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ARCHIVING the CITY: Athens and the Athens of the North MArch Stage 5/Stage 6 vertical studio 2019/2020: Christos Kakalis & Ivan Marquez Munoz

Above: Hugh Williams Williams, ‘Athens from the Hill of the Museum’, c. 1820, watercolour

Above: Hugh Williams Williams, ‘View of Edinburgh from Arthur’s Seat’, 1826, watercolour

SYNOPSIS This studio investigates architectural responses to archiving and mapping in the cities of Edinburgh and Athens, two urban fabrics with physical and cultural similarities as well as differences, the comparison of which will be explored throughout the year.

In semester 1 we will work both individually and as a group on mapping the studied areas aiming at an initial proposal for a building relevant to the examined concepts. After the January submission and developing on the themes explored in semester 1 you will further develop the proposal in semester 2: tectonically, contextually and programmatically. We will visit Edinburgh in semester 1 and Athens at the very beginning of semester 2. In semester 1, Edinburgh will be used as a testing ground of methods and approaches, which will be further applied to Athens or further developed in Edinburgh in semester 2.

Stage 5 will have to submit a coherent urban proposal by the end of the first semester to be further developed into a building project in the second, while stage 6 develop through the same stages, events and tasks their thesis until the end of semester 2.

We will use these 2 cities as the generators of the projects, and we adopt the theme of archive as the common thread to interrogate the urban environment at different scales of inquiry.

Image from the Archimedes’ Palimpsest (originally a 10th c. Byzantine Copy)

Athens Being an active palimpsest of numerous historical periods, Athenian urban fabric is an open archive in which permanent residents and visitors interact with different socio-cultural layers, while adding their stories to them as well. Mostly known for its historical core, the Acropolis and its immediate surroundings, Athens has been mainly developed since 19th century, after its independence from Ottoman Occupation and establishment as the capital of the Greece. With a first classical triangular shaped urban plan being gradually expanded, Athens was becoming an important city in Europe, including a series of industrial clusters and being also connected to the dynamic port of Piraeus. A number of drastic post-WWII development plans, have dramatically changed its landscape and skyline, with the period of 1960-1970s reaching a peak of constructive activity. Since early twenty first century, the European financial crisis has also affected the geopolitical and architectural landscape of the city with important developmental projects being frozen, intense demographic mobility, changes of use and abandonment re-forming its texture.

What can we live now in the city of Athens? The reality of a vibrant urban palimpsest worthy to be understood, read and mapped. Its further development needs to be imagined and designed, in different scales seeking to uncover the moments where its different layers not only over-lap, but actively co-exist.

Athens in 1960s, Demolition of 19th c. Neoclassical building to erect a high rise block of flats.

Athens of the North – Edinburgh Edinburgh has been connected to Athens, mainly since the middle of the 18th century, for different reasons. The beginning was mainly intellectual, as the one of the greater European Centers of Enlightenment was claiming the title of a cultural capital also through the comparison with Ancient, Classical, Athens. This was not only claimed by locals; it was generally acknowledged in the minds of the thinkers and travellers of that period that Scottish Enlightenment was worthily offering a connection to Ancient Athenian cultural renaissance (cases like the Irish writer Thomas Sheridan). Besides these intellectual associations, during the eighteenth century thinkers were also suggesting topographical interrelations between the two cities. Cases such as the traveller James Stuart that in 1762 mentioning the similarity in the preface to the seminal Antiquities of Athens. The Cambridge geologist and antiquarian Edward Daniel Clarke wrote in 1818 about the resemblance between the Athens-Piraeus and EdinburghLeith complexes. In addition, and most importantly, after his grant tour of Italy and Greece in 1817/18, the Edinburgh landscape painter Hugh William Williams underlined topographical connections between the two cities both through his extremely influential writings as well as painting. He is credited with the very famous phrase ‘The Athens of the North’. While we now think of Edinburgh as one of the great neoclassical and Greek Revival cities, when these writers were expressing these ideas either the New Town had not been designers or the key classical buildings where not erected yet. A Greek Revival started mainly after the end of the Napoleonic wars (early Victorian period) not only in architecture but in other aspects of the city, as well as the people (with phrases such as ‘modern Athenians’ being used for specific parts of the Edinburgh population). 1 Are there actual topographical similarities between the two cities? This is perhaps the result of early-nineteenth century interest in the Picturesque, that according to the historian John Lowrey has played a key role in the Greek Revival of Edinburgh. 2 A specific political symbolism is also carried in these revivalist tensions, while Edinburgh and Scotland in general was seeking to position itself in the United Kingdom. Edinburgh was still a capital of a nation (with the term nation not being fully developed and appropriated during that period; seen as a more fluid process that we think of it now).

