The architect's library: books, shelves, cases, collections, displays, exhibitions and READING.
46: travel spring 2025
ON SITE r e v i e w
audubon.org
Audubon’s interactive bird migration explorer https://explorer.audubon.org
World airline routes, mapped 2009 https://commons.wikimedia.org
Josullivan.59, 2009
of all kinds
ON SITE r e v i e w
On Site review is published by Field Notes Press, which promotes field work in matters architectural, cultural and spatial. field
46: travel spring 2025
notes
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ISSN 1481-8280 copyright: On Site review . All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopied, recorded or otherwise stored in a retrieval system without the prior consent of the publisher is an infringement of Copyright Law Chapter C-30, RSC1988.
Francis Towne, Castel Madama, above the River Aniene, near Tivoli, 1781. Pen and grey ink and watercolour, on laid paper with a fragmentary woatermark; signed dated and inscribed verso: CastelloMadamo/no,2./ April 22. 1781/ Light coming in from the right hand./Francis Towne. At auction at Sotheby’s 2021 Why do we travel? Is i to see new things? to rack up a gazillion photographs? to touch something elemental about unfamiliarity? to leave the quotidian behind for a while? What, historically, did travel bring to architecture? What do studios abroad, obligatory offerings for any self-respecting architecture school, bring to the study of architecture? Does travel always imply distance? Is travel a challenge or a pleasure? Is a challenge a pleasure? Is pleasure a challenge? Is there anything essentially imperialistic about travel? Is emigration travel or displacement? What does travel displace?
Each individual essay and all the images therein are also the copyright of each author.
back issues: www.onsitereview.ca editor: Stephanie White design: Black Dog Running printer: Kallen Printing, Calgary Alberta
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Peter Cook once titled a lecture: ‘I travel to find what I already know’. Is this the promise, or the danger, of travel?
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contributors and contents
introduction
2
some of the questions that underpin this issue
Rafael Gómez-Moriana
4
The Rise and Fall of Barcelona: from architectural tourism to touristic architecture
Tim Sharp
10
Dragons and Devils: Grunewald
David Murray
16
Travelling to Palladio: Vicenza and the Veneto
Janice Gurney
22
Rome in Pieces
Roger Mullin
26
The Travelling Conté Stick: not a touristic gaze at the north Atlantic
Vincent Yu-Xiu Giu
30
Travelling Landscapes: Chinese and English gardens of the eighteenth century
Tim Ingleby
34
‘The Island That Roofed The World’, Easedale, the Slate Islands, Scotland
Tricia Enns
40
Walking to the Dock: Vinalhaven, Maine
Anne O’Callaghan
42
Time and Place, Dublin Bay
Lesley McIntyre
46
Rediscovering Familiar Frontiers: the north coast of Northern Ireland
Stephanie White
53
Travel Lessons: ant ventures into the field
54
Travelling Theory: Edward Said on how and why ideas travel
Wayne Guy
56
Roads Are Not Places: from A to B
Call for articles
58
On Site review 47 : move slow and fix things
59
How students used to travel
covers
other travellers: bird migration routes in the Americas, world airline routes global whale migration routes, global shipping lanes 1750-2000
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the rise and fall of barcelona from architectural tourism to touristic architecture rafael gómez-moriana
spectacle accomodation opportunism protest
Gaudí’s heyday was in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when industry represented progress, and Barcelona proudly referred to itself as ‘the Manchester of the south’. The city held two international expositions during that period, one in 1888 and another in 1929, mainly to promote the latest industrial and architectural trends to the business and political elite. Mass tourism was not a thing in Spain until the 1960s, and then it was mainly of the sun, surf and sangría kind; not urban tourism. The elimination of trade barriers by Reagan and Thatcher in the early 1980s and the subsequent rise of globalisation finally shut down many of Barcelona’s factories, bringing to an end its industrial century. It was time to implement another economic activity. Today Barcelona is one of the most recognisable urban brands in the world, attracting over 12 million visitors annually. Whenever visiting tourists are asked in surveys what attracted them to Barcelona, 90% of respondents answer ‘the city’s architecture’, by which they really mean the work of Antoni Gaudí and his contemporaries. The rising popularity of Postmodern architecture in the 1980s led to the rediscovery of Gaudí. As a glimpse into any Barcelona souvenir shop will prove, Gaudí is the city’s main attraction, right up there with FC Barcelona. His exuberant buildings, which please crowds from every corner of the globe, made Barcelona into a busy destination for architectural tourism. Gaudí’s buildings, many of them residential, had to be restored and adapted for reuse as museum quality tourist attractions, a lengthy process that began in the late 1980s. Since then, visitor numbers to Gaudí sites have increased exponentially year after year. Casa Milà , the last project to be completed by Gaudí in his lifetime ( Sagrada Família is still incomplete), was transformed from a soot-covered apartment building with neon signs advertising a ground- floor shopping arcade into a museum with prestige office space to let. Bachelor pads that had been built in the attic in the 1960s by the architect Francisco Juan Barba Corsini were ripped out as part of the restoration effort; the attic now transformed into an exhibition space of models and furniture by Gaudí. Buildings by Modernista architects Lluís Domènech i Montaner and Josep Puig i Cadafalch were also renovated and transformed, and the German Pavilion by Mies van der Rohe and Lily Reich for the 1929 International Exposition was entirely reconstructed, opening in 1986.
