Dispatch from Studio-X Istanbul
Experimental Preservation Dispatch from Studio-X Istanbul October 2014 What are the defining aesthetics, strategies and ambitions of the emerging field of experimental preservation? Through a collection of places and spaces as imagined in books, articles, images and films, this exhibition renders an interdisciplinary conversation bringing together artists, architects, and preservationists to test traditional boundaries of the discipline. Curated by artists, architects, curators, and art historians in collaboration with Studio-X, the show includes works by Jorge Otero-Pailos, Tayfun SerttaĹ&#x;, Studio Droog, Crimson Architectural Historians, Jeremy Deller, David Gissen, Azra AkĹĄamija, Bryony Roberts, Peter Watkins, Alex Lehnerer, Rem Koolhaas, and Xenia Vytuleva, among others. Entries marked with an are featured in Avery Hall 200 from 15-31 October 2014.
Experimental Preservation Roundtable, Venice, Italy, June 2014. [source: GSAPP]
BOOKS AND PUBLICATIONS Future Anterior Edited by Jorge Otero-Pailos University of Minnesota Press, 2004-2014 “Future Anterior approaches historic preservation from a position of critical inquiry, rigorous scholarship, and theoretical analysis. The journal is an important international forum for the critical examination of historic preservation, spurring challenges of its assumptions, goals, methods, and results. As the first journal in American academia devoted to the study and advancement of historic preservation, it provides a muchneeded bridge between architecture and history. The journal also features provocative theoretical reflections on historic preservation from the point of view of art, philosophy, law, geography, archeology, planning materials science, cultural anthropology, and conservation.” [source: University of Minnesota Press, http://www.upress.umn.edu] Couleur Locale, Droog Design for Oranienbaum Renny Ramakers and Thomas Weiss 010 Publishers, 1999 “The project Couleur Locale, Droog Design for Oranienbaum highlights regional design. Oranienbaum is a little town south-west of Berlin in the former Eastern part of Germany. The castle of Oranienbaum, surrounded by a big landscape garden, was built by a Dutch princess of Oranje Nassau in the 17th century. Eager to preserve this Dutch-German cultural heritage for future generations, the Dutch government decided in 1997 to contribute to its restoration. This is based on a concept delivered by the local Cultural Foundation Dessau Wörlitz that is focusing on restoration, revival and innovation. For the latter two they ask Droog to cooperate. After a visit to Oranienbaum Droog comes up with the idea to design a number of products which fit in whatever the region has to offer and eventually should be produced there to revive economic activity, attract more tourists and add joie de vivre to the region. They aim to add a new cultural dimension in a way that both respects the soul of the area and gives it a contemporary interpretation. The key notions are: tradition, history and innovation, art and culture, nature and ecology, education and recreation, the relationship with the Netherlands, trade and economy and employment.” [source: Droog, http://studio.droog.com/]
Too Blessed to be Depressed - Crimson Architectural Historians 1994 - 2001 Crimson Architectural Historians 010 Publishers, 2002 “Forced to find beauty in mediocrity, poetry in pragmatism, history in the absence of monuments and the future in the past, Crimson has been shaped by the experience of living and working in Rotterdam, the city that never thinks. Over the past seven years they have produced research projects, plans and initiatives that range from purely historical studies, book reviews and critiques of contemporary architecture to exhibitions, panoramas and urban planning schemes. For them, history is not a clearcut period in the past but a total panoramic experience in which mythology, truth, writing, building and demolition intermingle. The Crimson Historians don’t keep their distance, they dive right in.” [source: Crimson Architectural Historians, www.crimsonweb.org] The English Civil War - Part II Personal Accounts of the 1984–85 Miners’ Strike Jeremy Deller, Ken Wyatt, David Douglass, Mac McLoughlin, Georgina Boyes Artangel, 2002 “Initiated by artist Jeremy Deller, The Battle of Orgreave was the partial re-enactment of one of the most violent clashes between striking miners and police during the 1984–85 miners’ strike. The original stand-off took place on 18 June 1984, the re-enactment some 17 years later, on 17 June 2001. This book contains a series of personal accounts by people who were all in different ways involved with the strike and the re-enactment. For example, there is the story of Mac McLoughlin (former miner and policeman on duty during the strike), who talks about the build up within the police force to that memorable confrontation. Stephanie Gregory (Women Support Group) reminisces about the effects on family life and about how many women supported their partners throughout the strike and afterwards. Finally, Howard Giles, who was involved with the precise orchestration of the re-enactment gives a moment to moment analysis of the battle strategy of the events on 18 June 1984.” [source: Cornerhouse, http://www.cornerhouse.org/]
Subnature: Architecture’s Other Environments David Gissen Princeton Architectural Press, 2009
[source: Places Journal, 2011, http://www.tba21. org, http://www.artbook.com]
“We are conditioned over time to regard environmental forces such as dust, mud, gas, smoke, debris, weeds, and insects as inimical to architecture. Much of today’s discussion about sustainable and green design revolves around efforts to clean or filter out these primitive elements. While mostly the direct result of human habitation, these ‘subnatural forces’ are nothing new. In fact, our ability to manage these forces has long defined the limits of civilized life. From its origins, architecture has been engaged in both fighting and embracing these so-called destructive forces. In Subnature, David Gissen, author of our critically acclaimed Big and Green, examines experimental work by today’s leading designers, scholars, philosophers, and biologists that rejects the idea that humans can somehow recreate a purely natural world, free of the untidy elements that actually constitute nature. Each chapter provides an examination of a particular form of subnature and its actualization in contemporary design practice.” [source: Princeton Architectural Press, http://www.papress.com/]
Jorge Otero Pailos, Image from The Ethics of Dust. [source: placesjournal.org]
Jorge Otero-Pailos: The Ethics of Dust Edited by Eva Ebersberger and Daniela Zyman Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary Published by Buchhandlung Walther König, 2009
The Western Town – A Theory of Aggregation Edited by Alex Lehnerer, ETH Zürich, Foreword by Robert E. Somol, Texts by Jayne Kelley, Alex Lehnerer, Jared Macken, Lorenzo Stieger Hatje Cantz, 2013
“In Jorge Otero-Pailos’ installations, the act of preservation is freed from its historic investment in stabilizing architecture. In The Ethics of Dust, he employs the cutting edge of conservation science to probe cultural, political, ethical and aesthetic definitions of architecture as it intersects with science and psychoanalysis.” ... ”The publication includes texts by Thordis Arrhenius, Daniel A. Barber, Daniel Birnbaum, Valeria Burgio, Dorota Chudzicka, Lorenzo Fusi, David Gissen, Francesca von Habsburg, Caroline A. Jones, Adam Phillips, and Raqs Media Collective; as well as a conversation between Francesca von Habsburg, Albert Heta, Jorge Otero-Pailos, Dinko Peračić, François Roche, Andreas Ruby, and Mark Wigley. This book is published on the occasion of the presentation of The Ethics of Dust: Doge’s Palace, Venice, 2009 at the 53rd International Art Exhibition, La Bienale di Venezia as an official project of the exhibition Fare Mondi // Making Worlds curated by Daniel Birnbaum, 7th June 22nd November 2009.”
