RIVERINE
Riverscapes are the main arteries of the world’s largest cities, and have, for millennia, been the lifeblood of the urban communities that have developed around them. These human settlements – given life through the space of the local waterscape – soon developed into ritualised spaces that sought to harness the dynamism of the watercourse and create the local architectural landscape.
Theorised via a sophisticated understanding of history, space, culture, and ecology, this collection of wonderful and deliberately wide-ranging case studies, from Early Modern Italy to the contemporary Bengal Delta, investigates the culture of human interaction with rivers and the nature of urban topography. Riverine explores the ways in which architecture and urban planning have imbued cultural landscapes with ritual and structural meaning.
Gerald Adler is a Professor and Deputy Head at the Kent School of Architecture (KSA), University of Kent, UK, which he helped to found in 2005. His PhD was on the German ‘Reform’ architect Heinrich Tessenow, and he has written on European twentieth-century topics. He is an active member of CREAte, the University of Kent’s Centre for Research in European Architecture. Adler began his career in practice, working in London, Tokyo, Winchester, Stuttgart, and Vienna, and currently directs the MA in Architecture and Urban Design at KSA.
Manolo Guerci is a Senior Lecturer and the Director of Graduate Studies at the Kent School of Architecture, University of Kent, UK. His research concentrates on Early Modern European palaces, but he has also looked at issues related to the conservation of historic buildings, traditional Japanese architecture, and post-war social housing estates, on all of which he has published widely. Educated in Rome, London, Paris, and Cambridge, he began working in France for the ‘Monuments Historiques’ agency, while he has previously taught at the University of Cambridge.
RIVERINE Architecture and Rivers
Edited by Gerald Adler and Manolo Guerci
First edition published 2019 by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
2019 selection and editorial matter, Gerald Adler and Manolo Guerci; individual chapters, the contributors
The right of Gerald Adler and Manolo Guerci to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record has been requested for this book
ISBN: 978-1-138-68175-0 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-138-68178-1 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-54562-2 (ebk)
Typeset in Bembo by Swales & Willis Ltd, Exeter, Devon, UK
Francesco Ceccarelli
From Bishops’ Inns to private palaces: the evolution of the Strand in London from the thirteenth to the seventeenth century
EXCURSUS TWO
Along the river Temo in Bosa, Sardinia
Giovanna Piga
Building rivers: how the aqueducts of Roman Britain furthered connections between towns and their riverine settings
Jay Ingate
Riverine architecture in the absence of rivers
Ishraq Z. Khan
The Sabarmati in Ahmedabad, India: the story of a city told through its river
Elisa Alessandrini
Villeneuve d’Ascq: a French new town built around lakes
Isabelle Estienne EXCURSUS THREE
Fleeting memories: bringing the Fleet River back to life in St Pancras
Sauf aux riverains: the riverine memorial of Georges-Henri Pingusson
Water and memory: tracing Nantes’ watermarks
Saren
Nature and artifice: Nadav Kander’s Yangtze, The Long River
Alexandra Stara
EXCURSUS FOUR
riverine: landscapes of the modern port city
ILLUSTRATION CREDITS
Cover Hannah and Gerald Adler (2017)
The amphibian townscape
1 National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.
2 http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Frankfurt_Merian_1646.jpg
3 National Library of Israel, Shapell Family Digitization Project and The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
4 British Museum, London, Department of Prints and Drawings
5 CIAM archives, Rotterdam
Ancient waterfront palaces: a case study of the Great Palace at Amarna
1 Sağ (2012) p. 422
2 Swoboda (1924) p. 154
3 Sağ from Stevenson (1965) p. 187
4 Sağ from Stevenson (1965) p. 196
5 Davies (1908) pp. 5–6
Spectacle of power on the Po: Ferrara and its riverfront during the Renaissance
1 ‘Su concessione del Ministero dei Beni e delle Attività Culturali e del Turismo, Gallerie Estensi – Biblioteca Mazionale Marciana. Divieto di riproduzione’. (By permission of the Ministry of Culture and Tourism. Marciana Library. No reproduction allowed.)
2 The Princely Collection, Vaduz
3 ‘Su concessione del Ministero dei Beni e delle Attività Culturali e del Turismo, Gallerie Estensi, Biblioteca Estense Universitaria’. (By permission of the Ministry of Culture and Tourism. Gallerie Estensi, Este University Library.)
4 ‘Su concessione del Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali’. (By permission of the Ministry of Culture and Tourism.) Archivio di Stato, Modena
5 ‘Su concessione del Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali’. (By permission of the Ministry of Culture and Tourism.) Archivio di Stato, Modena
6 ‘Su concessione del Ministero dei Beni e delle Attività Culturali e del Turismo, Gallerie Estensi, Biblioteca Estense Universitaria’. (By permission of the Ministry of Culture and Tourism. Gallerie Estensi, Este University Library.)