Has anyone ever noticed how often the word visitor is used by architecture students and practitioners when referring to the human subject of a design project? As in: “the visitor enters the building here…” or “this is a space where the visitors...” It is of course not at all inappropriate to use visitor when the project in question is a museum, but the V -word is also used frequently when discussing residential projects. It’s as if the primary task of architecture were to impress onlookers. Why is it that, in our collective unconscious, the visitor is today’s ideal subject of architecture? Is the impermanence and transitoriness of the Deleuzian nomad fundamentally preferable to the rootedness of the Heideggerian dweller when it comes to architecture? To begin with, human travel of some sort or other is always necessary when interacting with buildings; their immobility requires us to travel to them. And when we travel to unfamiliar territory, we tend to be much more perceptive to our surroundings than when we are in our everyday environment, which tends to be taken for granted. Travel thus ultimately makes us much more sensitive to architecture, an art that values exceptionality and extraordinariness. As travellers, moreover, we inhabit space transitorily and impermanently, which liberates architecture from the pesky and often mundane demands of regular, everyday users. It would certainly seem, then, that architecture and tourists are ideally suited for one another; a marriage made in heaven. What could possibly go wrong? This must have been what the political leaders of Barcelona were thinking during the late 1970s and 80s, when democracy was returning to Spain and Barceloneses wanted nothing more than to turn a proverbial page after four decades of repressive dictatorial rule by General Franco. La Barcelona grisa (grey Barcelona as it was referred to then) needed to be transformed into something radically bright and new, and what better means to achieve this than hosting an Olympic Games to kick-start a metropolitan transformation from grimy industrial port to chic and glam tourist destination? Up to the 1980s, Barcelona was still an industrial city. Factories and smokestacks were everywhere, the city was covered in soot, and shantytowns occupied the city’s beaches and steep hillsides. The only tourists to be seen in the city before the 1992 Olympics were hippie backpackers and camera-clad Japanese aficionados of Gaudí, an architect who had fallen into relative obscurity since the rise of rationalist modernism.
facing page, clockwise from top left: Antoni Gaudí, Casa Milà rooftop chimneys. 1912 Antoni Gaudí, Sagrada Familia. 1882-present Jean Nouvel, Glòries Tower . 2005 Antoni Gaudí, Casa Milà. 1906-1912, cleaned in 1990
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all images Rafael Gòmez-Moriana
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all images Rafael Gòmez-Moriana
from the top: Barcelona Pavilion , Mies van der Rohe and Lily Reich, 1929 ; reconstruction, Ignasi de Solà-Morales, Cristian Cirici, and Fernando Ramos, 1986. Park Güell , Antoni Gaudí, 1914
opposite, from the top : DHUB Building , MBM, 2013 Mare Nostrum Tower , EMBT, 2005
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Barcelona’s rapidly growing architectural tourism eventually led its political and business leaders to pursue another program that would build, literally and figuratively, upon this success; a program which we could call ‘touristic architecture’. If there is such a growing demand to visit historic buildings that were never originally intended for tourists, then why not complement that with spectacular new works of architecture constructed as tourist attractions from the very outset? Indeed, the reconstruction of the German Pavilion from 1983 to 1986 by architects Ignasi de Solà-Morales, Cristian Cirici and Fernando Ramos, working for Barcelona City Council, can be seen as a project that straddles both architectural tourism and touristic architecture. The original pavilion had long been demolished, having stood for only a year; it nevertheless acquired a certain mythical status thanks to the circulation in print media of a series of grainy black and white photographs. The Barcelona Pavilion is one of only a handful of Modernist buildings to be entirely rebuilt from scratch for no other reason than its significance in architectural history. Whereas the original pavilion was designed as a temporary stand for an exposition, the reconstruction was designed to last over a century. The Barcelona Pavilion that stands today was moreover built as a tourist attraction. It was of course also an important reconstruction project of architectural-historical interest, but cultural tourism and the display of art history always go hand-in-hand. Indeed, even the original 1929 German pavilion was a tourist attraction of sorts: it was built for a world exposition with the intention of burnishing the image of post-WWI Germany. Officially, it is no longer called the German or the Barcelona Pavilion, but rather Pavelló Mies van der Rohe , in honour of the architect of the original structure. Barcelona’s architectural tourism sites consist of historic works. Some, such as the Cathedral or the basilica of Santa María del Mar have not changed use but nevertheless charge tourists nominal admission fees. Medieval Catalan Civil Gothic structures such as the Saló del Tinell or the Drassanes shipyard have been converted into museums; the City History Museum and the Maritime Museum respectively. The Modernista Art Nouveau era is represented by seven works by Gaudí ( Palau Güell , Cripta Güell , Park Güell , Casa Viçens , Casa Batlló , La Pedrera , and the yet to be completed expiatory temple of La Sagrada Família ), three by Lluís Domènech i Montaner ( Casa Morera , Hospital Sant Pau , and Palau de la Música Catalana ) and three by Josep Puig i Cadafalch ( Casa de les Puntxes , CaixaForum , and Casa Amatller ); works that underwent extensive restoration and adaptation. Barcelona’s touristic architecture, by contrast, consists of newly built works with tourism as their main program. These include, in addition to the already mentioned Pavelló Mies van der Rohe , the 1992 Olympic telecommunications tower by Norman Foster and the 2006 Glòries Tower by Jean Nouvel, two full-fledged tourist attractions requiring admission tickets. Other examples of touristic architecture are more subtly masked as museums or public markets, examples of which include the MACBA contemporary art museum by Richard Meier (1995), the Forum building by Herzog & de Meuron (2004), the Santa Caterina Market by EMBT (2006), the Design Museum of Barcelona by MBM (2008), Barcelona’s iconic flea market by B720 (2010), the Barcelona Film Institute by MAP (2010), and the bizarre MediaTIC office building by Cloud 9 (2010). These are all freestanding structures contrasting materially and formally with their surroundings, and often prominently sited at the ends of visual axes while featuring larger than usual public spaces to maximise visibility and handle tourist hordes.
