of Monumentality and Borderscapes

of m o n u m e n t a l i t y

and B O R D E R S C A P E S

Jose Sibi | 10648479 Beyond The Mirror Analyzing Architecture Professor Fulvio Irace Assistant Valentina Marchetti MSc in Architecture and Urban Design 2020-2021 Politecnico di Milano

Contents

Abstract 03

A. Borders A1.

The border - an invention? 05 A2.

The ills of borders/walls 07 A3.

A border of possibilities 09 B. Monumentality

B1.

Man’s affection to monumentality and memory 13

B2. Monumentality during the isms 15 B3.

Monumentality today 17 C. Monumentality on Borderscapes C1.

Provocation 21 C2.

Not the first 21 C3.

How? 23

Conclusion 25 Acknowledgements 26 References 26

*cover image: source:

“the Trump Wall”, US-Mexico border wall, 2019 https://m.washingtontimes.com/news/2020/sep/25/court-rules-congress-can-sue-over-donald-trumps-bo/

Abstract The title of the essay shows how distinct and dichotomous in itself the concept of monumentality and borderscapes are to one another. The aim of this paper is hence to understand what a border means in the present day and whether its significance is still paramount as it once used to be. Of how porous and repellent it can be at the same time. Once a certain acquaintance has been achieved on this topic the next chapter deals with the topic of monumentality and its past and present perceptions. Of its journey through the annals of time and its ir/relevance today. The essay ends with the last chapter which is a provocation in understanding whether monumentality along borderscapes can work. In simple terminology, will vertical assemblies have the capacity to transform the perception of these horizontal no-man lands? The intent is not to create a manifesto of a new ideology but rather to understand what monumentality means today and whether it could prove to be an able ally or become a terrible tool in the quest for peace along and across border regions. keywords: borderscapes | monumentality | thirdspaces | pseudo-monumentality | social misconstruct AIM: This essay would serve as a guide in the author’s larger narrative (thesis topic) of finding an architecture towards peace and whether monumentality would have a significant role to play in this pursuit.

The preceding part of this essay can be found at: https://issuu.com/josesibi/docs/jose_sibi_architecture_ towards_peace

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a.

BORDERS

“When we extend a line from the Tijuana-San Diego border across a world map, we discover a corridor of a global conflict that links some of the world’s most contested border zones. Regions most affected by poverty, violence, accelerating climate vulnerability, and migration are situated between the Political Equator and the climatic equator.”

Estudio Teddy Cruz + Fonna Forman

MEXICO USA

FORTRESS ISRAEL INDIA EUROPE PALESTINE PAKISTAN

N.KOREA S.KOREA Politically volatile divides/ borders across the Political Equator

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A.1 The border – an invention? [border] Mariam-Webster: “an outer part or edge” Oxford: “a line separating two countries,

administrative divisions, or other areas” Cambridge: “a line that has been agreed to divide one country from another” But what exactly does a border constitute. We fly over it, we drive through it, we walk/run/swim across it. But we rarely spend time on it. It is not that we are obliged to. But it does seem threateningly disconcerting whenever someone mentions the almost dreaded term border. For most of the borders around the world, what is on either side of it is geographically, socially and ethnographically the same yet there seems to be a social ‘misconstruct’ that the other side is not. Lebbeus Woods explains this tendency to imagine these constructs when he says, “The existence of such spaces is conceptual, because the lines of the box, the ‘borders’ of the nations, drawn between the coordinate points only mentally are physical only on maps. Nevertheless, we regard them as real, even when we traverse the actual landscape they circumscribe.

When it comes to space, the mental is as potent as the physical.

What is the physical, after all, but sensations impacting the neural nets of our brains? Where do the sensations come from? How do we know that what we see is not an artifice of projections onto the brain? Ultimately, we do not. Space, in the end, is what we think it is.”

Is thus, the border really a finality? “If we accept the idea that a border is a construct, a social design, which is common knowledge now in border studies, it means that there is also room to redesign a border and hence there is a possibility to tell another, more liberating narrative of the same border, one that goes beyond the existing narrative of the border being the end of a national planning zone” (van Houtum & Eker, 2013).