From Bishops’ Inns to private palaces: the evolution of the Strand in London from the thirteenth to the seventeenth century
1 Darlington, Howego (1964) p. 51, pl. 3
2 Cambridge University Library. By kind permission of the Syndics
3 Collection Wellbeck Abbey, National Portrait Gallery, London
4 Hatfield House Achives. By kind permission of Lord Salisbury
5 Magdalene College Cambridge. By kind permission of the Pepys Library
6 Gater, Godfrey (1937) pl. 39
Revealing the Bièvre in contemporary Paris
1 John Letherland
2 Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Est., coll. Hennin, XXII, No. 1941
3 Photo Godefroy, Bibliothèque historique de la Ville de Paris/Cliché Leyris
4 Bibliothèque historique de la Ville de Paris/Cliché Leyris
5 Paris-Assainissement/Cliché Ben Loulou
6 Kent School of Architecture, University of Kent and Yang Guo, Jie Huang, Xianyang Wang, Zhou Lie and Liz Paola Arias Ruiz Diaz
Along the river Temo in Bosa, Sardinia
1 Giovanna Piga
2 Giovanna Piga
3 Giovanna Piga
4 Giovanna Piga
5 Giovanna Piga
6 Giovanna Piga
7 Giovanna Piga
8 Giovanna Piga
9 Giovanna Piga
10 Marina Piga
Building rivers: how the aqueducts of Roman Britain furthered connections between towns and their riverine settings
1 Jay Ingate. Original by Benh Lieu Song (https://upload.wikimedia.org/ wikipedia/commons/4/42/Pont_du_Gard_BLS.jpg). Free to use and modify under CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en
2 Jay Ingate
3 Jay Ingate after Stephenson (1889) p. 70
4 Jay Ingate after Bradley (1971) p. 20, fig. 6
5 Jay Ingate
Riverine architecture in the absence of rivers
1 Izmet Nashra Khan
2 Ishraq Zahra Khan
3 Ishraq Zahra Khan
The Sabarmati in Ahmedabad, India: the story of a city told through its river
1 Elisa Alessandrini
2 Bernard Kohn, published in www.bernardkohn.org/en
3
4
Giacomo Valzania
Giacomo Valzania
5 Gurjit Matharoo
Villeneuve d’Ascq: the French riverine new town
1 Jean Pattou
2 Jean Pattou
3 Archives municipales de Villeneuve-d’Ascq, fonds EPALE, 12EP57
4 Isabelle Estienne, Ensapl/LACTH (2017)
5 Ensapl/LACTH (2013)
6 Isabelle Estienne, Ensapl/LACTH (2017)
7
Isabelle Estienne (2017)
8 Isabelle Estienne (2013)
9 Isabelle Estienne (2017)
Fleeting memories: bringing the Fleet River back to life in St Pancras
1 4orm Architects
2 Guildhall Art Gallery, London
3 4orm Architects
4 4orm Architects
5 4orm Architects
6 Dr Philip Matthewman
Sauf aux riverains: the riverine memorial of Georges-Henri Pingusson
1 Gerald Adler
2 Janine Niepce/Fonds Pingusson. ENSBA/Cité de l’architecture et du patrimoine/ Archives d’architecture du XXe siècle
3 Philippe Pingusson/Fonds Pingusson. ENSBA/Cité de l’architecture et du patrimoine/ Archives d’architecture du XXe siècle
4 Philippe Pingusson/Fonds Pingusson. ENSBA/Cité de l’architecture et du patrimoine/ Archives d’architecture du XXe siècle
5 Fonds Pingusson. ENSBA/Cité de l’architecture et du patrimoine/Archives d’architecture du XXe siècle
6 Association Mémoires d’Humanité
Water and memory: Tracing Nantes’ Watermarks
1 Chateau des ducs de Bretagne, Musée d’histoire de Nantes, Alain Guillard
2 Wikimedia Commons, personal collection of Bruno Copet
3 Ann Borst, from Wikimedia Commons, Comblements de Nantes, by Rehtse
4 Google Earth
5 Google Earth
6 Ann Borst
7 Ann Borst
Sensing the Swan
1 State Library of Western Australia (2001)
2 State Records Office of Western Australia, cons 3868, item 342
3 Rex Nan Kivell, National Library of Australia, Reference number nla.obj-149745462
4 State Library of Western Australia, Reference b3348207 1
5 Western Mail
6 Manly Library
Nature and artifice: Nadav Kander’s Yangtze, The Long River
1 Nadav Kander. Image courtesy of Flowers Gallery
2 Nadav Kander. Image courtesy of Flowers Gallery
3 Nadav Kander. Image courtesy of Flowers Gallery
4 Nadav Kander. Image courtesy of Flowers Gallery
5 Nadav Kander. Image courtesy of Flowers Gallery
6 Nadav Kander. Image courtesy of Flowers Gallery
7 Nadav Kander. Image courtesy of Flowers Gallery
8 Nadav Kander. Image courtesy of Flowers Gallery
9 Nadav Kander. Image courtesy of Flowers Gallery
CONTRIBUTORS
Gerald Adler is a Professor and Deputy Head at the Kent School of Architecture, UK, which he helped to found in 2005. His PhD was on the German ‘Reform’ architect Heinrich Tessenow, and he has written on European twentieth-century topics. He is an active member of CREAte, the University of Kent’s Centre for Research in European Architecture. Adler began his career in practice, working in London, Tokyo, Winchester, Stuttgart and Vienna, and currently directs the MA in Architecture and Urban Design.
Elisa Alessandrini is Adjunct Lecturer in the History of Modern Architecture at the University of Bologna, Italy. She graduated in Architecture in 2007 with a thesis on the ‘Project for Houses and Craftsmen’s Workshops by the Sabarmati River, Ahmedabad’, while in 2012 she earned a PhD with a thesis on ‘Ahmedabad: Laboratory of Modern Architecture. The National Institute of Design (1961–1968) international contacts, echoes of Indian traditions’. She has published extensively on the subject, and participated in many international seminars, including ISVS (Ahmedabad 2008), mAAN (New Delhi 2009), ReteVitruvio (Bari 2010), SAH (Detroit 2012), EAHN (Sao Paulo 2013 and Torino 2014), AISU (Padova 2015).
Peter Beard is a Visiting Professor at the Politecnico di Milano, Italy. As an architect working within the fields of architecture and landscape, he has created a unique body of work marked by its sensitivity to places ‘as found’. His project for the nature reserve on the Thames marshes at Rainham was awarded a special mention in the European Prize for Urban Public Space (2014), following a national award from the Royal Institute of British Architects (2011), while his work on the East London Green Grid planning strategy received the President’s Award from the Landscape Institute (2008).
Ann Borst is Professor of Architecture at the Wentworth Institute of Technology in Boston, US, and a registered architect. Her teaching includes architectural design, urban design, and travel-based studios. Her funded research is centred in France, where she has studied contemporary architecture and regenerative urban projects in Paris and regional capitals, with a particular focus in urban reclamation projects on large-scale post-industrial sites. Borst’s professional practice is comprised of educational, cultural, and civic projects. She has investigated
the relationship between water and architecture over many years, through her graduate thesis, urban design research, travels, and current studio teaching.