John, Lowrey, ‘From Caesarea to Athens Greek Revival Edinburgh and the Question of Scottish Identity within the Unionist State’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, 60(2), pp. 136-157.

2 Ibid, p. 140.

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This is mainly expressed in the unfinished National Monument to the Scottish Servicemen killed in the Napoleonic Wars, built on the top of Calton Hill and following the Design of Athenian Parthenon (William Playfair, 1813-1815) and the later buildings designed and constructed by Thomas Hamilton on the same Hill, such as the Royal High School (1826). 3

Edinburgh, Demolition of 18th c. George Square to erect the new and modern buildings of the University.

3

John, Lowrey, ibid.

Key studio theme: ARCHIVING

Above: Christian Boltanski, ‘Stored Memory’

Archiving (accumulating the records of an assemblage) is a rather deep concept that is not only limited to the surfaces of the device in which it is organised (walls, screens, drawers and so forth, depending on its scale). The project explores archiving as a process that involves different stages: accumulation, documentation, classification and opening to the wider audience. It is classification that makes archiving a unique and multi-layered process worth examining in a multi-layered and multi-scalar way.

The architecture of the archive depends on its content: the materiality and size, the number of items and their age. Galleries and bookshelves are designed to accommodate the spaces of these objects that may greatly differ in type and size. A map archive, for example, has different needs from an archive of archaeological artefacts, or a Library that is an archived collection of books.

Systems of classification define the order and organisation of these containers (either spaces or furniture) and transform the complex from a space of collection into an archive. The archive is not a geography of ‘dead objects’, it is a living and developing collection that follows the narrative of the chosen classification system as well as interacts with the use of the building either by the keepers of the archives or the visitors.

The project asks you to see the archive beyond the walls of its building: to acknowledge the architectural qualities of archiving in the way cities are formed, relevant buildings are designed

and built, tangible and intangible elements of environment are classified, experience or even manipulated. To see archiving as a process of mapping and contextualising.

French artist Christian Boltanski uses a number of different elements (photographs, sounds, clothes, objects, light and darkness, videos) to put together installations as archives of memories from his birth and childhood, the second world war and the liberation of Paris from German occupation. ‘Storage Memory’ or ‘Les Archives de C.B.’ are characteristic cases of the kind of interactive archives that he suggests in which established ways of classification and writing/categorizing formal history are challenged in space and time. 4

Above: Christian Boltanski, ‘Storage Memory: Part I’

Archiving is about memory and the project invites you to see the city as an archive, an archive of personal and collective stories materialised in its fabric: in its solid and void spaces and the layers of history co-existing in its reality. The idea of palimpsest is really important in this exploration, suggesting that the city is the living co-existence of overlapping layers of histories, cultures, practices, tangible and intangible elements, hidden and imaginary landscapes. Remembering and

http://www.powerstationofart.org/en/exhibition/Christian-Boltanski-Storage-Memory.html, [date of access: 18 September 2019] https://neatlyart.wordpress.com/2013/06/21/stored-memory-christian-boltanski/, date of access: 18 September 2019] 4

forgetting are reciprocally interrelated in palimpsest process depending on the human experience of the urban fabric both at an individual and a collective level.

In this context Mike Featherstone, reminds us Walter Benjamin’s incomplete Arcades project (1982) as an archive of walking readings of the city of Paris. For Featherstone, flaneur, is not only a walker, a passive stroller through the city. He is a collector of moments that puts them together through the narrative of his body and re-tells this story in the montage ways in which he collates the texts of his descriptions. City becomes not only the context of these walks and archival synthesis of moments, but an active agent and built narrative of a network of personal and collective practices, actions, walks, stases that define the way the urban environment is formed and at the same time they are defined by it. 5 In the same way that Benjamin approaches his text as a city, we invite you to look at the city as a kind of a palimpsest text and suggest your own way of collecting and archiving a cluster of elements. These clusters can be related but not only limited to the following families of polarities: Solid/void Formal/Informal Sound/Silence Used/Unused Personal/Collective Sacred/Profane Key Texts: Mike Featherstone, ‘Archiving Cultures’, The British Journal of Sociology, 51(10, 2000, pp.161184.