“25 towns in the Wild West are the protagonists in this book, including famous places like El Paso, Rio Bravo, and Lahood—not as clichés, but as constructed reality. Detailed maps offer a previously non-existent overview of spatial contexts and form the basis for an intensive exploration of architecture and urban planning. The culture of the “city without a future” in the American West between 1860 and 1900 has been maintained in the films out of which it arises.This architectural analysis does not attempt to nostalgically reactivate the Western town, but uses it instead as a vehicle to critique contemporary phenomena in terms of infrastructure, the link between architecture and city, and the role of urban planning—after the Stranger persuaded the residents of Lago to paint the whole town red, he declared himself ready to protect it from the approaching gunmen.” [source: Hatje Cantz, http://www.hatjecantz.de/]
Bungalow Germania Edited by Savvas Ciriacidis, Alex Lehnerer, Texts by Savvas Ciriacidis, Uta Hassler, Korbinian Kainz, Quinn Latimer, Alex Lehnerer, Irene Meissner, Sandra Oehy, Philip Ursprung, Hartje Cants, 2014 “The Zurich-based architects and partners Alex Lehnerer and Savvas Ciriacidis view their work as a cultural practice that fundamentally assumes a (self-)critical stance towards the present. In Chicago, for instance, the architects proposed filling a hole left over from an unfinished skyscraper with a gigantic hot air balloon, which would then rise up into the air as a satirical commentary on a construction project that failed due to the bursting of the financial and realestate bubble in 2010. The two commissioners of the German pavilion interpret Artistic Director Rem Koolhaas’s theme of Absorbing Modernity 1914–2014 by examining the speculative reality of architecture through two protagonists, the Kanzlerbungalow [Chancellor Bungalow] and the German Pavilion. Their architectural installation in the pavilion transforms a historical retrospective into an experiment that is shaped by the intersection of material, space, and meaning.” [source: Hatje Cantz, http://www.hatjecantz.de/]
Trilogy of the Deserted City Tayfun Serttaş GSAPP Books, 2014 “Trilogy of the Deserted City is an experiment dedicated to problematize the consequences of the internal migration that Istanbul received, transforming it into one of the most crowded cities in the world over a short span of fifty years, through the city’s “desertedness.” The aim is not to be relieved of a sense of guilt evoked by the city by putting pieces of unorganized data next to each other. It is to call upon the souls that have remained hanging in its ominous history, disabling the unconscious, confronting the ab-normalities, revealing the repressed through skepticism. In the three consecutive layers of fake investigation and misdirection, the “desertedness” that is sought, followed, watched, evidenced, researched, interrogated is internalized. Thus the exaggerated urban metaphor becomes a game through a one-person search against the city and collective memory by the individual. This book was produced in parallel to Tayfun Serttaş’s exhibition at Studio-X Istanbul, Cemetery of Architects, January 31-March 28, 2014.” [source: Studio-X Istanbul, http://www.studio-xistanbul.org/]
Preservation is Overtaking Us Rem Koolhaas, with supplement by Jorge OteroPailos, edited by Jordan Carver GSAPP Books, 2014 “Preservation is Overtaking Us brings together two lectures given by Rem Koolhaas at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, along with a response (framed as a supplement to the original lectures) by Jorge Otero-Pailos. In the first essay Koohaas describes alternative strategies for preserving Beijing, China. The second talk marks the inaugural Paul Spencer Byard Lecture, named in celebration of the longtime professor of Historic Preservation at GSAPP. These two lectures trace key moments of Koolhaas’ thinking on preservation, including his practice’s entry into China and the commission to redevelop the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia. In a format well known to Koolhaas’ readers, Otero-Pailos reworks the lectures into a retroactive manifesto, using it to interrogate OMA’s work from within the discipline of preservation. This is the first book in the new GSAPP Transcripts series.” [source: GSAPP Books, http://books.gsapp.org/] Tayfun Serttaş, Trilogy of the Deserted City (details) [source: Studio-X Istanbul]
FILMS AND VIDEO La Commune (Paris 1871) Directed by Peter Watkins 2000, 345 minutes “All of Peter Watkins films are events. When he tackles such a mythical moment of French and World history as the Commune (Paris, 1871), Watkins provokes, disturbs, jostles. The story, based on a thorough historical research, leads to an inevitable reflection about the present. We are in the year 1871. A journalist for Versailles Television broadcasts a soothing and official view of events while a Commune television is set up to provide the perspectives of the Paris rebels. On a stage-like set, more than 200 actors interpret characters of the Commune, especially the Popincourt neighbourhood in the XIth arrondissement. They voice their own thoughts and feelings concerning the social and political reforms. The scenes consist mainly of long camera takes. For Peter Watkins, to make a film is to question his own work as a filmmaker. La Commune represents an uncompromising challenge to modern media and a penetrating critique.” [source: National Film Board of Canada, https://www.nfb.ca/]
The Other the Other and Beyond Directed by Tayfun Serttaş. 2005, 13:49 minutes. “Tayfun Serttaş’s performative video The Other The Other and Beyond consists of recordings from almost 30 buildings which used to belong to Istanbul’s minorities. The deserted buildings in urban historic centers are no longer functional. Today, these structures are no longer inhabited; their sculptural silhouettes resonate as records of the city’s multicultural memory. These buildings were acquired by the city after Istanbul’s Greek, Armenian and Jewish populations emigrated. Legal battles continue over the ownership. The 1936 bill prevents minority foundations from owning properties and the Turkish government thus attempted to nationalize some of the properties. The gentrification in city centers has increased the values of these old structures, creating a serious potential for rental income. On the other hand the owners, who are mostly living in diaspora, have regained important legal rights over their old properties. In the midst of this conflict, Tayfun Serttaş received special permission to enter these interior spaces.” [source: http://www.thisisathens.org] Zelig Directed by Woody Allen 1983, 79 minutes “Zelig has the form of a solemn documentary about the life and times of Leonard Zelig (Mr. Allen) in the late 1920’s and 30’s, and the larger lessons to be learned about American society from his brief but stunning celebrity. It opens with Susan Sontag, the critic (‘’Against Interpretation’’), photographed in living color, looking great and looking back over the decades to Zelig’s odd career. This we see in bits and pieces of old black-and-white newsreels, faded newspaper clippings and photographs, early films made during his medical treatment, home movies and contemporary interviews with some of the fictional survivors of that era, as well as with real people such as Miss Sontag, Saul Bellow and Dr. Bruno Bettelheim.” [source: Vincent Canby, “Film: ‘ZELIG,’ Woody Allen’s story about a ‘chameleon man,’ The New York Times, July 15, 1983 http://www.nytimes.com/1983/07/15/ movies/film-zelig-woody-allen-s-story-about-achameleon-man-034845.html]
Peter Watkins, La Commune (Paris 1871) poster. [source: National Film Board of Canada]