Francesco Ceccarelli is Associate Professor of Architectural History at the University of Bologna, Italy. The focus of his research is the early-modern and modern Italian city, from the Renaissance through Neoclassicism. He has published numerous studies on Italian architects active between the fifteenth and the nineteenth centuries and curated international exhibitions in architectural history, such as Une renaissance singulière: La cour des Este à Ferrare (Brussels 2003 and Ferrara 2004). He has also co-edited volumes on painted cities in Renaissance Italy, on villas and gardens in Renaissance Ferrara, and on Bolognese art and architecture in the age of Pellegrino and Domenico Tibaldi, as well as contributing significant chapters to the Electa series on the history of Italian architecture. Ceccarelli’s current research focuses on architecture and water in Renaissance Italy. He recently co-edited Richard Tuttle’s The Neptune Fountain in Bologna
Isabelle Estienne is an Architect DPLG, Doctor of Urban Planning, Maître-assistante at the National School of Architecture and Landscape (ENSAP) in Lille, and Researcher at the Laboratory of Architecture Design, Planning, History, Materiality (LACTH) of the ENSAP Lille. Her doctoral thesis (2010) focuses on French landscape architects, their professional integration and practices since 1945, and their contribution to the fabric of the city since 1960 through the case of Lille. She has also studied the relationships between landscape architects and architects, and contemporary urban projects and strategies (research programme POPSU), particularly in terms of spatial quality (participation in the research programme ‘Hospital as a living environment’).
Richard Gooden is an architect, born, bred and working in London. He has worked in private and public practices, has taught at various schools of architecture and has been involved in notable projects including those winning RIBA National and Regional Awards as well as Civic Trust Awards. From 2005 until 2011, he was an Assistant Head of Architecture at Hampshire County Architects, Winchester. From its inception in 2007 he also served as Vice Chair of the CABE Schools Design Panel, formed to provide independent advice on proposals for new and refurbished secondary schools in the Labour Government’s national schools re-building programme. He has a deep interest in the history of London and, with his colleagues, was the author of the winning entry for the 2013 RIBA Forgotten Spaces competition.
Manolo Guerci is a Senior Lecturer and the Director of Graduate Studies at the Kent School of Architecture, University of Kent, UK. His research concentrates on early-modern European palaces, but he has also looked at issues related to the conservation of historic buildings, traditional Japanese architecture, and post-war social housing estates, on all of which he has published widely. Educated in Rome, London, Paris and Cambridge, he began working in France for the ‘Monuments Historiques’ agency, while he has previously taught at the University of Cambridge.
Deborah Howard is Professor Emerita of Architectural History in the University of Cambridge, UK, where she is a Fellow of St John’s College. During her career spanning more than four decades, her research has focused especially on the art and architecture of Venice and the Veneto; the relationship between architecture and music; and cultural exchange in
the eastern Mediterranean. She has just completed a four-year interdisciplinary research project on religion in the Italian Renaissance home, funded by the European Research Council. Her current, Leverhulme-funded research project concerns industrial buildings and technology in the Veneto in the early-modern period.
Jay Ingate is a Lecturer in Archaeology at Canterbury Christ Church University, UK. He received his PhD from the University of Kent in 2014, and his research concentrates on the multifaceted role of water in the development of Roman towns, and its relevance to ongoing debates on the future of urbanism. This is the subject of his forthcoming book Water and Urbanism in Roman Britain: Hybridity and Identity, to be published by Routledge in 2018.
Ishraq Z. Khan is an architect from Dhaka, Bangladesh. She has a Bachelor of Architecture from BRAC University and an MA in History and Critical Thinking from the AA School of Architecture. She is interested in the cultural politics of architectural histories of South Asia. In Dhaka, she has worked with the practice of TKNRK & Associates and taught at North South University as Senior Lecturer. Khan is currently pursuing doctoral studies at Yale University.
John Letherland studied architecture at Manchester and worked in practice with Sir Terry Farrell for over thirty years. He was a founding partner of Farrells LLP and gained experience in master planning in the UK, Hong Kong, China, Malaysia and New Zealand. He is a CABE: Built Environment Expert, a long-standing member of the Academy of Urbanism (AoU), a member of the Worshipful Company of Chartered Architects and also a Trustee of Design South-East, the region’s leading source of Built Environment Design Support. He currently leads an urban design consultancy and teaches on the MA programme in Architecture and Urban Design at the Kent School of Architecture, University of Kent.
Kate Miller is a poet whose book The Observances (2015), shortlisted for the Costa and Michael Murphy Prizes, won the Seamus Heaney Centre Prize for First Collection. Educated in Art History at Cambridge and in Fine Art at Central St Martins, she has a special interest in the character and quality of public open space. Her PhD centres on writers’ accounts of walking the beach and perceptions of tidal flow.
Giovanna Piga is an architect who has been teaching for many years, and has recently concluded her PhD on ‘Urban Guidelines for Waterfront Regeneration in Northeastern Sardinian Port Towns’ at the Kent School of Architecture, University of Kent, UK. A graduate of La Sapienza in Rome, she specialises in sustainable waterfront design, high quality urban spaces, peripheries and urban landscapes. At KSA, she teaches Architectural Design, History and Theory of Architecture, and Drawing and Topography of Ancient Rome. As a registered architect, Giovanna has designed and coordinated various projects, and entered numerous design competitions for which she was awarded first prizes and finalists.
Saren Reid completed her PhD at the University of Western Australia in Perth. Her research interests include sensory history, the haptic sense, heritage, place-making, and waterfront re-development. In particular, her work considers how preserving and promoting a range of sensory encounters, particularly tactile encounters with water, shapes how waterside places are valued and cared for.
Mustafa Kaan Sağ teaches at the Kadir Has University Art and Design Faculty, Turkey. He was educated at Istanbul Technical University (ITU), obtaining his Diploma in Architecture
Contributors
in 2008, his Master in 2011 with a thesis on ‘Ancient Waterfront Palaces’, and a PhD on ‘British Missionary Schools and a Scottish Builder in the Ottoman Capital Istanbul: Nicholson Burness’. He also worked as a research assistant at ITU from 2010 to 2017. Since 2011, his research has been looking at Victorian monuments and British construction activities in Ottoman frontiers, particularly in Istanbul.
Alexandra Stara is Reader in the History and Theory of Architecture in the Department of Architecture and Landscape at Kingston University, UK. She is a qualified architect with Master degrees from UCL and the University of Cambridge, and a doctorate in the history of art from the University of Oxford. Stara has been lecturing and publishing on the hermeneutics of architecture, photography and the museum for the past twenty years. Selected projects include: the books Curating Architecture & the City (2009, ed.); The Museum of French Monuments 1795–1816 (2013) and The Edges of Trauma: Explorations in Visual Arts & Literature (2014, ed.); curating the international photography exhibition Strange Places (Stanley Picker Gallery, 2009); and recent essays, ‘Ghosts of Place: The Work of Ori Gersht’ in The Culture of Migration: Politics, Aesthetics, History (2015); ‘The Louvre Effect’ in Skiascope, journal of the Gothenburg Museum of Art (2015); and ‘The Depth Between Frames’ in Making Visible: Architecture Filmmaking (2018).
