Perspective is Everything

Same place seen from different viewpoints (Pas de la Casa, Andorra). 

Neon duty-free stores selling discounted liquor and cigarettes to ski bums already high on oxygen and speed, causing interminable traffic queues at border crossings back into Schengen-land.

If tax havens are the scourge of the planet (and their bankers the scum of the earth), 

how did they ever get away with occupying its most beautiful corners? 

Selling useless goods tax-free is arguably just a pathetic way of buying acquiescence. 

But I guess it ultimately depends on your point of view, doesn't it?

Power, Corruption and Architecture

Photo courtesy ElMundo.com

Transparency International released its annual report some weeks ago, and this year's corruption perception index, which ranks 177 countries from least to most corrupt, lists Spain as having dropped from position 30 to 40. In just one year.

Yes, you might well ask, but what does architecture have to do with all this?

Well, the biggest corruption scandal of them all, the Bárcenas affair (after Luís Bárcenas, the imprisoned former treasurer of the right-of-centre Partido Popular / PP, which governs Spain nationally as well as regionally in 11 of its 17 Autonomous Regions and locally in the majority of its municipalities), is about supposed illegal party funding during nearly two decades, mostly by construction companies and real-estate developers, who, in exchange for "donations" to the PP party, received favorable consideration by PP-led local or regional governments in the allocation of large public works contracts, or were granted favorable changes to land-use zoning bylaws when building private developments.

The whole racket began in 1990, but it went into high gear in 1998, when land law reforms passed by the Aznar-led PP majority government to facilitate zoning changes stimulated a huge boom in private real estate development that would last over a decade and that, upon bursting, would cause a disastrous economic crisis that is still on-going and seemingly never-ending. The construction boom's huge urban expansions required new infrastructure and public buildings, which in turn meant, of course, lots more opportunities to raise cash for the PP coffers. During the boom, the PP's slush fund was so large that Luís Bárcenas regularly handed out "bonuses" --envelopes containing large sums of cash-- to the party brass, including allegedly Mariano Rajoy, the current prime minister of Spain. Catalonia's ruling right-of-centre CiU party is embroiled in a similar scandal, the Palau case, in which contractors were allegedly systematically charged a 3% fee in the allocation of public works contracts.

Judges and journalists who have tried to investigate corruption networks, such as Judge Baltasar Garzón's probe into the "Gürtel" scandal or the Catalan digital newspaper Cafè amb Llet's uncovering of sleaze in Catalonia's public health system, have been either removed from office or sued for defamation, while a great many politicians accused of corruption are still in office. Corrupt politicians and royalty are defended, ironically, by none other than Spain's special "anti-corruption" prosecutor's office. Talk about impunity.

But what does architecture as distinct from construction have to do with all this?

The fact is that the real estate and public works boom of the 2000s coincides exactly with the period in which Spanish architecture was heralded around the world as exemplary. "Good architecture" thus became an unwitting byproduct of --if not a cynical smokescreen for-- large-scale political corruption. As long as critics, curators, and archi-tourists were gushing over all the fabulous new buildings in Spain, then maybe the hundreds of millions of euros of tax money that was being diverted into the pockets of politicians wouldn't be noticed. Or worse yet--this being the land of the picaresque por excelencia-- maybe such wrongdoing would even be tolerated if it meant Spain was being celebrated in the global spotlight, which it certainly was. The architecture boom was such a good party while it lasted, that nobody wanted to entertain the possibility that architecture, known to march hand-in-hand with power, might also be marching hand-in-hand with XL-size political corruption.

Many ordinary Spaniards are now sickened, not only by negative effects of the construction boom (urban sprawl, thousands of empty buildings, unemployment, forced evictions, polarization of wealth, disappearance of the middle class, etc.), but also by the perception that architecture was somehow either directly or indirectly complicit with the boom. This feeling of betrayal is especially significant because Spanish architects generally enjoyed a high level of citizen respect until recently. Before the death of Franco in 1975, architecture students were an important contingent in the pro-democracy student movement, and a number of architects played leading roles in neighborhood-association struggles to improve living conditions in Spanish cities.

Spanish architecture was thus identified with an incipient democracy movement at one time. Corruption, on the other hand, directly undermines democracy, and it is interesting to note a change that occurred in Spanish architecture from the end of the Transition period to the boom-years of the late 90s and 2000s. Whereas up to the 1992 Olympics most public works projects concentrated on renovating public spaces and building new public institutions (schools, sport facilities, city halls, etc.), usually at the neighborhood scale; after 1997, the year that the Bilbao Guggenheim Museum opened, a new typology emerges that we might call an "architecture of tourism": cultural facilities that are so large, they could only have been designed with hordes of tourists in mind as the principal user-group. Alongside these publicly financed tourism mega-projects, private real-estate development built primarily for purposes of speculation began to spring up. Generalizing grossly, we could say that the pre-Guggenheim period's architecture had the improvement of the lives of citizens as its priority, while most of the building undertaken during the post-Guggenheim boom years now ultimately had tourists and foreign investors in mind, in addition to voting citizens of course.

The more the construction industry profited (and the more they donated to political parties such as the PP or Catalonia's CiU party), the more Spanish architecture excelled in recognition and won international competitions. Coincidence? Or is it merely a case of having to take, as it were, the good with the bad (and the ugly)? The boom is also the period during which a significant number of prestigious Spanish architecture magazines went to global distribution, and when many celebrated architects from abroad started building in Spain and vice versa. Numerous architectural master's programs aimed at foreign architecture students appeared at the same time that many Spanish architecture students and academics went abroad to study or become leading figures at some of the most prestigious architecture schools. Thus, even architectural theory and criticism "boomed" alongside the construction and architecture boom, gaining increasing global recognition.

Spanish architecture thus shifted from mainly local concerns to chiefly global concerns. Accordingly, attention shifted from the concerns of citizens to those of tourists, consumers of global media, international financial speculators, and architectural academia. But all this changed from one day to the next when Spain's feverish construction bubble suddenly burst in 2008.  Architects themselves were not only suddenly out of work, but were also suddenly shunned by a society that until then had regarded them as heroes. Unfair scapegoats? Perhaps. In any case, a profession that was societally respected and internally bonded was now coming apart, both literally and metaphorically. Since the great crash, there has been almost no work, no income, and no optimism. A very high number of architects have been forced to move abroad, some as far as the Americas or Australasia. Interestingly, at this moment more US architecture schools are headed by Spanish architects than ever before (a group colloquially referred to as "The Spanish Armada").

Back in Spain, meanwhile, a law has been tabled to "liberalize" the profession and make it more "competitive" (we all know what that word really means). Enrollment in architecture schools is way down, while paper architecture, collectives, collaborating (once again) with activist groups and neighborhood associations, and un-solicited architecture are up, as are "alternative" spatial practices that approach art. Such alternatives to traditional practice, even if these put yet less bread on the table, show the inventiveness and persistence of Spanish architects, who are some of the best-educated in the world.