all images Rafael Gòmez-Moriana
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It is one thing, of course, to capitalise on existing (or once- existent) heritage, and quite another to build future or pre- destined heritage anew. In his writings on the preservation of architectural heritage, Rem Koolhaas remarks: ‘through preservation’s ever-increasing ambitions, the time lag between new construction and the imperative to preserve has collapsed from two thousand years to almost nothing. From retrospective, preservation will soon become prospective’. Touristic architecture is an important component of today’s experience economy, in which non-material experiences rather than material goods are marketed. In an age in which consumers have already acquired an excess of material possessions, experiences are a growing focus of economic growth in which travel features prominently. Indeed, even many material goods – especially automobiles – are today marketed as experiences more than products. Before the invention of package holidays and mass-tourism, travel was a much more elite affair limited to the upper classes. It was the labour struggles of the early twentieth century that led to the adoption of weekends and holidays for all to enjoy. Is touristic architecture then a similar democratisation of architecture? It certainly offers up a novel form of architectural consumption; one that is affordable to most: the Barcelona Pavilion can be experienced for merely 8 €, the cost of a regular admission ticket. While touristic architecture erodes some of the elitism and snobbery often associated with architecture, in Barcelona it has contributed to the problem of over-tourism, which puts added strain on infrastructure while transforming the city’s commercial landscape, not to mention causing rents to rise very steeply. Barcelona’s many municipal markets, for example, were once known for selling the freshest foodstuffs, but today many are focused on ready-to-eat foods, a reflection of how businesses have veered toward the more profitable tourism market. The same thing with housing: short-term accommodation is ever more abundant while long-term rentals are in ever shorter supply. The rise in the cost of living has forced working and middle classes to move out of the city, leaving a city centre increasingly devoid of the everyday urban life it once had. It’s not just the private sector that caters to tourists before citizens. Barcelona’s current supposedly socialist city council is hell-bent on expanding the airport and hosting ever-more international events to promote Barcelona as a destination. There is a growing perception that planning decisions respond to the needs of the tourism industry rather than those of the local population. The city’s planning department has even developed a tourism dispersal strategy whereby new touristic architecture projects sited in disadvantaged outlying areas would take pressure off the overcrowded neighbourhoods containing tourist sites. City Council even began to promote visiting peripheral working class neighbourhoods as more authentic urban experiences.
from the top: Forum Building , Herzog & de Meuron, 2004 Media TIC Building , Cloud 9, 2010 Las Arenas Shopping Mall , Richard Rogers & Alonso Balaguer, 2011
all images Rafael Gómez-Moriana
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But the worst thing about touristic architecture is how outdated and cringe-worthy it appears today. The buildings reek of having tried too hard to impress and outdo one another. There is moreover no common thread between them other than their effort at being unique and contrasting sharply with tradition. Wherever several works of touristic architecture are clustered closely together, such as at Plaça de les Glories (a former manufacturing district converted into a media district in the 2000s), the result is a hodgepodge; an authentic clusterfuck, an architectural disaster area marketed as the new and modern Barcelona; and tourists eat it up like freeze-dried paella on Las Ramblas. This in a city that only a decade and a half earlier won a RIBA Gold Medal for its Olympic-era urban projects. In the context of today’s climate-emergency, touristic architecture comes across as a big part of the problem, as what largely got us into this mess today. Their structural gymnastics, often involving immense rhetorical cantilevers, consume much more concrete and steel than would otherwise be necessary. The idea of an economy of means, or beauty coming from simplicity, went completely amiss in this period of excess. The only redeeming quality of touristic architecture is serving as examples for how not to design. Barcelona’s successful tourism industry, built largely on an architectural foundation, has come