INTRODUCTION
Gerald Adler and Manolo Guerci
Now, what news on the Rialto?
(Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice)
Rivers are ubiquitous across the face of the Earth, and, together with their complex systems of tributaries, shape the land on which we live. Over millennia they have carved out valleys, forming hilltops, escarpments, embankments, even islands in the stream. They may be estuarial systems, a main river joined by tributaries as it flows towards the sea, or delta systems reversing the estuarial pattern with streams diverging towards the sea. They are everywhere, but are also unique in their configurations. It is this geographical fact that gives buildings, settlements and urban scenes their individuality and character. It is not just physical geography, for cultural geography, social patterns and political arrangements equally shape riverine architecture. However, we should not lose sight of the fact that all natural rivers were originally bereft of human settlements, and that urban patterns and architectural place-making initiatives have only relatively recently been imposed upon them. That is, riverine architecture, even more so than other forms of the art and craft of architecture, must necessarily be aware of its pre-history.1 Yet there has been no theory of topography to have had as palpable an influence on architecture (particularly on the architecture of the then-fashionable garden cities) since Patrick Geddes posited his powerful (if over-simplistic) ‘valley section’ in the years around the First World War.2
Rivers give their banks ‘direction’, with a distinct sense of upstream (towards the source) and downstream (towards the sea). For Gaston Bachelard, the great phenomenologist interpreter of the materialist imagination (‘l’imagination matérielle’), ‘his pleasure [was] to accompany the stream, to walk along its banks, in the right direction, in the direction of the flowing water, of the water that leads life elsewhere, to the next village’.3 Of course, the closer we are to the river mouth, the more we can be confused by the effect of tides; yet the ability of rivers to give orientation (above and beyond what the sun’s path may offer) is an extremely
powerful attribute of theirs. Imagine living in the middle of a flat, featureless plain! This is the disorienting fate of the interplanetary colonists from Earth in Michael Faber’s sci-fi novel
The Book of Strange New Things 4 The natives’ cities are disconcertingly featureless, and seem to be made up of inchoate masses, at least to our human eyes.
Great riverine cities will have their cultural geographies, with zones profoundly influenced by the extent to which these are located up – or downstream. London is a good example. Even though it is some two generations since shipping of any magnitude moved downstream towards the estuary mouth and into the North Sea, the centre of trade and commerce – the City of London – remains downstream, while the locus of government, royalty and the Church (focussed around the City of Westminster) lies upstream. The two are powerfully linked, on land by the Strand, the fortunes of which are rooted in its very location on the Thameside. Generally, however, fashionable, residential areas would tend to be upstream of the noise and bustle of commercial river traffic. One thinks of the elegant suburban seats of Syon House, Osterley, Chiswick, or Strawberry Hill, with the great exception of downstream Greenwich, but this was so far downstream as to be clear of the major docks to the west. Alexander Pope was able to conjure up his Arcadian vision from his bucolic riverside garden at Twickenham. As befits a good riverine city, London is nonetheless in constant flux, as the newly fashionable lower reaches of the Thames, of Wapping and Docklands, make evident.
Rivers bring benefits to the settlements on their banks, but also dangers in their wake. Ignorance of microbes prior to the nineteenth century allowed us to use river water for drinking, but also for sewage disposal.5 The nineteenth century witnessed unparalleled improvements in hygiene, aided by the new technologies of the Industrial Revolution, but it was not technology alone that drove new attitudes to riverine aesthetics. The growing tendency to have separate functional zones in cities, one which of course reached its full flowering with the strictures of CIAM (Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne) at mid-twentieth century, meant that ‘the city beautiful’ of lakeside Chicago (and let us not forget the diminutive Chicago River), but more particularly, from a riverine perspective, Shanghai’s Bund, Liverpool’s promenade in front of its ‘Three Graces’, the new Vienna of Otto Wagner and its relationship to the Danube and its tributary, the Wien river, to name but a few, are all examples of this new attitude to the leisure potential of a city’s riverbanks, and the need to separate ‘business’ from ‘pleasure’. Whereas London’s Great Exhibition of 1851 would take place far from the Thames, in Hyde Park, but, interestingly, hard by one of its tributaries, the Westbourne (in its reincarnation as the Serpentine), its successor one hundred years later, the Festival of Britain, was located in a former industrial zone of the south bank of the river, an early example of regeneration avant la lettre. Industrial uses invariably conceal their sites from the public, so that the process of relegating commercial shipping, power stations and sewage treatment to locations generally downstream has opened up these hitherto cryptic spaces to citizens. One thinks, for instance, of the effect Tate Modern has had on its stretch of London’s riverside at Southwark, after its conversion from a power station.
The poet Frances Leviston (a keynote speaker at our Riverine conference) notes the ubiquity of water in civilisation, but also the particular places it carves out when it springs from the Earth and becomes a flowing river. Her poem ‘Sulis’ recalls the Romano-British cult centred on the springs that gave rise, and meaning, to the English city of Bath (Aquae Sulis):
Water’s not particular, but where it passes is; water like wisdom resists capture, never complacent, revising itself according to each new container it closes.6
While the River Avon’s meanderings define the city’s topography that provides the frame to its classical urban forms of street, square, crescent and circus, ‘taking the waters’ did not mean dipping one’s toes into the stream, rather it involved a trip to the Pump Room and imbibing a mouthful from the hot, sulphurous source. Certainly, when we happen upon a classic urban form like a circus of terraced houses, and find it tilted down, we sense that the architectural form is acting rather like a dowsing rod in its attraction to some flowing water, revealed on the surface or otherwise hidden. Percy Circus behind London’s Gray’s Inn Road does just this, tipping its houses down westwards towards the King’s Cross Road, as if it were a circular tray of dry sherry glasses listing dangerously to starboard. (The fact that Lenin, that great upender of society, stayed at No. 16 in 1905, is purely coincidental.) The reason it does this is due to its location on the steeply sloping left bank of the Fleet, a principal tributary of the Thames in central London, now sadly culverted in its journey south to the Thames at Blackfriars.
