the names of the designers and producers are not given, the dating of the thing is rarely to be found, and the objects are not chronologically ordered. All the things use every single centimetre of the cases, reinforcing accumulation and the de-aestheticisation of the collection. If some things still retain their coded label from the inventory, no codes or guides have been made to help the viewer finding a way through the alleys: the presented artefacts are neither explained nor displayed in an attractive way. But, in
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