2021 / The Artifice of Redress

2021

The Artifice of Redress

Abstracts

Owned Ruin Encounters in the Villages of the Turkish-Cypriots in Cyprus

Bahar Aktuna

Keywords: artifacture, collapse, world-decay, topo-tectonic, grafting

Ruin is originally a Western concept and according to Hu Wang, it has its origins in “the architectural remains of predominantly masonry structures.”[1] Ruin is inherently related to the mass and will to endurance. Since Georg Simmel’s work on the ruin, many recent studies take ruin to be a process of decay and change and indicate that ruins are imbued with values such as age value, historic value, social value, political value, ecological value, instrumental value, and ontological value. However, ruin as a manifestation of “terrain vague” is at odds with the field of architecture in architecture’s desire for an ordered environment for inhabitation.[2] As an architectural image of vulnerability and failure, existing and potential ruins continuously occupy the mind of the architects who work against breakage and disappearance. Ruin and building are antithetical concepts, and the architectural intuition for significant ruins is to save them and to fix them to a more or less static moment and thus remove the ruin from the ruins. When the ruins are not considered of any value, the remains may be abandoned, recycled, or removed completely if they pose any danger. Although architects learn from observing, documenting, and dissecting ruins, notably as in the Grand Tour and in the works of Louis Kahn, there are seldom instances that architects work toward ruins or envision the future of their buildings in ruins—these visions mostly pertain to decay as in Gavin Lucas’ “slow ruins” or Rose Macaulay’s “old ruins.” There is a contradiction between restorative and reflective stances toward the ruin, especially between the ethical stances of architectural and non-architectural fields.

Literature on ruins predominantly reflects the vantage points of various scholars and professionals and cases in which the effect of ruination does not extend beyond the ruin figure. In these works, we access the ruins from the perspective of a detached subject who does not see the ruin from the experience of the ruin temporality.[3] From the viewpoint of the ruin-subject that remains close to ruin and experiences ruin temporality, how does the ruin ruinate and how does it allow or guide ethical action rather than a mere aesthetic pleasure? In order to expand the horizon of understanding on the structures and processes of building in ruin, how they are experienced, negotiated and projected from within, I mutually explore the original ruin and the originary ruin-subjectivity of the ruin-dweller through the framework of Martin Heidegger’s care-worlds and Jonathan Lear’s world collapse. Through a hermeneutic-phenomenological method, I carry out a study in a context where world collapse is taken to the extreme and where it is possible to gather first-person accounts on expansive decay and immediate collapse while the owned ruin-subjectivities remain both within and outside the ruin.

The contemporary context of divided Cyprus presents an original case of ruin-encounters including the originary ruin-subjectivity of the ruin-dweller who encounters ruins both from within and from outside. The modern history of Cyprus has witnessed a civil war (1963-1974), which led to the de facto division of the country by the Turkish side (1974-1975), and a lasting inter-ethnic dispute between the Greek-Cypriot and Turkish-Cypriot communities. Through mass displacements that occurred between 1950s and 1970s, Cyprus remains physically and ethnically divided across the Green Line as Turkish-Cypriot led Northern territory and Greek-Cypriot led Southern territory. While there was no physical access between two sides of the island for three decades, the first checkpoint opened between two territories in April 2003. The rural landscape of Southern Cyprus is a site for many derelict and ruined villages of Turkish-Cypriots. Upon the opening of the checkpoints, these settlements attracted their former inhabitants who expected to find more intact settlements but rather encountered ruins and experienced the abolishment of time as the collapse of the embodied phenomenal world.

The research design is based on locating the series of ruined sites, visiting the sites to gather reactive and reflective notes on being in ruins authentically, and gathering experiential accounts of the former inhabitants of the ruined villages. The ruin-dwellers’ accounts of the devaluation of life in ruins, concealment of temporality, and their will to project in the overtness of collapse illuminate the essence of building in case of the impossibility of sustaining a bygone world and irreversibly disintegrated site. The new openness to the world is “counter-ruinance,” and Scott Campbell states that “[i]n a moment of insight, a kairos, [the] counter-ruinant structures point life back toward itself, and its original caring movement toward the world.”[4] The interpretation of notes and accounts through repeated readings reveal traumas, dreams, and varying projects, some of more architectural nature and some are less, of rebuilding a living present from the ruin. The study aims to broaden the vantage point on the topology of ruins through the accounts of ruin-dwellers and to evoke building from the lens of ruin.