The river in Victorian England may be a calming, placid sight, but it does not remain so for long. That idealistic creation of George Eliot’s, the youthful Daniel Deronda, ventures out on the bucolic Thames near Kew for a brisk summer evening’s row, and ends up rescuing the poor young woman Mirah who is contemplating drowning herself.7 The Victorian river is as often as not a place of danger: for The Lady of Shalott (1888) as depicted by John William Waterhouse and for Ophelia (1851–52), painted by John Everett Millais, the peaceful-looking rivers harbour hidden perils and are the scenes of human sadness and mental frailty. It is, however, in the lower reaches of our great rivers, as they flow through and define great cities, that the sinister potential of these waterways becomes palpable in their murk and stench. In Our Mutual Friend Dickens has made the Thames into a character as fickle and quirky as Mr Boffin in his bower, or as the supremely superficial and oleaginous Veneerings:
Allied to the bottom of the river rather than the surface, by reason of the slime and ooze with which it was covered, and its sodden state, this boat and the two figures in it obviously were doing something that they often did, and were seeking what they often sought.8
In another novel, Dickens casts the river in an even more gloomy and criminal mood, making it the home of the escaped convict Magwitch.9 Not quite so extreme, but depressing nonetheless, T. S. Eliot describes the Thames in words not that far removed from the halftones of James Mc Neill Whistler’s Nocturne at Battersea (1870–75), or Atkinson Grimshaw’s Liverpool Docks from Wapping (c.1875) when he writes (in ‘The Waste Land’):
Unreal city,
Under the brown fog of a winter dawn, A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many, I had not thought death had undone so many.10
Rivers are by their trans-topographical nature cross-disciplinary. Just as ‘[w]ater does not constitute one object of analysis but rather an intersecting set of processes, practices, and meanings that cuts across existing disciplinary boundaries’, so it is with rivers, if not more so.11 Heraclitus’s old saw about not being able to step into the same river twice may be extended to include riverine locations of buildings, structures and entire cities: they are never quite the same on re-visiting them, a fact that Claude Monet was well aware of, and that drew him back again and again to the banks and bridges of the Thames. Literature has certainly made its contribution, together with painting, in developing the consciousness of a distinctive riverine architecture. The allusive nature of much contemporary phenomenological writing (and painting: think Frank Auerbach and Leon Kossoff) certainly lend themselves to the riverine. Staying on the banks of the Thames, there have been numerous studies of the effect it has had upon London. Most recently, Nick Papadimitriou has taken up the cause of the tributaries of the Thames to the northwest of the capital, while Gillian Tyndall has written a classic of local history based on one village on one of its northern tributaries.12
Rivers have undergone something of a renaissance in recent architectural scholarship, not to mention in urban design practice. Which city has not sought to clean up its riverbanks, for reasons of cleanliness and of beauty? A recent example of many one might cite is the tidying up of the river in Madrid. Who can name this river? (It is the Manzanares.) Who even knew Madrid had a river? (Apologies to any Madrileños reading this.) The project, master planned by the design practice West 8 in collaboration with three locally based studios, has opened up a new public space in Madrid, linear and riverine, that has contributed to rebalancing the city to the west, in the valley below the royal palace.13 In the instance of London, the city experienced interludes of sporadic opening-up of the Thames to the public: one thinks of the Adelphi terraces of the late eighteenth century, and the Victoria Embankment of the midnineteenth. Londoners had to wait until the 1950s for similar efforts to improve the South Bank, efforts which have still not been completed. As for the world of scholarship, it was clear that a rising tide of environmentalism would turn historians’ and theorists’ eyes towards rivers, alongside the upsurge in phenomenologically minded critical studies being translated into architectural, urban and landscape terms. Our book, however, aims to use the riverine for strictly architectural purposes. Books such as Urban Rivers, City of Flows and Rivers Lost, Rivers Regained are all firmly within the firmament of urban geography, while The Fabric of Space takes a – highly relevant – economic and political stance on a variety of major river systems across the world.14 The editors of Rivers Lost, Rivers Regained admit that:
[e]nvironmental historians ignored urban topics for a long time. Cities were often regarded as the exact opposite of what this field of historical enquiry seemed to be about; namely, a place where nature was to be found only in derivative and ephemeral forms – a ‘second’ nature at best.15
The scope of Riverine is more restricted than such works of urban geography, and is limited to the consequences of riverine locations on individual buildings, groups of buildings, and landscapes. However, it attempts to open up new, critical ways of assessing and representing the architectural riverine, most notably through the media of poetry and photography. It takes a specifically architectural look at rivers, but does not conflate ‘architectural’ with ‘urban’. As a work of cultural criticism and of architectural history, it models itself rather on
Jonathan Hill’s book Weather Architecture in its themed approach to architectural history.16 This is a model of architectural history writing that owes a good deal to the historian Simon Schama’s popular works, starting with his book Landscape and Memory 17 It is, moreover, a means of making connections across various discrete disciplines that stretch back to Gaston Bachelard’s Water and Dreams (L’Eau et les Rêves), a precursor to his far more famous book The Poetics of Space 18
A river may ‘represent’ the nation-state through which it flows, or symbolise more supranationalist values. Claudio Magris thus describes the phenomenon in the case of the Danube:
The Danube is often enveloped in a symbolic anti-German aura. It is the river along which different peoples meet and mingle and cross-breed, rather than being, as the Rhine is, a mythical custodian of the purity of the race. It is the river of Vienna, Bratislava, Budapest, Belgrade and of Dacia, the river which – as Ocean encircled the world of the Greeks – embraces the Austria of the Hapsburgs, the myth and ideology of which have been symbolised by a multiple, supranational culture.19