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Mike Featherstone, ‘Archiving Cultures’, The British Journal of Sociology, 51(10, 2000, pp.161-184.

Key studio theme: MAPPING According to Edward S. Casey, etymologically, "topography" combines the Greek word for place (τόπος-topos) with the one for writing (γράφειν-graphein), relating lived spatiality with the notion of inscription. In the traditional use of the term, topos is connected to a specific mathematically defined location and graphein relates to "the model of a [two-dimensional] flat surface on which are inscribed images as well as words". 6 Thus, traditionally, topography is "the science or practice of describing a particular place, city, town, manor, parish or tract of land; the accurate and detailed description or delineation of locality". Though, the active role of the body in the understanding of place, calls for a critical revisit of the term.

Smell-Scapes of New York 7

Edward S. Casey, ‘Representing Place: Landscape Painting and Maps’, (Mineapolis – London: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), p. 160.

7 https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/interactive/2009/08/29/opinion/20090829-smell-mapfeature.html 6

Rethinking of what mapping is, re-negotiates the urban landscape and architectural readings through the “eyes of the observer”. Maps are interpretations of the reality following Deleuze and Guattari’s distinction between a map and a tracing: What distinguishes the map from the tracing is that it is entirely oriented toward experimentation in contact with the real. The map does not reproduce an unconscious closed in upon itself; it constructs the unconscious. It fosters connections between fields, the removal of blockages on bodies without organs, the maximum opening of bodies without organs onto a plane of consistency(...) The map has to do with performance, whereas the tracing always involves an alleged "competence." 8 A characteristic example of experimental mapping is, the situationist psycho-geographic model of the naked city that decenters the attention of mapping from the spatial qualities to human activity; it focuses rather on how the city is inhabited through human everyday rituals and registers the spontaneous and more fluid nature of body movement 9. In such records, personal and collective experiential readings of the place may involve memory, movement and negotiation with the boundaries of the real and the mental. 10

Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, ‘A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia’, p. I2.

"McDonough, Tom. Situationist Space. In ‘Guy Debord and the Situationist International’, Tom McDonough (Ed.), London; Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2002, pp.241-265.

10 For a comprehensive description of situationist mapping, please read: https://jacket2.org/commentary/avant-garde-iii-situationist-maps-take-two 8 9

Is the bodily information of a landscape restricted only to what is noticeable and countable? How is the more transcendental aspect of reality mediated through the human body? And how does the individual’s memory interfere in the reading of the urban landscape? The individual moving in it, either through habitual movements or pre-reflective ones, has the opportunity to participate in a "happening of place". 11 Being inside a landscape, therefore, he/she is involved in a dialogic relationship to it.

This embodied encounter involves a dynamic inter-connection of soundscapes 12, visionscapes, touchscapes, smellscapes and tastescapes. The different sensual qualities direct the individual's movement enhancing the meaning of his/her experience. Besides using the body to register and evaluate the stimuli of the external world to act accordingly, the individuals’ perception of the real greatly depends on their memory (critical component in mapping studies), politics as well as thoughts, cultural and social background and (even) imagination.

Allowing the body to be responsive to the environment facilitates the discovery of hidden landscapes that usually remain unnoticed. These are landscapes of subtle (formal or informal) undergoing activity that is perceived and recognized once the individual becomes immersed in the experience of the context. 13 Immersion implies a process of gradual familiarisation with the urban landscape through diverse techniques. These techniques include bodily movements, performative actions (i.e. choreography, walking itineraries) or even digital and locomotive tools (soundwalks, smell-scape recordings) and explorations of human interactions. The combination of these techniques as a process facilitates the creation of mappings that unfold potential 14. “The function of maps”, as James Corner argues, “is not to depict but to enable, to precipitate a set of effects in time. Thus, mappings do not represent geographies or ideas; rather they affect their actualization”.