increasingly under fire in recent years. Demonstrations demanding the degrowth of tourism are a regular occurrence, as is anti-tourism graffiti and even the dousing of tourists by watergun-wielding locals. There are now few places left in the city where locals can get away from tourist hordes. Indeed, one of the reasons Barcelonians are themselves travelling out of town more than ever is to escape from their over-touristified city: tourism as an antidote to tourism. Meanwhile, touristic architecture has travelled abroad as well, especially to China and the Gulf states. * In 2020, Fodor’s placed Barcelona on its ‘No List’ for the first time, doing so again in 2023 and 2025. But this has not served to lessen tourist numbers, which continue to grow year after year despite the physical limitation of having Europe’s highest urban density. Indeed, anti-tourism graffiti and demonstrations have themselves become highly sought Instagram backgrounds. Tourism’s ability to capitalise on anti-tourism surely makes it the ultimate form of capitalism. Perhaps this explains why young graduates from the city’s four architecture schools have been eschewing touristic architecture in favour of housing for some time now, resulting today in a wave of innovatively constructed cooperative and social housing projects that centre on livability, not visitability. Hopefully, these fascinating new residential buildings will not be museum-ised for visual enjoyment by tourists any time soon. £
all images Rafael Gómez-Moriana
clockwise from top: Barcelona Convention Centre , Josep Lluis Mateo, 2004 Hotel Vela , Ricardo Bofill, 2009 Santa Caterina Market , EMBT, 2005 Protest march against over-tourism, 2014
RAFAEL GÓMEZ-MORIANA runs the Barcelona term-abroad program for the University of Calgary School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape, and is a Spain correspondent for The
Architectural Review and Bauwelt. rafagomo.com @rafagomo
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berlin cold war intelligence gathering ruins
dragons and devils tim sharp
Tim Sharp
I don’t remember why I chose to approach Teufelsberg (Devil’s Hill) the way I did, probably it was the least number of changes on the suburban railway from where I was staying in Berlin. Anyway, I got off the train at Grunewald Station and slightly disoriented but curious, followed a sign to the ‘Platform 17 Memorial’. It turned out to be a memorial to the enormous number of Jewish inhabitants who were transported from this station between the autumn of 1941 and spring 1944. The single track runs between two platforms each with a wide rusted iron grid running its length. The platforms are edged with strips of iron sufficiently wide to contain the embossed dates, victim numbers and —if known— their destinations. Initially these were the Warsaw and Lodz ghettos, but includes later transports to Ravensburg / Sachenhausen, Theresienstadt, Auschwitz, Minsk and Riga. I walk down one side of the platform as it slowly becomes dark, the shadows of the overarching trees smearing the text like ink from those interminable administrative lists staining the platform edge. I am alone here and this adds to the impact. I walk the other side of the platform, then re-cross, returning slowly to my starting point. Because I’ve been concentrating on reading the engraved details, I’m slightly startled to find the figure of a young woman standing at the end/beginning of platform 17.
She is half turned, facing away from me. Her clothing, hair and demeanour are heavily biased towards a punk/Goth aesthetic —black T-shirt and jeans with a flock of shiny safety pins and looping chains. Her head is partially shaved, one hand holds a droopy black jacket. She is motionless. As I draw nearer I notice her biceps are tattooed, the same both sides: barbed wire. Her whole appearance resonates with the context and my mood. I’ve just decided to talk to her when a whole group of people appear. She waves as they converge. A few carry flags. They are from Israel and she is their guide. I decide I don’t want to engage with a crowd and flee in the direction of Devil’s Hill. It’s a slow uphill walk all the way. I take a wrong turning in fact, counting on the road veering to the left which it doesn’t. Instead I meet a walker coming towards me. He says I might as well keep going and take the road up over Dragon Hill, advice that instantly turns my little mistake into a medieval quest, and filling my mind’s eye with unreliable maps of unlikely lands with blank spaces filled with monsters. It is a short, steep climb onto a grass-covered plateau criss-crossed by well-trodden desire pathways. It also gives me the first view of my goal – the remains of the US-manned Field Station Berlin in the British sector.