We are now being told that the crisis is over, and that it's all going to get better from now on; that our sacrifices are finally bearing fruit. While we are being told this, the majority PP government is passing an anti-protest and hence anti-democratic "Citizen Safety Law" the likes of which have not been seen since the Franco era. Another law designed to protect coastal construction is being reformed to facilitate construction on those few remaining stretches of coastline that have not been destroyed already, while another law is being entertained that would provide an instant Spanish (and hence EU) passport to anyone "investing" half a million euros in Spain; a law obviously aimed at reducing the current surplus of approximately 800 000 apartments. Perhaps the PP ultimately wants to kick-start another con-struction boom; a re-ron. Only this time, the spectacular hotel casinos for both tourist consumption and real-estate speculation in one (giving a whole new meaning to the term "multi-use building") will be built by global developers and their brand of global architects. The Spanish government has already shown that it is willing to bend over backwards (which in Spanish translates as "bajar los pantalones", or lower the trousers) in order to meet the demands of developers, such as easing laws concerning money-laundering, smoking in public buildings, foreign work visas, and of course land-use zoning. What the failed negotiations over EuroVegas reveal is just how low the Spanish government is willing to go in lowering its trousers. The only one of Sheldon Adelson's demands that it couldn't meet was a guarantee that future governments would not recede on the final agreement. A democratically elected government cannot, of course, ever agree to such a condition--only a dictator is in a position to do so.

Although EuroVegas thankfully fell through in the end, the eagerness with which this project was embraced by ruling politicians paints a dismaying picture of Spanish architecture in the coming decade or two. It will likely become two-tiered and highly polarized, just like Spain itself, with a handful of local architecture collectives designing food banks, emergency shelters for the homeless, and Single-Room Occupancy dwellings for NGOs, while a handful of superstar "developer-architects" (with names like BIGGUS DICKUS, Co-opted Himmelb(l)au, OMG, and Frankly Garish) will probably be brought in to design private hotels, casinos, tourist apartments, gated communities and luxury marinas. There will be very little in the way of museums, since so many have been built in the last decade that there is little to no money left for their collections. In fact, public work will all but disappear, since there is little public money anyway, growing public opposition to these kinds of projects, and since it is no longer as profitable a method for filling the coffers of ruling political parties. But the PP party has already found another way to profit from the public sector: privatizing it by selling off public institutions such as Spain's regional health-care or education systems to their cronies.

This time around, "architecture" will have little to gain.

Looking for Progress Street / Buscando la Calle Progreso

[versión en castellano sigue a continuación]

"Attention. Liberty and Fraternity streets are closed due to road improvements. Temporary detour via Danger Street." That's exactly what the sign says. 

Good to know. Problem is we're looking for Progress street (carrer del Progrés, see map below), and if Liberty has been shut and we are obliged to take Danger street, then that requires crossing Venus street, and we'd rather not upset the goddess of beauty and love in our search for Progress. According to the sign, left turns are not permitted, but taking a series of turns to the right is something we'd much rather avoid. And where is Equality street when you need it most?

Are we stuck? Can anyone provide some useful direction out of this labyrinth? 

"Atención. Las calles Libertad y Fraternidad están cerradas por obras. Desvío temporal a través de la calle Peligro." Eso es exactamente lo que dice el cartel.

Es bueno saberlo. El problema es que estamos buscando la calle Progreso, y si Libertad está cerrada y estamos obligados a tomar la calle Peligro, entonces eso requiere cruzar la calle Venus, y preferimos no molestar a la diosa de la belleza y el amor en nuestra búsqueda de Progreso. Según la señal, no se permiten giros a la izquierda, pero tomar una serie de giros a la derecha es algo que preferiríamos evitar aún mas. ¿Y donde está la calle Igualdad cuando más la necesitamos?

¿Estamos atrapados? ¿Alguien puede proporcionar alguna orientación útil para salir de este laberinto?

Remembering Marshall Berman

I think it was in 1985. I would have been in my second year of study at University of Waterloo's architecture school, a co-op program in which terms of study alternate with work terms in other cities, and in 1985 I was on my first work term in Montreal. In the 1980s, that city had a public lecture series on architecture organized by Peter Rose and sponsored by the Aluminum Company of Canada, and it was at one of these lectures that I first learned about Marshall Berman. I went to his lecture not knowing anything about him, other than that he had recently written a book titled All That Is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity, and that he was not an architect but a professor of literature.

Whenever a non-architect would speak at the Alcan Lectures on Architecture, the talk would usually not be as well-attended as one by an architect, and some audience members would inevitably get up and leave after hearing only a few minutes and still not seeing an architectural slide projected onto the screen. I decided to stay, because I found what this non-architect had to say to be interesting. I still remember how he opened his talk by recounting his own personal experience of growing up in the Bronx, and how the urban change that was occurring around him at the time--Robert Moses's "urban renewal" projects--were what had prompted him to investigate the question of what it means to be "modern".

For the most part, his talk was essentially a summary of his fascinating book. "To be modern is to live a life of paradox and contradiction. It is to be overpowered by the immense bureaucratic organizations that have the power to control and often to destroy all communities, values, lives; and yet to be undeterred in our determination to face these forces, to fight to change their world and make it our own. It is to be both revolutionary and conservative: alive to new possibilities for experience and adventure, frightened by the nihilistic depths to which so many modern adventures lead, longing to create and to hold on to something real [!] even as everything melts. [...] To be modern is to find ourselves in an environment that promises us adventure, power, joy, growth, transformation of ourselves and the world--and, at the same time, that threatens to destroy everything we have, everything we know, everything we are." How refreshing to hear a discussion of modernity as contradictory and paradoxical, I thought to myself.

Professor Berman then ended his talk with a polemical idea that had a few of the remaining architects who stayed to the end visibly squirming in their seats. He spoke about the chasm between the culture of urbanism, isolated in its ivory tower, and the urban culture that was happening at street level, championing the former to redirect its gaze. To prepare us for what we architects might see, he proceeded to screen some crude, home-made film footage of break dancers and rappers in the streets of some of the less glamorous 'hoods of New York City. This was in 1985, some time before the likes of Public Enemy and Run DMC would catapult rap culture into the mainstream, so it was probably new sound and imagery for most of those in attendance. At this late point in his lecture some more members of the audience got up and left. For me, though, it was an event that motivated me not only to read his book, but to question the way I had until then thought about architecture. Just for that lecture I will probably always remember Marshall Berman.

La Grande Motte Revisited

I first saw La Grande Motte in the summer of 1978, more than a decade before I would graduate from architecture school. Back then, the town left an impression on me for its large pyramid-shaped concrete buildings, and for the fact that the beaches had scores of young women who went topless; a bit of an eye-opener for a 14 year-old male just landed from North America. 

In retrospect, I must have been very distracted by the peaches on the beaches, because more recently, upon revisiting La Grande Motte (this time accompanied by a female architect-friend), the place looked completely different to me, even though, at its core, it has changed little during that period. Clearly, what seduced me this time around was the architecture.

