Catch­ing Flak

Archi­tec­ture has a writ­ten aspect, some of which is relat­ed to the design and con­struc­tion of build­ings and some of which employs lan­guage as a tool for the descrip­tion of build­ings in nar­ra­tive. When we con­sid­er archi­tec­ture as a form of writ­ing that includes all the above, it can be sen­su­ous, lit­er­al, fig­u­ra­tive, and abstract—as an abstrac­tion, archi­tec­ture can be rep­re­sen­ta­tion­al of itself.[1] An inevitable byprod­uct of architecture’s writ­ten aspect is its pro­duc­tion of irony.

We define irony along the lines of Paul de Man’s 1977 odd­ly titled lec­ture on ​“The Con­cept of Irony,” where he described the term as any­thing but a con­cept.[2] Rather, de Man viewed irony as an inter­rup­tion in writ­ten nar­ra­tive, a nega­tion of its lin­ear flow. Inso­far as nar­ra­tive is the basis of civ­i­liza­tion­al his­to­ry, de Man main­tains, it is the tech­nique through which human cul­ture doc­u­ments its devel­op­ment over time.

Archi­tec­ture plays a sig­nif­i­cant role in such an effort. For exam­ple, when a work of archi­tec­ture is intend­ed to mark a moment in time—often as a monument—it offers cul­ture a cir­cuit of ref­er­ence between his­tor­i­cal nar­ra­tive and built form. In many cas­es, one work of archi­tec­ture refers to anoth­er that pre­ced­ed it in his­to­ry and there­by rein­forces the lin­ear­i­ty of the civ­i­liza­tion­al nar­ra­tive. Architecture’s ironies would there­fore be inter­rup­tions to this struc­ture of nar­ra­tive; they might be inter­pret­ed as gaps with­in the net­works of ref­er­ence, or ​“shorts” with­in the cir­cuit­ry of his­to­ry. These forms of archi­tec­tur­al nega­tion are mean­ings that inter­rupt any meta­nar­ra­tive of civ­i­liza­tion­al meaning. 

Here, we will focus on one exam­ple of an archi­tec­tur­al irony that inter­rupts the cul­tur­al meta­nar­ra­tive: the fortress. It is one of the Ur-forms of archi­tec­ture because it has tra­di­tion­al­ly func­tioned in the defense of cities, coast­lines, and bor­ders. Fortress­es have a sto­ried lit­er­a­ture, and they con­sti­tute a sig­nif­i­cant part of architecture’s mil­i­tary genre. First, we will show how fortress archi­tec­ture devel­oped through lan­guage and then we will explain the result­ing irony of fortress­es today.

As a form in the mil­i­tary genre, fortress­es were expen­sive, high­ly tech­ni­cal, large-scale mil­i­tary con­struc­tions that war­rant­ed a spe­cial­ized set of terms. Over time, this vocab­u­lary became a com­mon syn­tax for army engi­neers and sol­diers. The archi­tec­tur­al gram­mar of fortress-design and con­struc­tion reached a cli­max at the end of the 17^th cen­tu­ry with the work of Sébastien Le Pre­stre de Vauban, Louis the XIV’s guru of siege war­fare. He for­mal­ized the use of words that rep­re­sent­ed pre­cise pro­gram­mat­ic func­tions for the arrange­ment of any fortress. At the start of his New Method of For­ti­fi­ca­tion, Vauban pro­vid­ed a list of words and their respec­tive def­i­n­i­tions in about twen­ty pages. Here is a selec­tion of ten terms as they appeared in the con­text of the British trans­la­tion of that lexicon: 

Remov­ing these words from their alpha­bet­i­cal order allows us to arrange them in a for­ti­fied stack, a sort of poem. Off­set from the perime­ter of the moat, the chan­de­lier bedecked para­pet looms upon the ram­part, encir­cling the bas­tions that extend into the flanks con­nect­ed by cur­tain walls. These, in turn, descend inward toward the parade grounds, beyond the ban­quettes and the bat­ter­ies of weapons. Revers­ing direc­tion, we fol­low the line of fire, along the vec­tors of the pal­isades, where gal­leries dig in before the glacis that undu­late out­ward and then flat­ten into an esplanade of no-man’s land. These sen­tences do not only describe a tow­er of stone and earth­works, they also com­pose a tow­er of words that was once held togeth­er by the lan­guage of fortresses. 