Has the border been too politically charged that these spaces are left undesirable for intervention and involvement? By being a border region, has it already become a geography of conflict or is it vice-versa? If there have been numerous studies about borderlands and its potential capacities, why is it that so little 5

From left to right, top to bottom: Berlin Wall 1961 “dividing the country” US-Mexico Wall 2019 “the Trump Wall” Wall of Shame Lima, 1961 “dividing the people” ‘Peace’ Walls Belfast, 1969 “ divided communities based on religion” Nicosia 1961 “a divided capital” Israeli West Bank barrier West Bank, 2000s “conquer and divide” India-Pakistan border 2015 “a divide visible even from space” The Korean border 2020 “a divided country”

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has been done to utilize this capacity? “Can border regions be the laboratories to reimagine citizenship beyond the nationstate? Can a cross-border public and awareness be mobilized around shared interest between these two cities?” (Cruz, 2017).

A.2 The ills of borders/walls “Walls between nations are the most eloquent material expression of the human inability to coexist and negotiate” -Anonymous In his intriguing book Borderwall as Architecture, Ronald Rael notes, “One of the most devastating consequences of the borderwall is the division of communities, cities, neighbourhoods and families resulting in the erosion of social infrastructure.”

Why is then there a predisposition that the only infrastructure worthy of the border is the inevitable wall or fencing? For centuries borders have been demarcated on paper maps and walls have been erected on earth lands. Some of those borders and walls made sense. It was to keep the barbarians out. To protect the citizens, the lands and the resources. But in an age and time when the barbarians no longer exist (some may beg to differ), for whom and against what are we raising the borders and walls of today?

Yes, illegal immigration, human trafficking, drug smuggling are all problems that permeate through these said borders.

But are the walls we erect truly an answer to these social and political issues? In fact, prior to the fence [at the USA-Mexico border], annual border crossing deaths totaled a few dozen.

Now, they’re at hundreds each year. Since construction on the border fence started two decades ago, nearly 7,000 people have died trying to cross the border, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection (Guerrero, 2016).

“Walls won’t work because the border has long been a place of connectivity and collaboration. The border zone is a permeable membrane connecting two countries, where communities on both sides have strong senses of mutual dependence and attachment to territory. The inhabitants of this “in-between” place… thrive on cross-border support and cooperation, which have flourished (in diverse forms) over many centuries” (Dear, 2013).

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Human ‘canonball’ Javier Tellez, One flew over the Void, 2005 San Diego - Tijuana border

Left to right: “The No Border Line” Cadena+Asociados “Repellent Fence – 2015” Postcommodity, Cristóbal Martínez and Kade L. Twist

From sketch to reality “Teeter Totter Wall” 2020, U.S-Mexico Border Rael San Fratello Architects

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More disturbing is the reimagination of the border as a site for passive-aggressive political tactics through a mode of construction that swallows the border region as well as encroaching into the lands of the ‘Other’. This is predominantly observable in situations where one of the cities/ states/ nations/ countries is politically more capable than the other.

The most predominant example of this is the ‘structural violence’ practiced in Israel across and over the border territory to propagate the Zionist nation building program (Allweil, 2017).

A.3 A border of possibilities The border has thus either become a space that is often neglected by the respective powers that be or a region witness to a building spree that treads on perversion and modern imperialism. Part of the blame has to be pointed towards the thinking of the border as an edge space. An edge space that is either overlooked or one that is exploited. But what if instead of endorsing this preset notion of the border as just an extension we start to acknowledge it as a spatial zone in itself. “…which is flexible, multi-dimensional and layered” (Bouvy, 2002; Cupers and Miessen, 2002; Schoonderbeek, 2015). Rather than being a simple dividing line, the border constitutes a spatial zone that can turn out to be of territorial proportions. This type of border is no longer a fixed boundary, but a space of differentiation that consists of a multiplicity of various limits: the border also constitutes a territorial space (Rose, 2005; Schoonderbeek, 2015).

Experts have gone so far ahead so as to term these regions as ‘thirdscapes’, ‘thirdspaces’ and ‘thirdnations’ (Grichting, 2009, Dear, 2013). Thus, imbibing a quality to the identity of border regions. The essence of the border can be understood from two primary realities. One where the border divides similarities. The other where the border separates differences.