I mean, here we have an example of a late 20th-century new town with public spaces that are civic, dignified and human life-affirming and whose buildings are designed to contribute to an overall harmony; to something greater than the mere sum of the parts. La Grande Motte is living proof that it is possible to design a humanly-scaled, walkable, cyclable, and architecturally sophisticated new town without resorting to, say, the pre-industrial nostalgia of so-called New Urbanism. (Perhaps I'm being nostalgic too, but at least it's nostalgia for a period I have lived through.)

A small civic square on one side...

...on the other side, a courtyard garden

Architect Jean Balladur master-planned La Grande Motte in the mid-1960s as a place where the Northern European middle-class, which at that time was beginning to frequent Spanish destinations like Torremolinos or Benidorm en masse, could vacation closer to home, and in an architecturally more sophisticated setting. Emphasis was clearly placed on creating an overall sense of harmony akin to that of traditional vernacular architecture, but with modern materials and expression. 

La Grande Motte does not banish commerce, signage, sun shades, or Hello Kitty beach towels hung to dry over a balcony handrail. This is no Communist vacation camp. Rather, these kinds of elements of "individuality" are subtly veiled behind differently patterned perforated concrete screen-façades, which vary playfully but also consistently from building to building. 

Ah, yes, that age-old conundrum of finding a balance between overall urban identity and individual architectural identity. Interestingly, no building is privileged over any other at La Grande Motte. There are no singular "landmark" buildings by famous architects whose task is to somehow compensate for a sea of surrounding mediocrity. A similar lack of hierarchy occurs in the urban plan: No rows of sea-fronting buildings blocking second-rate buildings in-behind. 

Since 2010, La Grande Motte has been officially recognized as French 20th-century patrimôine. But it deserves to be celebrated outside of France too, because I doubt many other examples of new-town urbanism from the last half-century are this successful still to this day.

Calatravaland

Santiago Calatrava explaining his skyscrapers to mayor of Valencia Rita Barberá and former premier of the Regional Autonomy of Valencia Francisco Camps. Photo courtesy El País.

El País reported recently that the government of the Autonomous Region of Valencia, when it was presided by Francisco Camps (the Popular Party leader who resigned recently over allegations of corruption), paid architect Santiago Calatrava over €15 million to design three skyscrapers for the city of Valencia that, it turns out, are never going to be built. The unusually high "fee" for such a preliminary study, not to mention the lack of an architectural competition, are not the only irregularities, however. The site of the three controversial skyscrapers is adjacent to a monumental opera house, a science museum, an IMAX cinema, a stadium, and a bridge all designed by... (tada!) Santiago Calatrava. Such a concentration in one place of so many large buildings by one architect is rare, and rather questionable in its wisdom.

True, a number of architects are historically associated with cities in which they built their careers: Palladio with Vicenza, Gaudí with Barcelona, Mies van der Rohe with Chicago, to name only some examples. But their works do not appear conspicuously amassed the way Calatrava's work appears to be in Valencia. The problem with Calatrava's architecture is that it long ago became a signature style, which is to say a cliché. When sparsely distributed around the globe in different cities, it is not very perceptible. But when overdone in one place, a cliché easily becomes a theme park.

Calatrava's early work, mainly bridges, are appreciable for containing some rationality. But in his later work, especially larger buildings, rationality gives way entirely to spectacle and showmanship. The true "function" of Calatrava buildings is to impress--the uses for which they are designated are mere pretext.  The elongated and elevated proportions of the science museum at the City of Arts and Sciences, for example, make that building appear much larger than it is in reality; not unlike the way an aggressive dog makes its hair stand on end in order to appear bigger and more menacing.

The problem with the "City" of Arts and Sciences is that it is not designed by an architect-urbanist, but by an architect-sculptor of stand-alone objects. An architect-urbanist, when commissioned to design a large-scale urban project, will usually devise a plan in which the finer components--the buildings and public spaces that comprise it--are passed on to several architects to design, thereby ensuring that a single architect does not dominate. In the City of Arts and Sciences, however, Calatrava controls every detail, material, and color palette (white). Alright, to be fair: one of the buildings at the City of Arts and Culture, the aquarium, is by another architect, Felix Candela; but it is off to one end--a transition piece between the port of Valencia and Calatravaland.

It is useful to compare Valencia's City of Arts and Culture to another expensive cultural mega-project in Spain of roughly similar size and also designed in one signature style: the City of Culture of Galicia by Peter Eisenman. Here, six large buildings will, when completed, form an artificial hilltop landscape of sorts. But therein also lies a difference: The City of Culture of Galicia is actually relatively dense and compact. It is not a sprawling arrangement of similar-looking stand-alone objects, but a single structure subdivided by the overlay of a pattern of streets and public spaces.

Calatrava's work can be taken in low doses. It seems ideally suited for tourist consumption: an intense, once-in-a-lifetime "experience" to take photos of and post on facebook. But you couldn't take living there for very long. A good thing it is, then, that these towers are not going ahead. In fact, considering just how corny Calatravaland would begin looking with three skyscrapers added to it, I wonder if this might not have been the plan all along.

Context is Still Everything

The building that looks like an anvil is the soon to be completed Disseny HUB Barcelona, a design museum by the veteran firm MBM (Martorell, Bohigas, MacKay). It is characterized by a very large cantilever suspended over an elevated highway and traffic circle surrounding a park. This gesture serves, presumably, so that the end of the cantilever, which will be equipped with a large multimedia screen, will be visible from the park without being obstructed by the elevated highway. Considering that the architectural firm MBM is known for its rational, urban and contextual approach, that would seem to me like the main justification for such structural gymnastics.

But as it turns out, the very raison d'être behind this architectural move--the elevated highway--is slated to be demolished and submerged beneath what will become a much larger Plaça de les Glòries. It even turns out that this fact was known before construction began on the building, meaning of course that there was an opportunity to re-design the building to suit the "new" context--an opportunity that the architects, in all their wisdom, declined. What are we to make of this: that the very context that formed the basis of the architectural strategy of this building is, then, not so important in the end? I am reminded of something I read somewhere once to the effect of "fuck context."

To be sure, the elevated highway cannot be demolished until the tunnels are completed, so there is at least a window of some years during which the Disseny HUB design will make some sense. Just enough time for the building to be photographed, published, and talked about. And after that...who cares?

Power to the People: Andrés Jaque activist-architect

The office of Andrés Jaque Arquitectos

Still on the shy side of 40, Andrés Jaque is a leading member of a new generation of Spanish architects that is emerging onto the international scene, a generation that distinguishes itself more by its way of working – networking, to be more precise – than by any singly identifiable architectural style. Indeed, this generation is seemingly more interested in process than in product, quite unlike the previous generation, whose trademark minimalism of the 1980s and ’90s has become a kind of official dogma in Spain. What these generations have in common, nevertheless, is political activism, albeit approached from different positions. Members of the elder generation of architects took on positions of power in new governmental institutions, both municipal and regional, that had to be ‘built’ during the post-Franco transition to democracy, while those of the new generation more often work for NGOs, collaborate with neighbourhood associations and stage media events as acts of protest. The latter are more anti-Establishment. To their way of thinking, the perfectly detailed building is no longer as important as a design process that invites public participation and interaction by using digital platforms and Web 2.0 networks. In short, these architects are more ‘artist-activists’ than ‘professional experts’. Knowing that Andrés Jacque is one of their most outspoken exponents, I eagerly make my way to Madrid on the first high-speed train out of Barcelona one summer morning.