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Tim Sharp
From this far away it appears to consist of a tower and a rectangular block each with a geodesic dome on top of it. Even from here, about a crow kilometre away, the dome on the tower looks like repeating hexagons, while the one on the block shows it is constructed of triangles forming, appropriately, interlocking pentagons. The fact that I can see the structure beneath the skin means that it must be made of some kind of fabric. I walk slowly towards them, letting the beaten path lead the way until it seems to set off in the wrong direction. Resisting the invitation to make the same mistake twice, I stumble down the steep side of the dragon and into the semi-dark woods, aware that historically, during the Cold War, I would likely be in what was the prohibited security zone surrounding the complex. There is a little used path though and happily the undergrowth is not dense enough to hinder, merely to temporarily deflect. It is uphill now, as it should be, and I’m wondering about whether I should try to make tracks for the service road for the installation when I come across what appears to be part of an obstacle course for commandos. It turns out to be more peaceful in nature – a sign tells me it’s a training climb for an alpinist club. When I reach the gate that once must have been the sole entrance to the complex on the top of the hill, it is closed and
locked just as I had expected. My information suggested going round the perimeter to a point on the hillside further south keeping my eyes open for a ‘weakness in the defences’ there. But I’m intrigued by a handwritten sign offering a guided tour starting twenty minutes. The guide looks very informal and tells me that my information is somewhat out of date but still valid. Do I want a basic orientation? I do. He tells us —there are three others, a single woman who I could easily imagine in the role of an art historian if I was looking to cast a film, and a couple from the USA who are somewhat shocked and slightly indignant that the site is now private property —though some buildings are apparently occupied by an artist collective— and that they should be asked to pay. Initially, much of the site is as boringly functional as stripped offices usually are unless you’re a connoisseur of worn carpeting or spectral rectangles indicating absent desks, filing cabinets and supply cupboards. These admin buildings are a staggered row just behind the gate, site-control outposts, but we give them only a cursory glance. I tell the guide that I want to film and photograph and I will take time to do that. No problem. The sun has been periodically disappearing behind
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large cumulus clouds and then re-appearing to cast strong, elongated shadows. We enter a building and continue down a lengthy corridor with rooms either side, many dead ends filled with detritus: damaged furniture, collapsed masonry, warped doors and general rubbish. He talks about the radomes, as they are called. They are made of a whitish material that allows radar and radio waves unimpeded passage—winter cold too, I suspect—but prevents the weather from damaging the sensitive equipment used by the US and British Intelligence as part of the ECHELON programme of intelligence sharing of, in this case, the interception of traffic between East Berlin (GDR) and other Warsaw Pact countries. Conversation stops as we climb flights of stairs and pop out onto a flat roof with three radomes in close proximity. And they’re more impressive close up, losing the football on top of an upended Lego brick impression they gave from a distance. The building and the radomes have been savaged, at times more artistically or politically than others. The skins have the multi-coloured spray graffiti that is the go-to costume of our consumerist culture– publicly accessible architecture. It covers most intact and reachable surfaces. Atrocious and stimulating varieties pop up in interstitial spaces with the top layer often over tagging the work of previous sprayers. It puts me in mind of the time when we first moved into the house in Bucksburn, on the outskirts of Aberdeen in Scotland. My father decided that the new wallpaper (restrained flowery, 1950s pastel) should be on top of the original plaster and not simply pasted
over the previous layer of paper. That decision was more momentous than he imagined and resulted in one of the first incidents that brought home to me an awareness of material history. As an eleven year-old I was called on to help scrape down through the layers at floor level. I was fascinated as hot water, sponged on, loosened design after design, working back through a grubby, nondescript pattern to a subdued art deco geometry, a traditional floral pattern from the same period on through restrained art nouveau vines and Edwardian stripes to arrive at a dark red mid-Victorian paper from a hundred years before. My father kept samples for a number of years afterwards to illustrate the oft repeated story of the ‘seven layers of the living room’, making it sound as historically significant as a chapter from the Seven Pillars of Wisdom . The fabric skin of one of the radomes is tattered and one dome has actually been shredded down to its skeleton from ground level to above head height all the way round. Through the tatters, I glimpse the Berlin Olympic Stadium and clock tower built for the 1936 games filmed by Leni Riefenstahl: Olympia (1938), though her fame had already been established by the Nazi propaganda film, Triumph of the Will (1935). They must be about two crow kilometres away and some distance behind them is the cooling tower of a thermal power station. Now we go up the tower, our guide says, and afterwards we can look at a better class of wall art. Intriguing. More stairs to climb with camera, sound equipment and tripod. Unlike the more accessible domes which have been ripped
Tim Sharp
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open or in some cases, have undergone surgical procedures with a Stanley knife to leave precisely cut-out letters forming a signature or message, the radome here is whole, the skin taut, the lightness of the construction complemented by the whiteness of its constitutive hexagons lending the interior a subdued, restful light. Graffiti abounds here too, though some of it has been painted over. It’s not the parody of the divine finger almost touching Adam’s or the architecturally defined cameo of a hand with the flower of death that is the most interesting aspect of this radome but its audio characteristics. It magnifies and echoes even the slightest whisper and I sit at the centre wondering what I could record. I switch on to capture short burst of radome conversation interspersed with Hooos and Haaas and Heeellooos that reverberate off the walls, but the replay result is disappointing. The feeling of being intensely inside the sound is just not there and I think that with the right technical knowledge it would be easier to create an a more authentic approximation of what I’m hearing now in the studio, reality sadly coming second to skilfully manipulated audio effects. Why is it called the Devil’s Hill, I ask? The answer I get is prosaic: it’s just named after the nearby lake – the Devil’s Lake. Why was it called Devil’s Lake? Well, that’s a bit of research for later. Even so, my interest in ruins and the historical legacy of the hill shows it to be more than a natural bump in the landscape.
Apart from its association with post-war and Cold War intelligence gathering, stories of espionage and counter- espionage and exalted graffiti —spray painted murals— Devil’s Hill is an artificial mound 120 metres high made of the debris of bombed Berlin. After the city’s post-World War II partition into East and West, there was a shortage of dump sites to deal with the remaining rubble, and the eventual solution was to choose the site of the ruin of what would have become an anchoring element in Albert Speer’s overall design for Hitler’s projected world capital, Germania, namely the Wehrtechnische Fakultät of the Technische Hochschule [Technical College Faculty of Military Defence and Armaments]. Although a serious start was made, by the end of the war it was still a partial rendering of the forbidding, four- sided, barracks-like building five stories high with a central courtyard it was intended to become. Drawings, photos and models of the never completed complex exude all the weight and emotional heft of some megalomaniac hard-edged medieval castle imagined by a bureaucrat with a tower at each corner and a glowering facade. It was this incomplete shell that provided stable foundations for the rubble of Devil’s Hill which, deep in its innards, continues to digest the educational certificates, identity cards, military medals, family photos and other personal possessions lost by some who survived and some who did not. Incidentally, Dragon’s Hill is also composed of rubble.