The ideology of the intervention then should respect them both depending on the context of the setting. If a homogeneous approach is practiced or one is given precedence over the other, it would only result in inverting the desired effect and end up emphasizing the border all the more. It is also important to stress that the idea of debordering does not mean to naively cancel all borders and tear down the fences 9

Mise-en-scene of Borders << In-Difference

Difference >>

Radical openness (an as-if-region) CommUnity, GemeinSchaft Together seeking for common benefit Consciously deleting the borderline Border ecstatics of absence Communifying the plan Border becomes a historical relic

Theatrical closure (an as-if-border) Seducation-Scape Mutual attraction, challenging, daring Consciously making differences Border ecstatics of presence Atlas of differences Border as active separation

More = Less

Less = More

“To inspire the search for new designs, we made use of the theoretical concept of the Janus face implying a continuum of two different kinds of desires or, their reverse, fears... on the one hand there is a tendency to retreat behind the border, to close the door and hide away for the world outside... on the other side of the continuum there is... longing for the Other side” (van Houtum, 2010;2015)

From left to right, top to bottom: Wall as a Room, Jawahar Kala Kendra, Charles Correa | SDA The Blurred Edge, Kashmala Imtiaz India-Pakistan Border Border Blood Bank, Victor Hadjikyriacou USA-Mexico Border

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and walls. The dangers to this will only result in a more perilous situation and a re-dependence of the walls that once were. “‘Open the borders’ is an idealistic acclamation when cosmopolitan ideas are transferred in a political reality in unmeditated way” (Svetlic, 2016).

If Heidegger perceived space as “something that has been made room for, something that is cleared and free, namely within a boundary” he declared the boundary (read here as border) as not an ending in space but rather its beginning.

Heidegger’s argument is that presence is considered to be originating from the boundary (Schoonderbeek, 2015). And it is within this dimension that Wood describes the free space… a space where the norms and conventions of living cannot be applied. A ‘free space’ is a countermove, taking back that which belongs to no one and is thus without function. A free space is space awaiting alternative inscription, intervention and definition. It takes on a pregnant quality and holds a promise (Hermans, 2010). The transposition of this notion of the free space onto the notion of borders helps in providing a layer of clarity in understanding how the border can in fact be debordered.

“The border is not the euphemism for the selfishness, exclusion, proto-fascism, Eurocentrism, xenophobia etc. It is the only phenomenon that enables the cultivation of the relationship between (individual and collective) subjects. It is live and autonomous phenomena that reconcile the finitude and the infinity of “something”: it is the place where “something” spontaneously overcomes the “other” and so on. The border is not the negation of cosmopolitan ideas, on contrary; it is a privileged place which can serve human beings” (Svetlic, 2016).

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B.

M O N U M E N TA L I T Y

From left to right, top to bottom: Tower of Babel, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 1563 Ziggurat, circa 4000 BC Ur, Iraq Stonehenge, circa 3000 BC England Pyramids of Giza, circa 2500 BC Egypt The Monolith, 2001: A Space Odyssey, artwork by Arik Roper

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B.1 Man’s affection to monumentality and memory “Men die, the buildings go on” -Lewis Mumford There is no era in human history that has remained averse to the infatuation for building. From time immemorial, man has craved to be remembered. He has come to the conclusion that even though his mortal remains may return to dust, what he may build will survive the ravages of time. His propensity to erect can be found in myth from the biblical Tower of Babylon to the very real but still mysterious Stonehenge to the monoliths every city is proliferated with nowadays. He has seen his aspirations and desperations manifest in the raising and the razing of edifices.

Leon Battista Alberti in De re aedificatoria (On the Art of Building) proclaimed how monumentum has been “monuments of the things we find worthy to be transmitted for eternity to those who come after us... erected for preserving the memory of great events.” Alberti regarded the erection of edifices as the paradigm of human creativity and of that divine power of invention innate in human beings (Choay, 1984).

Why are we so stricken by that we erect? Maybe the argument

by Stanley Abercrombie in Architecture as Art could enlighten us when he said “Shapes arrest our attention, invite our curiosity, thrill us or repel us in the greatest possible variety of ways… with or without explanation, the power of shapes is indisputable.”

Vincent Scully went on to add “architecture is a conversation between generations.” And in Why Architecture Matters, Paul Goldberger stated “the buildings we live with surround us with a combination of stimulus and ease, of vibrancy and serenity, and their greatest gifts are conferred quietly, without our even knowing.”