Hidden away in the heart of Malasaña, a lively barrio in Madrid, Andrés Jaque’s small office is on a street so obscure that people from neighbouring streets haven’t even heard of it. Only the news vendor at the nearby Plaza del 2 de Mayo is able to direct me to Calle de la Galería de Roble. Entering the calle, I spot a sign the size of a business card on a storefront: Andrés Jaque Arquitectos. I knock on the door and am greeted instantly by the man himself – no secretary, no receptionist – and shown inside. The interior is minuscule but high, with a small mezzanine overlooking a double-height space. It’s the kind of shop that was probably once occupied by a neighbourhood shoemaker or locksmith.

The size of his office is the first thing I mention to Andrés. ‘We are actually two offices here,’ he says, ‘an architecture firm and the Oficina de Inovación Política (Office for Political Innovation or OPI).’ Oh, like OMA and AMO, but smaller? ‘Not exactly, because in this case one of the offices is not a business but a not-for-profit think-tank.’ Reminder to self: pick up on this topic again soon.

He introduces me to two colleagues: a young architect from Bogotá, Colombia, and a young sociologist from Lanzarote, Canary Islands. Wait a minute: a sociologist? Hmm. Just what does the ‘Office for Political Innovation’ actually do, I ponder aloud, and what, if anything, does it have to do with Jaque’s architecture practice?

‘Field work’ is his answer. ‘You know: research.’ He goes on: ‘Ever since I was a student, I’ve been more interested in the complexity of the life that occurs in architecture than in the complexity [and contradiction?] of architecture itself. I’ve wondered why it is that buildings are designed so that people are inevitably obliged to adapt to the architecture rather than the other way round. I decided to make it my mission to dismantle the widely held notion of architecture as a fait accompli. I believe architecture must adapt to reality.’ I find myself nodding in agreement: Jacque is very persuasive and enthusiastic. He would probably make a good motivational speaker, I think to myself.

‘Reality is extremely complex, so we need descriptions of it that are equally complex. The Office for Political Innovation is interested in qualitative sociology, in detailed descriptions of current ways of living and of social interaction that can inform the design process of buildings. This is why we engage in field work.’

How did Andrés go from having a student interest in field work to engaging in it professionally? ‘It all came about gradually. We were a bunch of friends and colleagues who one day decided to articulate and make public a political agenda. We would look for the “architectural dimension” of everything that was happening around us, especially news items of public concern: the environment, gender inequality, poverty, et cetera. We soon realized that to address these public concerns seriously and legitimately we needed to join people from other fields who were already directly involved in such issues. I’m tired of hearing architects say that we are like film directors, that we ‘direct’ others. No, we architects are a part of something bigger. In a complex urban reality, we don’t want just one person pulling all the strings. We need a multiplicity of agents. We live in a democracy, not a technocracy!’

Jaque is on a roll now. He is speaking in Spanish, and if there’s one thing Spaniards have it’s the gift of gab. This man is especially gifted: I can hardly get a word in edgeways.

‘In the end, what we are interested in is urbanism as a qualitative endeavour. Too often there is a fascination with the quantitative: numbers that generate “datascapes” and “mappings” as if these were ends in themselves. The question of urbanism is ultimately a qualitative one: what kind of social interaction do we want in cities? Koolhaas’s research into the “culture of congestion” and studies by the Multiplicity group are interesting examples of qualitative studies of the city.’

I point to dozens of pieces of coloured paper filled with notations arranged in rows on the wall, and ask if these are part of a field-work project.

‘Yes. One of our research projects involves a qualitative survey of the way people live. It’s called “Current Ways of Living”. We are interviewing hundreds of people in their homes to find out what sort of arrangement they live in – traditional family, single-parent family, gay couple, flatmates, roommates – and what kinds of problems and preoccupations this raises. One of the things we have learned first-hand is that there is no such thing as a traditional family any more. We strive for an urbanism that can accommodate ways of living that are as diverse as possible, not the unifying, pacifying urbanism we have now. Confrontation is more constructive than a fictitious consensus.’

I am reminded of something I read recently: that one of the primary motives behind the construction of spectacular public buildings by celebrity architects over the last decade has been to build consensus among citizens – that the Bilbao Effect is a pacification strategy. By bringing residential architecture into the urban political debate, Jaque is challenging this enshrined model. He is championing an urbanism of the ordinary and the everyday rather than an urbanism of the extraordinary and the holiday.

‘When you think about it, the domestic interior is much more of a politicized space than the innocent and sacred “home sweet home” it’s made out to be. John Lennon and Yoko Ono knew this when they bedded-in for peace. If we look beyond the traditional family at other kinds of cohabitation, such as apartments shared by Erasmus students, we find that the home is where we encounter “the other” and where all sorts of forms of collectivity are negotiated. Internet has also made the home much more public. Some homes are veritable television studios these days: look at the ongoing fascination with reality shows that occur in domestic spaces.’

Residential architecture is indeed what constitutes the bulk of the built environment; there’s little question that it has not been given the architectural attention it deserves, especially in Spain. But I’m still wondering how Andrés transforms field work into design. How are his theories manifested in his built work? Or are both these offices completely separate spheres of activity?

‘Each office has its own business model, priorities and levels of risk. One is an office that delivers a service to paying clients. This office has to deliver on time and on budget; it can’t afford to take too many risks. It has a responsibility to the public and to the client. The other is a not-for-profit organization. I couldn’t ask sociologists to collaborate on a research project if there was a profit motive. The motive has to be a common research interest and a common political goal – nothing else. We’ve received some research commissions, and sometimes an architectural commission has come out of a research project we’ve initiated. So while there is a transfer of knowledge between the two offices, their organizational and economic structures are different.’

I ask if this research finds its way to the real powers that be: politicians, planners and developers. ‘The OPI disseminates its findings by means of exhibitions and publications in places like the University of Alicante’s architecture school and La Casa Encendida Cultural Centre in Madrid. Through these institutions, I hope the information reaches politicians, planners and developers, because the diversity of living arrangements that exists out there is not reflected at all in the built environment. All we seem to find are three-bedroom homes for traditional families, which almost don’t exist any more. As architects, we have to enter into more of a dialogue with developers, who are a lot more willing to innovate their product if it can deliver an advantage for them. The problem is that the property and housing market is not very transparent. It has been driven entirely by speculation, which explains the repetition of three-bedroom units. Look at how developers' advertisements all seem to look and sound the same when compared with the way people describe their own homes in ads that tend to be much more nuanced and detailed. We do field work in order to go into detail, not to generalize. Details help us understand better just how complex reality is. At the Venice Biennale this year, I participated in a round table discussion with a few architects who have very large practices, and they were complaining that architecture is no longer possible because the only design freedom left to architects is in the façade. To this I responded: reduce the size of your practice, collaborate within a multidisciplinary network and refuse to work for big clients. Of course, the remuneration won’t be the same, but the satisfaction and the respect you’ll receive will be much greater.’