At the smaller geographical and civic scale, a river may unite its banks, or divide them, with a spectrum of engagement in-between. Paris is essentially united by the Seine, Hamburg divided from its southern hinterland (there is barely any city to speak of on the southern banks of the Elbe), while London’s South Bank has developed quite differently compared to the north, more powerful, bank, to the extent that it is popularly referred to (mainly by North Londoners) as ‘the wrong side of the river’. This is the case of rivers with one stream, with no islands midstream of any consequence. Riverine conditions on deltas are different, as are those of cities with islands midstream. The river Odra/Oder, forming the current Polish-German border, separates two cities (Słubice and Frankfurt an der Oder) that were once one political and municipal entity, whereas the Danube now unites the formerly distinct towns of Buda and Pest in the Hungarian capital. Upstream, the Danube at Vienna marks the limit of the (historical) city; the contemporary city has expanded beyond it (in a way that Hamburg has not yet done across the Elbe). Areas on this side of the Danube feel a long way from ‘old Vienna’, even though as the crow flies, you can be closer to the Stephansdom when you are in UNO-City than in Schönbrunn (with its royal and imperial palace) to the west. Vienna’s relationship to its river has similarities with Delhi’s to the Yamuna.20 Sam Miller describes the incredible scenes on the riverbanks, and in the river, attending the religious festival of Chhath. And indeed rivers and riverbanks have offered their host cities exemplary places of gathering, by virtue of their good transport connections as well as the sheer extent of space they represent. We see this in the great ice fairs held in London in the seventeenth century, in the fairs and popular gatherings on the extensive floodplains (for instance, at Dresden and Vienna), and indeed on the bridges themselves. Although Vienna lost the Wien river (it surfaces west of the Naschmarkt and to the east it reappears as the southern boundary to the Stadtpark, before finally flowing into the Danube), the Danube is still there – it would be hard to efface this mighty European waterway – and indeed is there in its various streams. The opening sequence of Maximilian
Schell’s film (1979) of Ödön von Horváth’s Tales from the Vienna Woods has bucolic images of its generous floodplain, with the outline of the historic city panning into and out of view, in rhythm with Johann Strauss the Younger’s lyrical waltz as soundtrack.21 Cities that have expunged their rivers are generally the poorer for having done so. This is mainly a matter of scale: the Senne flowed through Brussels until the middle of the nineteenth century when it was culverted.22 It was never a mighty river equivalent to the Meuse, the Rhine or the Seine, and so the engineering required to culvert it was feasible. Great rivers, though, may be diverted, or their various streams dammed, as was the case with Vienna (the Danube was ‘regularised’) and with the Loire at Nantes, whose city-centre islands have become part of the street-grain of the city.23
Riverine is a state of mind, a psychological mood that tempers our mental maps and serves to locate us in the world. This is where ‘riverine’ gets personal, growing up as we did, along the banks of the Tiber in Rome (Guerci) and by the Thames in London (Adler). A Roman childhood and upbringing would acquaint any young boy with the founding myth of the city, and the beneficence of Tiberinus, the father of the river, who saved the twins Romulus and Remus from death, who themselves went on to found the city itself. And it is again through the Tiber, around the springs of which, as Dante alludes to in The Divine Comedy, good souls reach eternal salvation, as opposed to those destined to hell via the Acherōn, that Rome is celebrated as the centre of Christianity.24 On the other hand, late twentieth-century Rome had to vie with northern Italian cities, particularly Milan, for cultural clout, but it was in the realm of the contemporary myth-making of cinema that the city held sway. Rome thus earned the moniker ‘Hollywood on the Tiber’ with its great Cinecittà film studios to the southeast of the city. Yet, despite films such as Pasolini’s Accattone (1961), which includes the famous scene of the protagonist’s dip in the Tiber – in itself a traditional event performed every New Year’s Eve from the Ponte Cavour – the river in the mind of Romans is more of an entity detached from the city, having being massively embanked in the late nineteenth century, and hence, to an extent, buried away. This has not only created a number of problems with the foundations of those palaces now straddling the many subterranean streams that once freely abutted from the hills to the riverbank – an issue much discussed by my late Professor of Architectural Conservation, Paolo Marconi, in his quest to re-appropriate Rome with its river – but has inevitably detached us from the river. Indeed, however many times one crosses it (primarily by car or public transport), the Tiber mainly becomes noticeable after the occasional deluge, especially when it reaches the oculus of the ancient Ponte Sisto, and re-imposes itself as a threatening force. The might of Roman rainfalls, and the consequent, if brief transformation of the city into an amphibian one, especially along the river plane – an event still unchanged today – is recalled by one of Rome’s most treasured dialect poets, Giuseppe Gioacchino Belli, in ‘Er Tempo cattivo’ written in 1833:
[. .]. C’aria serrata! oh ddio che ttemporale! Guarda, guarda San Pietro cor cappello!
Oh cche ttempo da lupi! oh cche ffraggello!
Eh cqua ssemo ar diluvio univerzale. [. . .]
Le pianare sò ffiumi e nnò pianare: ggià nnun c’è ppiù una chiavica che imbocca, e ’r fiume cressce che Rripetta è un mare [. .].25
And perhaps the fascination of a river is indeed when it reminds us of its potency, a fact that may explain why I would find it difficult to imagine the Tiber without its bastions, and indeed the tall poplars alongside them, the construction and planting of which, so the family story goes, my great-grandfather was involved with.
Speaking for the British side of our editorial partnership, as a child growing up in (North) London, boundaries, and pushing them, were the scenes of the rites of passage that marked out my peers’ group territories, and enabled us to transcend them. The tube and railway lines, the streams and tributaries, the North Circular Road, they all shaped our little world, and they all eventually related back to the Thames himself (if we ascribe paternity to London’s river). An apocryphal tale perhaps, but I have a memory of being told, at primary school, that the great glacier in the last Ice Age stopped just short of the tunnel mouth at East Finchley tube station on the Northern Line. This titanic image certainly impressed the geographical and prehistoric realities on my young and impressionable mind. Cliché though it may be, we rarely ventured south of the river, and even the South Bank of the Thames, with its magnificent theatres and exhibitions, was somehow exotic, as I have tried to express here:
Not the beached Strand: gazing across the flows
South banked we’d cross now and then
For diversion in Southwark’s bright stews.
Nor yet the Great Wall, our old china
Shoring up the Suburb from the wild heath
Just downwind from the last glacial sheet
Pulled up betimes miraculously short
Of the tunnel mouth at East Finchley tube.
No, when it comes to southern boundaries,
Think of widowed great-aunts in gloomy mansion blocks,
Kept lovers holed up in St John’s Wood villas,
The long road down Fitzjohn’s culminating
In canal-side cutting. White cliffs, large flats, Brighton Beach: the south coast of North London.26
Whether you were formed in Rome or London, as we were, or indeed elsewhere, the geography of our cities leads ineluctably to the imprint of cultural geographies and histories which, since riverine conditions are almost ubiquitous, have shaped the architecture we have grown familiar with. To be fluvial is a near-universal condition and, as water is increasingly valued and respected as our most important natural resource, so too have we come to regard riverine architecture and urbanism as something precious, delightful and abounding in cultural depths.