From ancient times the monoliths, pyramids, ziggurats, and obelisks have stood for something. They have been materialized to convey varying thoughts, messages and opinions from the builder to the beholder. Monuments are slaves to memory. They serve as a conduit for remembrance hired from the past to be projected onto the future – an object for temporal observation. Its infiltration is visible even in popular 13

From left to right, top to bottom: Cenotaph for Newton, Etienne-Louis Boullée, 1784 Painting of monumentality during the Romantic Era, The Architect’s Dream, Thomas Cole, 1840 The Monument to the Third International, (sketch and reimagined) Vladimir Tatlin, 1919–20

“We invite the citizens of Harburg and visitors to the town, to add their names here to ours. In doing so, we commit ourselves to remain vigilant. As more and more names cover this 12 meter tall lead column, it will gradually be lowered into the ground. One day, it will have disappeared completely and the site of the Harburg monument against fascism will be empty. In the end, it is only we ourselves who can rise up against injustice.”

The final ceremonial lowering was held on November 10th, 1993—the fifty-fifth anniversary of Kristallnacht.

The top surface of the monument remains visible, flush with the ground.

Harburg Monument against Fascism*, Esther and Jochen Gerz, 1986

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contemporary culture. The monolith in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (originally Arthur C. Clark’s novels) is seen to travel across time and transcend space and memory.

B.2 Monumentality during the isms The early 20th century witnessed an affliction towards monumentality when Lewis Mumford wrote The Death of the Monument and declared, “the notion of material survival by means of the monument no longer represents the deeper impulses of our civilization.” His distaste was not to the art of building per se but rather the static nature of monuments; of how “instead of being oriented toward death and fixity, we are oriented toward life and change.”

By the late 20th century, the term counter-monument was coined by James E. Young when he observed the growing apathy towards the rapidly increasing monumentality in an ever-repentant Germany. His perception was of the number of German artists who “contemptuously reject the traditional forms and reasons for public memorial art… [and] instead of searing memory into public consciousness, they fear conventional memorials seal memory off from awareness altogether.” (Young, 1992) (see insert of Harburg Monument against Fascism)* Sandwiched between these two assertions, Sigfried Giedion produced his essay ‘The Need for a New Monumentality’ and termed the period he belonged to as an era of pseudomonumentality. Here - he claimed of his time - seemed to be a tension between the ornamentation of the previous century and the abstraction of the present. In the near-Sisyphean task of trying to understand monumentality – what it is, what it has been and what it could be, he stated “Monumentality derives from the eternal need of the people to own symbols which reveal their inner life, their actions and their social conceptions… This demand for monumentality cannot be suppressed. It tries to find an outlet at all costs.”

Providing support to the hypothesis that monuments and monumentality still meant something, Moshe Safdie affirmed, “[monumentality gives] the city perceptible order, a sense of location for the people within it, a sense of structure and a much-needed hierarchy.” He recognizes monumentality as the 15

“Giedion envisioned Corbusier’s proposal as a sign of new monumentality” Palace for the League of Nations (unbuilt) Le Corbusier & Pierre Jeanneret Diagram by Colin Rowe and Robert Slutzky 1928 Palace of Soviets, (unbuilt) Boris Mihailovich Iofan, 1931–33

From left to right, top to bottom: Hieroglyphics*, Temple wall, Karnak, Egypt, circa 2000 - 305 BC I am a Monument Robert Venturi & Dennis Scott Brown, 1972 The Continuous Monument: An Architectural Model for Total Urbanization, Superstudio, 1969 De Re Aedificatoria Leon Battista Alberti , 1443-1452

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art of providing an identity to the city bestowed by the city builders and further goes on to state, “Since monumentality deals with dream, memory, and hence symbol, it is the most profound aspect of architecture as the formal and visual expression of culture.” (Safdie, 1984) It can be argued that even though Mumford and Young were on one end of the spectrum with Giedion and Safdie on the other about their sentiments towards monumentality, they all concurred on one thing: the need for monumentality to have a purpose far beyond the aesthetic. The need for it to have a function that could imbue an acknowledgement of the past, an understanding of the present and a hope for the future.

Mumford couldn’t have endorsed this better when he used the example of a museum as a monument and exclaimed, “The museum gives us a means of coping with the past, of having intercourse with other periods and other modes of life, without confining our own activities to the mould created by the past… here at last is a real escape for the monument.”