As the train pulls out of Atocha Station for the two-and-a-half-hour journey to Barcelona, block after block of soulless new housing blocks filled with three-bedroom dwellings pass by the window. Their formulaic monotony is perfectly revealed as the train accelerates. I come to a realization: this is not so much an architectural problem as it is a political one, and political problems do indeed require political innovation. 


[originally published in Mark Magazine #29]

It Came from Outer Space

Some buildings are built from the ground up, while others are flown to their site and lowered from the air with the help of aliens and flying saucers. This hotel in Barcelona's Raval neighbourhood is an example of the latter. Before it was lowered into place, the ground had to be cleared of obstacles (buildings, inhabitants, etc.)...for safety, of course. This part took the longest, as there was one neighbour who resented having to make way for progress. But once he was gone, it didn't take very long for this building to make its magical appearance on the cleared slate, er site. It happened one night during an important Barça game, when nobody was on the street. There was barely any noise, only a few strange lights, and voilà. As soon as the building was gently lowered to the ground, the spaceship was gone. Some workers tightened a few bolts, connected some cables and pipes, and that was it. Oh, shortly before the hotel opened, there was one last clean-up operation: a police round-up of suspected delinquents in the Raval whose activities had been repeatedly denounced throughout many years by residents. The hotel has been around for over a year now. At night, its red lights pay homage to the prostitution trade that flourishes in the area, in spite of efforts by the authorities to the contrary. Thanks to these generous aliens, and the collaboration of friendly monsters, the Raval is now hipper and safer. Benches placed by the Ajuntament de Barcelona for gazing at this object from (its) outer space.

Integrated Highrise

Barcelona is a city without very many tall buildings. Not only that: the few tall buildings that do exist are spread relatively evenly throughout the metropolis, not unlike the way church steeples once dotted the landscape. While this gives each tall building plenty of elbow room and unobstructed views, it also makes each one seem overly precious and sacred. The problem here is that cities such as Barcelona can only continue to grow in the Z-axis, and if each new high-rise building has to be set apart from surrounding profanity and venerated as a holy artefact of sorts, then high-rise construction will always be the exception to the rule – not a transformation of it.

Hotel ME Barcelona, by Dominique Perrault, is the least object-like and most successful of the handful of spectacular recent high-rise additions to the Barcelona skyline. It is a role model for accommodating and integrating high-rise architecture in medium-rise urbanism. Rather than being situated in a clearing in the dense urban fabric, the 31-storey hotel incorporates a six-storey base containing semi-public spaces that is contiguous with neighbouring buildings. A tower containing the hotel’s private spaces emerges from this base by way of a dramatic upward lifting of one of its vertical sandwich slabs – such that nearly half the tower appears to be defying gravity. The space below the elevated slab forms a monumental entrance to the hotel while a setback formed near the top by this 'lifting operation' is used as an exclusive restaurant terrace. Similarly, a swimming pool and terrace occupy the setback atop the six-storey base. The hotel is thus much more complex at its lower levels than at its top; an inversion of the 'ill-logic' of the skyscraper as a stand-alone object.

[originally published in Mark Magazine #18]

Everyday Camouflage in "The Visitor"

The story told by Tom McCarthy in his highly commendable film The Visitor, which deals, among other things, with the issue of illegal immigration in post 9/11 USA, unfolds in part in and around a Queens, New York, detention center that is a perfect example of everyday camouflage. In The Visitor, a recently widowed and disillusioned university professor named Walter Vale (Richard Jenkins) befriends, through unexpected circumstances, a young Syrian named Tarek (Haaz Sleiman), who is arrested one day and sent to a detention center operated by the sinister "United Correctional Corporation". When Tarek's mother Mouna (Hiam Abass) shows up at Walter's door some days later worried about her son, Walter takes her to Queens so she can see where her son is being detained. Walter and Mouna stop across the street from the detention center, and the following dialogue ensues: WALTER: That’s it. MOUNA: This is where the prison is? WALTER: Yes. That’s it. MOUNA: It does not look like a prison. WALTER: I think that’s the point. The dialogue reveals the insidiousness of everyday comouflage perfectly.

Everyday Camouflage in the City

INTRODUCTION

"Finally the journey leads to the city of Tamara. You penetrate it along streets thick with signboards jutting from the walls. The eye does not see things but images of things that mean other things: pincers point out the tooth drawers house; a tankard, the tavern; halberds, the barracks; scales the grocer's....If a building has no signboard or figure, its very form and the position it occupies in the city's order suffice to indicate its function: the palace, the prison, the mint, the Pythagorean school, the brothel....Your gaze scans the streets as if they were written pages: the city says everything you must think, makes you repeat her discourse, and while you believe you are visiting Tamara you are only recording the names with which she defines herself and all her parts. However the city may really be, beneath this thick coating of signs, whatever it may contain or conceal, you leave Tamara without having discovered it." –Italo Calvino

Camouflage, in both nature and warfare, is a means for escaping visual detection by an enemy or predator, presupposing a combative relationship between a viewing and a viewed subject. Yet, a civilian, presumably non-adversarial form of camouflage is increasingly present in many Western cities that has little to do with physical conflict and everything to do with (the prevention of) ideological conflict; with appeasing prevailing aesthetic sensibilities and notions of civic rectitude in the interests of creating an image of uniformity and cohesion.

“Everyday camouflage,” as it is identified here, is a strategy for concealing potentially problematic or undesirable building content by means of contrived architectural simulation. Examples include the concealment of new construction—especially urban infrastructure installations—behind traditional building facades; clandestine religious groups operating under the cover of “normal” secular architecture; banality concealed behind spectacular architecture; wealth disguised behind an image of poverty; or buildings whose contentious histories are “cleansed” by the application of new exterior surface materials. More generally, it is possible to identify three main cultural issues which seem to prompt applications of everyday camouflage: modernity, class, and memory.

In cases of everyday camouflage, the notion of “building type” is appropriated and at the same time subverted. The correlation that normally exists between building content and building form is taken advantage of in order to conceal by means of a deceptive simulation. A disjunction is thereby made to exist between what a building contains and what it “looks like” it contains. Any consistency between form and content is made to yield to a consistency among forms. Such an urban formal uniformity appeals to popular fantasies of the city as a harmonious space; a sentiment that is on the rise in an increasingly heterogeneous and pluralist age.

The existence of this everyday form of camouflage puts into question the socio-political construction of the city as the space par excellence of civilized society, revealing instead hidden deceits and the extent to which a mythical urban image must, at times, be made to prevail over reality (2). It shows, moreover, how the city is increasingly constructed and manipulated as a landscape; as “scenery” with which architecture is expected to conform, regardless of content. The very authenticity of what is experienced and seen is put into question by this marginal, relatively unusual phenomenon.