Tim Sharp
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Tim Sharp
Devil’s Hill is a layered architecture pointing to our present future, a marker for the beginning of a topsy-turvy world —from my point of view, that is— I’m becoming increasingly aware that each generation understands ‘normality’ with a different base line. So in my case municipally-owned housing, public transport, social medicine, education and communally owned electricity, gas, water etc. has to a large extent been turned on its head. Instead of the economy being embedded in the social fabric the reverse seems to be increasingly true. So the base of this hill is a relatively recent fortress that embodies an inward and backward-looking concept of territorial invasion, occupation and colonial administration packaged as an educational keep dedicated to the arts and crafts of war. On the very top, though, things are much more ephemeral, signals—radar and radio—were captured and transmitted by technology cloaked in secrecy and with products invisible to the human eye. I spy… takes on a new meaning. But in terms of intelligence gathering this level of technology has been downgraded over the years. Surveillance and intel collection have moved outward, into space, with high definition satellite cameras and advanced signal interception technology based in the web. At the same time, it has come closer, become more intimate and mundane, potentially insinuating itself into our private lives and spaces as surveillance capitalism. Our social interaction, financial transactions, physical movements and creative ideas are tracked and analysed for patterns, tendencies and proclivities. Our houses, telephones and cars are serving up our data, in chunks or crumbs, and contributing to the creation of integrated webs of information about us,
our friends and our activities. Consent has become one of the constitutive deceits of modern commerce which is no longer a series of transactions but a commitment to life- long exploitation. In theory, signing a document signifies agreement. In fact, due to the imbalances of power, access to the law and financial resources, it often confirms our impotence and delivers, along with the goods and services it supplies, an insidious and painless digital enslavement. Our private territory is being appropriated. In the twenty-first century most of us have become members of an Indigenous Nation of Relatively Powerless Users. It’s perhaps what you would expect from a culture that treasures its basic tenet: if you can keep it, it’s yours. Your land, your slave, your continent, your data, your market; the ‘invisible hand’ that guides us is that of the professional thief with a data habit that must be fed. The shadows are lengthening now, the guide has left me to it and will close the gate at sundown he says. I sit on a low wall on the roof thinking just how little of the essence inside the radomes is reflected in images. Whatever the camera is able to capture is automatically supplemented by what I already know, visually and aurally, but that is invisible to a viewer. It also occurs to me that this child of the Berlin Air Lift and a decade of Cold War was all part of a containment strategy by governments, especially the USA, to ensure that any socialist (not to say communist) tendencies abroad were quarantined and those at home crushed. Anti-Communism provided an ideal fear focus and a clear red line; Senator McCarthy with his witch hunts, the second batch of the twentieth century, was
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Tim Sharp
allowed enough rope to run wild for a time. This was sufficient to radically curtail any ‘anti-American’ tendencies in Hollywood and to establish liaisons and cooperations ensuring that the content of films did not stray too far from the mainstream political script. Further help was sought by bringing God onside — ‘In God We Trust’ on every dollar note, the official US motto, was adopted in 1956— elevating US foreign policy and business enterprises onto a higher (and rationally unassailable) plane. The world, said President Truman, was divided into two kinds of men; ‘those who reject and those who worship God,’ but not, of course, just any old God. It was also during this period that the successful attempt to wrest the title of cultural capital of the western world from Paris was made by CIA-instigated and financed organisations. New York was the destination. Anti-communist literary periodicals were established in London and Paris, and the US-based school of Abstract Expressionist painters —many of whom were apolitical— suddenly found themselves propelled onto the world art stage supported by sales and exhibitions organised by a network of museums, galleries and private trusts. The board members, trustees and donors of many of these, from the MOMA to the CIA-run Farfield Foundation were part of a covert anti-communist cultural front. The effects were so widespread that it is tempting to regard the CIA as not only an intelligence service and covert military machine but also a lightly camouflaged anti-communist Ministry of Culture. As an artist I can only draw strength from one of the poets supported (and then dumped) by the CIA, Robert Lowell, who epitomises the dilemma and suggests a solution, ‘we artists’, he said, ‘should be the windows, not the window dressing.’