In other words, the agency of mapping is most effective when its capacity for description also sets the conditions for new worlds to emerge. Unlike tracings, which propagate redundancies, mappings discover new worlds within past and present ones; they inaugurate new grounds upon the hidden traces of a living context. 15

11Ibid,

p. 153.

R. Murray Schafer, The Tuning of the World. A Pioneering Exploration into the Past History and Present State of the Most Neglected Aspect of Our Environment: The Soundscape (Indian River, Ont.: Arcana, 1993) 13 Kim Dovey, Ross King, ’Forms of Informality: Morphology and Visibility of Informal Settlements’, Built Environment, 37(1), 2011, pp. 11-29(19) 14James Corner, ‘The Agency of Mapping’, in ‘Mappings’, p. 213.

15Ibid, p. 214.

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In this context, you are asked to produce a collective mapping of the studied areas that will take, also, into consideration the results of the archiving devices that you will have developed individually.

Brandon M. Anderson, A map of Syracuse, MIT Media Lab A very interesting example is the work of Thaisa Way that she has mapped Gas Works Park in Seattle (designed by Richard Haag Associations), by writing ‘thick descriptions’ and drawing ‘thick sections’. For Way the landscape is an embodied history that not only involves (architectural) artifacts of the past but also the land itself. Dealing with the landscape of Gas Works Park as a series of co-existing layers of ground and architecture, way has represented the landscape through text and drawings (sections) in a generative way: a way that allows for the mapping itself to become the beginning of a new design. 16 To identify and explore the complex relationships of a place, or an event embedded in a time and place, requires moving away from ‘thin descriptions’, toward ‘thick descriptions’, 16

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/18626033.2013.798920, [date of access: 18 September 2019].

that engage a ‘multiplicity of complex conceptual stories, many of them superimposed upon or knotted into one another, which are at once strange, irregular, inexplicit’ (Geertz 1973 Geertz, C. 1973. The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays, New York: Basic Books:10). A thick section draws on the work to develop a visual study of thick descriptions; thick sections suggest that the surface is merely that which is at the top of a rich history of morphologies, natural and human. This thick section is not easy to draw any more than Geertz's thick descriptions were easy to write; however, through the act of simultaneously drawing and writing one can describe a place's thick history in a more dynamic manner.

Key Text: James Corner, ‘The Agency of Mapping: Speculation, Critique and Invention’, in Denis Cosgrove (ed), Mappings, (London: Reaktion Books, 1999), p.231-252.

Key studio theme: SCALE Introducing the term ‘assemblage’ in architectural studies, Kim Dovey, talks about the city as a ‘whole that is formed from the interconnectivity and flows between constituent parts- a sociospatial cluster of interconnection wherein the identities of both parts and wholes [that] emerge from the flows between them” (reference) The part and the whole, suggests the diverse interconnected scales that constitute the assemblage and ask for a design care. In this project we ask you to explore the multi-scalar understanding of city-assemblages: from the archiving and the mapping of the urban scale to a closer look at your intended place-making through modelling spaces at different scales. The polarities of stability/change and structure/agency are inherently involved in the multi-scalar understanding of assemblage, seen by Dovey, as a meaningful process of place-making.

Architecture, hence, has the unique ability to not only explore urban components of different scales but to also suggest different ways of interconnecting them through design. The scale of the city is organically interconnected with the scale of individual or group practices taking place in it, allowing for them to happen and at the same time existing and developing because of them.

Mapping the reality of the examined urban landscape involves different scale and is not only limited in the established, conventional, links of urban planning to the scales of the ‘whole’ (that for example go at least beyond the 1/500). Care should be taken for the way the different components and examined polarities are expressed in the reciprocal interaction between different scales.

You are asked to think in a multi-scalar way from the stages of reading and mapping to the stage of proposing and designing.

Key studio theme: FIELD/WORK

In November 2009, the Architectural Humanities Research Association (AHRA) organised a conference at the School of Architecture of the University of Edinburgh entitled ‘Field/work’ that explored the role of fieldwork as an integral part of architectural design. In the call for papers we read: Fieldwork has always been integral to the work of architects and landscape architects and the many forms of associated scholarship, from the site visit to the grand tour to the social survey. We visit sites- real and imagined- to collect, order and interpret data, to establish parameters, frameworks, contexts and outlines for design work. As the sites of design work and scholarship have become increasingly complex and mediated, the questions as to what and where the field is, how we collect data, how we ensure its reliability, and how it informs design work have renewed theoretical and practical significance.