  1. 1

    Wu Hung, A Sto­ry of Ruins: Pres­ence and Absence in Chi­nese Art and Visu­al Cul­ture (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton Uni­ver­si­ty Press, 2012), 7.

  2. 2

    Ignasi de Solà-Morales, Ter­rain Vague,” in Ter­rain Vague: Inter­stices at the Edge of the Pale, ed. Manuela Mar­i­ani and Patrick Bar­ron (New York: Rout­ledge, Tay­lor & Fran­cis Group, 2014), 28.

  3. 3

    As dif­fer­ent from Hetzler’s ruin time” as a con­di­tion between eter­nal pres­ence and absence that occurs in decay, ruin tem­po­ral­i­ty is the expe­ri­ence of collapse.

  4. 4

    Scott M. Camp­bell, The Ear­ly Heidegger's Phi­los­o­phy of Life: Fac­tic­i­ty, Being, and Lan­guage, Per­spec­tives in Con­ti­nen­tal Phi­los­o­phy (New York: Ford­ham Uni­ver­si­ty Press, 2012), 84.

A Reality of Rurality

Mo Michelsen Stochholm Krag

In the 18th century, the early preservationists such as Eugène Emmanuel Le Duc and John Ruskin manifested their concepts of how to approach cultural heritage. They formed the basis of modern restoration, occupying the field with prolonging, upholding, and restoring, in theory as well as in practice. Presently, and in line with their approach, the vast majority of safeguarded buildings represents imposing monuments in the cities supplemented with castles and churches in the rural areas.

In contrast to restoration of safeguarded monuments, this paper reports on a series of alternative preservation attempts developed and tested as radical transformation of abandoned buildings undertaken at full scale through a subtractive architectural practice. This radical preservation practice was initiated in Denmark, aiming at temporary and dynamic preservation strategies for the rural built environment with emphasis on involvement and close engagement with the local village communities. The aim was to re-activate obsolete buildings as material anchorage point of personal memories of place, to facilitate an exchange of these memories to strengthen the collective memory, and to rebuild the community cohesion within the depopulating rural villages.

Thus, the practice differs from the classic notion of cultural heritage practices as the buildings are preserved for those with a personal and geographic relation. Most of these transformed buildings originate from the recent past when rural farming villages were prosperous and hence, the buildings belong to the everyday environment in contrast to most listed and safeguarded monuments.

Based on twelve completed transformations, the paper claims that the alternative preservation indicate several intrinsic qualities as well as heritage aspects that might prove valuable to the development of future identities of the already contested rural village communities. These qualities are currently disappearing due to unawareness and lack of a supplementary heritage apparatus to identify and address them. The main challenge in the search for new directions in radical preservation are the nature of what must be preserved, as those intrinsic material and immaterial qualities are fragile and ephemeral, difficult to identify, and almost impossible to activate or preserve. As such, the research forms a critical practice opposed to contemporary heritage practices as well as current Danish rural planning policies.

A Land or A Ruin
Contested Vulnerability

Serena Dambrosio, Constanza Larach

Keywords: vulnerability, real-estate, monument, social integration

This text explores the varied and conflicting meanings that operate around the concept of vulnerability, through the case of Villa San Luis (Villa Ministro Carlos Cortés) in Santiago, Chile, discussing its implications in preservation discourses, historical narratives and neoliberal private urban interests.

Villa San Luis was a social housing complex built as part of a public policy program promoted in the 1970s during the socialist government of Salvador Allende to address urban segregation and informality and promote social integration in central areas of Santiago, Chile.

After the 1973 coup d'état and the establishment of the military dictatorship in Chile by Augusto Pinochet on December 28, 1978, the inhabitants of these buildings were violently evicted during the night and eradicated in different peripheral locations in Santiago, while these buildings and the site were illegally taken over by the Chilean Army.

In 1996, the housing complex was sold to a private real estate developer. Since then, through the gradual demolition of the housing blocks, the site has been opened to private investment and transformed into a commercial district, shaping one of the most expensive neighborhoods in the city.

In 2017, the last four remaining housing blocks (plot 18), began to be demolished to build new real estate projects, generating a deep controversy. A group of citizens, including former inhabitants but also architects and cultural agents, protested their demolition and demanded their protection arguing that the remaining ruins and their extremely vulnerable condition were an important part of Chile's history. These actions led to their declaration as National Monuments. However, this "monument status" was quickly withdrawn due to a technical evaluation presented by real estate developers, who argued against their permanence due to their structurally unstable and vulnerable condition. Vulnerability then became a counter-argument to support its imminent demolition to maximize the speculative potential of one of the city's most profitable sites.