Tim Sharp lives and works in Vienna. His photo and installation works explore the relationship between image and text; his films explore the mutability of the documentary assertion made by lens-based images. Recent work is concerned with the mechanisms and patterns of power involved in the (re) construction of historical, cultural and personal memory. https://www.timsharp.at Right now this demilitarised, privatised site is a slowly deteriorating architecture, while the surrounding former rubble hills have become tree-covered slopes and grassy meadows with dog walkers, bird watchers and the occasional family picnic. It remains to be seen whether it will be allowed to add another layer of rubble to the hill or become official heritage — deserving repair, restoration and monumentalising into official history. Either way, it really does seem to be a unique point of collision between past and future. I flip open my phone and use it to find out that the Devil’s Lake acquired its name from the Christian church which was confronted with a revered and deeply rooted pagan site and employed a re- naming strategy to turn it into a spiritual no-go zone. I don’t know how much these trains of thought would hold up to closer scrutiny, but I keep circling back to the same core concern: the covert methods and state-of-the-art technology of those times, that was first and foremost directed against the enemy without, has now been turned inward and by implementing a policy of category creep, governments are slowly turning non-conformist citizens into a suspects and every non-citizen into a prima facie criminal. At the same time, lax or non-existent controls on companies allows them to bleed data from our every act.
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travelling to Palladio david murray
learning history drawing books a career
Sir Bannister Fletcher, A History of Architecture on the Comparative Method .
Seventeenth edition, revised by R A Cordingley. University of London: Athlone Press, 1961 frontispiece: St Paul’s Cathedral (1675-1710)
David Murray
Travelling often starts with reading, which generates a compulsion to visit the places one learns and reads about. A favourite memory of books is how they smell, something referred to as bibliosmia . It evokes memories over a lifetime. Smell is, perhaps, one of our most potent senses for it guides us without sight. I love the scent of the pages of my long-term favourite book, A History of Architecture on the Comparative Method by Sir Bannister Fletcher, 17th Edition, published in 1961. It is unusually comforting. The architectural drawings are captivating. I was an architecture student at the University of Toronto in the 1960s. The history of architecture was a requisite multi-year course. Our primary text was A History of Architecture on the Comparative Method , first published in 1896 and updated and re-published ever since, the latest version being the 2019 twenty-first edition. The 1961 edition has been a constant companion in my library all these years and it is full of wonderfully informative architectural drawings, photos and narratives describing the evolution of architecture from ancient to modern. Travelling in my imagination to these historic buildings has been sustained over the years by the distinct aroma and provocative contents of Sir Bannister Fletcher. But travelling to some of these buildings, to see and experience them in the round, in their own environment, was the highlight of a three week tour of Italy in 1980.
opposite, from top right:
cover image of Tom Cruickshank and John de Visser, photographer, Port Hope,A Treasury of Early Homes . Port Hope Ontario: Bluestone House Publishing, 1987 Eric Arthur (born 1898), third from left, and the faculty of the School of Architecture at the University of Toronto circa 1942. He taught at the University of Toronto from 1923-1966. Drawings by David Murray while at University of Toronto Haliburton sketch camp in 1967 Echo Villa, Colborne Street, Brantford. Measured drawings by David Murray while at the University of Toronto under the direction of Professor Eric Arthur, 1965. Library and Archives Canada.
First, how do I account for my long-term interest in exploring historical architecture?
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I grew up in the picturesque historical town of Port Hope, Ontario with its predominance of nineteenth century buildings, residential and commercial. My youthful exposure to an array of well-preserved, beautiful Victorian buildings probably ignited my early interest to be an architect. In 1965, my class of 60 travelled to south western Ontario to document historic houses and produce measured drawings – a program instigated by Toronto architect and professor Eric Arthur, who had won an RIBA Measured Drawings competition in 1920. A love of architectural documentation, which was Eric Arthur’s talent, was also the predominant feature of the Sir Bannister Fletcher book. Arthur’s project for our historical documentation program was to prepare ink line drawings - plans, sections, elevations and details which, when these ink line drawings were completed, were accessed by Library and Archives Canada as additions to their important collection of historical Canadian architectural documents. Also, at the beginning of each university year, we would travel for two weeks to sketch camp in Haliburton, north of Toronto, to observe and sketch the small towns of central Ontario. Travel and drawing went hand in hand.
David Murray
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The drawings and descriptions in the Sir Bannister Fletcher book were my first introduction to the history of architecture, especially western architecture. These drawings, primarily plans, elevations, sections, details and some perspectives were intriguing because they were so informative. I could now start to ‘read’ the buildings that I was encountering as a young university student. But reading about these buildings was not enough. The compelling Sir Bannister Fletcher pages with their detailed building descriptions did not satisfy a yearning I had to visit the buildings I had studied. Travelling is a sensuous experience. I needed to confirm that these buildings really existed. Following the maps that I needed to prepare for the building visits in advance, how would I experience them after they had been found? Would I be able to connect with the artists and architects who conceived them?
In 1980 I went to Italy specifically to experience the buildings I had studied. This involved three cities, Rome, Florence and Venice, with side trips to Siena, San Gimignano and Vicenza. Let’s Go Italy served me well and kept me from sleeping in the streets, except the first night when I was delayed by lost luggage and could not find a cheap hotel. After roaming the streets that night for an atmospheric rendezvous with a Roman ruin and finding nothing open, I slept on a Roman park bench. Over the following week, the Renaissance came alive on the streets of Rome: Borromini’s S. Carlo alle Quatro Fontani, Bernini’s S. Andrea del Quirinale and Michelangelo’s St. Peter’s dome.