The field is the architect’s living laboratory.

Distant research of a site or an area can only give partial information of the spatial realities that take place there. This process is usually followed in theoretical projects on competition entries when the site of construction is abroad and the architects have to collect information from their

base and classify in the most creative way. The phase of application of first prizes involves a process of situating the theoretical proposal in its real physical, economical and ---- environment, usually requiring changes and compromisations that have to do with the contextualisation strategies.

Nieto and Sobejano Winning Prize Competition Entry for the Arvo Part Centre (Tallinn, Estonia), 2013

Nieto and Sobejano, Arvo Part Centre (Tallinn, Estonia), 2019

In combination with material from the web, books and existing mappings, the project asks you to conduct fieldwork – fieldwork seen not just as a visit of the site, but as an active practice of design process. The role of fieldwork in the process of producing or further developing your mappings and archivings becomes part of the design process connected with the previous and the next stages in a generative way: the one giving birth to the other; ‘the one because of the other’ and not ‘the one after the other’. The causal and creative incorporation of fieldwork in your work needs to be documented and expressed in the further development of your projects.

Highlighting the significance of context and the communicative role of architecture and criticising the current architectural emphasis on autonomous form, Dagmar Weston, suggests: The recognition of the modern malaise of formalism, placelessness and the poverty of meaning has led in recent decades to a renewed interest in place-making and strategies of regionalism. These explorations have been helpful, and reinforce this author’s conviction that to counteract the wide-spread tendency toward homogenization, aestheticism and banality and to maintain its traditional ethical function, architecture must grow out of the given conditions of its setting; it must be situated in and expressive of a particular physical and cultural context. In this sense, the setting or site must play a central role in informing the content and form of architecture and of the public realm”. 17

Dagmar Motycka Weston, ‘‘The Language of Stones’: Towards a situated architecture in the design studio’, J. de Paiva (ed), The Living Tradition of Architecture, (London: Routledge, 2016), pp.221-222.

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ARC8050 (Stage 5 – semester 1) Assessment Criteria:

Thesis [20%] [How logically does the brief follow on from the research and studio brief? How coherent is the response to this, from analysis to intervention and from urban strategy to programme?]

Design Development [15%] [How rigorously has the urban strategy been tested, analysed, and refined. How resolved is the design?]

Context [20%] [How thoroughly are the various contexts (material, historical, cultural, social, political, environmental, professional) investigated? How critically and creatively has the design approach responded to these contexts?]

Criticality [15%] [How thorough is the research, and precedent analysis? How successfully and originally has this been responded to in order to question existing conditions and propose alternatives? How reflective is the work?]

Representation [20%] [How clearly and appropriately is the range of exploratory drawing/modelling techniques used to investigate and communicate the driving ideas and design proposals across the scales?]

Studio-specific criterion [10%] [How successfully has the proposal interpreted the themes of archiving and mapping as drivers of the intervention?]

ARC8060 (Stage 6) Assessment Criteria:

Thesis [20%] How logically does the project brief follow on from the research and studio brief? How coherent is the response to this, from analysis to intervention, from urban strategy to programme and from site to building and detail?

Design Development [15%] How rigorously have the urban strategy and building design been tested, analysed, and refined?

How resolved is the design across all scales, and in terms of technological strategies?

Context [20%] How thoroughly are the various contexts (e.g. material, historical, cultural, social, political, environmental, professional, technological, etc.) investigated? How critically and creatively has the design approach responded to these contexts?

Criticality [15%] How thorough is the research, and precedent analysis? How successfully and originally has this been responded to and embodied in architectural form, in order to question existing conditions and propose alternatives? How reflective is the work?

Representation [20%] How clearly and appropriately is the range of exploratory drawing/modelling techniques used to investigate and communicate the driving ideas and design proposals across the scales?

Studio-specific criterion [10%] [How successfully has the proposal interpreted the themes of archiving and mapping as drivers of the intervention?]