B.3 Monumentality today On the advent of the printing press, Victor Hugo boldly stated through one of his characters, “The book will kill the edifice.”

Though not against the rise of print culture, “[his] fascinating thesis here is that, before the printing press, people expressed their identity and made statements for posterity in their structures of stone... in allowing humans to express themselves on the page, [it] stole energy from centuries of self-expression in architecture.” (Baum, 2018) (see insert of hieroglyphics)* Hugo made his polemic statement about two centuries ago.

Fast forward to today’s digital age, the printing press has been upended by a much faster, cheaper and visual mode of mass communication and an even more voracious consumption.

Does this render monuments and monumentality to be absolutely redundant today?

I shall take the service of two figures to posit that monumentality is here to stay. One from five centuries ago and one from the present. One from theory and one from practice.

Alberti proposed the hallowed significance of monuments when he claimed, “once an edifice has been designed in 17

“Ephemerality in Monumentality over the ages” Crystal Palace, Joseph Paxton 1851 Serpentine Gallery Pavilion, B.I.G, 2016

Between the Lines, extension of the Berlin Museum containing the Jewish Museum, conceptual plan, Daniel Libeskind, 1989 Top right and bottom: World Trade Center, conceptual sketches, Daniel Libeskind, 2003

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accordance with the rules of the three distinctive levels of the art of building (necessitas, commoditas, voluptas), it necessarily participates in a new human order of the sacred” (Choay, 1984).

One might assume that the asymmetrical lines of Libeskind’s Jewish Museum was an architect’s nonchalant play with lines and angles but that supposition couldn’t be further away from the truth. The lines of the museum are in fact derived from the addresses of famous Jews who lived in Berlin before the dark days. “I began plotting the Berlin addresses for names taken at random from the Gedenkbuch - [memorial book containing names of all German Jews murdered in the Holocaust] – on my map of the city. Then I looked for the specific address of people I’ve admired, Jews and Gentiles, and I paired some of them, drawing a line from the address of one to the address of another… the shapes made in the process… formed a distorted Star of David over the map of Berlin.” (Libeskind, 2004) His masterplan for the One World Trade Center was adorned with heavy nods of acknowledgement to American values - the insistence of a height of 1776 meters for the main tower which was to symbolize the year when the United States Declaration of Independence was signed; the initial design of the tower to look like an abstract version of the Statue of Liberty; the exposure of the slurry wall foundations in the landscape to acquaint the viewer with the foundation on which Lower Manhattan was built.

Neither the printing press nor the digital age would be able to ‘kill’ this. The edifice will survive. Monuments and monumentality are well and truly alive as long as they serve instead of impose, are democratic instead of enforced, are engaging instead of being inert. Because “even when everything has become liquid, we must have the occasional rock in the sea, indicated on a map and marked by a lighthouse, that reminds us of our own mortality and allows us to constitute ourselves.”

(Tacaks, 2011) “This is the reconquest of the monumental expression” (Giedion, 1944).

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C.

M O N U M E N TA L I T Y on bor dersca pes

From left to right, top to bottom: The first point established by the boundary survey following the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, Monument No. 258, U.S.-Mexico border, 1851 Kartarpur Border Terminal, (under construction), Punjab, Pakistan-India border Wagha-Attari Gallery Pakistan-India border, expansion, 2015

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C.1 Provocation The previous two chapters have dealt individually with the unrelated topics of borders and monuments. A zone of persistent ignorance and an entity of relentless attention. Hence, if by bringing the essence of monumentality towards the border regions, can this affect the landscape and language of the edge spaces? In simple terminology, does a vertical assembly have the capacity to transform the perception of these horizontal no-man lands? Can a new meaning be achieved for monumentality on one hand and a change in the identity of borderscapes on the other?

“Architecture domesticates limitless space and enables us to inhabit it, but it should likewise domesticate endless time and enable us to inhabit the continuum of time.” (Pallasmaa, 1996)

C.2 Not the first This provocation is not based on an ingenious original thought but rather a discovery that monuments have time and again been erected on border territories. Some have been raised to establish ownership, while some have just found themselves near to one when the border lines were drawn up.

Nevertheless, these monuments serve as a point of attraction.