Finally, in 2020, as a result of a negotiation between representatives of opposing sides conducted by the Ministry of Culture, it was agreed that 800 square meters of the remaining 4,329 total square meters would be preserved to build a monument-museum commemorating the history of Villas San Luis, on one of the footprints of the remaining ruins.

In the discourses of protection or destruction of these ruins, the idea of vulnerability was used to refer to the physical image of the ruin, instead of highlighting the current precarious condition of the land and the social diversification that the original project intended to carry out. Is it more important to preserve the memory of what Villa San Luis meant in the past than to conserve and apply the principles of land use and integration that the original project proposed?

Through the case of Villa San Luis, this article aims to discuss how monumentalization policies avoid addressing relevant urban issues by romanticizing the idea and image of vulnerable ruin. While commemorating, the monumentalization of the ruin also reflects the inability to carry out meaningful urban actions and reminds us that what was not preserved is a site for social diversification and solidarity.

Who will benefit from the new commemorative project? Can the protection of the ruins of Villa San Luis act as a reaction against an urban culture based on economic development or is it just part of the same value system?

Letting Me Decay. Letting You Forget?
Ruination ‘In Peace’ in the Wounded Landscape of Cyprus

Savia Palate

Keywords: ruination, militarisation, conflict, memory, Cyprus

In his essay “The Ruin”, Georg Simmel writes about ‘peace’ within the form of a ruin that can only be suspended. This suspension intensifies when ruins are situated in territories tormented by ethnic and socio-political conflicts whose state, due to unresolved political antagonisms, remains undefined. When, in 1974, the island of Cyprus was violently divided along physical and ethnic lines, several areas across the island were militarized, abandoned, and subsequently left suspended in a process of ruination. The case of Varosha has become paradigmatic of this suspension and ruination. Located on the easternmost coast of Cyprus, Varosha has been fenced off by the Turkish military until very recently. In October 2020, the area was unilaterally and injudiciously opened and surrounded by bulldozers and other machines threatening to ‘clear-out’ the area. Prior to 1974, Varosha had been a luxurious cosmopolitan tourist resort. For the past 46 years, it has languished as a ghost-town, while Varosha’s recent reopening has been a disruptor of ‘peace.’

Whereas the ruination of Varosha and its current status remains debatable, the meanings and representations that came to define and describe the area and its periphery during its 46-year period of disuse are manifold. This paper aims to examine not only the conflicted nature of these ruins, but the fact that the ruination of this territory retained a juxtaposition of human and non-human intentions. For the period this area remained in suspension, the process of ruination shaped and altered, even temporarily, socio-spatial allegories of hope, pain, and opportunism as well as Varosha’s future. This contrasts sharply with the harsh reality of Varosha today, which is openly threatened by demolition as another spatial victim of political controversy.

Neo-Romance: Ark Architecture of Expectation

Alberto Petracchin

Keywords: Ark, future, values, fragments, exploration, expectation, refoundation

All is lost, as we stand in the twilight of the old world we are confronted with fragments, places and theories in ruins; we inhabit neo-romantic spaces, times and architecture, defined at the same time by nostalgia for what we are losing and by heroic explorations towards the unknown. Dealing with continuous cyclical destruction, all architecture is today an attempt at salvation: to bring to life our treasures as a projection towards a future. The loss of conditions of order requires strategies which, by acting in advance and working over lengthy periods of time, manage to save those materials which could be destroyed but at the same time could prove useful for designing a new genesis: all architecture today is an ark. Assuming that our existing artifactual evidence is shattered, the ark can be construed as a ‘radical re-foundation’ before the world undergoes a definitive reset. This essay discusses the figure of the ark and its return to the architectural debate, structuring the argument in a triptych and using authors and experiences from outside the disciplinary field, such as theology and philosophy, which rejoin within the territories of architecture. ‘The return of the ark’ deals with the theoretical foundation of this architecture and its strategy of saving the fragment; ‘fragments’, on the other hand, uses examples taken from architectural literature to consider projects that have already reasoned on the theme of the choice of the treasure and therefore of the values to be carried into the future and which, as fragments themselves, are useful for the design of a ‘brand new testament’ of the project; finally, ‘architecture of expectation’, outlines the fundamental theoretical and design moment of an ark architecture called to suspend time while waiting, in the flood, for better times. The fragments that remained hidden and cultivated are released in the distant future to upset the coordinates of the real, to refound the next land.