ESSAYS Cemetery of Architects Tayfun Serttaş Site-specific installation / İstanbul 2014 Dimensions variable (60 pieces) Architectural inscriptions, which could be read on the corners of buildings in Istanbul in the last quarter of the 19th century, evidence the parallel development of the identity of the individual to modernism. Instead of the anonymous architecture of the period before Westernization, these individual architects felt the need the work on their own, playing a role in forming a professional community in a contemporary sense. In contrast to traditional palace architects, supported by the state, the architects of apartment buildings that primarily work within narrow urban lots give direction to civil architecture with their minor activities. As the empire enters a period of Westernization, the cultural rights provided by the rescript of Gülhane and the land cleared by the 1870 Pera fire opened up the path to the building of apartment buildings that was necessitated by the new life style; Istanbul’s urban identity is almost re-created with the eclectic style of architectural structures that arose from the synthesis of the European and the Ottoman in the short span of fifty years. The modernization of the Republic that refused to take as its heritage previous formations of modernity and the moving of the capital city to Ankara stopped the most revered client—the state—from receiving services of projects and design from the industry of architecture, preparing the ground for the architectural interruption experienced in Turkey. The policy of Turkifying the economy that began in the period of the Party of Union and Progress would extend into the early Republic, revising architecture as an area to be conquered. Through the system of thinking that was on the background of the First National Architectural Movement, the re-capturing of this area that was dominated by “others” in the period of the Westernization of the Ottomans was as crucial as the “independence of the country.” The ideology that dictates the re-construction of the concept of the architect through national identity consequents in the absolute erasure of civil architectural heritage and the actors from shared memory. Cemetery of Architects proposes to open up to discussion the buildings of the period, some of which are destroyed within plans of urban transformation, through their architects beyond
nostalgia and local exoticism as legitimate and indispensable actors with the tools of contemporary research. --------
Cemetery of Architects is supported by Silkar Mining and Trading Corporation and Tabanlıoğlu Architects [source: http://tayfunserttas.com/works/cemetery_of_ architects.html]
A More Monumental, Non-Naturalistic Environment David Gissen tarp: Architecture Manual 2012: Not Nature, 2012 Publication of the Graduate Architecture and Urban Design program at Pratt Institute For the past five years, I have been interested in writing about and visualizing a conception of environment within architecture that is more historical than statistical, more representational than affective, more thing than flow, and more resolutely monumental than pervasive. I would contrast this monumental and historical idea of environment to the ways in which the concept of environment is generally positioned within contemporary architectural practice. Today, architects often utilize the concept of “environment” to invoke a prerepresentational realm of flows and forces – natural, scientific, social, political, even mystical. Such a concept of environment appears most clearly in the vectored graphics architects use to visualize an environment – those little arrows that typically represent the movement of air, heat, or water. In some cases, the environmental vector becomes a metaphor for less naturalistic forces - via charts and statistics or other external realms through which architecture responds or emerges. Such an environment- idea appears as a sack of quivering data. It contains a pronounced present-ness via the language of physical forces and information, whether we examine the air over a 19th century city, the path of ice in the arctic, or the exchange of capital in the beginning of the 21st century. Many architects imagine all of these things – swirling around architecture, impacting architecture and the physiology of it s subject s in a totalizing and immediate manner. Architects interested in nature and data are not the only ones chained to the movements of environmental flow. Various computationally situated and neo-expressionist architectural approaches also site their work within the environmental vector, but with a more intense
mystification of the source. Extending through writings on animate form, fields, and neo-baroque affectual aesthetics, the form, subjects, and representational techniques of these theoretical approaches also become imprinted with vectored pathways. This work sublimates these latter aspects of architecture into a vitalistic milieu but with a more super-natural and animist aura, versus the architectural environmentalist’s or geographer’s more natural and social orientation. Architecture appears as so deeply immersed within its setting – or the impressions that it puts up on a viewing subject – that the distinction between object and context collapses. Ironically, the most ardent naturalistic environmentalists and computational aesthetes share a very close vision of the context within which their work emerges – a thick space of force and pre-representational influences on the subject. To think past the vectored environment in architecture is to think past the scientific, technological, and naturalistic sublimation that dominates our understanding and experience of environments. It requires us to understand both an environment within which architecture is set, and one that is within architecture as something other than trajectories, flux, and molecules. For me, this would imply a partially Kantian concept of environment – rooted in understanding environment with an aesthetic emphasis. In his discussion of the perception of the ocean, Kant wrote that we have a more aesthetic sense of it when we forget its scientifically defined contents and uses (the structure of its currents, it s role as a biological realm, or a site of commerce) and begin understanding it as both a form and as a series of a-scientific impressions. In this specific case, the ocean takes on a monumental character as we become aware of it as something other than a pathway, a context for life, or as a system of wave frequencies. In the context of architecture and environment, I am interested in aesthetics as a type of a-scientific form of experiential understanding that can begin to lend environment a monumental, potentially more object-like character. To achieve a monumental sense of environment via conceptions of Kantian aesthetic distance would be intensely paradoxical. To continue with the ocean example, it would require us to understand the ocean as a thing – in a Kantian sense – but it would also at the same time require us to understand its possibility as an environment – the setting for life and the living. Thus, this desire to monumentalize and objectify environment contains several powerful and interesting tensions: monumentality typically requires visibility, form, and a separation between
subject and object such that the object emerges as a distinct figure. Yet, from a scientific viewpoint, environment can never be fully removed from the subject. The idea of environment from Comte to Darwin to Canguilhem is completely reliant on the immersion of the subject. We can gaze at other objectified environments that we are not obviously attached to, for example, when we look at fish in a fish tank, to cite one of many examples. But we still observe environment as the context for life – the fish tank is simply a type of theater of environment that reflects and reaffirms our own experience of milieux as something we exist within. Within the fishtank, the water inside the tank becomes analogous to the air we breathe. Environment is pervasive, and within a liberal philosophical context all things emerge from their environment. The living and its environments stick to each other. A more radically socialist perspective considers the environment to be endlessly created by its subjects and pluralistic – versus homogenous and given. This gives us a much more satisfying idea of environments that are in endless production and that we may produce. But whether a more liberal or radical concept of environment, environment and subject appear to share an inseparable union. I think one way to resolve this paradox would be to both eliminate the intense naturalism and scientism within architectural invocations of environment, and to also unhinge the idea of environment from the present-tense of its subjects. That is, environment appears partially disconnected from any instrumental use for both our life and the present life of other beings – like a fish tank without its fish – but that holds the potential to function as a setting for life. It’s not that this monumental concept of environment is dead; rather, it do es not aestheticize or invoke an environment as the absolute context for contemporary life. There is a disconnect between what we understand as an environment and the lives of the subjects who gaze upon it or are within it. A monumental environment might invoke, reconstruct or represent environments that have vanished from the context of the city or that await a life that is yet to be lived. It is an environment that may point the way to some life we lived (past-tense) or are not yet living. I’ll offer some examples of the latter possibilities of monumental environments from my own experimental historical projects, but these are meant as examples rather than absolutes. What the monumental environment can be or become extends beyond the particular historical and reconstruction-ist bent of these two examples. Nevertheless, these two projects point to some possibilities for the monumentalized environment. Pittsburgh Reconstruction: Imagine