Visitors flock to see them regardless of their unchanging character which begs the question as to whether it is the monument in itself that attracts or is it the site on which it has been located. Taking the example of the India-Pakistan border, a high number of monumental architecture ranging from war memorials, religious structures, historical edifices, trade check posts are observable along the borderlands. More intriguing are the galleries/stadiums built around the international border crossings in the state of Punjab which serves as a spectacle for the high number of footfalls to these crossing points.

These huge constructions and the functions they behold entirely changes the phenomenology of the fringe regions by subverting the visible border and allowing a peek onto the other.

“Fictions structure our reality. If you take away from reality the symbolic fictions that regulate it, you lose reality itself.” (Zizek, 2006) 21

From top to bottom: Pass Museum, Austria-Italy border, Werner Tscholl, 2012 World’s First International Cable Car connecting China and Russia, Amur River, UNStudio, 2019 Eiffel Tower over the borderwall provocation that is neither intended nor will work, artwork by author

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C.3 How? If architecture can be smuggled into the reimagining of the existing border wall now, it will put into place several very important conditions that will affect the future of the landscapes, cultures and bio-ecologies that it now divides... If the wall were remodeled to perform a multitude of functions that improved, interacted with, and contributed positively to specific issues found in its immediate context, it could be embodied with new meanings (Rael, 2017).

The suggestion is not a radical experiment as in uprooting something as the Eiffel Tower and planting it over any border divide per se. That will only be considered irrational and naïve. But if the mistreated border regions can be imagined as a two-dimensional plane onto which the addition of a three-dimensional member will breathe life, then a sense of purpose can be disseminated over these thirdscapes in which “architecture initiates, directs and organizes behavior and movement… A building is not an end in itself; it frames, articulates, structures, gives significance, relates, separates and unites, facilitates and prohibits” (Pallasmaa, 1996). Neither should the proposal be stuck to the past. Even though history should be given its due respect, “… it is impossible to take over the beautiful architecture of a past era; it becomes false and pretentious when people can no longer live up to it… [the] building should preferably be ahead of its time when planned so that it will be in keeping with the times as long as it stands.” (Rasmussen, 1959) This proposed combination of monuments along borders also automatically poses an answer to Pallasmaa’s opinion on visual perception, “Peripheral vision integrates us with space, while focused vision pushes us out of the space making us mere spectators.” The border and its vastness can entertain the former while the monument can engage in the latter. The humble power of the monument is further revealed when “a curious exchange takes place; the work projects its aura, and we project our own emotions and percepts on the work.” (Pallasmaa, 1996) “The monument is the celebration of the struggle, not the victory itself, the aspiration for the utopia, not utopia itself.”

-Romaldo Giurgola 23

The Wall Game uses some sections of the wall as a two-sided playing field... It is a game only for two opposing sides.

One side cannot play it alone, as unbalanced structural forces will bring the wall down very quickly... Conversion of a construction occurs when its system of order, that is, its basic system of spatial reference is transformed by the system of order of the opposing side... Even the most bitterly opposed adversaries who learn to play together find it difficult to kill each other.

Wall Games, Lebbeus Woods, 2019

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Conclusion With the recent volatile political climate that seems to be on the edge of the next ma jor conflict and the surprising rise of populism that has seen people from discounted territorial regions taking revenge through the ballot box for attention (Rodriguez-Pose, 2018), the importance of regional policies has never been of more paramount importance. Border areas form a part of these territorial regions that are in a state of distress and in need of immediate remedial action.

Hence, after due diligence in the concepts of both borderscapes and monumentality, one may arrive at the deduction that the proposed juxtaposition is an experiment worth trying. Though they are both polarly opposite propositions, the argument that has been put forward in the previous chapter allows for a field of perception and certain justifications as to why this strategy carries merit. Thus, the position of the author relies on the qualitative aspects of monumentality which when dispersed over politically perilous but neglected borderscapes, can cultivate new perspectives and purposes that will hopefully lay a foundation for prospective peaceful discourse and exchange both along and across the divide.

“Design has never been about giving someone or some group what they ask for but what they wish they had asked for and retrospectively pretend that they did ask for” (Colomina & Wigley, 2016).

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Acknowledgements I would sincerely like to thank professor Fulvio Irace for holding this lecture along with Valentina Marchetti and opening my eyes to a broad number of backstage topics in architecure that were intriguing throughout the whole semester. The timely discussion with Prof. Irace enabled me to direct this paper towards the topic of monumentality and thus an experiment with borders.