*
This book is divided into three main sections – ‘Ensembles: by the river’; ‘Topoi: of the river’; ‘Meanings: beyond the river’ – and four excursi. These are preceded by an introductory chapter on ‘the amphibian townscape’ (Howard), which sets the tone of the book and justifies its breadth by reminding us that water affects all five senses: sight, sound, smell, taste and touch. Indeed, Deborah Howard analyses the impact water has on categories such as
identity, language, media of expression, and communication and divide, exemplified most notably by such cities floating on water as Venice and Amsterdam. The shaping role of rivers, from the individual to the urban scale, and from old to contemporary, is the subject of the first section, ‘Ensembles: by the river’, which spans from ancient waterfront palaces like the Great Palace at Amarna in Egypt (Sağ), through famous medieval and Renaissance ensembles such as the Este’s along the Po in Italy ( Ceccarelli), or the high clergy and their secular counterparts’ by the Thames in London (Guerci), to the contemporary, increasingly fashionable trend of ‘revealing’ hidden rivers such as the Bièvre in Paris (Letherland). This section ends with the first two excursi, one that keeps us (poetically) on the Thames (Miller), and another that brings us to the shores of the only river on the Italian island of Sardinia (Piga).
Mustafa Kaan Sağ discusses how one of the earliest waterfront palaces in history, the Great Palace at Amarna, a city built along the Nile by King Akhenaten in around 1350 BC as the new capital of Egypt in order to honour the god Aten, was affected by and related to the river, within a broader discussion of the motivations behind erecting a palace next to a body of water and the effect this had on ancient waterfront palace design. At an urban scale, albeit much later chronologically, this discussion is resumed by Francesco Ceccarelli, who examines how Ferrara was architecturally and urbanistically planned along its river, the Po –indeed Italy’s biggest, longest and, consequently, ‘most rivery’ of rivers – when its entire riverfront was the focus of numerous interventions by the Estes aimed at creating a magnificent backdrop for those who reached the city by water. A similar context, albeit on the shores of the Thames in London, is analysed by Manolo Guerci, whose chapter concentrates on the evolution of the Strand as the focus of architectural conspicuous consumption, from the power houses of the high clergy, the so-called Bishops Inns, built from the thirteenth century, to their secular counterparts in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, which epitomise the rise and fall of great Tudor and Jacobean magnates. As the main highway into London, the river was the catalyst of this development, and has remained, unlike many other embanked river towns, at the heart of public display and pageantry, as the latest celebrations for the Queen’s Jubilee have shown. John Letherland shifts our attention to river tributaries, such as the Bièvre in Paris, which were culverted and have almost completely disappeared from view, and to contemporary trends of investigating not only how they impacted upon urban development but also how they can be revealed. This work brings together the results from Letherland’s master’s students at the Kent School of Architecture, who explored how urban landscapes have been shaped and influenced by their natural landscape, and how this knowledge can be used to create places that are liveable and successfully accommodate population growth. The poem ‘Waterloo Sunrise’ in the first excursus by Kate Miller brings us back to London, as it celebrates the Thames crossing between the Strand and the South Bank at its pivotal bridge, twice replaced during the twentieth century. Commissioned by Canon Giles Goddard of the Church of St Johns for the 2017 Waterloo Festival, bringing music and the arts to a bustling Lambeth parish, it offers an altogether different dimension to this section. An equally diverse outlook is that of Giovanna Piga in the following excursus, ‘Along the river Temo in Bosa, Sardinia’, which examines the interesting instance of the island’s only river town, while introducing the significance of a small-scale approach to the broader discussion of waterfront regeneration. Like the following excursi, Piga’s also acts as a photographic entr’acte that separates this section from the next.
The second section, ‘Topoi: of the river’, concentrates on the role rivers have had in characterising specific riverine typologies, from broad infrastructures such as aqueducts (Ingate), through ones where the outcome, that is, the architecture originally shaped by, and conceived as ‘of the river’, has evolved when rivers are no longer present (Khan), to rivers as epitomes of a city’s entire history (Alessandrini), down to new towns designed around derivates of rivers such as lakes (Estienne). The excursus in this section provides further insights into another ‘revealed’ river, this time a tributary of the Thames in London (Gooden).
By focussing on Roman aqueducts in Britain, Jay Ingate challenges the notion that these structures, often rooted in mythology, are primarily to do with their architectural or engineering nature, rather than with their riverine one. This marked separation, he argues, has been far from consistent throughout history, while a better understanding of this changing relationship between natural and manmade sheds light on how to ‘release’ water in urban spaces, a theme also touched upon by Letherland and Gooden. The next chapter by Ishraq Khan brings us far away from Europe to Bangladesh, a country traversed by over 800 rivers and tributaries, and where spaces originally meant to be ‘beside rivers’ have gradually been deprived of their very raison d’être. In attempting to develop the poetics of the riverine ruin, Khan looks at changes in the city of Dhaka and its desires as a simultaneous stimulus for the creation of such a typology, offering a commentary on how the changing relationship between buildings and landscape affects the structures of meaning and power in that city. With the next chapter by Elisa Alessandrini we, as it were, continentally stay put, as she explores the changing role of the Sabarmati River in Ahmedabad, Gujarat’s largest city in India’s most westerly state, and the urban development and regeneration along its banks since the 1960s. Famous for its textile heritage and enlightened industrial elite, Ahmedabad features a handful of buildings by Le Corbusier, triggered by his invitation to plan distant Chandigarh in 1951. As well as three of the architect’s most poetic villas, these include the city’s Textile Mill-Owners Association seat known as ATMA, which epitomises Alessandrini’s quest to tell the story of a city through its river. We leave the subcontinent with Isabelle Estienne, who brings us back to Europe with the following chapter on ‘Villeneuve d’Ascq: a French new town built around lakes’, in France’s Nord-Pas-de-Calais region. She examines how one of a handful of new towns planned in the 1970s as laboratories for the development of new urban forms, with a focus on the quality of the living environment and a propensity to blend in with the natural landscape, developed around a predominantly watery environment. Not long before this was happening in France, Le Corbusier was busy in India with his own new town (Chandigarh), and the contrast could not be greater. While the change that occurred between the 1950s and 1970s was conspicuous, one still wonders what the Master would have made of it. The second section ends with the excursus by Richard Gooden, which, as previously mentioned, deals with another interesting case of ‘revealing’ lost rivers, that of the Fleet in London. This project was awarded first place in the 2013 ‘Forgotten Spaces’ competition, organised by the Royal Institute of British Architects in association with the Ordnance Survey and other sponsors. The theme was to uncover the potential in abandoned or neglected city locations, imagining possibilities for their reuse or their potential for transformation. Gooden’s excursus, with its visual narrative, separates us, as in the previous section, from the next and last one.