the smoke that once hovered over an industrial city reconstructed as a figure and in isolation over the present context of the city. Against the sealed towers of the contemporary city, the smoke can no longer be read as quite the same devastating milieu it once was. It may serve to visualize an environment that is no more and enable us to understand our own carbon-saturated environment as something that may, one day, pass into history as well. Reconstruction of the Mound of Vendôme: Imagine an environment that invokes a more revolutionary environmental and socio-natural scenario: in the center of the Place Vendome wrapped around the base of Napoleon’s column is a glass box dotted with holes, such as one may find in a natural history museum or zoo and that typically holds plants or animals. Inside is a monumental mound of lifeless dirt. The mound is a reconstruction of the one built there by members of the 1871 Paris Commune. The Communards created this mound of dirt as a type of cushion for when they toppled Napoleon’s column – a hated symbol of war and imperialism – to the ground. The contemporary glass box and its dirt mound stands there under the rebuilt column as both an object of the past and a possible future in which that column will be moved or will no longer exist – an environment with a type of revolutionary history and potential. Of course, there are many other possibilities for a monumental historical environment to be visualized and examined within architecture. These two examples and the above outline begin to suggest how environments might become unhinged from visualizations of naturalism, animism, and present-ism. I believe the absence of these things within a setting that we still understand as an environment lends environments a type of grandeur or magnitude of aesthetic meaning that I label “monumental.” These projects and the above, brief essay also suggest the paradoxes of producing environments outside of scientism, super-naturalism, and present-ism. Whatever the paradoxes, our contemporary socio-natural and environmental anxieties, as well as our progressive political aestheticizations of environment, deserve a monumental response as much as the pervasive realist one, and much more than one of escapist mystification. --------
[source: http://htcexperiments.files.wordpress. com/2012/05/gissen_2012b1.pdf]
Foto Galatasaray Tayfun Serttaş Open Archive / İstanbul, 2011 The Foto Galatasaray project is based on the re-visualization of the complete professional archive of Maryam Şahinyan (Sivas, 1911 – İstanbul, 1996), who worked as a photographer at her modest studio in Galatasaray, Beyoğlu uninterruptedly from 1935 until 1985. The archive is a unique inventory of the demographic transformations occurring on the socio-cultural map of İstanbul after the declaration of the Republic and the historical period it witnessed; it is also a chronological record of a female İstanbulite studio photographer’s professional career. Armed with the wooden bellows camera her father originally took over from a family that immigrated from the Balkans in the aftermath of the First World War and the black-and-white sheet film she continued to use until 1985, Şahinyan, in a sense, arrested time – both against the technological advancements photography was experiencing and contemporary trends. In the end, she created an unparalleled visual coherence without compromising her technical and aesthetic principles. Consisting entirely of black-and-white and glass negatives, the physical archive of Foto Galatasaray is a rare surviving example of the classical photography studios of İstanbul’s recent past. Changing hands after Şahinyan left the studio in 1985, the archive was transferred to a storehouse belonging to Yetvart Tomasyan, owner of Aras Publishing. Twenty-five years later, approximately 200,000 negatives in the archive were, over the course of two years, sorted, cleaned, digitized, digitally restored, categorized and protected by a team under the direction of artist/researcher Tayfun Serttaş. Foto Galatasaray was never as visible as some of the elite photography studios, famous since the 19th century, like Phebus, Andriomenos or Sabah. Nonetheless, it played an important role in representing the middle and lower classes that ensured the continuity of the studio. Şahinyan was a devout Armenian woman, and her identity created a closely-knit circle that determined the sociological basis of Foto Galatasaray’s clientele, setting it apart from İstanbul’s other studios. Except for four understated passport photos, no photographs exist of Şahinyan herself, who throughout her life remained behind the camera, scrupulously taking hundreds of thousands of photographs, retouching them, and painstakingly numbering and dating each film she developed. Spanning half a century, her work impartially traces the ethnic, social, cultural, religious and economic
transformations taking place at the center of the city. From ordinary passport photos to photographs that turn important ceremonies, for which the subjects prepared with great care, into memorabilia, Foto Galatasaray’s mise-en-scènes offer proof that the need for cultural representation within the rush of daily life has in recent decades been of great importance. The archive covers various political periods, from the 1942 imposition of Turkey’s Capital tax to the war against Cyprus in 1974. It also reflects a wide range of interests including the decrease in İstanbul’s Greek, Jewish and Armenian populations as immigration from Anatolia increased; changes in dress, accessories and hair styles; the transformation of class and demographic structures in urban life; differences between generations created by adaptation to the city; prototypes of gender; and, naturally, the aesthetic preferences of Şahinyan as a female photographer. -------About Open Archive As an Open Archive project, Foto Galatasaray makes new readings of recent history possible through the examination of Maryam Şahinyan’s photographs. It aims to develop a critical approach to preconceived ideas around social memory deeply marred by historical discontinuities. The selected projects of SALT Research are exhibited and presented for interpretation in Açık Arşiv [Open Archive], located at SALT Galata and dedicated specifically to this subject. Starting with Foto Galatasaray, the Open Archive project explores possible relationships between archives, democracy and transparency. SALT supports the notion that archives can be revolutionized on distributed networks and with the participation of a multitude of users. The archive is never “complete” and is of value only when offered for public use. [source: http://tayfunserttas.com/works/foto_galatasaray. html]
Conservation Cleaning / Cleaning Conservation Editorial by Jorge Otero-Pailos Future Anterior Volume IV, Number 1. Summer 2007 Cleaning is mysterious, since it is the labor that erases itself if it is successful. –Jeff Wall
When considered from the point of view of conservation, cleaning is not just a matter of practical maintenance, but an epistemological pursuit. The practice of cleaning occupies a central place in conservation literature, where it often stands as a synonym of discovery. Cesare Brandi, Italy’s most prominent twentieth-century conservation theorist, conceived of occasions to clear aside dirt as opportunities to lay bare and expand the types of knowledge that define conservation. To him, the cleaning of paintings and buildings offered chances to ask questions about the authenticity of works of art, the expressive intentions of the original creators, and about the nature of aesthetic integrity. He insisted that conservators be critical of their own prejudices, famously chastising them for projecting their aesthetic preferences onto paintings instead of trying to uncover the work’s original state.(1) The conservator’s desire to find vibrant colors in a painting might lead her to scrape a layer of original varnish applied by the painter precisely in order to attenuate the crudity of a picture’s coloring.Brandi showed how, paradoxically, indiscriminate cleaning could obscure the original work as much as the thickest layer of filth. There was, Brandi argued, a way of cleaning that was particular to conservation, which is best described as hermeneutic: a means of interpreting the nature of the artwork. Thus, to clean properly, the conservator had to employ technical skill, but also an ethical and philosophical understanding. Brandi’s analyses of cleaning must be considered in relation to his career-long project to establish conservation as a discipline with its own body of knowledge. By the early 1950s, his reflections on cleaning served to define the discipline of conservation by circumscribing a mode of practice. Today, it is important to reconsider cleaning within the larger context of historic preservation, which is seen as a field that borrows methods and concepts from conservation, as well as an ever-increasing number of disciplines including architecture, art, history, planning, archaeology, jurisprudence, landscape design, and countless others. In this expanded field, to assume that cleaning can only yield pertinent knowledge when considered from the point of view of conservation is to uncritically perpetuate the very disciplinary divisions that historic preservation puts into question. To value conservation over the other disciplines is to reduce knowledge to an intellectual territory carved out of historic preservation in the name of the conservator’s authority. To surrender cleaning to conservators is not only to limit historic preservation knowledge pointlessly, but also to do a disservice to conservation, which is denied the