Everyday camouflage also reveals how architectural appearance can be made to perform in a strategic and performative capacity; how architectural aesthetics can comprise a stratagem—a means to an end—as opposed to an object of visual contemplation—an end in itself. The aesthetic of camouflage is, after all, “uninteresting” unless viewed outside of the field in which it operates. Likewise, examples of everyday camouflage in the city tend to make for visually uninteresting architecture: in most cases, these buildings look no different than neighboring buildings. And yet, the odd juxtapositions that these banal-looking buildings embody between interior and exterior result in disjunctions and “complexities and contradictions” that are nevertheless revealing.

In contrast with a stylistic use of camouflage, such as, say, Herzog and de Meuron’s seamless blending of the Dominus Winery into the Napa Valley landscape, the camouflage discussed here is not the result of any architecturally clever and innovative surface treatment. Camouflage here is an operative means of deception; not an aesthetic. This important distinction is analogous to the difference between a military camouflage pattern worn as a fashion style in cities (as has been the vogue), where it is obviously not intended as a means of dissimulation since such a pattern is completely ineffective in an urban context; and a military camouflage pattern worn in the field by soldiers or hunters in action, for whom it is not a “look” but an operative necessity.

Could the Dominus Winery’s exterior surface have been intended as a means of dissimulation? It certainly does not look like a traditional winery, but it also does not resemble any other type of building. In questions of camouflage, there has to be a motive operating within a certain context: if something is camouflage (and not an aesthetic pattern), then what is being concealed and, given the circumstances, why might this concealment be occurring? Just as a hunter is trying to avoid being seen by prey he is stalking or a soldier by an enemy, there may be interests in concealing certain programmatic activities occurring in certain circumstances.

Conversely, the examples of everyday camouflage cited here could very well not have been intended to be acts of concealment, even though the circumstances of the building programs in question could be seen to warrant it. We can really only ever speculate. But architectural theory—and in this case also cultural theory—is precisely that: speculation.


ARCHITECTURE AND CAMOUFLAGE

The surface of a building always conceals from view, to varying degrees, that which it contains and shelters. Historically, architecture’s content has been revealed on the exterior by means of ornament and typological form. While interior styles could vary to reflect private tastes, the outward appearance of a building has traditionally been consistent with its function in some way. Richard Hill puts it quite bluntly: “The connections between the use of a building and aspects of its visible form are powerful and consistent.” (3) The very notion of architectural typology, or the categorization of buildings into ‘types’—not unlike the scientific categorization of plants, rocks or animal species—is premised on such consistency. Camouflage of any sort would not be effective without a set of assumptions on the part of a viewing subject; assumptions that have their basis in “normal” appearances.

Eighteenth-century Architecture Parlante addressed the issue of the outward expression of function theoretically, contending that a building’s façade must represent or symbolize its function on the exterior. In Claude Nicholas Ledoux’s project for a wheelwright’s shop at the royal salt works at Arc-et-Senans, for example, the building’s content is communicated externally by means of a pattern of concentric circles on the façade.

Claude Nicholas Ledoux: Wheelwright’s shop, Royal Salt Works at Arc-et-Senans

Such literal and highly specific display of content remains the exception and not the norm, of course. More typically, a wheelwright’s workshop would have occupied a building that looks like a workshop, with finer ornament or a sign communicating at closer reading a more exact idea of the activity occurring within. Typological form is premised on “types” of activity—public institutions, residences, religious worship, commerce, banking, industry, and so on—and not on “specific” activities. Such general categorization of types, in conjunction with more specific ornamental definition, allows for readings of building content at multiple levels of detail.

The Functionalist movement of the early twentieth century, on the other hand, which sought to do away precisely with ideas of traditional building types and ornament, argued, not unlike the architects of Architecture Parlante, that it is the exact function of a building that should determine its form. Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour have noted, with respect to modernism, that “meaning was to be communicated, not through allusion to previously known forms, but through the inherent, physiognomic characteristics of form. The creation of architectural form was to be a logical process, free from the images of past experience, determined solely by program and structure.” (4)

Modernist transparency and form, which would be made possible by new construction techniques such as steel and reinforced concrete, would liberate the façade not only from bearing loads, but also from having to represent a building’s function through ornament and symbolism. Indeed, there was to be no more “façade” in modernism, but an exterior surface that was a seamless result of the interior: “A building is like a soap bubble,” wrote Le Corbusier in 1927. “This building is perfect and harmonious if the breath has been evenly distributed from the inside. The exterior is the result of the interior.” (5)

This notion of a more precise functional form, in conjunction with transparency, would become a hallmark of architectural modernism. Yet modernism’s abandonment of the notion of the building type in favor of physiognomic form, coupled with literal transparency, renders the city itself much more polymorphous and difficult to navigate; precisely the basis of much of the humor in Jacques Tati’s 1967 film “Playtime.” As Lewis Mumford writes, “In the past half-century, architecture has turned from enclosure to exposure: a virtual replacement of the wall by the window.” (6)

Architecture’s moral obligation to honestly convey content is reinforced, indeed reified, by modernist transparency. The very idea of transparency was revolutionary in its symbolism and utopian in its potential applications: to shed light into hermetic social enclosures and to open political processes to public participation and inquiry; the sort of values that are epitomized in the glass dome that Norman Foster designed more recently for the Reichstag in Berlin. “Transparency opened up machine architecture to inspection –its functions displayed like anatomical models, its walls hiding no secrets; the very epitome of social morality,” writes Anthony Vidler. “Transparency, it was thought, would eradicate the domain of myth, suspicion, tyranny, and above all the irrational.” (7)

Transparency never really succeeded in opening up the city, of course. For one thing, glass is never perfectly transparent due to its alter-ego; reflectivity. For another, it became apparent that for many modernist architects, transparency and function were alibis for engaging in formalist exercises. Nevertheless, the notion that a building should in some way reveal—as opposed to conceal—its content remained unquestioned throughout modernism. “A building should be true, not dishonest. Forms must be what they seem to be. A building should be a true expression of its purpose and of its age. Materials and structural systems should be used with integrity and be honestly expressed. The society of forms should achieve its goals through harmonious cooperation” wrote Edward Robert de Zurko in 1957. (8)


URBANISM AND CAMOUFLAGE

With the advent of architectural postmodernism, however, the tacit understanding that buildings should be transparent—either literally or figuratively—with respect to content gives way to the imperative that building form must conform with urban context. Everyday camouflage can be seen to represent an extreme form of urban contextualism, where it is no longer a question of architectural mediation between context and communicating or revealing content, but an outright prioritization of the former at the expense of the latter.