The references provided by professors Alice Buoli and Gaia Caramellino on borderscapes and monumentality respectively have been exceptional sources for the writing of this paper.

Special gratitude is in order towards Marc Schoonderbeek (Program Director, Borders&Territories, TU Delft) and Henk van Houtum (Co-Founder and Coordinator, Nijmegen Centre for Border Research) for their valuable time and in providing research work that helped me to complete this paper.

References -BIBLIOgraphy Borders Woods, L. (2009, November 19) The Question of Space, Retrieved from https://lebbeuswoods.wordpress.com/2009/11/19/the-question-ofspace/ van Houtum, H. & Eker, M. (2015) BorderScapes: redesigning the borderland, Territorio, (72) , pp. 101-107* Cruz, T. (2017) Foreword: Borderwalls as Public Space? in Architecture as Borderwall Rael, R. (2017) Architecture as Borderwall: A Manifesto for the U.S.-Mexico Boundary Allweil, Y. (2017) Homeland: Zionism as Housing Regime, 1860–2011 Schoonderbeek, M. (2015) Complexity and simultaneity. The border as spatial condition, Territorio, (72) , pp. 95-100.

Eker, M. & van Houtum, H. (2013) Border Land: Atlas, Essays and Design.

History and Future of the Border Landscape Grichting, A. (2013) Boundaryscapes: a digital and dynamic Atlas for collaborative planning in the Cyprus Green Line, Territorio, (72) , pp. 108-116* Svetlic, R. (2016) Debordering of the Border and Its Limit, Borders/Debordering, Poligrafi, (21), pp. 45-58 26

Schoonderbeek, M. et al. (2010) Border Conditions Hermans, S. (2010) Endurance, Strength Play and Game, Border Conditions Dear, M. (2013) Why Walls won’t work: Repairing the U.S-Mexico Divide, New York: Oxford University Press Guerrero, J. (2016, December 13) Death At The Border: Threat Of Trump’s Wall Intensifies Search For Dying Migrants, KPBS *as a part of the “Border/scaping. Borderlands and urban studies in dialogue” seminar conducted in Politecnico di Milano on 10 September 2014 Monumentality Mumford, L. (1937) Death of the Monument Choay, F. (1984) Alberti: The Invention of Monumentality and Monument, Monumentality and the City, The Harvard Architecture Review IV Abercrombie, S. (1984) Architecture as Art: An Esthetic Analysis Goldberger, P. (2009) Why Architecture Matters Young, J.E. (1992) The Counter-Monument: Memory against Itself in Germany Today, Critical Inquiry, 18(2), pp. 267-296 Giedion, S. (1944) The Need for a New Monumentality, New Architecture and City Planning, pp. 549-568 Giedion, S., Leger, F. & Sert, J.L (1943) Nine Points on Monumentality Safdie, M. (1984) Collective Significance, Monumentality and the City, The Harvard Architecture Review IV Baum, S. (2018, December 13) The Book Will Kill The Edifice, Retrieved from https://medium.com/@spencerbaum/the-book-will-kill-theedifice-cf3ac706ea35 Takacs, D. (2011) Liquid Monumentality: A Search for Meaning, Thesis Report, University of Waterloo Monumentality on Borderscapes Pallasmaa, J. (1996) Eyes of the Skin Woods, L. (2009, November 09) Wall Games, Retrieved from https://lebbeuswoods.wordpress.com/2009/11/09/wall-games/ Rasmussen, S.E (1959) Experiencing Architecture Kul-Want, C. (2012) Introducing Slavoj Zizek: A Graphic Novel Rodriguez-Pose, A. (2018) The revenge of the places that don’t matter (and what to do about it), Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society (11) pp. 189–209 Colomina, B. & Wigley, M. (2016) Are We Human? Notes on an Archaeology of Design 27

-SITOgraphy An architect’s subversive reimagining of the US-Mexico border wall | Ronald Rael https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=zjrFw3MASGc Post Commodity on Borderlands | Art 21 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kKDfilSLXEs&t=18s Michael Palin at the India-Pakistan border ceremony | BBC https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n9y2qtaopbE Tanya Aguiñiga in “Borderlands” | Art21 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7bDvgPOl4J4

Mexican child over the borderwall, Tecate, Mexico Parisian artist ‘JR’, 2017

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