David Murray
left , Detailed drawings of Palladio’s Basilica in Vicenza, in A History of Architecture on the Comparative Method . above , my 1980 photo of the Basilica
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above, page 727 of Bannister Fletcher showing San Andrea del Quirinale (1608-13), and above right is my 1980 photograph of it.
right, also from page 727, San Carlo alle Quattro Fontani (1638-41), façade (1665-7). My 1980 photograph shows it unchanged.
below, Palladio’s Villa Capra in Vicenza, p art of page 741 of Bannister Fletcher. Below right, how I found it in 1980.
David Murray
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https://www.smk.dk
left, My well-travelled poster. I say this because I nearly lost it several times, once backtracking to retrieve it from the train. above , Andrea Palladio (1508-1580), active in Venice and the Veneto. This portrait was painted by El Greco circa 1570-75. Oil on canvas. 116 x 98cm. Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen.
The highlight of the whole trip was seeing the Palladio buildings I had studied opened for the celebration. They were real and I was immediately and intimately connected to the past and to the architect who was still so influential to the course of western architecture four centuries after his death. Such a touching historical connection was a wonderful experience; when I got to Venice, I discovered a special multi-city exhibition for the four hundred year anniversary of the death of Andrea Palladio in 1580. I bought the exhibition poster which has been on my walls these many years since.
below, 1,500 lira to enter 400 years of Palladio: €4,35 today.
David Murray
Also in Vicenza I serendipitously got to visit Palladio’s Villa Capra, built over many years from 1567 to the 1590. Again, the drawings in A History of Architecture on the Comparative Method came to life. I touched the stone and sensed an atmospheric connection with Palladio and my ancient architectural profession. His treatise, Il quattro libri dell’architectura ( The Four Books of Architecture ) was broadly disseminated at end of the sixteenth century — still an important reference for European and North American architects.
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Since that trip in 1980, travel and study have brought a lot of influences to my architectural practice, which gradually evolved into the field of conservation. This is not a common architectural specialty, in part because in western Canada there has not been a lot historical work to sustain a specialised practice. But I have managed. An architect often falls into a career path dependent upon their early architectural exposure combined with the vagaries of the economy. The boom and bust economy of Alberta pushed my path in the direction of conservation because the Government of Alberta prepared consequential historic resource legislation in 1973, as I was just starting my career. When the Alberta private sector was subject to a deep recession starting in 1983, I was forced to open my own office, and found that the Alberta Department of Culture had a budget to start implementing their historic resource protection legislation. The influence of Sir Bannister Fletcher, the travel I experienced to these Palladian gems and subsequent travel to experience many more architectural destinations over the following years, has allowed me to fall into and embrace a fulfilling career in studying, documenting, restoring and writing about Alberta’s architectural legacy. £
David Murray, Monument at Evergreen Memorial Gardens , Edmonton, 1976. When the Edmonton Post Office tower was demolished in 1972, the clock and the tower were saved for some future reconstruction. Evergreen Gardens contacted the demolition company, acquired the stone for a monument in keeping with a drift away from religious iconography in cemeteries. David Leiberman and I, working in association with Rick Wilkin Architects, spent the summer of 1976 on how we might reassemble all the tyndalstone pieces, not as a replication, but in a totally new way. The only new piece is the precast concrete oculus dome. A V Carlson Construction pieced all the stonework with traditional skills they rarely used. At the time, as reported in the Edmonton Journal , we said ‘As students, you’re schooled in antiquities. This was an opportunity to build a stone structure, on a small scale, in the traditional way.’ ‘The monument was designed as an incomplete structure, feeling it would have been somehow disrespecful to recreate the tower itself.’
1968
This is where the study of Sir Bannister Fletcher took us, long before I’d actually been to Italy.
David Murray
DAVID MURRAY graduated in architecture from the University of Toronto in 1969 and practices in Edmonton Alberta. Travelling over the years with his wife, artist Cristl Bergstrom, their focus has been the pursuit of art, architecture and good food, often found in the same place. London’s Tate Modern for example. www.davidmurrayarchitect.ca
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Rome in pieces janice gurney
fragments translation history connection
In 1997, years before I first saw Rome, I had an intense response to one meditation from Marcus Aurelius that I read in Original Sin , a mystery novel by P.D. James. This meditation became the catalyst for a number of art projects made from 1998 to the present. The first project was a series of paintings titled Punctuation in Translation . Each painting is of the same meditation taken from each of twenty English translations of The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius that I collected. There are no words in the paintings, only the punctuation marks that vary over the centuries with each different translator. I visited Rome for the first time in 2008. Because of my work with The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius , I decided to focus my trip on the sites that had existed in his life time. I felt an immediate connection to a city where multiple layers of history co-exist within our present moment. Here past and present are fluid, moving and existing in each other. Fragments connect but pieces will always be missing. I have travelled to Rome seventeen times since that first visit. I have selected three sites to write about that continue to be central to many of my art projects.
all images Janice Gurney
left to right: Punctuation in Translation Book 10.17 (from the translation by Meric Causaubon in 1634), 2006 Punctuation in Translation Book 10.17 (from the translation by Gregory Hays in 2002), 2006
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