Between Construction and Deconstruction
The Design of Monumental Grounds

Chiara Pradel

Keywords: Earthworks, Construction and Demolition Waste, Landscape

If one looks at the construction or demolition phases of an architectural oeuvre with attention to the secondary effects of the building process, a significant quantity of material movements and of produced spoils comes to light. It can be generally estimated that a single standard construction site originates approximately thirty percent debris compared to the total weight of building resources, or, in other terms, that almost one third of the entire construction material provided in each building site is, at the end, potentially wasted and spurned out. As evidence of this fact, in Europe more than 840 million tons of construction and demolition waste are produced each year, the majority of which is made of concrete debris. This huge amount of spoils, that constitutes the major flux of waste across the continent, could be only partially reused for producing aggregates, while a significant surplus is usually destined to disposals inside separate, neglected landscapes, thanks to unexplored and concealed operations that, from time to time, are designated as “landscaping”, “environmental restoration”, “recultivation”, “filling for cultivation”, “landfilling” etc. A sequence of erratic earthworks made by inert, gravel or aggregates are rising together with ever-growing cities or alongside increasingly-heavy infrastructures such as artificial canals, high-speed rails, interregional roads networks or tunnels, staging a sort of “creative destruction” paradigm—on one hand they bear witness to the main, “insatiable” construction activity, and on the other they embody what has been irretrievably separated and rejected from the process.

This paper take into consideration, as main case studies, several cyclopean earth-structures that have arisen from the recent realization of the Gotthard axis (1999-2020) for the New Rail Link trough the Alps—which connects Southern Germany to Northern Italy passing through Switzerland—and that have affected and largely transformed river deltas, wooded valleys, alpine villages and urban peripheries.

How is it possible to knowingly assemble and design landscapes out of these landfilled construction ruins, namely by huge depots, embankments, ground-levelling and ground-fillings made of inert waste? From one hand, it is no longer possible to look at these monumental phenomena as fixed, delimited and local, since they are simultaneously affecting inter-connected open spaces throughout which earth-flows are broadly reshaping the landscapes all around us, on a planetary scale. From the other hand, it is possible to rethink some open and accessible landscape design solutions placed between art, landscape design and land reclamation projects, that explicitly reinterpreted huge volumes of inert waste coming from the construction field. The need to reuse earth, to reduce soil consumption in order to preserve an essential and non-renewable component of the natural capital and to valorize, in general, new ecologies linked to the building activities that affect human and non-human environments urge us to better understand all aspects of architecture’s contemporary narrative, especially focusing on those considered marginal such as architecture’s debris, to investigate the possible role of reparative design and the redefinition of ground-related formal structures inside landscape.

The Drawing as a Boundary Object
Interacting with Vulnerabilities through the Process of Drawing Space

Thierry Lagrange, Johan Van Den Berghe, Moragh Diels

Keywords: Drawing, Boundary Object, Design Driven Research

This article aims to uncover the drawing as a potential boundary object by dissecting and describing its preconditions, characteristics and qualities based on an auto-ethnographical research project of the second author, where a boundary object unintentionally emerged.

The research case conveys a drawing of an imaginary mnemonic house -never finished as a precondition for its existence-, based on specific memories regarding the last weeks of the second author’s father’s life. The main goal of the drawing process preceding this drawing was establishing a deeper understanding of the agency of architecture and drawing in the context of a grieving process. The reflection on this drawing process transcends individual involvement and indicates the therapeutic capacity of drawing as a boundary object, because of its bar lowering potential as compared with a conventional communication through words. This drawing came to light in the setting of the research group ‘The Drawing and The Space’, where the potential of the act of drawing is explored through design driven research.

A specific design process is bound to precede this kind of drawing, the four following chronological steps were deducted from the research case: (Step 1: The Agency of Memories And Thoughts) By analyzing specific memories in different rooms of the second author’s childhood home through memo writing, feeding the drawing process and vice-versa, and (Step 2: The Act of Drawing) translating them into annotated plans/sections to keep an overview of the correlating memories, a sequence of materialized memories emerged. The repetitive consecutive section/plan are no execution drawings, they facilitate the ordering of thoughts and ideas. (Step 3: Participative Drawing) Friends and family provided drawing assistance in order to ‘finish’ the drawing for the exhibition. The ‘final’ design, drawn on scale 1:10 (2700 x 2200 mm), is an interior of leave-taking, guiding beneficiaries through the embodiment of memories of the last weeks of the second author’s father’s life, triggering to look back and forward, raising questions like: Why did he remain silent? Why did they remain silent? Should they have known? What signals did they miss? (Step 4: The Public Peer Review) The presentation of this boundary object for an international panel of peer reviewers have led to new insights, showing how loss not only leads to sorrow, but through the act of drawing also leads to new transferable knowledge. One of the key elements in this research case is dealing with vulnerability on multiple levels: during the hand drawing process, in the hand drawing and in the activated space initiated by the drawing. We elaborated on the inherent relationship between the autobiographical drawing as boundary object and vulnerability in this research case:

(1) The main objective of these hand drawings is translating emotion into matter, so a part of the self can solidify (the drawing). The materiality of the drawing itself helps the drawing evolve. Topologically interpreting and translating memories through drawing domestic spaces creates a direct confrontation with the self and inevitably leads to introspection. (2) Through the drawing process a re-enactment of these memories re-emerges. The drawing is an intermediary for verbalization on three levels: verbalization of the first order, with the self, (3) subsequently verbalization of the second order, with familiar others in the context of a safe space, and in the end verbalization of the third order, with unfamiliar others in the context of a brave space. In order to capture the memory specific details and the inherent subjective nature of a memory the design was deliberately drawn by hand on a large scale. This size could activate verbalization about the drawing and participation of other beneficiaries, who are also coping with loss. Another objective of this way of drawing is looking for ways to grasp and solidify subjectivities and make them more transferable between beneficiaries on an intersubjective level of understanding, i.e. the author’s remembrances of things coming from an awareness of vulnerability of the self. In turn, what is not drawn may be very revealing to the self or others. Consequently, this way of drawing activates space that also has the capacity to convert vulnerabilities to new understandings.

The purpose of this article is to observe the emergence, effect and after-effect of the drawing as a boundary object. This first description provides a basis that requires further research in order to see how and to what extent these indications are confirmed or critically questioned. The process of developing the second author’s research case raises the awareness of the capacity of architecture and architectural drawing to contribute to a personal and a societal well-being, in processes of loss and mourning.

Vulnerability of the Liminal
Line and Critical Potential in the Act of Drawing

Anđelka Bnin-Bninski

Keywords: liminal, line, ambiguity, vulnerability, critical drawing

The line is a principal medium of imagination, conception and representation within the process of architectural drawing. Commonly considered traces on paper, lines harbor the rich complexities of various intentions and meanings, and they are conditioned by different technologies and material representations. Lines preserve doubts and uncertainties in the drawing process and embody the potential of misinterpretations. Hence, the line is considered a principal agent of spatial vulnerability. This investigation suggests a focus on the instability and ambiguity of the line as potential for drawing’s criticality. The discussion is developed via the relationship between liminality and line.

Liminality is herewith defined as an unstable yet dynamic state that enables vulnerability to be preserved throughout the ambiguousness of drawing. Beginning with the etymological analysis of limit, limen and line, an argument is developed based on Jacques Derrida’s philosophy of limit and line and Andrew Benjamin’s thesis of preliminary drawing. The research outcome emerges as The Atlas of Liminal Line Dynamics, which convenes dialectical examples of ambiguous and unstable lines presented through textual and graphic analyses. Selected examples are drawn from the history and theory of art and architecture: invisible line, scale line, dashed line, poché, lineamenta, trait, meandering line, texture line, broken and curved line, Klee’s line and fold. This research emphasizes the need for the sensitive and fragile nature of specific lines to express and manifest specific spatial qualities and questions.

The liminal condition of the line is explored as critical potential, as it preserves the line in an exposed and unstable state: interstitial technologies, materialities and spatial quests between process and statement, architect and builder and finally between the builder and inhabitant. The Atlas of Liminal Line Dynamics is considered an unfinished and open sequence that reinforces the active criticality embodied in the vulnerability of the line in the architectural drawing.

Three Creative Figures to Codesign with Vulnerabilities

Céline Bodart, Chris Younès

Keywords: codesign, vulnerabilities, figures, translation, caring

In the 21st century, another civilizational policy is announced within the uncertainty and disorder: the advent of ecological sciences based on the recognition of the interactions of living organisms and their environment, as synergistic or symbiotic ecosystems, participating in the awareness of the toxic character of the nature-culture division and of unlimited exploitation; also of the awareness of a community of the terrestrial destiny of the living. Climate change, loss of biodiversity, precariousness, misery, exclusion – so many challenges to be faced that call for diversification and locating new common grounds. These are far-reaching issues, since they involve considering political changes that combine environmental, social, economic, cultural and mental dimensions. The changes to be made are crucial.