broader cultural currency on offer in interdisciplinary work and downgraded to a purveyor of raw information. Ideally, historic preservation should enable serious conservators to consider those questions opened through cleaning in other disciplines, even if they are currently unthinkable within conservation. Within the discipline of art, Mierle Laderman Ukeles has distinguished herself for a career devoted to exploring the cultural stigma associated with cleaning. In her 1973 performance titled “Hartford Wash” she carefully hand-cleaned the front entrance steps of the Wadsworth Atheneum, in Hartford,Connecticut. Ukeles brought cleaning before the public in an effort to question why the act of cleaning and maintaining the museum’s stones was always concealed from visitors and done after hours. She exposed how even in museums, where the cleaning performed by conservators is most prized, cleaning was associated with menial work performed by unskilled lower classes. By taking on the persona of a maintenance worker she focused the public’s attention on the gendered social roles associated with cleaning. Ukeles also interviewed male maintenance workers.(2) Significantly, what they found most degrading about cleaning was being regarded as maids (i.e. women). Through her performances Ukeles managed to mount a feminist critique of the museum as an institution that relegated women (whether artists or staff ) to secondary roles and cast them off into the realm of invisibility. The majority of management and leadership positions in conservation are still held by men despite the fact that it is mostly populated by women. Unfortunately, issues of class and gender in conservation have yet to receive adequate scholarly attention. We must thank artists for leading the way in raising the general consciousness about the fact that cleaning can reveal as much about the work of art as it does about the politics and prejudices of conservation practice. The quiet portrayals of cleaning in Jeff Wall’s photographs have broken the discursive silence regarding gender and class inequity within conservation. Upon first glance, his Restoration (1993) is a masterful exercise in equipoise. The group portrait depicts a team of conservators working on a panoramic painting in Lucerne, Switzerland, each occupying distinct positions in the foreground, middle ground and background of the picture plane. Upon more careful consideration we become aware that the positions occupied by each conservator are different in more troubling ways. In the foreground are two sweaty women in tank tops carrying out the hard manual work of
consolidating the painting. One is placing small patches of permeable paper over surface cracks to which she will then apply an adhesive. The other is taking a break. In the middle ground is a third female conservator, dressed in a white lab coat. Her job is not manual but intellectual. She helps guide the production by contemplating and reflecting on the process. In the shadowy background stand three male figures dressed in business attire. They look to each other, and not to the painting. Their interests are political and institutional, and they are holding a private conversation, to which the female conservators are not invited. Wall holds up a mirror to the conservation world which invites reflection on the gendered power relations that take place between the positions that structure the discipline. Wall has also examined cleaning in relation to the preservation of modern architecture. His Morning Cleaning (1999) depicts an immigrant maintenance worker engaged in the daily ritual of mopping Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona Pavilion (1929, Reconstructed 1983–88). We witness the labor that goes into producing the reflective visual effects that are central to architectural history’s canonical interpretation of the pavilion. The photograph is a powerful critique of what our standard history represses, such as the class structure upheld and required by modernism’s fetishistic valorization of shined and polished materials. Wall’s work raises important issues about the historic preservation of modern buildings, and suggests that cleaning should be more adequately considered and interpreted. If the Barcelona Pavilion can be said to be the prototype for Mies’s later designs for domestic architecture, then the National Trust for Historic Preservation cannot do justice to the Farnsworth House (Plano, Illinois, 1945-51) without exposing the public to those who cleaned, and continue to clean, all that glass.(3) After Edith Farnsworth’s interior modifications were swept under the carpet to restore Mies’s original intent, the continued concealment of the cleaning staff from the public eye is perhaps the only authentic register left of the elite form of American domestic life that took place at the Farnsworth House. Cleaning opens up a different set of questions about the Modern canon when considered in relation to Philip Johnson’s Glass House (New Canaan, Conn., 1945-49), which the Trust will be opening to the public in the summer of 2007. Although famously inspired by drawings of the Farnsworth house, Johnson’s material palette leaned towards non-reflective materials, such as the herringbone brick floor or the leather ceiling tiles in the bathroom. Significantly, whereas Johnson
and his life partner employed a window cleaner on a monthly basis, they never repainted the plaster ceiling, allowing cigarette smoke stains to form above the living room chairs, along with water marks from leaks. Unless the stains are properly interpreted, the curators will face pressure to clean the ceiling in order to satisfy the expectations of paying visitors that the building be “properly” maintained. But to clean the ceiling would be to mask the degree to which the glass house bore the seeds of Johnson’s later radical departure from Modernism. Questions of cleaning are seldom addressed in landscape architecture. The designs of Carmen Perrin, a Bolivian artist working in Geneva, are a rare exception. Her 1991 project entitled Voie suisse (Swiss Path) created a striking landscape design with a minimum of means. She simply cleaned a number of large erratic boulders found in a walk around Uri Lake. The unnatural shine of the boulders immediately made them stand out from the forest, as though they had been intentionally placed there to constitute a series and delimit a territory. In essence, she employed the methods of sculpture conservators but deployed them in a new context, that of nonsculpted stone. In doing so, she also interrogated whether the types of knowledge that conservators pursue through cleaning could be made relevant to landscape design. The normative question regarding the original state of a statue’s surface recedes beyond the horizon of meaningfulness when the statue in question is a boulder whose contours have been shaped over millions of years through the erosive action of water. Perrin’s cleaning only replicated that natural erosion on a compressed time scale, blurring the line between artifice and nature. Her abrasive cleaning was a form of sculpting that, although microscopic in terms of matter, stretched its reach and ambitions over a vast stretch of time. In a subtle but powerful way,Perrin’s work illuminates how conservation can be understood as a form of temporal artistry. Conservation participates in historic preservation at the risk of having to question its own assumptions about what constitutes pertinent knowledge. It is a risk conservation cannot afford to avoid if it aspires to have any relevance in the wider world of culture and politics. To accomplish this conservation will have to open the door of the laboratory to theoretical and historical reflection. For theory will expand the knowledge base on which to build a new conservation practice, and history will probe the depth and solidity of that base. Prejudiced assumptions that intellectual work is secondary to the “real world” of laboratory life will stand in the way. The hurdle is not insignificant.