But the coher­ence of lan­guage has been breached. This assault is not only the result of our awk­ward attempt at writ­ing an iron­ic poem: the words are sim­ply hard to fol­low. We also can­not blame our­selves as mere lay­men who lack the nec­es­sary knowl­edge of these tech­ni­cal terms. Indeed, so many of these words do sound famil­iar because they have received new def­i­n­i­tions that over­whelm those devel­oped by Vauban. Fortress­es and their vocab­u­lary have tak­en on an iron­ic char­ac­ter because of the cul­tur­al repres­sion of their tech­ni­cal mean­ing. These terms have been (pur­pose­ly) for­got­ten from the main­stream of cul­ture as the build­ings have increas­ing­ly dis­ap­peared from the lin­ear nar­ra­tive of his­to­ry. Fortress lan­guage appears to have become antique, anti­quar­i­an even. Mean­while, phys­i­cal fortress build­ings no longer belong to strate­gies of war, nor do they express the enclo­sure of cities, nor do they fig­ure promi­nent­ly as pro­tec­tors of nation­al bor­ders. Cer­tain­ly, nobody would take on the expense of build­ing a fortress any longer. It is ridicu­lous to for­ti­fy a place with a build­ing when one must defend against drones or cyber­at­tacks, except metaphor­i­cal­ly, as in design­ing a ​“fire­wall.” Fortress­es are now memo­ri­al­ized as sites of the lost nar­ra­tive strength of architecture—they remain as his­tor­i­cal sites of vic­to­ry or loss, as relics of for­mer polit­i­cal and strate­gic rep­re­sen­ta­tions of power.

The writ­ten aspect of fortress archi­tec­ture lives in the scrapheap of metaphor. The very silli­ness of a con­tem­po­rary fortress allows it to con­tribute to our def­i­n­i­tion of archi­tec­tur­al irony. With its dis­lo­ca­tion from cul­ture, the lan­guage of fortification—and its corol­lary archi­tec­tur­al forms—have come to inter­rupt the flow of cul­tur­al mean­ing with archa­ic mean­ings. Paul de Man would have called this, after Fichte, paraba­sis. This is our mod­ern Tow­er of Babel. 

The lan­guage of mil­i­tary archi­tec­ture has an exten­sive dou­ble life: ban­quette fur­ni­ture, hang­ing chan­de­liers, cur­tain­wall façades, urban boule­vards, inte­ri­or enfilades, Thanks­giv­ing parades, bat­tery pow­er, and print­ed mag­a­zines. These are just some of the terms that have tak­en on new mean­ings and have lit­tle to do with war­fare. There are still more terms relat­ed to for­ti­fi­ca­tion that have not yet found their way into com­mon par­lance: glacis, caponier, case­mate. What might they come to mean?

At their moment of cul­tur­al rel­e­vance, fortress­es bor­rowed from oth­er gen­res of archi­tec­tur­al lan­guage too. We can point to the terms used for domes­tic aspects of that archi­tec­ture that helped feed and house the gar­ri­son. One won­ders why cer­tain fortress-terms also share philo­log­i­cal kin­ship with ani­mal anato­my: how do cuts of meat relate to the bas­tioned flank? In the ser­vice of irony, it is pos­si­ble to trace these ele­ments of lan­guage and their cor­re­spond­ing forms as they reemerge in incon­spic­u­ous places, or at incon­ve­nient times. Fortress-irony, if such a thing can even be named, offers a cer­tain com­ic relief, albeit nerdy and even bor­ing. At the same time, it may also sharp­en the crit­i­cal stakes, as it were—or give anoth­er type of salience to archi­tec­tur­al rhetoric.[4]

Just as main­stream cul­ture repress­es the archa­ic lan­guage of mil­i­tary archi­tec­ture, it also repress­es the fortress­es that linger in cities or under them. Often, we ignore mil­i­tary build­ings that pop­u­late the coun­try­side, or we look past those that surf the waves in the sea. In 2023, hun­dreds of refugees from Cuba and Haiti were processed after land­ing at Dry Tor­tu­gas Nation­al Park. News cov­er­age of this trag­ic encounter with the Coast Guard said lit­tle of the beau­ti­ful archi­tec­tur­al land­mark Fort Jef­fer­son that occu­pied the back­ground of the images.[5] This was one of the 42 forts of the so-called ​“Third Sys­tem,” built to pro­tect the US coast­line after the British inva­sion that spawned the War of 1812. That mon­u­ment con­tin­ues to stand on the west­ern most island of the Flori­da Keys, as ​“Guardian of the Gulf.” But there is irony in the fact that such fortress is now a snor­kel­ing and fish­ing des­ti­na­tion over­seen by the Nation­al Park Service.