As with many aspects of postmodernism, the fantasy of the architecturally consistent city was foreshadowed in an earlier period. Toward the end of the neo-classical period, at the height of European colonial expansion worldwide, a cosmic image of the capital city as an architecturally unified entity began to take hold in the imagination of rulers and architects—even if this image was only a façade. Leonardo Benevolo has observed that "many of the most admired complexes of the late eighteenth century in England--the Circus and Royal Crescent in Bath (J. Wood, 1764 and 1769), the famous squares of Bloomsbury (1775-1827) and, later, Regent's Park (J. Nash, 1812)—consisted in the superimposition of a uniform architecture upon a number of separate houses; symmetry and unity of perspective, originally the elements of structural planning, had now become the vehicle for mere external uniformity." (9)

But whereas late eighteenth-century urban consistency is intended as the architectural expression of a consolidation of power by a ruling class, postmodern urban consistency can be seen more as a reactionary response to an emergent cultural pluralism and aesthetic heterogeneity; a side-effect of growing economic globalization and trans-national migration. In a global marketplace, commodities and the infrastructure and organization required to move them entail the proliferation of new, non-vernacular forms and expressions which, precisely in order to appeal to local consumers, are often dressed up.

Another aspect of globalization is that cities themselves have become internationally recognizable “name-brands” associated closely with certain imagery. This imagery, which is partially fabricated, then becomes one which the “real” city must literally build if it is to physically resemble it. The more consistent the real city becomes with this image, it is believed, the more it will in turn attract tourism and investment. The paradox is, of course, that as cities grow and prosper, they must modernize their infrastructure and, in the case of older cities, their building stock. This creates, in turn, a greater need to employ camouflage strategies for the sake of emulating the idealized urban image; a catch-22 situation.


MODERNITY

Modernity is the object of concealment in most cases of everyday camouflage. Nowhere is this more blatantly visible than with the increasingly common heritage practice of “façadism,” whereby a decrepit building is demolished but its façade retained so that new, modern construction can be incorporated in-behind and, more importantly, out of sight. It involves great expense as the façade must be temporarily braced and supported while demolition and subsequent new construction occurs.

This controversial practice, which represents a compromise between outright conservation and outright modernization, raises the question: to whom does a façade belong—to a building, or to the public space that it faces? For many citizens, the face of a building is an immutable aspect of the collective memory of the city; which explains why façadism is rarely met with public opposition. But façadism is also good for tourism. It is especially common in European and American historical city centers; places where the traditional industrial economic base, which has relocated to the urban periphery or to other parts of the world, is being substituted by cultural tourism.

The very willfulness and expense of façadism suggests that the city is increasingly perceived as scenic landscape; as an object to be consumed rather than as a space of productive activity. Façadism constitutes a “camouflaging” of modernity by a society which increasingly demands the conveniences of modernization but at the same time rejects any image of modernity in the historical public realm. (10)

Rail tunnel ventilation facility behind historical hotel façade, Paris

A public transportation mechanical facility situated in Paris illustrates this very well. The La Fayette ventilation facility, situated between the Gare du Nord and the Gare de l’Est, contains machinery that draws fresh air into rail tunnels below. It is hidden behind the façade of a Haussmann-era hotel that was retained when the rest of the building was demolished. The content—mechanical infrastructure for public transportation—is hidden entirely from public view behind an architectural façade belonging to another, very different type of building. The concealment of mechanical systems behind historical façades is encouraged in many cities’ architectural conservation policies; policies which were drafted in response to public outrage at the construction of buildings such as the Centre Georges Pompidou by Piano and Rogers in the 1970s; a building whose exterior resembles somewhat the content of the La Fayette ventilation facility.

Cultural institution resembling ventilation facility 

Another practice, similar to façadism, and also increasingly common, is that of entirely new building construction—including new façades—which appear, even at close-range, to be historical. The argument cited in support of this more insidious form of everyday camouflage is not architectural conservation but rather contextualism.

An ensemble of 1986 office buildings in Richmond-Upon-Thames, United Kingdom, by Quinlan Terry, provides an example of everyday camouflage in which modern construction is completely masked behind an exterior that appears to date, in every detail, from a previous century. The buildings contain flexible, open-plan office space with central air conditioning, underground parking, and modern communications infrastructure. The buildings are sited between the banks of the River Thames and the historical center of the town, forming a series of public spaces that link town and river. The high visibility of the site from across the river would surely have been a factor favoring the use of camouflage in order to create an image sympathetic to the Prince of Wales’s vision of Britain.

Quinlan Terry: office building, Richmond-Upon-Thames

Contextualism—the visual blending-in of a building with its surroundings—is of course the operative strategy behind most forms of camouflage in general. (11) Contextualist architecture, especially when containing a modern program such as technologically advanced open-plan office space, clearly establishes a disjunction between form and content in which modernity can be seen, again, to be the object of concealment.

But modernity is not the only object of concealment in everyday camouflage. On the contrary, in the 1960s and 70s, it was common practice to clad older, traditional buildings situated in the central business districts of large North American cities with abstract louvers, screens or large commercial signs that would make them appear to be more modern. Manhattan’s Times Square provides the best-known example of this phenomenon. Here, new architectural layers conceal tradition within an historical context in which the aspired urban image was that of the modern metropolis. Today’s practice of façadism represents a perfect reversal of this form of everyday camouflage. In fact, the addition of new cladding onto older buildings can actually be compared to a long history of architectural palimpsests and the sort of historical layering existing in ancient cities; façadism, on the other hand, entails a resistance against historical layering; a maintenance of the status quo.


CLASS

Another, less usual form of façadism has to do with designer culture, taste, and class distinction in urban situations where these values predominate. As opposed to the populism of retained façades, “designer skins” speak of an elitist form of façadism.

Barcelona Hilton: building by one architectural firm; facade by another.

The Barcelona Hilton Hotel is large business-class hotel in which two different architectural firms collaborated: a “high-profile” firm designed the façades (Viaplana Piñon), and a “production firm” designed the rest of the building (Mir, Coll, Carmona). This building sets a precedent in which, from the very outset of the project, a “designer skin” conceals what is in reality a formulaic, banal building. The hotel’s important situation at the upper end of the Avinguda Diagonal, an important gateway into the city in its wealthiest district, prompted city planners to require that the client hire a firm from a list of architects “approved” to design building façades in strategic locations. As a city that has worked hard to become a global referent in architecture and urban design, Barcelona seems to be reaching a point in its radical transformation in which the growing expectation for everything to be “designed” must be satisfied superficially for reasons of feasibility.

Brian Murphy: Hopper Residence, Venice, California. 