In America, where anti-intellectualism is a welldocumented tradition, the representatives of professional conservation organizations have historically derided theory with impunity.(4) The hostility to theory is astonishing given that it was conservators who first made the radical move to theorize practices like cleaning in an effort to gain a legitimate foothold in the academy, where intellectual knowledge is most prized. Conservation may again become a radical practice, but it will need to clear away the coats of doctrinal charters that conceal the originality of its ideas. It will have to go back to its roots as it were, to regain the confidence to rethink cleaning. --------
Endnotes (1) Cesare Brandi, “The Cleaning of Pictures in Relation to Patina, Varnish and Glazes,” in Burlington Magazine, n. 556, v. 91 (July 1949): 183-188. (2) Since 1977 Ukeles has served as artist in residence at the New York City Department of Sanitation. Her first official work in that capacity was called Touch Sanitation Performance, and involved shaking the hand of every employee and mimicking their actions as they collected trash. For her account of the interviews of sanitation workers she conducted see Tom Finkelpearl, “Interview: Mierle Laderman Ukeles on Maintenance and Sanitation Art,” in Dialogues in Public Art,(Cambridge, MA and London, England: The MIT Press, 2000), 312. (3) The Farnsworth House was purchased at auction by the National Trust for Historic Preservation in 2003, and is currently operated as a house museum by the Landmarks Preservation Council of Illinois. (4) A classic primer on the subject is Richard Hofstadter’s Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, (New York: Knopf, 1963), which was written as a historical critique of McCarthyism. Evidence of anti-intellectualism in conservation can be found in professional publications such as the Bulletin of the Association for Preservation Technology. For instance, in 1985, then APT President Walter Jamieson described philosophy as a “frightening word for the practitioner” only for “irrelevant pedants droning over empty lecture halls,” and presented theory as a form of “academic wind-bagging” and “irrelevant and abstruse speculation.” See Walter Jamieson, “Introduction of ‘Principles in Practice’ Theme,” in Bulletin of the Association for Preservation Technology, n. 3-4, v. 17 (1985), 3-4. [source: Future Anterior, Volume IV, Number 1. Summer 2007]
Creative Agents Editorial by Jorge Otero-Pailos Future Anterior Volume III, Number 1. Summer 2006 The wrecking of a building is already a spectacle, although not one supported by any dramatic intent. The collapsing roof of a burning building, the toppling of a dynamited chimney stack are thrilling moments, even if we feel a little shame for admitting the fact. [...] Could we design our buildings to wreck well—that is, not only to be easy to destroy but spectacular as well? (What a peculiar idea!) There could be a visible event and a suitable transformation when a place “came of age” or was about to disappear. –Kevin Lynch(1) The idea of designing the “endings” of buildings is an important contribution of historic preservation to architecture, as the latter has previously only been concerned with the design of opening sequences, to use a filmic analogy. By aestheticizing the endings of buildings, historic preservation fundamentally transforms them. And so, historic preservation is burdened with having to justify its intent. For what purposes do we intervene? Insofar as aestheticizing endings is a way of protracting them, the practice is often referred to as “saving” the building. But “saving” a building is never a disinterested act. One can save a building in the interest of say culture, or economy. What does it mean to “save” it in the interest of architecture? In that case, the purpose of our intervention is primarily to reveal something about architecture that could not be disclosed other than through our involvement in that particular building. Now architects and architecture historians typically assume that the historic preservationist intervenes in order to reveal the architecture that was already in the building—deposited there presumably by an Architect. But if we examine closely the aesthetic practices of historic preservationists we will find that they often disclose architectural dimensions of buildings that were unintended by its “original” architects. Seen in this way, historic preservationists challenge the presumed monopoly of the “architect-author” over architecture, and require a new model for understanding how various “creative agents,” as I propose to call them, involve themselves in the advancement of architecture through the transformation of buildings. From the perspective of historic preservation, the architecture of a building does not begin with its construction. It is quite possible for a building to exist as mere construction until a historic preservationist intervenes to disclose it as
work of architecture. This is most evident in the aesthetic appropriation of so-called “vernacular” buildings as works of architecture by historic preservationists. A radical example of the sort of aesthetic appropriation I have in mind is Gordon Matta-Clark’s (1943-1978) famous Four Corners: Splitting (1974). Matta-Clark intervened in a “vernacular” two story single family suburban house in Englewood, New Jersey that was about to be demolished and replaced by a larger development. He sawed a vertical transverse cut down the center of the house, through the wood walls and floors, to the basement’s masonry wall. He then removed the top course of concrete masonry units from the wall at the short gabled side. This made one half of the house tilt outward, which widened the gap at the crest and made it difficult, even dangerous, to move from one side of the house to the other. Whereas before the intervention the building remained closed to architecture, MattaClark’s ending aesthetic opened questions about architecture in it. For instance, it interrogated the definition of architecture according to the principle of structural stability, and examined the limits of the possibility of inhabitation. Through Matta-Clark’s intervention this building surged into architecture long after it had been erected. Matta-Clark’s work prefigures that of Mark Sandoval (b. 1952), a historic preservation architect in California, who in November 2005 sawed in half Richard Neutra’s Stafford House (Los Altos, 1939). This splitting was designed to “save” the structure from the contemporary taste for super-sized houses. Sandoval’s team loaded the pieces onto two flat bed trucks, and moved them to a less expensive site. The intervention raises questions about the definition of architecture as a function of the immobility of buildings, and thus deploys the house within architecture against the grain of Neutra’s intentions.Even after the pieces are reunited, the presence of the cut and its “missing” site will destine the house to bear the permanent mark of incompleteness characteristic of historic preservation aesthetics. It would be incorrect to say, however, that Matta-Clark or Sandoval are the “authors” of the architecture in the buildings they worked on. The term “author” refers to the source of a work of Architecture. Roughly since Giorgio Vasari’s publication of Le vite de più eccellenti architetti, pittori, et scultori in 1550, the architect was accepted as the source of Architecture. The scholarly tradition that ensued from Vasari followed the logic that the architect’s design was the single source of Architecture. In this model the building always stood as a more or less “deficient” execution of the “ideal” design. This tradition
came to a head in the 1960s with the architectural reception of structuralism. Roland Barthes’ “The Death of the Author” (1967) and Michel Foucault’s “What is an Author” (1969) prompted studies that questioned previous assumptions by focusing on the process of how individuals come to be considered authors. For an architect to be recognized as the author of the architecture in a building he had to undergo a process of “authentication” by various institutional mechanisms such as professional associations, government agencies, architectural journals, architecture critics, and historians. Questions arose about the vested interest of these institutions in shoring up what by then appeared to be the “mythology” of authorship. Contemporary historic preservation emerged in this intellectual context, in opposition to the reduction of architecture to the “authority” of the architect, as a means for various creative agents (such as “the public”), who had been relegated to the margins by the mythology of authorship, to lay claim to architecture and participate in the struggle to define it. The architectural adaptation of the 1960s critiques of authorship had the positive effect of recognizing that architecture is a discipline; that is to say a social and institutional intellectual formation which is not identical to buildings. But it had the negative effect of assuming that therefore physical buildings were secondary or even unessential to architecture. The resulting discourse was an anachronistic throwback to Vasari, which gave primacy to the economy of architect-produced images, over the “defective” building, and thus the import of the critique of authorship only reinforced the myth of authorship it purported to take down. The unexamined premise of this dismissal was that existing buildings could not contribute anything new to the advancement of the architecture discipline after the involvement of the “original architect.” But as the work of Matta-Clark and Sandoval demonstrates, existing buildings can further architecture even in the absence of an “original architect.” Because historic preservationists aestheticize the many endings of buildings, their aesthetic production is free from the myth of single origins (and originality) that governs current thinking about design. They cannot presume their designs to be the authorial “source” from which architecture’s disciplinary body of intellectual, aesthetic, and practical knowledge emanates. Historic preservation destabilizes the belief that design is the ex-nihilo “origin” of architecture, undercuts the hegemonic figure of the “architectauthor,” and signals the legitimacy of other