The third section, ‘Meanings: beyond the river’, goes past the physical or typological spheres of rivers as it concerns the memorial, symbolical, phenomenological, sensorial and
visual sides of riverine, from the Monument to the Deported on the edge of the Île de la Cité in Paris, poignantly located behind the chevet of Notre Dame and virtually sunk within the Seine (Adler), through the Memorial to the Abolition of the Slavery and its riverine relationship in Nantes, in a paper that deals with the reclamation of the waterways of a city originally made of estuarial islands (Borst), to the traditions of bodily engagement with the Swan River on the Perth foreshore in Western Australia at the turn of the twentieth century (Reid), down to the role of photography as an interpretative and poetic device for riverine landscapes (Stara), and finally to the landscapes of the modern port city, the subject of our concluding excursus (Beard).
Within a discussion of the phenomenology of rivers in cities, Gerald Adler analyses the cryptic monument to France’s Second World War deportees, carved out from the banks of the Seine in the early 1960s. This seemingly invisible, yet extremely evocative memorial shifts our attention to the dark sides of the river, being the locus of massacres (St Bartholomew’s Day, 1572), of communards shot on the bridges in 1848, and of the many Algerians whose bodies were dumped in it in 1961. A similar, if methodologically different, line of enquiry is followed by Ann Borst in the next chapter, which examines a range of urban strategies deployed in Nantes such as unearthing lost riverways through evocative site design, revaluing the artefacts of its maritime industry, and confronting its role in the slave trade. These interventions reflect a spectrum of relationships between water and memory: reconstruction of the physical presence of water in the urban fabric; preservation of the social and workforce history of the city’s former port and shipbuilding industry; and introspection on the waterborne origins of human trafficking. Through the analysis of the history and traditions of bodily engagement with the Swan River on the Perth foreshore at the turn of the twentieth century, the next chapter by Saren Reid brings us to Western Australia, where she explores how cultural changes and technological developments facilitated the rise of new aquatic leisure practices which brought people into close contact with the smells and physical characteristics of the river. We then move to China with Alexandra Stara, whose chapter focuses on the work of Nadav Kander’s photographic series Yangtze: The Long River (2006–08). This illuminates one of the most ancient encounters between nature and artifice – that of river and city – an encounter which acquires renewed significance in our fraught late modernity. The analysis contributes to the argument about the relevance of such a medium as both an interpretative and poetic device for architecture and landscape. The book ends with the fourth excursus by Peter Beard on ‘Metropolitan riverine: landscapes of the modern port city’, which examines two projects, one a documentary, the other the design of a landscape, set in Shanghai and London respectively. The projects are presented together, firstly to show something of the present-day state of these port-city siblings, and secondly as a way to reflect on the nature of this new metropolitan riverine. Although different in scope, Beard’s excursus is accompanied by a series of evocative photographs, which not only emboldens Stara’s points, but also nicely concludes our riverine journey across east and west.
Notes
1 See Andrew Ballantyne (ed.), Rural and Urban: Architecture between Two Cultures (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2010) for essays on this fundamental architectural distinction.
2 Volker M. Welter, Biopolis: Patrick Geddes and the City of Life (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT, 2002), especially Chapter 3: ‘The City and Geography’, pp. 54–80.
Another random document with no related content on Scribd:
OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.
1.F.5. Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of damages. If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement violates the law of the state applicable to this agreement, the agreement shall be interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or limitation permitted by the applicable state law. The invalidity or unenforceability of any provision of this agreement shall not void the remaining provisions.
1.F.6. INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone providing copies of Project Gutenberg™ electronic works in accordance with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the production, promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg™ electronic works, harmless from all liability, costs and expenses, including legal fees, that arise directly or indirectly from any of the following which you do or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this or any Project Gutenberg™ work, (b) alteration, modification, or additions or deletions to any Project Gutenberg™ work, and (c) any Defect you cause.
Section 2. Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg™
Project Gutenberg™ is synonymous with the free distribution of electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of computers including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers. It exists because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations from people in all walks of life.
Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the assistance they need are critical to reaching Project
Gutenberg™’s goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg™ collection will remain freely available for generations to come. In 2001, the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure and permanent future for Project Gutenberg™ and future generations. To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation and how your efforts and donations can help, see Sections 3 and 4 and the Foundation information page at www.gutenberg.org.
Section 3. Information about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a nonprofit 501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal Revenue Service. The Foundation’s EIN or federal tax identification number is 64-6221541. Contributions to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent permitted by U.S. federal laws and your state’s laws.
The Foundation’s business office is located at 809 North 1500 West, Salt Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887. Email contact links and up to date contact information can be found at the Foundation’s website and official page at www.gutenberg.org/contact
Section 4. Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
Project Gutenberg™ depends upon and cannot survive without widespread public support and donations to carry out its mission of increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be freely distributed in machine-readable form
accessible by the widest array of equipment including outdated equipment. Many small donations ($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt status with the IRS.
The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United States. Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up with these requirements. We do not solicit donations in locations where we have not received written confirmation of compliance. To SEND DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any particular state visit www.gutenberg.org/donate.
While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who approach us with offers to donate.
International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from outside the United States. U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.
Please check the Project Gutenberg web pages for current donation methods and addresses. Donations are accepted in a number of other ways including checks, online payments and credit card donations. To donate, please visit: www.gutenberg.org/donate.
Section 5. General Information About Project Gutenberg™ electronic works
Professor Michael S. Hart was the originator of the Project Gutenberg™ concept of a library of electronic works that could be freely shared with anyone. For forty years, he produced and
distributed Project Gutenberg™ eBooks with only a loose network of volunteer support.
Project Gutenberg™ eBooks are often created from several printed editions, all of which are confirmed as not protected by copyright in the U.S. unless a copyright notice is included. Thus, we do not necessarily keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper edition.
Most people start at our website which has the main PG search facility: www.gutenberg.org.
This website includes information about Project Gutenberg™, including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks.