The residence of actor Dennis Hopper in Venice, California, by Brian Murphy provides, on the other hand, an example of a banal exterior strategically concealing an extravagant and unusual interior program: that of a wealthy Hollywood actor who decides to build a house for his extensive contemporary art collection in a tough, working-class part of the city. It thus follows, to the letter, Adolf Loos’s dictum “the house should be silent to the outside; inside it should reveal all its wealth.” The house is windowless on the street façade and clad entirely in corrugated metal, a material that is visible on the many garages and industrial sheds in the area. The white picket fence, retained from the former tenants, is the only domestic interruption to an otherwise inhospitable exterior. Since it in no way resembles neighboring houses, the Hopper Residence is a non-contextualist kind of camouflage, resembling more a type of natural camouflage known as “mimicry” in which a species adopts exterior characteristics of a species that preys on its hunter. Mike Davis considers this house to be part of “an entire species of Los Angeles ‘stealth houses’, dissimulating luxurious qualities with proletarian or gangster façades.” (12)


MEMORY

The built works cited this far employ various camouflage strategies in order to conceal problematic content. Yet camouflage can also be applied retroactively to an older building in order to physically conceal a problematic history with which it is associated. In this sort of application, camouflage attempts to erase a painful collective memory.

Adaptive re-use of military hospital, Brigham City, Utah, before and after

The small town of Brigham City, Utah, is the site of an extensive array of military buildings renovated into housing that give an example of everyday camouflage concealing a problematic collective memory by means of a superficial application of colorful new building materials. What is now “Eagle Village” was originally a World War II military hospital and prisoner of war camp that was subsequently converted into the country’s largest Native Indian residential school. A private developer purchased the abandoned barracks in the early 1990s, after the school closed, with the intention of converting it into a New Urbanist “village” of affordable row houses. In order to present a new “residential” image to the blighted zone, a vertically striped multi-colored pattern was applied to the façades and roofs that corresponds with the new row-house units. Through the use of color and a “dazzle” camouflage tactic of disruptive patterning, the figural unity of this monotonous complex is broken and given a new image with the aim of creating a desirable commodity. Eagle Village raises, moreover, the question of what to do with buildings that were sites of problematic events. In the case of O.J. Simpson’s Los Angeles residence, the solution taken was to demolish a perfectly fine mansion. In the case of Nazi-era buildings in Berlin that were reoccupied when that city was made the capital of a reunited Germany, the solution was to publicly stress the new democratic use that was being made of these structures, psychologically disrupting the association between the form and the memory. (13)

Church of Our Lord in the Attic, Amsterdam

The conservation of a religious group’s collective memory during a period of religious proscription is another situation in which everyday camouflage has been used. When Amsterdam was made Protestant in the Alteration of 1578, all public displays of Catholic symbols were prohibited—including Catholic churches themselves, many of which were either demolished or renovated into Protestant churches. Collective Catholic worship was allowed as long as it occurred in locations which appeared, on the exterior, to be inconspicuous. One such location, which remains intact today, is the Our Lord in the Attic Roman Catholic Church, on the Oudezijds Voorburgwal canal in the historical center of Amsterdam. This church was constructed between 1661 and 1663 in the attic over a new house and store for the wealthy hosiery merchant Jan Hartman. In contrast with the austerity of the Dutch Classical style used throughout the house, the church, which has two galleries suspended from the roof, is rich in ornamentation. Under Calvinist rule, the architectural concealment of Catholic churches was written into law, thus possibly constituting one of the first written treatises on the subject.


CONCLUSION

The above cases of everyday camouflage involve aspects of modernization, class or memory that, in their respective contexts, could be seen to be “at issue” with prevailing public sensibilities. Rather than provoke or stir up controversy, the buildings employ camouflage in order to avoid detection, and thereby confrontation. Such an attitude stands, interestingly, in complete antithesis to the current climate of spectacular and attention-seeking architecture. As Roy Behrens writes: “Art portrays a unified form and—however daringly—always distinguishes figure from ground in order to utter some “thing,” while camouflage always subverts these laws in order to say “no thing.” (14) How do we judge these works in architectural terms—are they necessarily “bad design” because of their fakery, banality, lack of integrity—because they are, in effect, simulacra? Can buildings designed to dissimulate attention even be considered “architecture,” or will they always be “mere” buildings, albeit unusual ones? Must architecture always look like “architecture”? (15)

These questions may be academically trivial since this phenomenon remains a relatively marginal one. But as Michel Foucault has shown us, it is precisely how a society deals with what it considers to be its aberrations and deviations that can offer more insight into what that society considers normal. Similarly, everyday camouflage sheds insight into urban “normality” precisely because it is a “false” and therefore highly contrived normality.

Everyday camouflage “appears” to occur mainly in technologically advanced urban societies that have undergone massive modernization in recent decades. It is no coincidence that its rise coincides with one of a hegemonic mass-media that employs urban imagery to promote lifestyle consumption. The city is revealed by this phenomenon to be a space of illusion and desire; an illusion that must be maintained, at times, by highly theatrical means. The fact that camouflage, which is adversarial by nature, occurs in the purportedly more civilized realm of the city says perhaps the most about the degree to which the city, as a concept, is shrouded in myth.


NOTES:

1. Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities. Trans: William Weaver (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972) pp. 13-14.

2. Rem Koolhaas writes in S,M,L,XL (New York: The Monacelli Press, 1995) that “the historical city is full of falsifications and manipulations that make it impossible to talk about what is authentic and what is not.” (p. xxviii)

3. Richard Hill, Designs and their Consequences (London and New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999) p. 111.

4. Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour, Learning from Las Vegas (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1972) pp. 7-8.

5. Le Corbusier, Towards a New Architecture (London: The Architectural Press, 1927) p. 167.

6. Lewis Mumford, The City in History (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1961) pp.268-269.

7. Anthony Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1992) p. 217.

8. Edward Robert de Zurko, Origins of Functionalist Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 1957) p. 11.

9. Leonardo Benevolo, The Origins of Modern Town Planning (London: Routledge, 1967) pp. 13-14.

10. In the United Kingdom, for example, public pressure is increasingly demanding that mobile phone antennas be concealed inside props resembling trees or church steeples so that landscape views are not “spoiled,” while many covenants of home-owner associations in master-planned communities prohibit satellite dishes unless these are made to resemble rocks, trees or architectural ornaments. See www.utilitycamo.com

11. An important exception is “dazzle” camouflage, which uses a disruptive, highly abstract pattern in order to disorient and confuse and which was proved to be successful in protecting warships.

12. Mike Davis, City of Quartz (London: Verso, 1990) p. 238.

13. Stenen Spoken, “Ghosts of Stone”, Archis, 1991. Vol. 3, pp. 69-73.

14. Roy R. Behrens, Art and Camouflage: Concealment and Deception in Nature, Art and War (Cedar Falls, Iowa: University of Northern Iowa, 1981), p. 14.

15. Stan Allen writes, in Points and Lines (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1999): “I’m more interested in what architecture does than what it looks like.”


Photography and research collaboration: Sheila Nadimi.

Research for this project was made possible thanks to grants from the Graham Foundation, the Canada Council for the Arts, and the Netherlands Foundation for Art, Design and Architecture.

Thanks to: Roemer van Toorn, Rob Kovitz, Bishnupriya Ghosh, Miguel Roldán, Anjela Wilkes.

[this article originally published in Lotus International # 126. Earlier versions of this research project were presented / published at the Second Savannah Symposium, Authenticity in Architecture (2001) and in On Site Review #9 (2003)]