“creative agents” (understood as an indi vidual or a collective). From the perspective of historic preservation, design appears as a “response” to given material and intellectual conditions that furthers the creative agent’s interests in a field. Creative agents advance their interests in architecture through designed interventions in existing buildings, which challenge architectural conventions, and weaken its disciplinary boundaries. Understood in this way, design is not architecture but the art of transforming its relationship to this building at this particular time. In other words, design is an appropriation of buildings into works of architecture. But buildings are material entities. They come to be and inevitably cease to exist. And so design can only appropriate them into works of architecture temporarily. As such, design is an “event” of appropriation. We can now add nuance to our response to the fundamental question of historic preservation: What does it mean for a creative agent to “save” (or design the ending aesthetics of) a building in the interest of architecture? It means to create events of appropriation; to design moments for appreciating the manner in which architecture and buildings become mutually contingent; to create opportunities to witness how the upsurge of buildings into architecture, and of architecture in and through buildings, stamps both of them in time, and renders them historic. This is the sense in which the term “historic” enters preservation: as the incomplete, contingent, and temporal way that architecture and buildings differ from one another, while constituting each other. The historic destabilizes the association of preservation with permanence, undercuts the presumed identity of buildings and architecture, and undermines the primacy of the “original author” or the “original design” as the centering reference of architecture. Through the aesthetization of the historic, creative agents lay claim to buildings and architecture from the margins, redrawing the contours of the discipline towards a nonfoundational design practice. --------
Endnotes (1) Kevin Lynch, What Time is This Place? (Cambridge, Massachusetts and London: The MIT Press, 1972) 178. [source: Future Anterior, Volume III, Number 1. Summer 2006]
EVENTS AND EXHIBITIONS What if? Exhibtion: Boijmans Van Beuningen Museum, Rotterdam, 1999 Curated by the Crimson Architectural Historians “The Boijmans Van Beuningen Museum plays a major role in the cultural life of Rotterdam. Situated close to an attractive water course at walking distance from Central Station and the river Mass, it occupies a prominent place on the cultural axis of Rotterdam. It owes this central position to the historical decisions and struggles that have shaped Rotterdam. But what if history had taken a different turn? Where would Boijmans have been then- literally and metaphorically - in Rotterdam? [...] For the exhibition in the Boijmans Van Beuningen Museum we decided to stick as close as possible to the pictures and documents everyone knows: the bombing, the post-war reconstruction, the city today and the museum. The exhibition was no more science fiction than developments then and now. By manipulating reality in tiny and specific ways we sketched a parallel history as if it had really taken place. We produced urban design schemes as if they had been made at that time and, in a series of manipulated snapshots we gave hyper-realistic picture of Rotterdam and Boijmans in that parallel history.” [source: Too Blessed to be Depressed - Crimson Architectural Historians 1994 - 2001] The Ethics of Dust, Doge’s Palace Exhibition: 53rd Venice Art Bienale, 2009 Commissioned by Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary Curated by Jorge Otero Pailos “Jorge Otero Pailos has undertaken to create a record of the world’s pollution through The Ethics of Dust, a series of installations resulting from its preservation. [...] As an architect and theorist specialized in experimental forms of preservation, Otero-Pailos scientifically removes and preserves the dust settled on key historic buildings of the world. Latex, the cutting-edge of preservation cleaning technology, allows Otero-Pailos to isolate that microscopic layer of history. Separate, but never entirely free from the building, pollution is allowed to recast its own story. Building on the tradition of 19th century architects and conservators, who made plaster casts of the world’s monuments so academics could study the architecture of distant cultures, Otero-Pailos’ casts of pollution suggest a new way of looking at
architecture and our history.” [source: Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, http://www.tba21.org/]
Bryony Roberts, Inverting Neutra exhibition (detail). [source: www.bryonyroberts.com]
Inverting Neutra Installation: Neutra VDL Studio and Residences, Los Angeles, 13 July - 7 September 2013 Designed by Bryony Roberts “Inverting Neutra is an installation and resulting video by Bryony Roberts at Richard and Dion Neutra’s VDL Studio and Residences in Los Angeles that offers spatial inversion as a strategy for activating historic architecture. The VDL House is known for its close interlocking of interior and exterior space, in which void spaces penetrate the house from the street up to the roof terrace. The project inverts the spatial logic of the building by filling the void spaces with hanging blue cords, manifesting a latent spatial figure that weaves through the house. This inversion both celebrates and subverts the existing architecture, offering an alternative to the static preservation of modernism and a strategy for creating responsive form.” [source: Bryony Roberts Studio, http://bryonyroberts.com/]
Cemetery of Architects Exhibition: Studio-X Istanbul, January 31 - March 28, 2014 Curated by Tayfun Serttaş The exhibition Cemetery of Architects examined the relationship between the physical identity of urban space and the individual through an archive. The exhibition, eponymous with an installation by the artist, brought together works that problematize the impact of historic interruptions on Istanbul’s cultural map. In the book Trilogy of the Deserted City, to be launched in parallel to the opening, the artist shares with the viewers the background of three different projects in which the same historic problem is attempted to be resolved through various media and methodologies. [source: Studio-X Istanbul, http://www.studioxistanbul.org/] The Mound of Vendôme Exhibition: The Canadian Centre for Architecture, 19 June - 28 September 2014 Curated by David Gissen “The Mound of Vendôme is a seemingly simple yet provocative artifact: an earthwork that became a central part of a radical attempt to transform urban iconography during the two-month rule of the Paris Commune in 1871. The Mound of Vendôme, an exhibition and research project by David Gissen, recalls this lost structure and calls for its contemporary reconstruction and historicization. A series of images show the square before and after the destruction of the column: an unknown photographer captures a perspective of the Column in 1851, Bruno Braquehais photographs a statue of Napoleon I that fell during the uprising and Charles Marville documents the tower under construction in 1873. Other featured objects from the CCA’s extensive collection of Commune-era holdings include drawings, models, full-scale studies, newspaper clippings, maps and petitions to city officials to reconstruct the Mound of Vendôme with the use of these and other artifacts. Contemporary renderings by David Gissen imagine the reconstruction of the monumental earthwork and reawaken the possibility of transforming the iconography of urban spaces today.”