Per­haps the great­est repres­sion of mil­i­tary archi­tec­ture fig­ures strong­ly in one of the core nar­ra­tives of archi­tec­tur­al mod­ernism in Europe. The era­sure of the medieval ram­parts around the city of Vien­na made space for the Ringstraße at the end of the 19^th cen­tu­ry and lit­er­al­ly laid the ground­work for Otto Wag­n­er to the­o­rize a form of a mon­u­men­tal mod­ern metrop­o­lis.[6] Even the Vien­nese archi­tect Adolf Loos, with his dis­tinc­tive psy­cho­an­a­lyt­i­cal view of mod­ern life—for Loos, archi­tec­ture was a tool that enabled repression—was unable to see the new­ly cleared land as the great­est act of repres­sion: that of a for­mer fortification. 

Canons, too, are a medi­um of irony. In the Ger­man lan­guage, lit­tle dis­tinc­tion is made between the weapons of war and the annals of dis­ci­pli­nary knowl­edge: both kanonen are spelled with a sin­gle n. Bring­ing can­nons into the canon, Robin Evans described the conun­drum faced by ear­ly mil­i­tary engi­neers who sought to describe the pro­ject­ed sur­faces of fortress­es. The form of a defen­sive fort, he showed, made a direct rela­tion­ship between the arc of an offen­sive shot and the pro­jec­tion plane of draw­ing. In the field, a vec­tor of offence pro­duces a cor­re­spond­ing geom­e­try of defense. On paper, rep­re­sent­ing that geo­met­ric con­flu­ence requires a set of rec­i­p­ro­cal ortho­graph­ic con­ven­tions. The longevi­ty of these projections—plan, sec­tion, elevation—now cel­e­brates five cen­turies of archi­tec­tur­al atten­tion and far out­lives their val­ue for fortress design. Evans writes of one ear­ly user, the artist Albrecht Dür­er, who spec­u­lat­ed on the form of a fortress as a trun­cat­ed cone with the visu­al aid of a projectile’s path [ 1 ]. The con­vex sur­face was simul­ta­ne­ous­ly formed by the attack of can­non­balls and informed by the impres­sion of bat­tered arch­es. Evans play­ful­ly dwelled on a pos­si­ble moment of inde­ci­sion: Dür­er need­ed the wall to map the path of the pro­jec­tile, and he need­ed the path to map the wall. We will nev­er know which one came first.[7] His pro­jec­tions of a fortress were there­fore dou­bled: they were self-ref­er­en­tial to the process of pro­jec­tion itself. Self-ref­er­ence, accord­ing to de Man, is a fun­da­men­tal part of the iron­ic trope as it posits the ​“I”—the self—and simul­ta­ne­ous­ly posits its destruc­tion. In this case, the ​“I” of the fort is its geo­met­ri­cal con­struc­tion and the ​“not‑I” is its destruc­tion under can­non fire. Per­haps this irony is cap­tured in Vauban’s depic­tion of a for­ti­fi­ca­tion caught in a cloud of linework flak [ 2 ]. Flak itself is an abbre­vi­a­tion of a com­pound­ed Ger­man word coined dur­ing World War II. The acronym stands for the Flieger-abwehr-kanonen, or the fly­ing defense can­nons, that pro­duced clouds of shrap­nel in the skies.

Dur­ing this time of height­ened emo­tions brought about by wars, mil­i­tary terms might be the last object we might sus­pect to remind us of irony. There is noth­ing iron­ic about war, as it is expe­ri­enced. Yet we do find it dis­turbing­ly present in the mod­ern lan­guage of our dis­ci­pline. So, much like a fortress under can­non fire, we too are will­ing to catch some flak for the sim­ple obser­va­tion that the fortress was once an archi­tec­tur­al form that pro­tect­ed; and its mean­ing was cul­tur­al­ly clear. Now, it is a form that destroys form. It is ironic.