Sarajevo, 3-13 October 2014 Future Heritage Collection is a project by the artist Azra Akšamija (Boston/Graz) in collaboration with Lejla Hodžić (Sarajevo), Margarethe Makovec (Graz), Anton Lederer (Graz), International Theater Festival MESS (Sarajevo), and <rotor> Center for Contemporary Art (Graz) “What is, for you personally, an important part of the cultural heritage of Bosnia-Herzegovina? Bring it to the office of the Future Heritage Collection! What is the need for cultural heritage preservation? Many municipalities and countries of the world collect and preserve their cultural heritage, first of all to make cultural developments in particular surroundings understandable for future generations and to preserve what our ancestors considered important. But, what is to be done, when cultural institutions of a city, region or country are no longer able to gather and protect cultural heritage systematically? Citizens of Bosnia-Herzegovina are invited to assemble the Future Heritage Collection. Therefore, we need the active participation of citizens who are willing to become collectors of their own cultural heritage and to bring in contributions for the Future Heritage Collection, without political or national filter. Anyone can contribute to the collection and bring in objects: these could be recognisable objects of art and culture, but also objects of everyday life, household goods, furniture, items of clothing, handicraft, books, poems … the introduced objects will be collected, displayed, photographed and catalogued during the MESS festival, and then returned to their owners.” [source: Future Heritage Collection, http://www.mess.ba]
[source: Canadian Centre for Architecture, http://www.cca.qc.ca/] Future Heritage Collection Exhibition and Collection Office: JAVA Galerija,
David Gissen, The Mound of the Vendôme (detail) [source: David Gissen]
50th Anniversary, GSAPP’s Historic Preservation Program Exhibition: Columbia University GSAPP, Fall 2014 “In the fall of 1964, six valiant students at Columbia University enrolled in a new course offered by the Architecture program. The Documentation and Restoration of Historic Structures, taught by Professor James Marston Fitch, was the first educational opportunity in Historic Preservation at the school. Composed primarily of interdisciplinary topics and guest lecturers representing the different fields of preservation, the course’s popularity quickly expanded. In 1968, it evolved into a degree granting program; six years later in 1974 the two-year Master of Science degree in Historic Preservation was established, the first of its kind in the nation. Fifty years later, Columbia University’s Historic Preservation program remains a leader in the field of preservation education. The past five decades cultivated a community of over twelve hundred alumni, faculty, and friends who are significant members of the preservation field. As the first degree granting program of its kind, Fitch and the subsequent program leaders were challenged to define the curriculum of a Historic Preservation degree and the expectations of a graduate. The defining elements have endured the past fifty years – an interdisciplinary curriculum based on collaborative teachings of architects, archaeologists, art and cultural historians, engineers, physical scientists, and planners; ample opportunity for hands-on work and site
visits; and utilization of not only the local resources of New York City but other parts of the country and world. The preceding fifty years are rich with innovation, challenges, and accomplishments.” [source: GSAPP Historic Preservation Program, http://www.arch.columbia.edu/] Experimental Preservation Roundtable Discussion: Venice CCCP Observatory, 5 June 2014 The roundtable Experimental Preservation brought leading voices of this emerging field into conversation to critically examine its defining aesthetics, strategies and ambitions during the 14th International Architecture Exhibition in Venice. The roundtable was co-organized by Thordis Arrhenius, Erik Langdalen and Jorge Otero-Pailos with presentations from Andreas Angeladakis( Architect, Athens); Lucia Allais (Princeton University); Svetlana Boym (Harvard University); Reinhard Kropf (Principal, Helen & Hard Architects, Oslo); Louise Maserliez (Marge Arkitekter, Stockholm); Ines Weizman (Architect, London).This was the second in a series of roundtables on experimental preservation as part of an ongoing collaboration between the Oslo School of Architecture and Design and Columbia University’s GSAPP. [source: GSAPP, http://events.gsapp.org/]
Tayfun Serttaş, Cemetery of Architects, Istanbul, January-March 2014 [source: GSAPP, Studio-X Istanbul]
Files on Alternative Preservation Exhibition: Venice CCCP Observatory, 5 June 2014 Curated by Xenia Vytuleva Assistant Curators: Javier Anton, Elis Mendoza Contributors: Svetlana Boym, Eduardo Cadava, Jorge Otero-Pailos Designer: Jiyoni Kim “In an over-determined environment of tabula non-rasa, preservation is the narrow way to rethink, re-load, re-calibrate the past and the future and to expand the boundaries of contemporary architectural practice vis-a-vis the totalitarian expansion of archeology of knowledge. Files on Alternative Preservation challenge to probe not only the physical but also the theoretical and metaphysical boundaries of preservation – to conceptualize the discipline as a powerful vehicle capable of engaging tangible as well as intangible heritage. Its pulsing and shimmering nature of a draft, a sketch, a pro-jectum allows to plague in in various contexts, balancing on the border of existence and non-existence. Attention to sidewalks, mystery of reading the image, and the concept of “Off- Modern” highlight that the mist around the building is equally important to preserve as plans and sections, breaks and stones. Files on Alternative Preservation encompass multiple layers of meaning, balancing on the border of different media; politics, architecture, science, art history, law and poetry. Files on Alternative Preservation (The power of the invisible) publication was printed in conjunction with a pin- up exhibition at the GSAPP Preservation Day hosted by the CCCP Venice Observatory during the 14th International Architecture Exhibition.” [source: Xenia Vytuleva]
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Jiyoni Kim, Files on Alternative Preservation poster. [source: Xenia Vytuleva/Files on Alternative Preservation]
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Azra Akšamija, Future Heritage Collection posters. [source: Azra Akšamija]
Studio-X is a global network of advanced research laboratories for exploring the future of cities through the real-time exchange of projects, people, and ideas. Global Network Programming 415 Avery Hall, Columbia GSAPP 1172 Amsterdam Avenue New York City, NY 10027 USA studiox@columbia.edu Amman Lab 5 Moh’d Al Sa’d Al-Batayneh Street King Hussein Park P.O. Box 144706 Amman 11814 Jordan Studio-X Beijing A103, 46 Fangjia Hutong, Andingmen Inner Street, Dongcheng District Beijing, China 100007 Studio-X Mumbai Kitab Mahal 192, D N Road Fort Mumbai 400 001 India Studio-X New York City 2008-2014 Studio-X Rio De Janeiro Praça Tiradentes, 48 Rio de Janeiro, Brazil São Paulo Lab Revolving locations Tokyo Lab Shibaura House 3-15-4 Shibaura, Minato-ku Tokyo, Japan 108-0023 Studio-X Istanbul Meclis-i Mebusan Caddesi 35A 34433 Salıpazarı, Istanbul, Turkey Studio-X Johannesburg Fox Street Studios, second floor 280 Fox Street (Corner Fox/Kruger) The Maboneng Precinct Johannesburg, South Africa Santiago Research Cell Av. Dag Hammarskjold 3269, 1st floor Vitacura, Santiago, Chile arch.columbia.edu/studio-x-global twitter.com/StudioXNYC
Experimental Preservation is a curated collaborative collection by Gregory Bugel, Marina Otero, and Agustin Schang (Studio-X Global Network Programming, Columbia University) with the kind advice and suggestions from Azra Akšamija (MIT Architecture), David Gissen (California College of the Arts), Selva Gürdoğan (Studio-X Istanbul, Columbia University), Alex Lehnerer (ETH Zurich), Jorge Otero-Pailos (GSAPP, Columbia University), Tayfun Serttaş (artist), and Xenia Vytuleva (GSAPP, Columbia University). With special thanks to all the contributors, to Ashley Hoefly, Gavin Browning and the Office of the Dean at GSAPP. Every effort has been made to assure accuracy in the information contained in this booklet. However, due to the scope of this project, the Studio-X Global Network cannot guarantee complete accuracy of the material presented, and it is possible that something was omitted or misquoted. All necessary permissions have been secured. This document is intended to provide a general overview of the subject of Experimental Preservation. For more detailed and up-to-date information, the reader is encouraged to review directly the sources listed here.